CW35
“Dissonant Beauty To Be Forgotten” The song will sing itself I don’t care what you say And the bomb can drop itself You don’t know anyway You could say I told you But don’t look beside you The watch will charge itself You don’t have to rewind And the brake can pump itself You don’t pay any mind You could say I told you But don’t look beside you Your cellar He loves you He heats this house These forces Match pitches À la Charlie Rouse And the choir illuminates Wobble words to a glow And the cat just kissed the mouse Sandal shows all your toes You could say I told you But don’t look beside you Don’t look beside you But don’t look beside you
“Dissonant Beauty To Be Forgotten” was written in Austin, Texas, in 2002 or 2003. I left Austin, where I’d moved in 2000, in the summer of 2003, to return to New England (sweet New England). I left with ten or fifteen songs I could actually play (even the lyrics were memorized!), mostly unrecorded. But I’d sold my 4-track to a pawn shop before leaving town.
I thought the Tascam—a big gray one, cassette, with a digital display and razor-accurate zero stop—was broken. I’d bought it, used, from Daddy’s Junky Music in Newington, New Hampshire, not long before moving South. I used it a lot in Texas, but was driven insane by little elusive, inconsistent ticks of sound on my tapes. The trick was to mix down to another cassette with as little of the trickster glitter (like an unwanted starscape beginning to prick the sky at dusk) as possible. It wasn’t until getting back to New England, with no way to record and worse than no money, that I got Tascam on the phone and finally learned what the problem was: humidity. The gray 4-track was fine.
It wasn’t until late 2004 that I had a way to record again. My then girlfriend (a long-teetering relationship in its final stretch—a teetering made worse by my financial woes) bought me a new 4-track, a blue Portastudio 414 MKII, simpler than the gray one, on Musician’s Friend. And a brick of Maxell gold.
By February, 2005, I had recorded, and burned some CD-Rs of (“released”), February Demos. “Dissonant Beauty To Be Forgotten” was on there. (February Demos isn’t on my Bandcamp, but “Dissonant Beauty To Be Forgotten” is on the Billy Don’t Pawn Your Horn collection.)
All this to say, there was a brief time in my late twenties when I was (minus the shows) kind of a normal singer-songwriter: I had a set of songs I could perform on cue, and it took me a couple years to record them. (No disrespect. It’s just interesting to watch yourself change over time. I got better at some things (writing and recording fast) and worse at others (performing, remembering).)
In Texas, I had a handheld cassette recorder—I still have it—that I would record “ideas tapes” on. Periodically, I would go through the recent tapes and take notes on what was on them. I called this process a “tape walk.” (There may have been a step—I don’t remember—where I would dub the keepers (songs that deserved to be finished) to another cassette.) “Dissonant Beauty To Be Forgotten” was the title I gave today’s song, what I wrote down during the tape walk, because I was going to pass over it, let it go. Then I changed my mind. I finished the lyrics, but kept the original title.
(I believe “Dissonant” refers to the blues in the melody over the second chord (with the descending high voice, it’s technically three chords, but you get the idea). The song is not particularly dissonant by my standards, including back then. It does move between two keys a whole-step apart (don’t look beside you)—I love doing that (another good example is “The Sun Comes Back”)—but it isn’t that dissonant.)
I won’t crowd, much, what the song is plainly saying: that we are not alone. I didn’t have a religion then, and I don’t now (though the phrase “spiritual but not religious” has always annoyed me), but the song is definitely asserting something: Don’t look beside you if you don’t want to know. Because There’s more to this. For me, the song is a little spooky, and a lot relieving. It soothes me still. I forget and then I remember.
“These forces / Match pitches / À la Charlie Rouse”:
Charlie Rouse, many readers know, is most famous for his long tenure playing tenor saxophone with Thelonious Monk. I’ve always loved when Rouse is playing unison with Monk and he’s slightly out of tune. (Or maybe it’s Monk!—certainly he was often stuck playing “close-enough-for-jazz” pianos.) To me that intonation isn’t “bad,” it’s wide. 💕 Wide unison is the perfect metaphor, in my opinion, for that hidden hand moving alongside your own, imbuing what you do with an uncanny aura.