Something that is always interesting, as an artist, is how people try to compare your work to someone else's. Everyone does this - I do this - it's just natural to want to relate somehow, through something you already know. Sometimes the comparisons make me happy; most often they don't make any sense to me. Sometimes they infuriate me. Musicians I've never heard of, or I've never listened to, or worse of all, musicians I can't stand. Lots of singer songwriters play the piano. But with almost all of them, and I say this factually, it's arpeggiated simple chords, plunky triads on the quarter, 8th notes on the last beat and a half - sometimes syncopated, the occasional 'dramatic' 7th added in, major for happy and minor for sad, repetitive and predictable. Sitting in doctor's waiting rooms, standing in line at the grocery store, there it is, over and over and over and over again. I IV I IV I IV ad nauseum, and then a I VI II V I in the chorus. My GOD!
So look, I'm just gonna say it. I am not a Tori Amos fan. Never have been. Never could get through an album. (No disrespect.) Sarah McLachlan, not a fan anymore. "Fumbling towards Ecstacy" was a masterpiece and I'll never stop loving it, but most everything after that doesn't do it for me. But people compare me to those 2 women all the time. I'm hoping that's just because it's their only point of reference. Because honestly, there ain't NOTHING in my music that resembles what they do. People say, 'No, I definitely hear some Tori Amos in your music.' No man, no you don't. There is no Tori Amos in my music, because I have never listened to Tori Amos, have never liked Tori Amos, would not ever have been influenced by Tori Bloody Amos. Dig?
All right, rant over.
I have 4 major female songwriting heros: Kaki King, PJ Harvey, Joanna Newsom, and Bjork.
Kaki King: A kind of demon guitarist and songwriter, the antithesis of primping diva. She writes the most beautiful, complex, moving music. Not pretty - but really beautiful in the larger sense - to the senses and all the other faculties that have no name. I have spent so many hours walking around this island with her music in my ears. First time I heard her, I remember being hit by a kind of stunned dumbness. Cause there just ain't nobody to compare her to. Watch this:
Kaki King and
more Kaki KingPJ Harvey: a through-and-through authentic irreverent un-self-conscious performer. She doesn't write music to please - it makes me happy to listen to her music even when I don't like it, because it's just so her own. She delivers everything with total, raw conviction. She's a little scary too. I like women that are scary.
PJ Harvey - rid of mePJ Harvey - the pianoJoanna Newsom: this woman is no slouch. Epic, dream-like songs, bizarre and floridly ballsy. Brilliant poetry. Her voice is strange and captivating, and her 1st 2 albums gave me hundreds of hours of totally enraptured listening. I'm not in love with her latest album, but I'm okay with not always enjoying or getting what I want from artists. She deserves her freedom- and what the hell do I know? But just listen to this:
Joanna Newsom. So excited to see what she'll do next.
Bjork: it's obvious. She's a genre of music unto herself. She's Queen of some unnamed country. I actually cannot listen to her very much anymore, because most of her songs are time capsules that take me back to really heavy potent times in my teenage years, when I listened to her constantly. The instrumentation, her voice, ah God - it was all a revolution.
BjorkAnd an honourable mention goes to...
Fiona Apple: where did she go? I suspect/worry/have this feeling that she hasn't been well. Her album "When the Pawn" was amazing, but since then I feel she's been the victim of overzealous producers. The arrangements are ridiculous, just not good. The piano lost its role, drowned out by fluttery flutes, too much percussion etc. I hope she finds herself again - she can be such a powerful performer. This was a good year for Fiona:
Fiona AppleOther musicians that I am owe a lot of influence to: Brad Mehldau, Neko Case, Jeff Buckley, Keith Jarrett, Tom Waits, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, Esbjorn Svensson, Tin Hat, Billy Holiday, Nick Drake, Edith Piaf, Siouxsie Sioux, Alice Babs, Bad Plus, Billy Strayhorn, Andrew Bird, Radiohead, Astor Piazzolla, Avishai Cohen, Pinback, Death Cab, Stravinsky, Ravel, Part, Grieg, Faure, Debussy, Schumann, Whitacre, Scriabin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Villa-Lobos, Barber, Mozart, Reich, Copland, Glass, Brahms.
Feeling somewhat better today. It's been nice to have time/the excuse just to lie in bed and watch youtube videos of my favourite musicians - get all stoked up with ideas and inspiration. By the way, today is Monday, not Sunday as this post says. Which means I only have 2 days of work left before holidays, and then my trip. Crazy. I have a couple of musical goals for my time away. One is to re-learn my pieces on a small, portable, non-weighted-keys keyboard (surprisingly, no small task), and to play standing up. This'll be weird when I've had 25 years of sitting at a piano. I also want to play at least one gig while I'm there, with said keyboard, in said position, but it's not manditory. My other goal of course is to write more music. Some people have been saying that my lyrics are very very dark and that they'd like to hear me write a happy song. Well, I've tried. But fuck that. Writing 'dark' songs makes me happy, so there. Everyone loves darkness - it's at least half of what we are.
