Song Book

4 Responses to “Song Book”

  1. Lala Logan says:

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    My dear Mr. P.T. Walkley–i just came across ‘ No one needs to know’ and fell hard for it. I tried to get guitar chords so I could make a travesty of it with my talent-free strumming, but no luck. Googled you, found this site, found Mr Macy Walks Alone, but that song isn’t on any of the albums here. What gives, and how did you create such a perfect piece of music as this “No One Needs to Know”? It’s got so much going on in it and all of it is up my street, Love the siimple opening, then the drums kicking in and the lala lal ala lalalala,–I’m mad for the tune. Too short so I’ve been listening to it over and over.

    The song mysteriously appeared on my Ipod just now after I synched it. I assume my daughter is at the bottom of this, but better I should tell you how it moved me — I’ll query her closely on where she got it, how she found it, and how glad I am to have a young person to keep me fin the music loop. I am a woman of a certain age (hint: born in 1956) and I am frustrated and amazed by how many of my co-gen are actually great musicians, can play all kinds of instruments very well (age will do that)l and yet stick with the same old shite–okay, so it’s not really shite, but I’ve heard it all before. Life is too short to play Dick Dale’s surfing classics forty or more years on, and enough with the beatles, already (I’m glad when young people find some old shit that’s great, or when we are surprised by the past–like Baby Blue playing at the end of Breaking Bad–but that’s very different from living inside the old juke box, thinking the hits from the past 50 years should suffice.

    I loved the music I grew up with–Janis Joplin, Allman Bros., the Dead, all the Brit Boys– Jeff Beck, Led Zep, Yardbirds, Clapton &* friends, Ray Davies, Stones, Stevie Winwoodf, P. Floyd, etc, all those brills musicicans are fantastic, I know. But I keep telling my friends, man you have GOT to hear what the next generation is doing! They have taken all that old time music and they have made something exquisite, off-kilter, magnificent that you cannot miss. And yet miss them they do, and I can’t be heard over the moldie oldies. It’s a shame because you have taken the music into such wonderful directions, doing such unthinkable things, in your lyrics and instrumentation. Makes me glad I didn’t croak it in the 1980s before say Broken Bells did Vaporize, or before I heard that break in Gorrillaz Feel Good Inc , before London Grammar, Beirut , Haim, the Middle East, or the Aussie bands, or Montreal French pirate ska, or the cowboy serial killer sounds. And P.T., Walkley. Everyone is so completely themselves, untaggable, free frtom the old A&R suits with their PR ditats. The Beatles freed themselves from that shit because they COULD (I will never forget hearing Eleanor Rigby for the first time at age ten or 11 on a tinny, mono radio–I had to sit dfown. ASnd a Day ion the Life–fuggeddaboudidt.

    But now this freedom is everywhere (except ion the pop machine): people laying down all kinds of crazy tracks making a single song out what would probably be three disfferent songs in my day. Sometimes these old farts will say, ‘Oh, they have all the equipment and technology now” (AS IF Dylan or the Jeffereson Airplane wouldn’t have killed for such limitless horizons–well, Dylan, he’s never lacked for innovative curiousity). I get so annoyed when I hear that and I say YES, that’s what’s so great about the music–you break any of the good songs down to a acoustic guitar, they are brilliant,–very global, very sophisticated) and then they kick it up a notch or ten with a well-placed digeridoo, a pack of oboes, a mess of strange percussion and you have got music that is fucking way way beyond the old wall of sound, or the prescribed tempo, lyrics, breaks, choruses, etc.

    As you have done. You, sir, are precisely the kind of song writer-musicician that makes me haunt Itunes for something special–usually I go all over the world listening to the 40 seconds of a song (I’m right abvout 85 per cent of the time, but with the french it’s tough–they could start out really down and dirty and sexy and then the berets, bagettes, and accordians start up et je regrette beaucoups. Okay I have bent your ear enough. Now I’ll let you bend mine.
    Thanks for the kick this morning.

    Lala

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