Waltered States Blog
Waltered States
The vow of silence is one of the more attention-getting vows of abnegation one can make. On many occasions, the getting of attention may be the whole point. At other times, a vow of silence may lead to spiritual growth of a yeasty sort. Here’s Vow Of Silence, a new song.
The harsh discipline of musical life under Walt’s repressive regime does not allow us to pursue every possibility a given song might suggest. Here’s a harmony vocal for Trouble On His Mind that didn’t make it into the official sheet music package.
Today we release the video and sheet music for Trouble On His Mind, the third track on my Songs Sung Sideways album. It is a song with some really obvious subtleties — helpful for those who find ordinary subtleties hard to grasp.
Many of the songs I play most are by Long Dead Songwriter, whose body has returned to Nature, and whose works have flown up to join the Public Domain. Here’s a video and free piano arrangement of Alberta, a song I met through Bill Dobbin, whose birthday is today.
My new song Forgotten Dream raises some difficult questions. One of them is, “In what style am I written?”
Two weeks have now passed since Walt’s Band was launched and Just The Moon was released on May 1. What better time could there be to pause and reflect upon the stately rhythm of Walt’s Wise Plan, whose clock ticks but once a fortnight?
In addition to its primary function of masking baldness, a pianist’s hat serves a myriad of purposes: lending a jaunty air; casting a shadow of mystery; mitigating shortness of stature; providing variation from the naturally dull shape of the head; to name but a few.
Just The Moon is not a Scott Joplin rag in character, structure or even time signature, but without classic piano ragtime the song probably wouldn’t have existed, and we might not have Travis-style guitar picking, either.
The poet Péguy spoke of a facile writer nonchalantly pulling words “from his overcoat pocket”. Over You is the ultimate overcoat pocket song, springing to life fully formed like Athena (though she emerged not from Zeus’ pocket but from a cleft in his skull).
If it weren’t for Walt’s sponsorship of this site, his participation, and his leadership, it could never be anything more than an overblown vanity project on the part of a single, self-obsessed songwriter. Thanks, Walt.
