[This might feel like home, 2013]
I wake up in the morning
stumble to the sink and wash my face
make myself a cup of coffee
brace myself for the day
I’m a little weary lately
less inclined to run from what runs after me
Love found me on the telephone
when I couldn’t stop crying
a gentle friend listened in silence
drove to Maroubra to sit beside me
Whatever I did it had nothing to do with me
whatever I did, love found me
Continue reading “Nothing to do with me”
[Eyes Open – SUPERHYDRATED, 2000]
It’s hard to hear this song without hearing the squealing wheels of trains; feeling the languid heat of the Australian summer; and catching the disconcerting other-worldy echo of the suburban malaise I grew up in. But the song centres around the eight years I taught English and Drama at Birrong Boys’ High School – a tough school in Sydney’s southwest – working with Nick Danta, collaborating with Tim Carroll and the BYDS network and creating several large scale drama projects framed as responses to violence.
And if you look too long you see too much
And it’s hard sometimes, just keeping your eyes open
During this time there were more than a few tragic student deaths, and these stories weave their way through the track. The train announcer’s megaphone voice is particularly piquant – one young man was killed tagging a carriage; a few years later disaster arguably avoided when an alert train guard spotted a year eight boy showing his friends a gun on the platform shortly before school – enabling authorities to find it on him during class. Too many stories to list.
Continue reading “If you look too long you see… angry, lost young men”
[SUPERHYDRATED, 2000]
A kid on a train with tag sticky hands
A bridge in the distance not distant enough
A speeding up carriage slows down a life
Exhale like the bottom of an aerosol can
If you look too long, you see too much
And it’s hard sometimes just being
A kid on his knees with gun barrel eyes
A brother who’s been drinking but not enough to fall over
A stupid crack like a fire cracker going off on Chinese New Year
Blood all over quite unlike a quilt cover
And if you look too long you see too much
And it’s hard sometimes, just keeping your eyes open
and it’s hard sometimes, just to open your eyes
Continue reading “Eyes Open”
This, the closing track on illumineon, was written in London in the middle of a treacherous year, while I struggled to make my ‘difficult’ third album, embark on a new musical direction and teach English and Drama full time in London’s South West (and later South East) to stay afloat. If I recall correctly, I was standing at the exit gates on Tottenham Court Road.
Replete with quivering ghost voices courtesy of some strange Ibanez delay unit and sliding industrial background guitars, I’ve always been happy with the way it nails the nonchalance of waiting for someone at a big city station while holding the warmth and humble certainty of spotting them for the first moment in the crowd.
It’s easy to be busy looking for something else, searching the world for hope, love, kindness, warmth. For me, Charcoal whispers back – twelve years later – ‘Look at what you have! Be surprised by what you see every day… hold these things, the embers are easily blown out.’ Grand gestures fade as quickly as small moments, but there are more small moments, so grab what you can.
Someone is shouting
Electric, mega phonetic
Subway train insistent
[Charcoal – from illumineon, 2003]
Countless faces
I’m standing
Cold, waiting
Crowd like a shadow passing
Shuffling in overcoats
Dark clothes
Someone is shouting
Electric, mega phonetic
Subway train insistent
And I’ve got pocket hands
Staring like a local
Then her eyes
Among the dead wood
Charcoal lit
And I am warm again
Despite appearances to the contrary, and the gently explicit lyricism, Breathe is a gospel song. While the angelic choir or low moaning blues vocals might not give it to you immediately, the celebration – the inter mingling of body, spirituality and the elevation of sex to celebratory ritual – might.
For me it combines ways to talk about sex – tight and funky Prince guitars and cheeky irreverence; the dark magic, pulsing low end, off kilter looping of D’Angelo’s Voodoo. But I’m never going to manage the offhanded sexiness of either of those two masters, and I know it. I guess the lyrical drive comes in part from Bruce Springsteen’s Cover me – itself perhaps a reference to the Biblical story of Ruth – arguably one of the few times we see specific references to premarital sex and romantic coupling in the Old Testament. Yep. Desire, old school.
Which brings us to entanglement / disentanglement.
We make our way along the beach
to the headland past the people
I feel like you could open me up
Here’s the church,
here’s the steeple
Icebergs is floating like a superliner
Clinging to the coast
I got my hand tangled in yours
It’s here I want to be the most
We make our way along the beach
to the headland past the people
I feel like you could open me up
Here’s the church here’s the steeple