And part two:
I have written about two hundred songs, the bulk of which I would say, were love songs. Love songs, and therefore, by my definition, sad songs. Out of this considerable mass of material, a handful of them rise above the others as true examples of all I have talked about. Sad Waters, Black Hair, I Let Love In, Deanna, From her to Eternity, Nobody's Baby Now, Into my Arms, Lime Tree Arbour, Lucy, Straight to You; I am proud of these songs. They are my gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children. They sit grimly on their own and do not play with the other songs. Mostly they were offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births. Most of them are rooted in direct personal experience and were conceived for a variety of reasons but this rag-tag group of love songs are, at the death, all the same thing - life lines thrown into the galaxies of the divine by a drowning man.
The reasons why I feel compelled to sit down and write love songs are legion. Some of these came clearer to me when I sat down with a friend of mine, who for the sake of his anonymity I will refer to as J.J. and I admitted to each other that we both suffered from psychological disorder that the medical profession call erotographomania. Erotographomania is the obsessive desire to write love letters. My friend shared that he had written and sent, over the last five years, more than seven thousand love letters to his wife. My friend looked exhausted and his shame was almost palpable. I suffer from the same disease but happily have yet to reach such an advanced stage as my poor friend J. We discussed the power of the love letter and found that it was, not surprisingly, very similar to the love song. Both served as extended meditations on ones beloved. Both served to shorten the distance between the writer and the recipient. Both held within them a permanence and power that the spoken word did not. Both were erotic exercises, in themselves. Both had the potential to reinvent, through words, like Pygmalion with his self-created lover of stone, one's beloved. Alas, the most endearing form of correspondence, the love letter, like the love song has suffered at the hands of the cold speed of technology, at the carelessness and soullessness of our age. I would like to look, finally, at one of my own songs that I recorded for The Boatman's Call album. This song, I feel, exemplifies much of what I´ve been talking about today. The song is called Far From Me.
For your dear, I was born
For you I was raised up
For you I´ve lived and for you I will die
For you I am dying now
You were my mad little lover
In a world where everybody fucks everybody else over
You are so far from me
Far from me
Way across some cold neurotic sea
Far from me
I would talk to you of all matter of things
With a smile you would reply
Then the sun would leave your pretty face
And you´d retreat from the front of your eye
I keep hearing that you´re doing best
I hope your heart beats happy in your infant breast
You who are so far from me
Far from me
Far from me
There is no knowledge but I know it
There´s nothing to learn from that vacant voice
That sails to me across the line
From the ridiculous to the sublime
It´s good to hear you´re doing so well
But really can´t you find somebody else that you can ring and tell
Did you ever care for me?
Were you ever there for me?
So far from me
You told me you´d stick by me
Those were your very words
My fair-weather friend
You were my brave-hearted lover
At the first taste of trouble went running back to mother
So far from me
Far from me
Suspended in your bleak and fishless sea
Far from me
Far from me
Far From Me took four months to write, which was the duration of the relationship it describes. The first verse was written in the first week of the affair and is full of all the heroic drama of new love as it describes the totality of feeling whilst acknowledging the potential for pain - for you I'm dying now. It sets the two lovers it describes against an uncaring world - a world that fucks everybody over - and brings in the notion of the physical distance suggested in the title. Strangely, though, the song, as if awaiting the "traumatic experience" that I spoke of earlier to happen, would not allow itself to be completed until the catastrophe had occurred. Some songs are tricky like that and it is wise to keep your wits about you when dealing with them. I find quite often that the songs I write seem to know more about what is going on in my life than I do. I have pages and pages of fourth verses for this song written while the relationship was still sailing happily along. One such verse went:
The Camellia, The Magnolia
Have such a pretty flower
And the bells of St. Mary's
Inform us of the hour
Pretty words, Innocent words, unaware that any day the bottom would drop out of the whole thing. Love songs that attach themselves to actual experience, that are a poeticising of real events have a peculiar beauty unto themselves. They stay alive in the same way that memories do and being alive, they grow up and undergo changes and develop. A love song such as Far From Me has found a personality beyond the one that I originally gave it with the power to influence my own feelings around the actual event itself. This is an extraordinary thing and one of the truly wondrous benefits of song writing. The songs that I have written that deal with past relationships have become the relationships themselves. Through these songs I have been able to mythologize the ordinary events of my life, lifting them from the temporal plane and hurling them way into the stars. The relationship described in Far From Me has been and gone but the song itself lives on, keeping a pulse running through my past. Such is the singular beauty of song-writing.
Twenty years of song-writing has now past and still the void gapes wide. Still that inexplicable sadness, the duende, the saudade, the divine discontent persists and perhaps it will continue until I see the face of god himself. But when Moses desired to see the face of God, Exodus 33, 188, he was answered that he may not endure it, no man could see his face and live. Well, me, I don´t mind. I `m happy to be sad. For the residue, cast off in this search, the songs themselves, my crooked brood of sad eyed children, rally round and in their way, protect me, comfort me and keep me alive. They are the companions of the soul that lead it into exile, that safe the overpowering yearning for that which is not of this world. The imagination desires an alternate and through the writing of the love song, one sits and dines with loss and longing, madness and melancholy ecstasy, magic, joy and love with equal measures of respect and gratitude. The spiritual quest has many faces - religion, art, drugs, work, money, sex - but rarely does the search serve god so directly and rarely are the rewards so great in doing
[the whole thing is here,
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=800055 - sorry for posting such a huge chunk of text]