This is the first song I ever wrote. Well, actually, it is the second song, but the first song is called The Mailman and possibly too perverted to share.
I was a painter living in Los Angeles when I got the feeling it was time for me to do something new, although I wasn’t entirely sure what. The best way to figure out, I decided, would be to spend 5 whole days being drunk. Which was a little bit challenging since the combination of alcohol and sunshine has always made me queasy and L.A. is a very sunny place. It also meant I would have to navigate the city on drunk feet for a few days.
But luckily, it only took a couple of days for the answer to arrive in a flash of certainty- I was going to be a musician! I had always known I was going to become a musician SOMEDAY. In fact, I had already bought myself a little $30 guitar so I would be ready when the time came.
The first dozen or so songs I wrote were all about my unrequited love for the sophisticated & urbane Dusty Stables. I was living in L.A. and had just been evicted, divorced, and forced to give Pablito and Eekeleedee (my parakeets) up for adoption. I was moving into a 100 square foot apartment with no means of support other than selling paintings. I had no car and all in all my survival skills were iffy.
But Dusty Stables was (in my mind) a true city slicker. He wore sunglasses (I have always admired people who wear sunglasses), and black clothes, something that men in Kentucky never do. The omnipresence of his laptop and phone combined with his height and sharp features to give him a comforting, robotic quality. I felt he would have an easier time navigating the complexities of city life than your average meat ball. And on top of it all, he seemed nice.
This was the first song I performed publicly. I had just started playing guitar and writing songs a week earlier, so even under ideal circumstances it was a struggle to get through a song. Still, I was under so much pressure regarding what I was doing with my life, that I didn’t feel I could afford to wait any longer before beginning my new career. But I had no idea how nerve-wracking performing before an audience could be. I especially didn’t realize that nerves could cause my arms and legs to jerk around in large spastic movements completely beyond my control.
So, my “performance” was pretty much a complete disaster, and when you throw in my painter’s overalls, gigantic pink checkered shirt, and tiny half-sized child’s guitar, the whole scene must have looked strangely pathetic. Still, people loved me, because there is nothing better than watching someone convulse uncontrollably on stage. No amount of skill and professionalism can match the thrill of watching nature have it’s way with a person despite their best attempts to stop it.
This is kind of from my “who needs men” songwriting phase. I’ve always admired women with a ‘who needs men’ attitude, although in reality I’ve never been one. Even when I wrote this song, although I was single, I was still dependent on various men for various things like money, food, housing, laundry, transportation, friendship, guitar tunings, advice and approval. But I didn’t feel I was getting these things for free. I felt I was paying top dollar, trading little pieces of my soul for little pieces of safety.
That’s why “man hating feminists” seem heroic to me, not because I think there is anything particularly hateful about men, but because it’s such a bold move to say “Screw you men! I’m opening this jar for myself!” I put them in the same category as people who live off the grid or swim with piranhas for fun. People eager to sacrifice comfort and safety for crazy independence and adventure. Sassy, brassy ladies with nerve. I wish at least a tiny piece of their nerve would rub off on me.
Well, I guess this would be my free love song… I wrote it while living in L.A.
In L.A. the element of freedom was absolute. Finally, a place where people were free to explore past lives and send golden beams of gratitude to their guardian angels, but also a place where Hugh Hefner was free to parade around in his silky underwear. The sheep could roam freely, but the wolves could eat openly, so all in all it was hard to say if you were better off or not.
So at any rate, this made me nostalgiac for Kentucky, where there is little tolerance for non-conformity of any sort. The land of yellow and green squares, fences, and bread baskets. A place where Hugh Hefner is only free so long as he keeps it within the family.
I believe there are spirits of justice in the universe, in fact multiple “species” of justice spirits. One group is called the Emerald Knights.
They patrol the forests where the fairies live, slowly riding their white horses around the forest’s perimeter, peering with their far-sighted eyes deep into the thickest parts of the woods where the most dastardly deeds take place. They watch and watch, and their piercing eyes record every injustice and abuse that occurs. They sit perched high up on their horse and do nothing, they let the chaos and the evil thrive, until a predator suddenly crosses a certain threshold of cruelty- a line known only to the Emerald Knights- and then WAM! like lightning they charge on their horse into the forest, and all the fairies close their eyes because they know what comes next will be horrible. It is hard to say exactly what does happen next, since no one but an Emerald Knight has lived to see it, but I think the perpetrators are more or less executed, so swiftly and violently that neither they nor their cronies have time to utter a word in their defense.
