Singing
I was listening to that song "A Pair of Brown Eyes" by the Pogues. I was thinking a lot about war since I played paintball last week - how nobody is making art or music about it, or how I'm not... And well, this song makes me think a lot of things... Plus, what the fuck do I know about war? But isn't there anyone who knows something about war who is willing to talk about it?
I found a great analysis on this mp3 blog I love called "moistworks," but it's buried in this huge page, so I copied the analysis into the comments here....
It's an amazing song because it moves between the realities of the guy sitting in the pub, and the fantasies he latches onto inspired by the music he's listening to. Pretty amazing - somehow psychedelic because it's dealing with the altered state - drunkeness - and how your mind works differently. Lots of swaying. Kind of like free-association, but not with thoughts, with emotions, where the reality of the song's emotional content is more real than where the singer is... But of course it's not like it's artsy postmodern tripe - it's a great song to sing without instrumentation, by yourself, to your dog, when your car's most important part is busted....
Anyway, the singer makes references to all these differrent songs, and that other blog seems to have figured out that it talks about, but at one point the lyrics go:
"An old man in the corner sang
where the waterlilies grow..."
But that's supposed to be a song title. I couldn't find the mp3 of the song, though I could hear 20 sec.s on iTunes - WTF? Isn't there any place where people can find old tunes or folk music for free? It's folk music! It's the original copyleft!
But I did find the sheet music. I am proud when I can find info that isn't elsewhere...
I'd like to learn how to sing this song - can anyone help me? Because I want to be an old man. And because, well, I've downloaded about a million songs, and they don't make me happy. I want to learn to sing songs that don't require instruments so I can sing anytime, so I can have the information in mh head and nobody can accuse me of stealing it. I hate how modern music alway requires instrumentation. The voice is of course the most amazing instrument - almost everyone has it and it's free and loud and easy to use and I think it is also the healthiest, and all these mp3s are making me sick in the head.
By the way, booze isn't always so cool, kids - check out this interview with Shane MacGowan...
But that whole album is amazing. That last song (which in a similar fashion is structured around that song "Waltzing Matilda") addresses what is going on in my country more profoundly than anything I've heard anyone say. But I'm not going to put it up here, because eventually I'm going to get busted for posting music, so I guess I'll just urge you to find it yourselves...
2 comments:
As I said, I'm copying this crap in from that other blog because it's buried. I'm glad to copy what I consider to be a well-done analysis:
I have no experience of war, and am humbled by the thought of it. But there is a song I think of when war occurs to me.
"A Pair of Brown Eyes" is the fourth song on the Pogues second album, "Rum, Sodomy, & The Lash," which takes its name from Churchill's take on the Royal Navy. The album was produced by Elvis Costello and released twenty years ago - though never, to the best of my knowledge, in the US. It is the band's most traditional work, perfectly-formed and timeless. But "A Pair of Brown Eyes" was my favorite song long before I knew who the Pogues were, and I'm still a bit in awe of it.
I heard it when I was 17, when a friend included it on a mixtape I've since lost. Fifteen years later, I've listened the song so many times - the things that come to mind now I only felt back then. There are cinematic songs out there. Others seem to hand you a telescope (you can almost count the nails and nickels some of Springsteen's people carry around in their pockets). Here, the scene begins in a bar, with Shane MacGowan's self-obliteration jammed up against a simpler, drunken nostalgia:
One summer evening drunk to hell
I sat there nearly lifeless
An old man in the corner sang
"Where the water lilies grow"
A jukebox in the corner kicks in, and Johnny Cash- the third singer we've heard so far, if we count the old man and MacGowan himself - sings an even simpler song:
And on the jukebox Johnny
Sang about a thing called love
And a conversation begins:
And it's "how are you kid and what's your name?"
And "how'd you bloody know?"
Suddenly, the scene shifts to something out of Flanders Field:
"In blood and death 'neath a screaming sky
I lay down on the ground
The camera zooms in close:
And the arms and legs of other men
Were scattered all around
and closer:
Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed
Then prayed and bled some more
before pulling back:
And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts one to three
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me"
and into the present tense:
I looked at him he looked at me.
All I could do was hate him
The old man's song is horrific - a sudden burst of violence and, as if in war, the language itself breaks down (isn't "some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed/then prayed and bled some more" almost funny at first?). To make it worse, we've got Johnny's illusive "thing called love", the old man's elusive "pair of brown eyes" - love takes a hard hit in this song, but the singer's contempt is harder. True, there's a certain bit of identification going on:
While Ray and Philomena sang
Of my elusive dream
I saw the streams, the rolling hills
Where his brown eyes were waiting
And I thought about a pair of brown eyes
That waited once for me
But a few lines later, there's a certain amount if identification going on with brick walls:
So drunk to hell I left the place
Sometimes crawling sometimes walking
A hungry sound came across the breeze
So I gave the walls a talking
We do get a bit of a reprieve - a long last shot that's as flowery as anything Johnny, Ray, and the mythopoetic Philamena would sing:
And I heard the sounds of long ago
From the old canal
And the birds were whistling in the trees
Where the wind was gently laughing
But the only real light comes from the fact people still find reasons to sing, and not shoot themselves:
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes
____________________
Selected comments:
The Ray and Philomena in the song are part of the unbelievably popular Irish country and western singer/cover version set - Ray Lynam and Philomena Begley. They would have been on every country pub jukebox in Ireland in the 1970s an '80s. Never figured out why they made it onto one of my favourite songs.
he Johnny in the song, is almost certainly Johnny Cash singing "about" A Thing Called Love. MacGowans father is a huge Johnny Cash fan and Shane has quoted him as one of his earliest influences. Again it was a very popular jutebox song in its era.
ay Lynam and Philomena Begley had the hit version in Ireland of the Country standard "My Elusive Dreams". That, and the Johnny Cash "A Thing Called Love" would have been staple fare on the jukeboxes of North London pubs throughout the 70s and 80s.
What gets me about the song is how it seems to encapsulate the desperation that was an undercurrent within Irish boozers in North London around that time;- broken dreams, melancholy,reminiscences, nostalgic songs from beyond, anger, desperation and way too much drink. I remember walking into a pub between Kilburn and Cricklewood one Monday evening in the middle of summer 1984. It was a Monday evening maybe 6.30 pm, the place was packed. The bar was lined with men barely talking. When myself and a few of my friends walked in, thirty heads turned round and eyed us up. Thirty angry pairs of brown eyes waiting there for us. We thought we were going to get leathered just for exercise.
The funny thing was that around that time the influx of boatloads of young Irish people changed the atmosphere in most of those pubs, and Shane his songs and the Pogues helped to see ourselves in a different way, make us
feel better at being Irish, and turned things around to the point that people from abroad could see the value in the music the culture people telling us that they were interested in us because of who we were, where we were from, how we spoke, how marvellous our culture was. We didnt believe them but went along with it anyway. The Pogues Revoloution probably started the celtic tiger, predating as it did Euro 88, and was possibly more important than Johnny Logan winning his second Eurovision.
But thats something different.
To me the song struck a very big chord, it articulated an Irish experience that no one was talking about.
The Dark Streets of London is the same song, only the main guy in that song doesnt get in the door of the pub.
Silly, every song you learned in elementary school music class doesn't need instruments. I still want to make an album called "Shawn O'Sullivan Sings the American Songbook" with Shawn singing, like, "Bicycle Built for Two" or "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" a capella.
But the problem with all those songs is they're so short.
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