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The Word of the Day is “Ambience” 🙂

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was perhaps the seventh or eighth album I’d ever gotten in my young life (long ago, yes) and had a huge impact on the way I listened to music and my understanding of what popular music could be in terms of content and production. An element of this that I’d long ago internalized was the use of spoken voices and ambient sounds to enhance the message of the music whether this noise is beneath the music, almost subliminal, or if it is prominent enough to obscure the music itself. There are other albums in the Pink Floyd discography that I could use as a reference here – as well as numerous other artists that also have used these techniques to great effect – but I refer here specifically to Pink Floyd primarily because Dark Side of the Moon laid the conceptual foundation in my head and also because I imagine that the music of Pink Floyd is familiar to most people and the best possible touchstone for this blog entry.  I once saw a snippet of video documentary in which Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour said something about how his band mate Roger Waters would not hesitate bury a musical moment underneath factory noises and the like if he thought it served the song.  It has stuck with me ever since.

I’d be a fool to try and deny the Pink Floyd influences across my catalog as Quicksilver Night because it’s self-evident throughout much of it but I think it’s doubly apparent when it comes to the song “Homecoming” from the Presque Vu mini EP. If you listen you’ll likely be struck by an overall gospel-like quality to its main themes – and I hope this is the case because it was intentional – but there comes a point when the tonality shifts to B minor (around 2:39) and the song assumes a deeper melancholy as the plaintive piano sounds while the pastor intones gentle words of hope and comfort. These words and the solo piano are soon overtaken by powerful chording and an insistent solo guitar that fairly drowns out everything else. As composer and producer I meant for a guitar solo – as it is wonderfully played here by Jason Cale – to evoke the sense of mental cacophony that obliterates all the sympathies and words of condolence that are heaped upon us at such times. The first verse lyrically touches upon that same thought; if you’ve ever sat numbly at a memorial service while well-intentioned people offered you half-heard words of consolation then you know exactly what I mean.

Rain whispers softly graveside, mute and yet unrelenting
(Echoes in your head, meaningless and so confused)
And you hear the words spoken from a page (makes no sense at all…)
Lines from an actor on the stage, curtains fall…

Stand in the open doorway; breathe of the dust and shadow
(And then say good bye to the ghosts that fill this room)
With your hand on the lines that marked you grow (turn and walk away…)
Mind on a child you used to know, yesterday…

Paint spatters on the carpet, free by a careless brushstroke
(Searching for a sign of what lies hidden here)
Like new skin covering those old dead scars (layered, buried deep…)
Thin, and you know just where they are, underneath…

As an aside I’d like to add that an acquaintance of mine experienced the loss of a loved one contemporaneously to his hearing this song and it resonated with him enough so that he played it on his podcast and quoted the lyrics with a catch in his throat. I’m still not quite sure how to feel about that; I was unaware of the timing and feel somewhat badly about it in spite of his assurances that no harm was done. Still, admittedly, it seems to me that there’s universality to the experience that I hope I’ve tapped into as a songwriter.

If you’re interested in perhaps checking out other such instances throughout the Quicksilver Night catalog then here’s a list of most (I likely missed something, TBH):

Symmetry (2018)
“The Symmetry Overture” (track 1): children at play
“Quicksilver Night” (track 3): a Sudanese camel market
“The Ship of Theseus” (track 4): waves and wheeling gulls
“Child of Spring” (track 8): ticking clocks

“Exeunt” (single, 2016): traffic

Reliquary (2015)
“Ultima Forsan” (track 1): ticking clocks
“Sojourner” (track 3): footsteps
“Exegesis” (track 4):  rain, distant thunder, church bell, sheep, & birds

Lucent (mini EP, 2012)
“Again the Cusp” (track 3): desolate winds

Some are more original than others, admittedly, while some are almost de rigueur in progressive rock (e.g. a ticking clock to evoke the passage of time, etc.)

