“Searching For My Twin” Single Release Show
Jalopy Theatre | Brooklyn, NY | Friday, July 12 | 7:30 PM | $15
Waymore’s Blues
There’s this great video where Waylon Jennings plays his original song, “Waymore’s Blues,” for his wife, Jessi Colter. It’s a pretty senseless song — it starts out memorializing 1920s country godfather Jimmie Rodgers, it proceeds with kindergarten spelling lessons, and it features this artfully horny and self-reprimanding verse:
Well, I got a good woman, what's the matter with me?
What makes me want to love every woman I see?
I was trifling when I met her, now I'm trifling again,
And every woman she sees looks like a place I came in
I’m no proponent of marital infidelity, but I am a proponent of artful lyricism, and this is that.
I bring the video up not just because of the song, but because of what Waylon tells Jessi after he’s done:
Waylon: [The song] don’t make any sense. It does, but it don’t. I had to really dig to get a story out of it.
Jessi: Yeah.
Waylon: What it’s about is uh … well the first part is about Jimmie Rodgers.
Jessi: Who’s really been gone a long time.
Waylon: The second verse — I really don’t know what it’s about. You could say it had a concept to it, you know.
Jessi: Honey, that’s not the way you do it. You don’t say that it has a concept —
Waylon: Wait a minute now.
Jessi: — after you’ve finished it. No kidding. Now you really are mistaken here.
Waylon: [Defensive] It’s a good song, alright?
I like this moment because it pinpoints an essential divide in writing styles, writing experiences: Sometimes, you sit down with something to say, and you try to figure out the best way to say it. Other times, you sit down with nothing specific to say, but you’ve got a feeling you want to express anyway, and you just open up your brain and see what falls out.
If you want an example of the latter style, think about stream-of-consciousness writing. Think about Dylan’s mid-’60s work, think about Naked Lunch, think about this story Patti Smith improvised at the behest of certain Rolling Thunder Revue figureheads. Anyone can do it. It’s like dreaming: You let your brain make associations that defy logic, that are driven by random association or by the words’ cosmetic properties — or, if you’re the type that likes labyrinths, by some deeper, stranger motive.
Antilogic
For years, this was the only way I wrote. I’d open my notebook — to write lyrics, poems, fiction, and other uncategorizable slabs of prose — and have no idea what was on its way. I remember writing a surrealistic story about a painting of a giraffe. I remember writing a Tom Waits-type song whose opening lines were “One glass train, and a picture of two/The trash in the corner, and the airplane glue.” I remember writing an epic poem called “hades,” a sort of modern reimagining of Dante’s Divine Comedy. They all were driving at the essence of the urge, the urge that compels people to do anything at all, to write anything at all. I wanted to be a clean, logicless channel for that urge.
Why? Because something in me has always mistrusted logic. Much as it’s an invaluable tool in negotiating day-to-day dilemmas, much as it can help clarify a muddy picture of same-seeming choices, the inherent claims of logic — that we can or should reduce the raw magic of reality to gears and levers and energy sources, understand their co-relations, manipulate them to human ends — feel like bullshit to me. Having touched the quick of artistic satisfaction, felt the fleeting magic of musical fulfillment, I can see the limitations of logic, its spiritual poverty in comparison to acts of communal enrichment.
To the extent that I have a politics, antilogic describes it. At root, my observation is that ideology-driven logic is our fundamental human problem. Ideology divides people, ideology turns neighbors into enemies, ideology tells us that there’s anything different about us beyond the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of our DNA that makes my nose a little more crooked than yours. And logic is ideology’s scaffolding, its fuel, its weaponry; the biased selection of facts, the willful conflation of rhetoric and truthfulness, the exploitation of the drug of self-righteousness. Without logic, ideology loses all its power.
How do you deprive an ideology of its logic? One way is to highlight its points of logical failure. Logic is a human tool, not a property inherent to the universe, and therefore not a tool that can be used to describe the universe with 100% accuracy 100% of the time. For any ideology, there’s a situation where its principles fail. A liberal ideology fails in times of resource scarcity; a conservative ideology fails in times of abundance. An ideology of radical openness clashes with the need for privacy; an ideology of radical exclusion clashes with humanitarian (not to say Christian) principles.
