Geeks and American Song

Below are some of my comments about this album. You can skip over them and go directly to song clips or the lyrics below the comments, but if you want to read something I wrote while half in the bag, wade in.

Pete and Maura Kennedy: "Sam is a unique new voice on the scene. Great songwriting, great vocals, great guitar. These songs are highly personal, but grow from the deepest roots of American music."

I’ll add to Pete and Maura’s generous comment, which you have to respect because Pete and Maura are great. Google them or follow my link elsewhere. Now, I don’t know if I’m unique like they said, but Geeks The Album certainly is because you can’t get a copy anymore. That makes it rare and therefore valuable, so if you can find a copy, burn it. Feel free. And I’m indeed proud of the songwriting as well as the guitar. The guitar is great because it’s overdubbed; you can look up overdubbing in Wikipedia. I tune the instrument low and strangely, and I overdub my performance mistakes. I make many mistakes, but thanks to overdubbing the end result is above average. I’m not a great singer, but, oh well, I sing on pitch.

And now on to my songs growing from “the deepest roots of American music.” That’s true. I’m middle-aged, and although I’ve only memorized a fraction of this country’s staggering repertoire, I’ve absorbed a lot of it. I’ve heard a century of American song and misunderstood little because I’m analytical and can understand what I hear on several levels.

My songs are indeed highly personal, but invented for the most part – not from my own life. However, the way I observe is personal. Years ago my brother Skip told me to look at every passing face on the street as if it had a frame around it, and to know each as a portrait, reading every line as a chapter or sentence from a memoir. I was stoned when he told me that, and I drank deep from his wisdom. With the aid of drugs to enhance the idiocy of my youth, I recognized the depth of his advice.

Here’s where I think American songs come from. Our country is young and brash, and built on hope. Most of us are peasants, nevermind what royalty runs in your blood. Most of our ancestors came here with very little; what some carried under their shirts was more than they left behind. They fled famine, religious intolerance and economies devoid of opportunities for simple folk and arrived on these shores with a shovel and a plow. Some fought on the front lines of our independence only to be rewarded with land that laid between the wealthy and the “savages,” or whoever was considered undesirable. That pattern, one of scorn for poor people – our precious Constitution be damned – continued in a variety of ways until America looked a lot like Europe, but a Europe improved enough by the strict absence of religious intolerance. The robber barons were here and doing quite well, but still, opportunities were everywhere. Music flowed from that. There were opportunities to marry outside of one’s caste, and many did. It didn’t seem so unattainable – only most of the time – and many other things seemed to be within reach. Music flowed from the joy of that, and also from the joys and sadness of hard work on your own land. Most American sunrises held the promise of enough to eat; not many bombs hid behind them – that would come later. Life was hard and violent as anywhere, but our Constitution promised that any grievance against unfairness would be taken as seriously as God would take it.

Now America is full of people who can dance around the Constitution as if it weren’t there. Our leaders do it, those people we trust to protect it. Wisdom certainly thrived as our country matured, but cleverness grew faster. The robber barons still take whatever they want and run everything as they always have; they are our Royal Court. Religious tolerance favors the conventional Judeo-Christian. The path to racial tolerance is steep and seemingly without end. The fairness extended to the descendants of our slaves, and the natives who were here before us, is crushed by a human nature so fearful of differentness that no Constitution can eradicate it. There are problems.

Music flows from problems. The need to ignore them and dance is a flood of need as great as the need to dance from problems solved. Humans get crushed beneath a wheel as soon as it’s invented, although sometimes the wheel is diverted. Parents abuse children who in turn abuse their children, although sometimes the chain is broken. Hopes are dashed and are reborn in rubble. The music flows.

The music always flows.