You know, “Latest News” and all that… 🙂

The “Presque Vu” mini EP is approaching 80K cumulative streams on Spotify but the curve of that approach has largely flattened; it might well hit 100k by the end of the year but unless something else happens to goad things between now and then I don’t expect much more from it as I turn my attentions more fully to the “Asymptote” album.  I intend to submit “October Skies” to Sirius XM for consideration in July but have no expectations in that regard. (Addendum 6/28/2019: I just discovered that Sirius XM bought Pandora, completing the acquisition in February of this year, so I am not sure it makes any sense for me to submit the music separately. I need to do some additional research on the subject. – wcr)

I’ve been looking into various musical licensing services such as Taxi (https://www.taxi.com) and am thinking of going that route. I’ve read conflicting accounts as to their efficacy and several customer reviews of both Taxi and numerous others but nobody seems to agree on any of these kinds of services so it looks like I’ll just have to pull that trigger and see what happens. Such seems to be the story of my life, doesn’t it? Offhand I think I have two or three vocally-driven songs that might lend themselves well to being included in a movie and a several instrumentals that might work for advertisements or videogames but I’ll never know if I don’t put my foot in the door first, will I?

Things are moving forward just as they should be and I am content. Let’s hope that I didn’t just jinx that. 🙂

… A little bit about the songs “Symmetry” & “October Skies” by way of example.

I sometimes write poetry but it seldom lends itself well as lyrical verse. When I am inspired to write lyrics, however, my process usually leads me to superimpose words over a previously composed melody, sort of like poetry but constrained to fit that pre-existing melody. I’m sure most lyricists do this to some degree or another but I admittedly often do this at an operatic level; in effect I write a lot of instrumental music and sometimes I’ll hear the melody as being performed by a human voice and it’s not uncommon for me to write lyrics with melodies that harmonize with other instruments or even echoes of themselves.

But here’s something that people don’t often seem to notice: my lyrics are often personal, sometimes deeply so. This is probably masked by that fact that I’m not the one singing them and perhaps they’re also obscured by use of metaphor. Let me use “Symmetry” by way of example.  “Symmetry” is what it seems to be at first brush – three discrete voices all sung by the same person, oddly overlapping – but it’s more than that. Sometimes these voices reinforce each other and other times they seem to conflict or even contradict one another. This is because they’re all internalized voices inside the same man’s head, mine. I’d once replied in an interview that “I was going through a very rough patch in my life at the time” when I first began writing it (around 2000) but that doesn’t begin to encompass the array of health-related, marital, and career issues I was then facing and all of it on the heels of a couple of deaths in the family. I wrote “Symmetry” based on this feeling of ‘I need to face this squarely and I will somehow get through it.’ The song is representative of a head full of doubts, self-recrimination, and yet somehow reassurances all ricocheting around in the same skull. Let’s take a look at these lyrics again and listen now that you know those internal voices are all me trying  to come to terms with a seemingly-unraveling life, now that you know the pronoun ‘you’ in this song is me talking to myself:

“Symmetry”

Cast aside, a sacrifice
You redeemed your pride at such a price to pay
Remembrance in cold rain of a lifetime away
Ancient and bloodstained, a two-sided blade…
I can’t breathe!

Doubts that assail you at every turn
Echoes of failed youth and lessons unlearned yet today
Enduring the old pain, a dream’s promise unclaimed
Naked and unchained, a child again…
I can’t breathe!

Face the darkest night, a man alone, staring into the pyre (I can’t breathe!)
Burning bright, coming home, walking into the fire (I can’t breathe!)
There must be symmetry…

Small comfort in shadows and no peace in the light
In a world without heroes to continue the fight undismayed
Have you forgiven your own naïveté?
And cruel Fate that has dealt you a hand you’ve misplayed?
I can’t dream!

