Ball of Wax 57 Songs: Ken Cormier – “Kitchen Sink”

Everywhere I look lately, I see these comments, posts, and tweets that let me know everybody out there is “living their best life.” Some of them even encourage me to live mine. But you know what? I can’t. Ken Cormier is living my best life. From having poetry and fiction published several times over to producing gorgeous spoken word and audioblog bits to being a Creative Writing professor who is widely loved by his students (it’s true—I checked!) to delivering a doctoral dissertation on audio technology and identity expression (the abstract itself made me cry), I’m pretty sure Ken Cormier is the man I was supposed to be when I grew up.

If that weren’t enough, he’s a damn good musician with an ear for jaunty melodies and a knack for arrangements. “Kitchen Sink” is an eccentric number that opens with a drum loop and muffled dialogue that sounds like somebody’s admiring somebody else’s ride (or, considering the quirkiness of the song, somebody showing off their Cat’s Cradle skills) before bursting into a progression that plays with key and mostly uses three notes—c, d, and f—in various melodic combinations that cleverly give the whole thing its sense of movement and whimsy. Lyrically, Cormier puts his creative writing skills to use in ways that seem to serve the rhyme scheme more than logic or storyline, yet paint a picture of a narrator with a weariness for the company of other humans beyond the companion to whom he’s singing, and with just a hair of psychedelia thrown in to keep things from being too grounded in reality.

I suspect Ken Cormier may actually be aware that there’s a guy out there that envies what he’s got and what he can do, because he works two specific components into “Kitchen Sink” as if to show me personally that there are many things I’ve yet to learn that he’s already mastered. The first is throwing a meter change into the song that is maddening in its incongruence and its easy flow and handily answers the age-old question, “Will a section set to 11/8 work in a song in 4/4?” The second is the ending: as many tomes have been written about the use of cadence to signify closure as have been written about the numerous durations a final note or chord should be allowed to ring out. Cormier dismisses all of this by ending the song abruptly after the last lyric, and it’s a perfect stop. [Just wait ’til you hear the next track, which almost works as a continuation/coda to this song. One of my prouder moments in sequencing. -ed]