Album commentary part 4
11) Tomorrow without you
I wrote this lyric back in 2002 as a demonstration for students for how to get a song out of somebody else?s?a response song. Just as ?All messed up? ("Potboiler") is sung from the dumped female?s perspective of ?Getting Out of it? ("Hammers and Anvils"), this song is sung from the perspective of the exited female lover in the Beatles? song ?Yesterday?. If a woman leaves a man and he didn?t see it coming, the reason he didn?t see it coming is the reason she?s gone. Oddly I only set it to music in August 08 on the encouragement of my daughter, to whom I had sent the lyric as a model of the AABA song structure.
12 The Chosen People
I started this is June 2008 in response to George Bush?s trip to Israel to commemorate the 60th anniversary of that nation. ?The chosen people? was the phrase he used to describe the people of Israel and the US. The catalyst for the music was the death of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, a big influence from the time my wife introduced me to his work in the early eighties. ?A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips? was my dimly recollected model (the volume of poetry from which it came has been lost in transit somewhere) though I have sourced the poem on the net recently so Google away if you are interested.
13) Rootless Cosmopolitan
Supervision of a master?s thesis has lead a colleague and I to grapple with notions of ?New Zealand-ness? in art and notions of national identity. ?God?s mountain? is Maungatua on the Taieri plain, beloved subject of Colin McCahon, Jerusalem refers to James K. Baxter?s commune on the Whanganui river (for foreign readers these are arguably our major artist and poet respectively). On the whole the song is a reality check on the notion that God, Maori world-view and connectivity to the land form the cornerstone of New Zealand-ness. The juxtaposition with the previous song was deliberate.
I wrote this lyric back in 2002 as a demonstration for students for how to get a song out of somebody else?s?a response song. Just as ?All messed up? ("Potboiler") is sung from the dumped female?s perspective of ?Getting Out of it? ("Hammers and Anvils"), this song is sung from the perspective of the exited female lover in the Beatles? song ?Yesterday?. If a woman leaves a man and he didn?t see it coming, the reason he didn?t see it coming is the reason she?s gone. Oddly I only set it to music in August 08 on the encouragement of my daughter, to whom I had sent the lyric as a model of the AABA song structure.
12 The Chosen People
I started this is June 2008 in response to George Bush?s trip to Israel to commemorate the 60th anniversary of that nation. ?The chosen people? was the phrase he used to describe the people of Israel and the US. The catalyst for the music was the death of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, a big influence from the time my wife introduced me to his work in the early eighties. ?A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips? was my dimly recollected model (the volume of poetry from which it came has been lost in transit somewhere) though I have sourced the poem on the net recently so Google away if you are interested.
13) Rootless Cosmopolitan
Supervision of a master?s thesis has lead a colleague and I to grapple with notions of ?New Zealand-ness? in art and notions of national identity. ?God?s mountain? is Maungatua on the Taieri plain, beloved subject of Colin McCahon, Jerusalem refers to James K. Baxter?s commune on the Whanganui river (for foreign readers these are arguably our major artist and poet respectively). On the whole the song is a reality check on the notion that God, Maori world-view and connectivity to the land form the cornerstone of New Zealand-ness. The juxtaposition with the previous song was deliberate.