Gently wreathe your head, sins atoned, within a shroud of delusion (I can’t dream!)
Leave the dead, carved in stone, to find their own solutions (I can’t dream!)
There must be symmetry…

I’ve publicly stated several times that the song “October Skies” is about the sense of home as a place where my bones seem to resonate with the landscape. I wrote it to describe my distant childhood home in the Allegheny foothills, the overwhelming feeling of belonging there when I visit and the absolute surety that I will return someday for good. That’s very much true but it’s not quite the entire story.  I’ve done my best to put into words how deeply connected I feel to that area when I’m there, a resonance in my bones, but I always feel as though those words fall short of the mark. A few months back I went to the village graveyard in my hometown to pay my respects at the grave of a recently-deceased uncle (my father’s brother) and the nearby grave of my own brother. I wandered a bit and found myself standing at the foot of much older cenotaph still clearly marked “Warren Russell” – my grandfather’s grandfather – and the weight of our family history in that place was palpable to me. “October Skies” on the surface seems to be about this deep connection I feel to the landscape but it goes beyond that. My second wife Renée, although she has no real connection to those Allegheny foothills beyond her relationship with me, is the truest love of my life but is fourteen years younger than I. The recurring line “Although so far away I’ll return to them someday … and I’ll stay … but please know before I go, my dear, I love you ever more” speaks of my inevitable death and the fact that I’ll likely leave her behind to live for decades longer after I depart this world but that I love her like no other. There’s emotional pain but also beauty in that thought.

For those that might wonder why I chose Meagan to sing it rather than a male it is quite simply that I felt that her beautiful voice fit the subject matter. The song isn’t gender-specific.

“October Skies”

The foothills of my home sing clear, calling to my bones…
Fields of darkened loam lie there, waiting for the snows…
And although so far away, I’ll return to them someday … and I’ll stay…
But please know before I go, my dear, I love you ever more…

The hillsides burn so bright, they stay, dancing in my eyes…
Lurid autumn light, gold flames coloring the sky…
And although so far away, I’ll return to them someday … and I’ll stay…
Sure as coldest winter nights give way to warm days in due time…           

The pine and hardwood stands, above, looking down below
Running through my hands, the blood of the river flows
And although so far away, I’ll return to them someday … and I’ll stay…
But please know before I go, my dear, I love you ever more…

I love you, ever more…

The top picture hints at the autumn landscape of which I speak in “October Skies”. This picture was taken at Allegheny State Park; I don’t know when or by whom or I’d credit it accordingly. I found it on the ASP facebook page a few years ago and downloaded a copy. I haven’t doctored the colors or contrast at all and although I can’t speak for the original I can honestly say it often looks just like this. In fact this picture doesn’t really do it justice; sometimes it’s absolutely breathtaking.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees…

“It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.”

The above is the first verse of “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887). You can find it at multiple online sources but you probably already know how each blind man perceives the whole of the elephant differently than the others based on his limited experience with a small part of it and how each man “was partly in the right and all were in the wrong” per the last line of the poem.

This post is about the same sort of perceptual bias in a harmonic setting and will delve a bit into some music theory; my apologies to anyone that is put off by this but my underlying point about seeing the whole picture in the following paragraphs should still make itself apparent if you even if don’t have a background in music theory.

Listen to Quicksilver Night’s song “Presque Vu” and note a sort of harmonized guitar fanfare at around 03:29. Those three guitars and the bass look like this “on paper”:

It took me a while to accept this figure in my composition because it sounded right to me but it seemed to me at first as though it shouldn’t work. You might note that there are parallel perfect fifth intervals moving from beat one to beat two and then again from beat three to beat four. This bothered greatly me at first – I’m a bit compulsive – but then I stopped thinking about the figure as a series of four separate arpeggios (serially Emin7, G, Bmin7, and then D) but instead as a repositioning of notes within the same chord so Emin7 across beats one and two and then Bmin7 across beats three and four.

That resolved that particular bit of cognitive dissonance in my own head but then I realized that’s not the entire story either because there’s a sustained Asus2 on the rhythm guitar across the measure. So instead of two beats each of Emin9/A then Bmin9/A … although that is technically correct … the measure-long flourish is merely a repositioning of the notes across in a full measure of an A13 chord.

It’s sort of like looking too closely at first and all you see are pixels but as you “pull back” in view you see the measure is not one beat each of Emin7, G, Bmin7, and then D but more Emin9 and Bmin9, two beats each. Then if you perceptually pull back a little further and the sustained chord and the bass make it clear that it is really one contiguous dominant chord – A13 – across the length of the measure. The aphorism about “not seeing the forest for the trees” easily applies itself to music.