Songs are not always poems. Sometimes they’re not even songs.
At least, not in the traditional sense of riming verse and chorus or even in the broader freeform sense of jazz performance.
So, in searching through her catalogue of music, I should not be surprised at how unconventional some of her songs really are, and how they seem to broach the boundary of free form jazz, deviating from the often too-rigid structure of pop and rock.
After all, she did study jazz performance in the late 1990s.
All this, of course, escaped me in listening to the songs she gave me on CD when we first met, even though I have listened to them repeatedly ever since.
What I did not know at the time is that she appears to have two collections, one of original song and covers released in 2005, and another apparently of jazz standards released two years later – which explains why when I listened to her work online, I heard songs that weren’t on the CD she gave me.
All of the original songs from that CD were written prior to 2005 when she and her husband put the compilation together, yet strangely reflect consistent themes found in much of her later poetry work.
The structure of her original works seems to be more aligned with looser jazz formulas, such as the one I kept listening to this week.
It amazes me how she refuses to be boxed in by traditional rime. This song is structured similarly to the song I wrote about earlier, a kind of verse, pre-chorus, chorus, with a musical intro, several musical interludes, and a curious outro, all with only the barest hint of rime, relying on musical production and her amazing voice to carry the song.
This song unlike the previous one is more orchestrated, bright up-front drums, a moody piano, and a thick string section for the intro and musical interludes following each chorus.
As with some of her later poems, this song talks about waking in the middle of the night to a delirium – which may well be desire for the man who is the focus of the song, waking that does not promise her a brighter day ahead.
“So, I’m waiting for … for someone to tell me what I have to do, because I’m waiting for you,” she sings, doing what she does in later poems, internalizing the issue, taking blame for something that may not be her fault.
And like in many of her other poems, there is an erogenous element, as moon light speaks to her when it is quiet and fills her with fire – in this case, as in later poems, unfulfilled passion.
“But I cannot see you, cannot hear you, I can’t tell what you are,” she sings, oddly avoiding the expected “where” in the last line so as to expand the meaning of that line to include identity, rather than just about longing. Is he what he says he is, or is he deceiving her?
And then we get a kind of double meaning, as she says she is waiting for someone to “trigger” what she has to do, both a sexual reference, while at the same time shouldering the burden of who should be responsible for taking action, relying on him to tell her what she should do.
The next verse deals more with her internal conflict, less about him, than what she thinks she did wrong or perhaps intense conflict of feelings going on inside herself.
“All my ecstasies and failures pushes me into the fire,” she sings, “into a new circumstance that kills me.”
The use of fire in this verse seems something other than its use to define lust as it was in the first verse, powerful emotions are at play inside of her.
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