no deleuzian allusions intended
woke up this morning huskily, as if i had been yelling all night long. my throat scratches and itches and feels like sandpaper. it’s gray and rainy outside, the perfect weather to work. when i got up i turned on the stereo (the very first thing i do in the morning) and my “best of morcheeba” compilation started to play. then, when “fear and love” began, i pressed the ‘repeat’ button. i always loved that song for its chiasmic logic and for the fact that these were the first words that s. wrote to me. Fear can stop you loving. Love can stop your fear. Fear can stop you loving. But it’s not always that clear.
last night (and the night before) i was chatting/skyping with alice. and she told me that she wanted to send me some candy (because i frequently complain about the candy shortage over here - not that there was any, but i like to complain about it anyways…) but then the postal employee weighed the parcel and told her:
“that’ll be 60 dollars standard shipping…”
the reason we skyped was “dialogues”. i don’t know anybody else who has such a reliable perception, understanding and taste of music, and she was making very very helpful suggestions. i sent her a couple of rough mixes and then we listened to them via skype and discussed each version’s strengths and weaknesses. if she was living in cologne she’d be the remaining 199 lurkers and world domination would be close at hand.
so after we had our little conference yesterday night i went to see jodie who had to work. it was after midnight already, but i was all hyper and exhilarated from, well, from the song actually. i never had this before : it really sticks with me wherever i go and i have to keep humming the chorus over and over again. when i was standing by the bar, wired and wound up, unable to wipe my mad grin off the face, drumming with my fingers onto the counter and blinking my eyes nervously, jodie shouted:
“stop being annoying, phil! are you on cocaine?!!?”
and i guess it really felt like it. of course she made me drunk then and i stayed until she closed the place at half past three.
alice posted this: Listening to late Leonard Cohen. Don’t like the drums or the gospel singers, but I love that old voice. wish that rick rubin would swoop down and do for Lenny what he did with Johnny Cash before he died.
and my first reaction was : yeah, exactly! wouldn’t it be great to be able to listen to all these beautifully written song in equally beautifully produced and recorded versions?
and then i thought : wait a minute. it’s probably not that leonard cohen is sitting at home with a hat full of great songs and he is unable to find a producer. there must be a another reason for the demo-like sound that the last couple of his albums have.
and then it hit me that he might be equally scared of fucking up a beautiful song in the process of fleshing it out as i am. that maybe he knows that these songs have an unbelievable potential which doesn’t really need to be ‘realized’ : there is ’something possible’ in them that is never redeemed. as if each of these plastic, shallow sounding songs had an overwhelming, indescribably beautiful doppelgänger that is playing at the same time, but that stays purely virtual. maybe that is so because he’s afraid that the attempt to record and manifest this latent version will never live up to the virtual possibility.
but he’s probably way past this stage. but i am not, and i think this is the very thing i’m struggling with right now, and always have : to end up with a ‘realization’ of a song that has such potential. and i’m neither zen nor old enough to accept (and be comfortable with) the idea that maybe there is no need to realize this virtual song, that it will always shine through the dullest production ever, and that you therefore don’t have to try and capture it, because the thing that you capture and materialize will always be only a fraction, only a limited version of what has been going on in the first place.
and of course the reason for writing all of this is to postpone the work on the ‘materialization’ of “dialogues”. Fear can stop you singing. Songs can stop your fear. Fear can stop you singing. But it’s not always that clear.
