New Alternative/Art Rock Album
There’s a line somewhere between what makes sense and what almost makes sense.
I’ve become increasingly interested in that line.
Not crossing it for the sake of being strange. Not abandoning melody, musicianship, or the pleasure of a song that simply feels good coming out of the speakers. I still want all of that. But lately I’ve been curious about how far a song can wander from the expected and still bring you along.
Ambergris is a further flirt with that line.
I’ve spent a long time building a musical library, and for much of that time songs behaved more or less as songs are expected to behave. They had stories. They had destinations. People arrived somewhere by the end.
I’m less certain now that they need to.
Life rarely presents itself in a clean narrative. We remember a face but forget the name. We remember exactly what someone said but have no idea why it mattered. A laugh survives for decades. An expensive evening disappears. Something overheard at the next table becomes more interesting than the conversation we were having ourselves.
Memory seems to have its own editorial department, and apparently nobody is supervising it.
That interests me.
So does the distance between what we observe and what we think we know. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives watching other people, interpreting expressions, filling in missing information and constructing explanations from very little evidence. Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes we’re spectacularly wrong. Most of the time we never find out.
There’s humor in that, but also something strangely human.
The recent expansion of my musical library has given me permission to leave more of those spaces open. A lyric can notice something without explaining it. A guitar can answer a question the words never quite asked. Harmonies can become a little uncomfortable. Silence can be useful. A thought can wander into the room, stay for eleven seconds and leave without showing identification.
And a song can end before the listener has been told what to think about it.
That may be the line I’m flirting with.
I don’t want to live permanently on the other side of it. The line is interesting precisely because you can still see it. Melody matters. Musicianship matters. Emotion matters. So does the simple pleasure of a great guitar playing something you want to hear again.
But every now and then, I like leaning over that line far enough to wonder whether I’m still writing the kind of music I thought I wrote.
Ambergris leans a little farther.
I think I’ll leave it there.
Bill Leyden's Blog 