This is an old song, written for her when she was just a little thing. Now she’s two. She said “Happy Burday You!” and blew out her own candles. It goes quick, I tell you.

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The first time I heard Iron & Wine, I was riding at night in someone’s rented white van, heading to the Nevada desert. Since then the music of Sam Beam has had a tendency to work best with me in the dark, and it’s our music of choice if we’re traveling by night.

This is the only Iron & Wine song I know how to play. I heard it for the first time last weekend, fell in love, and learned it over the course of the week. The image of a house burning down before your eyes really resonates with me right now. Our house isn’t burning in the literal sense, but we are packing up and moving for the first time in seven years. Boxes, chaos, memories. Excitement and worry. That strange otherness, the feeling of being outside your routine, of being in fact outside yourself, as though watching your body from the side, as in a dream. That’s what I tried to weave into my interpretation of Sam Beam’s breathy, amazing song.

I have one more song to record for the Fractal Foundation and then I’m taking apart my studio. It feels like the end of something wonderful.
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This song is probably instantly familiar to almost any Russian under a certain age. It’s written by Viktor Tsoi, the frontman of the legendary 80’s Russian rock band Kino. Over the last week that I’ve been working on this song, it occurred to me how well Tsoi painted with words and music. His music always takes me places and puts pictures in my head.

I’m dedicating this one to the man who first introduced me to Kino way back when we were roommates in college and I was just starting to study Russian: my dear friend Yuriy. Thanks for turning me on, man. Tsoi zhiv!

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A Star Known as the Sun
(translation by Anastassia and me, via www.lavalingua.com)
White snow, gray ice…
A city, bound by roads,
Covers the cracked ground like a quilt.
Clouds float overhead,
Muting the heavenly light,
And a yellow fog rises from the city
Which, for two thousand years,
Has lived under the light of a star known as the sun

Two thousand years of war,
War without cause or reason,
War is the business of the young,
War is a cure for old age.
Blood, red red blood,
In but an hour only the earth remains,
In two, the land is covered with grass and flowers,
And in three, it’s alive once more,
Warmed by the rays of a star known as the sun

And we know that it’s always been this way:
That fate favors he who follows other laws,
And is destined to die young.
He knows not the words yes or no,
He remembers neither title nor name,
But he can reach the stars,
Believing that it’s not a dream,
And fall, burnt by a star known as the sun.

This one literally came to me in a dream back in 2004. I had been living through a series of recurrent nightmares, the kind where you wake up before dawn, panting, covered in sweat. After a few weeks of this, things turned slightly better when I began running outside into our courtyard as soon as I awoke from the dream. Being outside in the cool pre-dawn air made it somehow easier.

So one night, in my dream, I started chanting the words to this song. And when the dream became nightmare I shot out of bed, grabbed my guitar and pocket recorder, and literally came to consciousness in the courtyard, strumming this melody and singing these words. It was a lot slower and dreamier, of course, but most everything that is in this song now was somehow in that first, freaky pre-dawn recording. I think it would be interesting to dig it out from my personal archives, but if you must know, what I modestly call my archives is actually a gigantic digital mess - so it will take some time to find. But I’ll get it done sometime soon and throw it up here for comparison.

This recording is from sometime in 2005, and was the most complex thing I had recorded to date.

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Frank Zappa made a bunch of instrumental albums by chopping out solos from various live performances and stringing them together in his studio. It’s really kind of an amazing technique. (If you listen obsessively, like some of us here, you can sometimes even figure out which song he chopped the solo from).

This here is my attempt at the same technique. Unlike Zappa’s work, the song itself wasn’t so hot - but I really liked where the solo was going. It’s an early take for the solo (this is all pretty unfinished, remember), where I sort of noodle around and try to find something I like. Without exactly meaning to, I took a pretty folksy song and kind of launched it into outer space. I guess I was trying to branch out my style and play longer, more sustained notes. I think it takes a kind of courage to play slowly, and that sounds to me like what I was trying to do here.

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