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Eric Andersen In (Spoken) Pieces

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Eric Andersen
Thu Nov 28, 2024
Don Graham

Eric Andersen has been one of the voices of the people since the great folk boom of the 1960s and he shows no signs of slowing down. His latest offering is a unique collection of songs, narratives and insights into the man behind the legend.

“Eric Andersen In (Spoken) Pieces” is an hour and forty-five minutes of pure Eric Andersen, some songs, some spoken word and all a window into a legendary artist and pop culture icon. My first reaction was it would be a must have for all Eric Andersen devotees to complete their collection of Andersen works. Speaking to Eric he had a different take on that thought.

“I would expand on that angle. It’s for people who live for ideas, narratives and words who are not necessarily completists”. So, in other words if you’re a fan of the man’s work you will be pleased to hear it and if not yet a fan but enjoy a little deeper thinking you will become a fan.

The following is a summary of the project and a description of the genesis of the tracks in Eric Andersen’s own words.

“This musical collection is an assemblage of my past and present longer-spoken (song) narratives. The chief motive for why these works exist is that as a songwriter I often wanted to crash through the boundaries and barriers of conventional songwriting to create longer more adventurous works than what the typical verse-chorus,verse-chorus songwriting formats offered—to allow myself to find other means to escape and explore missions geared to chase new lyrical landscapes and to travel uncharted narrative rivers--sometimes just for the thrill of where it all would lead me. The destination didn’t matter—only the journey counted. The music often became a ferry that carried me over unfamiliar waters on a kind of telepathic fishing expedition—a boat built for catching lines and not fish! Below are some brief outlines of the spoken song pieces found in the collection.”

Fifty Times

This is Lord Byron’s humorous, witty, quick-take on the toll upon a listener’s patience—having to sit through a poet’s long-winded recital of verses--“When people say, ‘I’ve told you fifty times,’ they mean to scold, and very often do; when poets say, ‘I’ve written fifty rhymes,’ they make you dread that they’ll recite them too.’”…ah Byron!

(From the album Mingle with the Universe: The Worlds of Lord Byron, 2017).

Ghosts Upon The Road

This is a narrative of moving stone cold broke from the Lower East Side to Boston waiting for my first album to be released. I ended up waking up alone in an abandoned building before moving across the river to Cambridge. I was a sort of an outlier and not a part of the storied Club 47 folk scene. They didn’t accept or take a kid songwriter from New York very seriously. And on top of that, I wasn’t a traditional imitative urban folk singer. I ended up mowing lawns for money and killed time going to Harvard night school with my girlfriend Debbie Green and taking courses on Joyce, Eastern religions, and French Symbolist poetry. (From the album Ghosts Upon the Road, 1989).

Memory of the Future

This is roughly a spontaneously based series of conversational riffs, stream of consciousness kind of piece I wrote together with polymath musician Robert Aaron. We simply sat at a kitchen table in Norway and went back and forth doing Burroughsian phrase cut-ups--like a couple of giddy Kerouacs looking into a mirror. It became more like a first thought best thought word routine rather than a composed narrative lyric. He produced the soundtrack. But the concept of memory itself—namely something called a Memory of the Future wasn’t a gimmick though on the surface—it sounds absurd. A back story—when my partner was once traveling to Egypt I stayed behind and read about pyramids. I learned that in ancient Egypt priests wielded all the power. They had a ritual where they would lay the Pharaoh flat out on a table and administer dreams by way of a hallucinatory dream-inducing substance that would allow him to dream, conjure forth, and receive images he would witness in his deep dream-state sleep. The goal was to report back and possibly reveal the future as told by the vision in his dreams. During the vigil, the priests patiently waited for the Pharaoh to awake. Then they gently prodded and questioned his drowsy fresh memory of any dreams he had seen foretelling the coming future. This would determine everything. That was the source of the idea of the title and where the title sprung from. (From the album Memory of the Future, 1999)

Armed To The Teeth

The audio track from the eponymous YouTube video about organized ignorance into private armed militias and the vital need to resist both their weapons and ideas. (From the YouTube video “Armed to the Teeth” 2023)

Confessions of a Judge Pentient (Song of Deception)

Drawn from Albert Camus’s novel La Chute (The Fall), this piece tells of a highly respected but hypocritical Parisian judge who becomes guilty, passing by one late night on a bridge to witness a young girl at the precipice at the moment she plunges into the River Seine—a suicide he neither helps to prevent nor interfere with though he passed close enough to see the damp curls on the back of her neck. He watches her fall then hears her screams drifting in the current. He walks home in the rain and doesn’t read the newspapers for three days. His increasing guilt drives him out of Paris to a new life in Amsterdam counseling and offering legal advice to impoverished seamen in a brown sailor bar. Robert Aaron created the track. (From the album, Birth of a Stranger: Shadow and Light of Albert Camus, 2018).

Dangerland (Love People Not Guns)

This is the audio track from my YouTube video which David Amram and I composed and recorded about the endless record of mass school and supermarket shootings—inspired by the atrocities in Uvalde, Texas and Tops Groceries in Buffalo; including the mass shooting episodes in Columbine, Sandy Hook, Austin, Parkland, Houston, Virginia Tech, Georgia, the list goes on. (From the YouTube video, 2023)

Beat Avenue

A day-in-the-life narrative about being in North Beach, San Francisco on the day JFK was gunned down, murdered in Dallas, Texas. A shocking day for many because Kennedy was a bird in flight and his immense moving shadow provided safety and shelter for change and new ideas. Suddenly, the bird was shot down out of the sky leaving so much exposed. The world felt splintered after that. (From the double album Beat Avenue, 2003.)

The Fall (Song Of Gravity)

This piece provides more details from the Camus book La Chute (The Fall). I created the track in Ravenshead, Nokinghamshire, England—the town of Lord Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abby. Michele Gazich adds violin. (From the album, Birth of a Stranger: The Shadow and Light of Albert Camus, 2018)

Darkness

Byron’s beautifully written bleak apocalyptical doomsday narrative. I’m accompanied by the special micro-tonic strings he may have heard in his travels in the Mediterranean. (From the album Mingle with the Universe: The Worlds of Lord Byron, 2017).

No Man’s Land

My singular take on the American Dream. Track composed and played by Robert Aaron. (From the album Memory of the Future, 1999)

Hymn of Waves

I scribbled this lyric down fast in a Saratoga Springs motel late one night after a show while my road assistant had run out to grab me a tuna salad sandwich-with-chips-emergency ration. The music came by itself--naturally—almost like an “Amazing Grace”. I needed a title song for the second cover-song album I’d recorded of Sixties Village songwriters I’d admired. A fast and simple track. Robert Aaron and I recorded it on bass and guitar. He added tenor sax at the end. (From the album Waves, 2005)

This is an hour and forty-five minutes of entertainment and education and is available now on all major platforms and wherever you stream your music.

ericandersen.com

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