19. Kether to Malkuth
The first release of 2023 is "Kether to Malkuth," a tribute to David Bowie's 1976 "Station to Station" album (my version, like the original, is a short LP, almost an EP, really, but it is listed as the former on Apple Music, as with Bowie's original "LP"), taking its title and overall conceptual frame from a lyric that comes from the title song, and which is in reference to the metaphorical "stations" of the Kabbalah, a form of mystical Judaism that Bowie was interested in at the time, as much as he was interested also in Aleister Crowley's "Black Magic" (indeed, another lyric of the Bowie song references Crowley, if one is keen enough to catch it; you know, those sure, nasty-white stains...), freezing his urine whilst binging on milk, and hopelessly addicted to another white-as-milk substance: cocaine.
Why this album? Why a tribute now?
As I was teaching my university course on Bowie last December (late 2022), one day during class I had a sudden realization (perhaps it wasn't quite at the level of "epiphany," but...):
The original "Station to Station" album was released on January 23, 1976. If I started recording my version during that month, I could finish a tribute in time for its anniversary the following month, i.e. by January 23, 2023.
And so, I decided then and there that I would eventually do at least one or two songs in time for its anniversary in 2023.
I had been wanting to do some sort of version of the title track for a long time, in fact, and, although I'd done many, many Bowie covers before, even full cover albums -- including "I'm a Blackstar!," an LP of mine that includes every song off of the "Blackstar" LP, all drastically reinterpreted as electronica, apart from the acoustic "Dollar Days" -- I had never done any songs from the seminal "Station to Station" album but very much wanted to, especially the title track.
I eventually ended up selecting, arranging, and recording three out of the seven total songs from the original LP, utterly reinterpreting the title track (the original is around 10 minutes long, mine over 22...), which I arranged for piano, electric guitar, a bit of drums in the opening section, the lengthy middle section going completely "dark ambient" before returning to some vocals at the end.
Music video for "Da'at"
Next, I tackled "Word On a Wing," a sort of soulful, almost ballad-like song in the original version that is also a cry for help to a (presumably Christian) God (Bowie offers a prayer to his "Lord" in the lyric, unlike the more Buddhist strains of his song from the '60s, "Silly Boy Blue," which he wrote as a tribute to his Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chime Rinpoche, and again different from "Seven Years In Tibet," which he would record in 1997 for the alternative drum & bass-laden "Earthling" album). For me, "Word On a Wing" has always been one of the most emotional and, if not totally transparent (Bowie never was, intentionally, totally transparent about anything!), then at least more open and vulnerable moments on an otherwise mostly icy album, and I wanted to do my own version of it.
Another track from the "Station to Station" album I've always liked very much, and one I'd always felt Bowie's vocal performance to be quite "emotive" rather than "icy," like the previous song, is "Wild Is the Wind," a song that was itself actually a cover song for Bowie (I believe his version was influenced by Nina Simone's version, a cover, again, of the original song, which was composed by Dimitry Tiomkin and Ned Washington and performed by yet another artist...), not his song originally at all, so my purely acoustic arrangement, backed only by the sound of sampled wind and literally played "live" with the classical guitar whilst sitting on the floor of my apartment room one evening, should be thought of as a cover of a cover, rather than purely as another of my "David Bowie covers," just as Bowie's version was not based on the original version, either, presumably, but on Simone's interpretation of it.*
* As an aside, this whole thing also got me to thinking that the Bowie cover of "Wild Is the Wind" is in some ways a bit like my own versions of "Hallelujah" have been -- originally inspired, as they were, to a large degree, by Jeff Buckley's interpretation of the Leonard Cohen song, itself covered by John Cale. Cale's version was, from what I understand, the version that Buckley himself apparently first heard before he discovered the Cohen original, and so he must also have heard it before he had arranged the song in his own style, recording it for his seminal "Grace" LP. Buckley's much more emotive, romantic solo version, ironically, is now perhaps as famous (if not more famous?) than the original Cohen version itself, or at least in some circles it is.
My own versions of "Hallelujah," by the bye, have evolved a lot over the years the more I've performed and rearranged the song for acoustic, and the way that I perform the cover these days sounds more like "me" than it does Buckley, I think, though in fact I'm not even really sure if my earlier versions had sounded much like his arrangement either. (I originally strummed the chords with a pick, rather than doing the arpeggios emphasized in Buckley's version, but the [vocal] long tone at the end and my style of singing overall were definitely heavily Buckley-influenced from my first attempt at recording the song c. 2018...) In any case, the point here is that everyone has his or her influences, and that cover versions, or even covers of covers, sometimes get mistaken for originals, especially when they are done by people who are as (or more) famous than the songwriter or songwriters who wrote and/or performed the original song is (or was). In this sense, then, my versions of "Hallelujah" are not really a part of this conversation, per se, since few people are even aware of their existence, but I wanted to say something about it/them anyway as a part of the larger discussion about covers of covers, which started with my referencing Bowie's version of "Wild Is the Wind"!
I simultaneously filmed every song from the "Kether to Malkuth" project as I was recording it/them at home, in separate parts (i.e. first keyboard, then vocals, etc.), and these were later edited to make a series of three music videos. All recordings for this album were, as usual, done at home, here in my small apartment room, and all in LOGIC, with the exception of "Wild Is the Wind," which, though recorded at my place, where I dimmed the lights and put lit candles on the floor for the video I would film, sitting on the floor and strumming my classical guitar whilst singing it live, in real-time... The track was a direct recording via my iPhone, positioned strategically on its stand, meaning that the sound came directly from the phone's mic (as in the video), though I later mixed/mastered the entire thing in LOGIC, adding the wind samples as backing for atmosphere and a decent amount of reverb to the guitar/vocals, which were all, due to the way it was recorded, on "one track," so that the guitar and vocal parts could not be mixed separately. (Actually, I have done many recordings this way before, as when I've recorded/mixed/released live acoustic things first created as videos in my room, but for most "studio LPs" that are acoustic, I tend to favor recording guitar/vocals separately.)
Music video for "Wild Is the Wind"
The other two tracks on the short LP (can I say "short LP," which is a bit like saying "Short Long-Play"?), which are primarily keyboard-centric, apart from some electric guitar I played during the first part of the lengthy "Kether to Malkuth" (my reinterpreted version of "Station to Station," to reiterate), were all done in LOGIC, with each part recorded separately via USB/MIDI. This was of course "by necessity" anyway, since I couldn't perform all of the parts myself simultaneously, as if I were a "one-man band" -- I'm not that dexterous, nor do I have as many arms as the Goddess Sarasvati (or Kali...)! The vocals, then, were recorded via the standard USB mic I always use for such recordings in LOGIC, connected directly via the computer to the LOGIC recording interface. The piano part for "Word On a Wing," the second of the three tracks here, was almost entirely improvised atop the synth part I had first improvised and laid down, and much of the vocals, too, ended up improvised in terms of melody/tone/style, though I started by singing the original lyrics, albeit ultimately deviating from them many times as I loosely interpreted the original atop my synth/piano improv and created my own unique (I think) tribute to Bowie's 1976 masterpiece.
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