As Paul wrote a while back, my Songs about Books assignment is the book Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. It’s a tough book to categorize, but it is quite lovely. I just finished reading it for the third time (it’s very short), and will probably read it at least a few more.
I’ve written one song so far, which I may or may not keep, and which will probably sound very strange to someone who hasn’t read the book (it’s about the author’s friend, who was in a terrible accident and rendered quadriparetic – well, it’s actually about that friend’s feet). Yesterday I started on my second song, and I thought I’d share the route I took to get to its starting point.
The book is about, among other things, the author’s love of/obsession with the color blue, and also about the many manifestations and meanings of blueness. There are several musical references in the book (e.g. Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen), and of course the idea of “the blues” is touched upon numerous times – both in reference to music and depression. The idea of having one of my songs for this project be a blues song was discarded more or less at the same moment as the thought entered my head. I don’t normally write in that form, and it seemed it would just come across as trite and forced and kind of silly, which is the opposite of what this beautiful book is.
There is a portion in the middle, though, where the author refers to how she has imagined her life “ending, or simply evaporating, by being subsumed into a tribe of blue people. I dreamed of these blue people as a child, long before I knew that such people actually existed. Now I know that they do, in the eastern and central Sahara desert, and that they are called Tuareg, which means ‘abandoned by God.'”
Photo of Tinariwen by flickr user wheelzwheeler
I had a bit of an “a-ha” moment upon reading this, as there is a wonderful musical connection left unspoken here. There is a fantastic band called Tinariwen, comprised of Tuareg musicians. (Their album Aman Iman: Water Is Life is essential listening.) They play a sort of droning proto-blues made with electric guitars and percussion and gorgeous voices singing together. They are part of a larger African musical genre that has been referred to, among other things, as “desert blues.” So here we have blue people* making music that is blue, but not the blues – or the blues before it was the blues that we know. The connection was too irresistible, so I thought I would try writing a riff-driven song inspired by the music of artists such as Tinariwen (without just aping them or outright ripping them off). Of course I’m not the first to have this brainstorm: there are scads of musicians these days making music inspired by various African genres, including some excellent recent instrumental rock from the likes of Master Musicians of Bukkake and Earth that has echos of Tinariwen and other desert blues acts. If you’re not familiar with any of the artists mentioned in this paragraph, you’ve got some listening to catch up on. Odds are they do a much better job of it than I will, but I always like finding a new jumping-off point for my own work.
Yesterday I put down a rough recording of something along those lines that I quite like. I don’t have any lyrics at this point; I had assumed this song would be about the author’s fantasy of joining such a group of blue people, but we’ll see where it goes. Anyway, it’s always satisfying when I think I’d like to achieve something musically and manage to do it (or at least do it to my own satisfaction) in fairly short order. It’s very likely (and probably for the better) that the final piece won’t evoke this entire thought process, but I thought anyone following the Songs about Books project might find it of interest.