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I found this swimming hole today on my 'lunch break'. I went in snorkeling, without the snorkel.
It was so hot and sunny on the South-East part of the island, I couldn't resist going over to Big Beach too. I ran my lunch break into overtime. There were humpback whales breaching and spouting off in the distance. I was happy - no, jubilant - in the water again and felt compelled to dance a mock-ballet in the waves for quite some time. Nobody knows me here. It's great.
My mouth is hurting real bad right now - too much pineapple today. I bought a couple from a road-side fruit stand, where the lady skinned and cut them up for me, insisting that I try them both before I take them. They were so sweet and tender you could swear there was no acid in them. She wanted to charge me $10 each. I just laughed, and then we haggled happily until the price was reasonable. A couple tourists came up and started inspecting the fruit.
Day 6 - back to the West & North coasts. I was really excited to revisit these strange and dramatic cliffs. The picture above is taken from a rocky ledge, looking straight down at the surf. The waves roaring in. It was truly something to behold.
I scrambled down through a maze of dried mud and volcanic rock and came into what I could only describe as a moonscape. Huge fields of craggy, pock-marked craters and boulders standing over the sea. Gray and holey as Swiss cheese. It was very, very strange and utterly awesome. Deadly quiet except for whistling wind and crashing waves.
The diversity of colour and texture and natural design on this island is almost obscene. Rich red canyon-like walls, valleys engorged with green.
Today - mini adventure #1: La Perouse Bay -the barren, jagged lava flows on the South East tip of Maui. Archaeological remains of an early Hawaiian village, beaches of black lava rock and white coral... really breathtaking. Such a hot day, right under the slopes of the volcano.
Look what I found. How nice.
Dr. Seuss trees!
Seaweed jewels.
Jungle fowl.
Bougainvillea clouds.
Who are you?
I don't know what this is. A kind of urchin? Barnacle? Anyone know?
A cloudy, calm, sweet day. Water is just slightly cooler than the air.
Coconut husk in the seaweed.
It was a workday, so I didn't go far from home. It rained this morning for quite a while - such a beautiful warm rain. This is a 'cold front' ... ha ha. Tomorrow it returns to sun through the weekend. I've decided to keep my rental car a few more days because I found a hiking book and am now super excited about a whole bunch of trails on the other side of island that I MUST hike. Whoo-hoo! Also, I ate a fruit I've never heard of - Lilikoi. Potent!
It's such a different kind of green here. It was hard to leave Vancouver after that stretch of beautiful shimmery weather. But I hear it's none too pretty there today. Sorry about that...
I'm afraid I just can't help myself. I'm crazed with anticipation. My beloved BC coastal wilderness, I will miss you. I will miss those misty moist mossy lungs of the Earth. I almost can't believe anything else exists right now. But I am hungry, hungry, hungry for sunshine - I hope I'm not being a traitor to my native land. These pictures are from my first, solo trip to Maui. I just had to cry when I arrived there, because it is so impossibly beautiful - the air just wraps you up in sweet rich life.
Just imagine the way this sand feels underfoot. You can't. It's too soft for words. It's so fine it actually becomes part of your skin. You almost can't wash it off.
Look at these trees! Just look at these amazing peg-leg roots! Like some kind of crazy cartoon.
One of the north-shore beaches at dusk - 2 blocks away from the Monastery I stayed at.
Sugar cane fields line the roads in Paia. Everything has this golden hue - both from the sun and from the red-brown soil that works its way over every surface.
The coastline along the Road to Hana. Thick, dense jungle. Sheer cliffs dropping down to the sea.
Upcountry, heading up the slopes toward the volcano. Ranch lands, views of the other islands in the distance. Goat farms, lavender fields, hillsides covered in tufts of something that looked like heather, like some tropical version of the Scottish highlands.
Black sand beach - so hot!
The Stupa at the Tibetan monastery where I stayed, lit up in celebration of Buddha's birthday. Which is different all over the world. (It's the full moon day of the sixth month of the Buddhist lunar calendar, which would be the fourth month of the Chinese calendar, except in years in which there's an extra full moon, and then Buddha's birthday falls in the seventh month, except where it starts a week earlier. In Tibet it's usually a month later; in Japan, Buddha's Birthday always is April 8.... ?!)
The western mountains, on the hot, dry side of the island. Pineapple and mango plantations line the roads.
Pewter light.
Front of the little monastery. There were cats, and bunches of apple bananas hanging outside the doors. Kind, kind people. And Huge harmless spiders. I'll go visit when I'm there.