It’s not that I think we should live without codes or values. Quite the opposite: I think a values system should influence our goals, our decisions, how we interpret the consequences of those decisions. It’s a matter of what comes first — your values, or your ideology. An ideology tells you that certain attitudes or behaviors are always right in all circumstances. Values give you a compass for figuring out a course of action based on your circumstances. Ideology is a tyrant; a values system is a trusted advisor.
The heartless employ of logic creates monstrous corporations, dictatorships, civil wars. It makes global superpowers race to build nukes that will justify whether capitalism or communism is always right. It tells government leaders they should defund the arts and give the military Catch-Me-If-You-Can-type budgetary carte blanche. As someone who has felt — and, a few times, created — the spiritually liberating effects of art, full-force, I know that naked, unqualified logic is nonsense. I know that there’s another urge, a deeper urge, an urge for unity that came first, and that is infinitely stronger than the divisive properties of ideology.
Searching For My Twin
Almost anytime I play “Searching For My Twin” live, someone approaches me after the show to me to ask me what it means. In that it happens so often, it’s interesting. I infer that the song moved these people in some way, but that they couldn’t quite pin it down — didn’t know whether the song was literally true (that I have an actual twin from whom I was separated at birth) or metaphorically true, and if the latter, what exactly the metaphor means.
I tell you all this — the Waylon story, my politics of antilogic, those inscrutable audience reactions — to get you in the right mindset to listen to “Searching For My Twin.” It’s coming out Friday, July 5, alongside two other originals: “Bankrupt & Crucified” and “Hangover Cure” (in 2024, three songs constitute a “single”). If you react to it like these bemused audience members have, I’m here to tell you that I didn’t write it to mean anything in particular.
The ingredients that went into it included a sort of crazed optimism, the kind that John Prine has in songs like “Illegal Smile” and “Sweet Revenge.” They included the key of G, which, from the point of view of a guitarist whose abilities are as limited as mine, is a very homey-feeling key on the acoustic guitar. They included the unpremeditated phrase, “Searching for my twin,” which I initially wrote as a mystifying way to end the first verse, but which was packed with enough bait-and-switch wildness to support the whole song. And the last ingredient is you.
The abrupt shift from the first chorus to the second verse might strike you as a familiar disjointedness — the disparity between the romantic ideal of a road trip and the practical facts of driving seven hours a day and using putrid bathrooms. You might picture your own childhood home, stripped and uninhabited, at the end of that same verse. You might think of the titular search as the quest for a soul mate, or a true self, or an idealized self, or a best pal, or an idol, or something else entirely.
My favorite songs are labyrinths: confluences of image and melody in which, with enough patience, I can find some deeper feeling or message. The words are the clues, the music is the map. The maze may include dead ends, misdirections, backtracking, and moments of unanticipated revelation. What I find might look nothing like what you find, and as long as we can find our ways in and out, we’re both the better for it.
As with “A Little Green Left,” I invite you to stream, to save, to share, and generally to help me get this music in front of as many sympathetic souls as possible.
July Shows
Friday, 7/12 | Brooklyn, NY | Jalopy Theatre | “Searching For My Twin” Release Show | 7:30 PM | Tickets
Thursday, 7/4 | Brooklyn, NY Rooftop Concert | 7:30 PM (RSVP)
Saturday, 7/6 | Brooklyn, NY | Yoga Block Party | 10:00 AM (RSVP)
Saturday, 7/13 | Morris Plains, NJ | Autodidact Beer | 7:30 PM (RSVP)
Sunday, 7/14 | New Canaan, CT | House Concert | 5:00 PM (RSVP)
Thursday, 7/25 | Manhattan, NY | Cafe Wha? | 6:00 PM (Tickets)
Friday, 7/26 | Jersey City, NJ | Fox & Crow | 9:00 PM (RSVP)
Sunday, 7/28 | Westport, CT | Compo Beach | 12:30 PM (RSVP)