City of Legends / William F. DeVault

I am, as I write this, listening to the final MP3 mixdown of TRUTH, the titular piece from the new CD.

Not bad. The voice is a little strident. The music is evocative of a late-60’s hashish parlour (don’t ask me how I know what that should sound like). I like the presence of the piece.

Here’s the lyric:

It’s swell here in Hell
while we waterboard Jesus because
he doesn’t think a rich man can make it to Heaven
by killing everyone who is just looking for some truth.

We know better, don’t we?
The envelope under the door says so
and we put on our spray-tan glow and go
tripping down the yellow brick road of priests’ skulls.

Manson was also sincere. I fear
we are using a bent yardstick for good
when we polish the brass for a gallon of gas
so we can look for truth on that road of priests’ skulls.

It’s a bloodbath and we just laugh
and debate celebutante taunts for tired old men
who don’t have to put it on the line for the divine
right to be wrong with other people’s blood on the pavement.

Just looking for the truth
that we don’t want to face. We’re in disgrace
for everything we claim as anecdotal proof
of God favouring us in our endeavors.

Sonic boom doom and the groom won’t make it back
from the black-tarred fields that concealed
desperate men who see no sin in sacrificing truth.
And your sons and daughters, fathers and mothers and brothers.

If our leaders really believed in the God
they invoke in mad mantras as a smokescreen
they would quake in fear as their end draws near,
not shed crocodile tears over their three-martini lunch.

The road to Hell is paved with the lies
of people who cannot even face themselves in the mirror
without a wall of self-deception to shield their fates,
sealed with kisses that are not worthy of s streetwalker.

Speak truth. Live it. And give it as legacy to our children.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll post the piece at the listening room at williamfdevault.com

Maybe. I’m going to go work on the cover…

(right now cleansing my musical palette by listening to…wait for it…wait for it…"Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" by David Bowie. Admit it, you would have NEVER guessed that selection.)

An old fan asked why I had chosen the twenty seven tracks I currently have posted to the Listening Room at williamfdevault.com.

The simple truth is, they’re the ones I have gotten to so far. But, not wanting to let me squirm out of the corner, she asked what my opinion was of the pieces I have placed. That’s tougher, but it is a good deconstructive and self-critical exercise, so I will make a brief comment on each of the tracks, and that will be the end of it.

from out of the city: Nice, brief, to the point. Engineered to have an alien, distant radio engineered sound quality. I find it interesting.

Eros V: Romantic, erotic, tender. I always listen for The Selke’s vocalized backgrounds. It’s decent, pretty solid.

Kisses for Karma: Maybe I went too far with this piece, over-producing it (okay, the horns and harmonicas…). But it has a nice energy to it.

Bragi to Freya, on his deathbed: I like this. Yes, you can challenge the tribal drums on a piece about Norse deities. So?

Wordslinger: Almost twenty minutes of building energy. One of my favourite projects.

Beasts of Legend: If you stick it through, you’ll find I included "glass roses" on the end. A very articulate endeavor, employing many of my more soulfully romantic works.

glass roses: The simple, direct faith in romance.

The Gods of Love, Live at Kyrienar: Stan Freberg would be proud. And the music and performance are solid.

Damascus 3: Quick, direct, to the point and accelerating. I would have liked to do more with my voice, but I played it safe.

NQ: Also known as "the Nosferatu’s Quandry". A little bit of the dance devil got in there and we have some funk. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it came out.

Right Set of Lips: Very well received. Sweetly romantic, to the point and the music does not drown out the vocals. I like the earnest appeal.

Falling and Fallen Angels: Ambitious, maybe too ambitious, musically. I give it points for stretching, though.

Brisant Revelations: A nice bit of chaotic rock there. Too rough to be a complete success, but it has a swagger and my vocals are something I’d not imagined. I blame the drums.

Joining the Machine: Grim but perhaps a bit over-produced. Apocalyptically over the top?