Then the Emerald Knight turns his horse around and rides slowly out of the forest, offering no explanation or words of comfort to the fairies who now peer at him from between their fingers.
… if James wasn’t encouraging me to include ALL my songs on this blog I would probably leave this one out because it makes me feel embarrassed! I’m not sure what my brain was thinking when I wrote this, or if it was thinking at all, but I do remember exactly what I was feeling… I was surrounded by a mustard colored light and that light became this song.
I have always felt a little uncomfortable around mustard yellow. Until recently I couldn’t even eat mustard out of an irrational fear that I might end up with a yellow stain on my clothes. I’ve never really taken the time to think about this color or what it means to me, although I always notice when it shows up. It seems to be favored by people who work in the theater and lovers of purple velvet. (It’s also a popular choice for colonial homes around Portsmouth.)
At any rate, this ochre light surrounding me was a blend of several forces, such as:
1. The gold of spirituality and idealism darkened by fear, leading to an apocalyptic outlook.
2. The nutritive butter yellow of Kentucky darkened with nauseating ideas from childhood about the role of females in this world. Such as them being less intelligent than men and doomed to make their way through life on “sexual wiles” alone, an idea which repulsed me- especially when I was still young enough to think boys had cooties. Of course my conscious mind had rejected these ideas, but- like mustard wiped from a white shirt- the stain remained.
I like to think that, for the most part, these mental influences have now been released from my mind, and that is why I can eat mustard without (great) fear. It tastes good.
I was determined not to write this song because it seemed quite weird to me and my ambition at the time was to be the most normal person in the universe. Nonetheless, it would not stop singing in my head, over and over, until finally I relented and wrote it down.
If I had to speculate on its meaning, I would guess it is a mating song for some member of the vegetable kingdom. Their ways are not our ways. I think many of the songs (and other ideas) that end up in our heads are placed there by plants.
This song was inspired by the fairies of fire, and the book “Enchantment of the Faerie Realm” by Ted Andrews, a book I wish I still owned. Although many of my beliefs (like the belief that wearing designer clothes will make you rich) have changed over the years, my faith in fairies has never wavered. What else could explain the growth of plants and those tiny smiley faces you see in the sunbeams?
At the time I wrote this song, I always wore boots. Generally white boots, since brown boots represented drudgery and losing track of your life’s purpose, and black boots represented tyrany and abuse. They couldn’t have heels in case I needed to run for my life. They needed thin souls, so the pounding of my feet against hard surfaces would stimulated my electrical systems. And the toes had to be pointy- to represent fire.
Pants needed to be flexible and yielding enough to kick a predator in the chest and then escape over a tall fence. But sweat pants were out of the question, since they dampened my electrical circuits. Shorts were impossible, since they triggered water-attacks (the feeling that I was dying of thirst.) Skirts were less than ideal, since they make you reluctant to hang upside down or climb a pole, but it was generally skirts that I ended up with anyway. At least they let your legs be free (I hated it when pants touched my legs), and generally you only need to climb trees at nighttime anyway, when the bad guys are all out.
I needed shirts that would cover my shoulders and the back of my neck, which I could not bear to have exposed. But no turtlenecks- they brought to mind strangulation. And no sweaters, since I feared they would absorb the electricity from my body. Multiple layers of fabric covering my heart were a must and I preferred it to be something hard and form-fitting, like a suit of armor, which frequently led to me wearing extra layers of underwear on top of my shirts.
I always wore a hat, even indoors and even at night. I didn’t feel safe without one, and it needed to have the widest brim possible, which generally meant I ended up wearing fussy outdoor-wedding hats covered in lace and silk flowers, a look I didn’t much care for. And last but not least, I needed a gigantic cross pendant, to keep anyone from trying to steal my soul. Later, I switched from a cross to a letter A.
