New song… chirpier and a lot of fun. I’m going to perform it for the first time tomorrow (19th December, 2011) at I Bar, near Lilavati Hospital. If you’re in Mumbai do drop by. Music @ The Big Mic, 10 pm at I Bar. Let me know what you think of this track.
A recording of my first foray into songwriting. I performed this at an open mic on Monday and it did pretty well… yay! It has a few rough edges but I guess this stuff only gets better with time. Yeah, so no Grammy speeches yet. Let me know what you think. Share some love!
Scrabble does the blues. We discovered his latent talent last weekend when I pulled out the blues harp and belted out some random notes. Scrabble ran into the room and joined in. He gets incredibly happy whenever the harp plays. He wags his tail, wears an intense expression and lets it all out. He’s incredibly shy though and goes quiet when someone walks into the room. This is a secret recording. This is his song.
Recorded on the iPhone using loopy. Guitars- me, Harmonica- me, drums- Loopy and vocals- Bluesmeister Scrabble!
Write your message on a sheet of paper,
Fold it into an air plane,
Set it free in a room
Full of you and me,
And all our little excesses,
We’ll watch it fly,
And it will never land,
Because you and me,
We are too much even for gravity
To hold down,
Our lofty notions of how the world
Should be defies every law of
Thermodynamics,
The sun doesn’t set in our world,
The sky gives up eventually and tilts
With the exhaustion of those who expect
So little and are still let down,
And even the waves pause to think
If just perhaps it’ll be alright to wash
Away our foot steps,
Because you and me, we have so much night
In our despair,
Our shadows get fat just sitting around,
And you and me, we have such bright futures,
The lines on our palms stretch like
Latitudes and longitudes across
Our whole hand,
And when you look at me,
Your eyes against my skin
Burn a hole in my face,
But when I look at you,
Your beauty resurrects my nose,
And my nose is sharp
It can smell your thoughts
Even as you exercise discretion,
We happen to fit so well
We will humiliate nature
If we come together,
So instead, I suggest,
Just for tonight,
You sleep at your place
And I’ll sleep at mine,
I don’t think there’s enough water
In all the seas of Jupiter
To curb the flames that’ll spark
From the touch of my fingers
Against the curve of your waist.
When it comes to you and me,
Our lives pan out like journeys
Across two different worlds,
We move towards each other,
But the universe keeps expanding
And there we are,
Further apart than where we were
Before,
If I could change something
It would be this,
The distance between wanting to
Hold you and actually holding you
Would be equal to walking
To the bakery
And back,
Follow the smell of promise,
Turn around the corner
And there we are,
Simple.
This is my personal favorite. It’s an old poem that I always thought needed its own soundtrack. So last night I was playing around with uke, and this is what happened. Strumming and plucking and a little bit of lead and the poem got it’s sound. I hope you like it. You might have to turn your volume up. It’s kind of soft.
On a dark rum evening,
No ice, no mixer, just straight up
Kind of evening,
Cigarettes taste stronger,
And linger kind of evening,
And the sun is in limbo
The sea is aflame kind of evening,
On this evening,
Don’t say what you feel,
Don’t search eyes for consent,
Don’t hold hands,
Don’t watch lips,
Don’t lean closer,
Don’t hold each other,
On this evening,
Walk away in opposite directions,
You are being tricked into
Feeling more than there is,
You could put your hand into a box
And say- Ah! the air feels different,
You could take a sip of bottled water
And find it sharper than tap water,
You could feel your pockets for change
And twenty pence would tinkle like a pound,
It’s a Coyote evening,
It’s a friday poker night of
Trickster gods,
And their doobie burns slow and strong,
What you breathe are their exhalations,
What they breathe are your longings,
Hide under your blankets (in separate beds),
Resist from touching yourself,
It’s the kind of evening
Where you walk around the corner
And bump into regret,
You say – I love you. I love you.
No! You mean – I love this. I love this.
Say it, taste it, it’s mouldy, but it’s true,
I love this. I don’t love you.
It’s a marshmallow evening,
And you hear a background score,
And you see your life as a story,
And you think – There she is,
And there she is,
And you think – she smiles at me,
And she has smiled at you,
And you think – I know her,
But you don’t,
You don’t even know yourself,
It’s that time of the day when if someone
Asks you – what do you do?
You might even close your eyes for a second
And answer – I do this.
You think you love your job,
No, you hate it,
So don’t be so fucking sagacious,
You are a disgrace,
- I ask her if she’d like to leave
- She does
- She wears the evening like a cloak of fire
- The taste of her sex is moist and sweet,
- Her skin is soft to touch and pleasant
- She loves me. She says it. I love you.
- I say it too.
No! You don’t. You don’t.
You-don’t-love-people. You-love-this.
It would have all been alright
Till you said it.
It’s just a very, very wrong evening.
This is an older poem that renders rather well to jazz. It was once performed with a Tea Chest Bass, that’s exactly what it is… a tea chest with a broom handle and a rope. Right now I have a double bass, some uke and a touch of blues harp and flute. This too has been looped with LOOPY on iPhone. Great app. Get it!
This is an active performance version looped with a zippo lighter, a ukulele and an iPhone. The idea was to compose instant music with spoken word at the event itself. Tried and tested, the background score took all of 2.34 minutes to create. After that it was a matter of pulling in the right loops at the right time. That’s a bit tricky, but manageable if you don’t go Michael Jackson on your screen. So, yeah… it works I think. With moderate musical skills and an iPhone, it’s completely possible to soup up a one man show. What do you reckon?
Let’s build a shelf,
And then another,
And keep at it till we have
Corridors full of them,
They will rise from the floor
All the way to the ceiling
A hundred storeys high,
Let’s build these shelves
Of strong rose wood,
Let’s build them to last
Longer than we will last,
And our kids will last,
Longer than turtles will last,
And the earth,
And all the planets
In our milky way,
Let these shelves last so long
They become asteroids,
Or comets circling different suns
On the edges of the universe,
Where time folds this way and that way,
Like laugh lines and crow’s feet,
Like wrinkles on our foreheads,
Like forgotten scars on our knees,
Like latitudes and longitudes of
Our paper ball worlds,
Let the orbits get wider and wider,
Till it seems like nothing holds
Them together,
But everything is held together
By something,
Even if we cannot see it,
And eventually it doesn’t matter,
Except that it is,
Let’s fill these shelves with
Memories bound with thin twine,
So as eons pass and ages pass and
Generations pass,
The pages will scatter everywhere
One page at a time,
Fragments of a story floating
On the seas of Jupiter,
An origami of constellations
In a sky so far away
Our minds cannot reach there
Even if we try,
But these memories will,
And whoever finds them
Will look upon them and wonder
At what they mean,
And will infuse them with new meaning,
And that’s how we will evolve,
Our memories like seeds
That grow into trees,
And tired leaves that let go
with a sigh,
And are ground to dust
Under little feet,
And the dust that’s carried by
A river, by an ocean,
And the sand that makes castles,
And the castles set adrift
Wave after wave after wave,
Everything is held together
Even as it changes shape,
Even if you cannot see it,
That’s how it is,
That’s how it always is.
