As noted in this journal from a few days ago, I’ve been inspired to look back at some of her old songs as if they are poetry.
If have, of course, listened to some of these songs thousands of times since she gave me the CD a year ago, only to realize that some the songs posted on some online accounts weren’t on the original CD, and, and in fact, had been recorded much more recently than when the originals were back perhaps in 2005.
These stand out partly because of the difference in production value since the CD music was produced by her husband, a very capable musician in his own right, while a few later pieces she apparently recorded in her apartment, one using a piano she kept in her kitchen, the other using a guitar she apparently received as a gift in late April last year.
The guitar work is simple, using minimal effects, perhaps reverb. But her voice is so powerful, it gives the song its own sense of orchestration as she raises emotions a lesser performer could not manage.
While all of her songs have an amazing haunting quality that carries me along on their emotional roller coaster, the song recorded with guitar in her apartment came at a particularly critical time, just as we were hitting the skids, yet just prior to the real drama that happened later in the month of May.
Like all of her songs – including covers – the real magic is in her voice. So that her husband’s orchestration on the CD enhances only to a certain degree the magic of the music. It is to her voice that I was always drawn, a seductive arrangement that would entice anyone, even people who never met her in person, showing a range and gift for phrasing that is remarkable.
At this point, the guitar piece may well be the last song she recorded (I have no way of knowing if she has posted anything since) and may well be a musical and emotional swan song since it comes at a time when she was on the cusp of change, although still held out hope for the future. A month later, after all the drama (I helped inflict on her), this song might well have been impossible for her, because she could not with the same confidence believe in it.
In some ways it seems to be a throw back to her days following high school when she seemed more like a folk singer than the talented jazz singer she became, although this song is much more complex in music and meaning. It comes at a time when things seem to begin to crumble, and she seems to be looking for answers in the wind, the blowing leaves she sees as being free (when she clearly was not), somehow symbolic of her life.
“But I can feel it, each time they touch men, they touch me even when I’m turned the other way,” she said, going on to say she feels it even when she is sliding, she is still bound to believe – at a time when it is still possible for her to believe.
The song seems to reflect the emotional fog she was then going through when somedays all she saw was a blur in front of her and was forced to be in a state without grace.
This last is a curious phrase that suggests something I don’t know enough about to go into here.
But the song suggests a certain speechlessness, or perhaps helplessness against fate, and yet even then, she feels the sense of potential freedom, the blowing wind, the clinging leaves, touching her, feeding her even when she is sliding – as she appeared to be early last May.
Her voice rises and falls in pitch and volume, suddenly floating well above the music, then falling into almost a whisper, powerful verbal devices that seduce the listener, forcing attention on where she will take us next.
Her voice is clearly full of the grace her lyrics claim she lacks, as she takes us on an emotional ride, going up and down octaves with such ease as we cling to her wings to follow, there is huge power in this vocal vehicle that keeps you clinging, and as she touches themes she would later embrace in her poetry, such as thoughts coming into her head, drawing her out of bed reluctantly, part of that ever problematic early morning conflict she later called hamster thinking, then something small pulls her free, reminds her of the leaves in the trees – and in one passage about their dying, and yet she gets to live another day, again feeling the power of this freedom touch her, feed her.
Again, she refers to facing reality without grace, almost as if a Garden of Eden tale, in which some temptation has severed her from what she wants and needs, and yet as with those Biblical characters, she is still bound to believe.
As pointed out, this song comes before the full fury of the spring and summer, at a time when she still holds out hope for salvation, even though some of her relationships have just gone sour.
Her remarkable vocal talents elicit incredible feelings, not the subtle lust of some of her other songs, but in this case, real passion as if this is an anthem to what is possible, something she might not later be able to recreate. In that moment of time, however, in early May she still clings to hope the way dead leaves cling to tree branches, still feels the touch of wind, feels a sense of what might be possible.
Looking back, this strikes me as her swan song and makes me wonder if she will be able to create on this level again. Listening to it, also makes me feel a bit ashamed for the part I played on dimming the lights on this amazing talent.
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