Wednesday, October 19, 2011

The Face The Lonesome Cowboy Sees



Today’s post is practically nothing, but in a kind of crazy way I’ve got a quite a few things to say about it.


Faces

I didn’t make any plans to have a theme this week, and I don’t have a theme this week.

However, on Monday I did a post that was built around me having seen a woman I know driving her car and talking on her phone and staring straight ahead. Actually, I saw this woman doing this more than once and she always had a very strange expression on her face (her very beautiful face!) and it (the expression, I mean!) made me think of gargoyles. Exerting Agency, Liminal Entities And Scripts

Then on Tuesday I did a post about the very cool expression I’d once seen when a woman told me she was looking forward to leaving a certain job and never going back. Memories Of Faces/Lost In Shadows


So today I’ve been wondering if I had anything else to say about faces.


And I realized I had a loose end about faces that was actually older than the blog.


A couple of months ago I did a song, Quasi Una Atomic Octopus Fantasia, that I’d posted only the lyrics to years ago.

But even earlier than that I’d done a week of five songs where I posted lyrics from songs that I’d written a long, long time ago. (I’d done the music to one of those five songs a couple of years ago: Quasi Una Zombie Fantasia.)

But another one of those old, old songs was a kind of science fiction/country and western song [!] about a guy having a vision about seeing a face, Five Songs: #5 – Lonesome Cowboy.

I’ve always wanted to put up the music to this song, but, really, the music is kind of simple (or simple-minded if someone wants to be mean to me) and I never could get up the energy to do the song for the camera. But with the added incentive that it is about a face, and a loose end, well, I decided to go for it.


Richard Brautigan

My favorite writer is Richard Brautigan and at the end of his great novel, “Sombrero Fallout,” the writer achieves something like momentary peace of mind in his breakup with his girlfriend by sitting down and writing a country and western song. When I wrote this song I was being a Richard Brautigan character.


Diminished 7th

This song is built on just three chords. The root, a diminished 7th half a step up, and then a minor 7th half a step up from that. Here I’m playing in the key of B, so it is a BM7, CDim7,C#m7. Over and over again. I have no idea if this kind of progression is at all interesting to listen to, but my thinking was to keep the focus on the little story the lyrics are telling. And playing and singing a little progression like this is very relaxing because it becomes a kind of meditation exercise after a while, playing the same thing over and over.


So here’s today’s post. I’ve made the video dark and grainy, like an old cowboy song should be. (The signal path here is just my guitar to my metronome speaker. My Tascam had a low battery, so it’s unavailable, across the room getting charged.)



























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