Texture of Your Tongue: Not sure how I feel about this one. It has some nice experimentation to it, though.

Strange but Beautiful: I like the simplicity of the partnership between my voice and the piano in this romantic ode with a twist.

Thunder Out of Valhalla: The poem "We Owe Debt to Memory" was put in the music grinder and came out as a bit of jazz-tempered rock strutting. I am ambivalent…in the accurate use of the word.

Love Gods (Multivox): My favourite sonic experiment to date. Yes, all six voices are me I still have the original tracks.

Darfur (Jesus Wept): I have been very humbled by the response to this piece about the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan. We even got some pick up overseas for radio airplay. Booyah!

A Passion, Unrelenting: Banjos? Did someone call for banjos? Actually, I started out with mandolins, but this evolved into a bluegrass-flavoured melange that owes a lot to the West Virginia band The Weedhawks.

The Taste: This poem and recording probably wraps closer around my soul than anything else I have ever done. I love it, unabashedly. Special, special thanks to the great Alan MacDonald for his tutelage in music theory.

Centaur: The glide of this well-oiled synthesizer romp, a romantic flirt of a wisp of a thought on the way down the road.

32fps2: Can you tell we had fun laying this one down? We did. A little raw, but everything comes together. Just stick around,t he vocals don’t cut in until the 2 and a half minute mark.

Evangelist: The vocals are off-key and strained as I struggled to find myself and my soul. I literally bled during the sessions for this CD. Perhaps too intimate for some. There is art and beauty in the truth.

Love is an Howling Beast: We played a bit to keep this from turning into self-mocking parody of the integrity of the words. Painful for me to listen to, as it chronicles the failure of my second marriage. Startlingly archival instrumentation

They’re Shooting Monks in Burma: Another protest song poem, this one about Myanmar massacres. A bit naked and folksy for me, but it gets the job done.

The Panther on the Beach: An early reading, very well articulated. I am proud of the villanelle and glad I could express it so well.

So there you have it, there it is. I’d suggest you haul it over to the Listening Room at williamfdevault.com and at least check out a few tracks.

I think this is the first time this has ever happened to me. A song is wedge in my head, playing soundtrack to the hours I am spending here, at the computer, editing some technical documents and writing a proposal for a client. Hairy-scary proposal, too. You don’t want to know which branch of the US Armed Forces it is for or what they do with our services if we win.

But back to the song. Wow. It is one of my own. One of the ones off of my CDs. I can’t recall it happening to me before. But the taste, which is the musical version of the taste of remembrance, is doing its thing in my brain, and I am enjoying it. I am rediscovering me.

Not a bad thing, I think. I am happy.

The poem, itself, is something of a miracle. Clearly an Abstra work (one written about not a single person, but an abstraction) I still called upon specific memories of specific women at different moments as I wrote it and later recorded it. The slow, malevolent and mournful guitar was my vision.

I conjoured the Leopard, the Selke, Brigit and Psyche to fuel the work.

If you think I am going to turn in before midnight, PST, or feeling as funky as I was a few hours ago, you’re mui loco. (Did I get that right?)

One of the talents I have is the ability to manipulate my own emotional state. Sometimes it is easy, like running downhill, all you need to do is start moving. Sometimes it’s a lot tougher, like running uphill, requiring more will, but possible.

So I am right now fighting my way out of a funk a dunk to end all funk a dunks. I call those my suicide spirals. I ride them out for a few, then seize the first opportunity to pull up…I do this by any of several methods, not the least of which is list making. Tonight’s list is the ten best tracks on my CDs this past year.

Hmmm…I really can’t use THE NAKED READS as more than one track, as that’s really all it is, despite the multiple works on it, one very long track. But the contents of THE LAST ROMANTIC VERB and NEMICORN are valid, so here goes.

1. DARFUR (Jesus Wept): Have to give this track its due. It has received radio airplay overseas and recognition from several sites. It is nice to take the focus off my heart or genitals once in a while.

2. RIGHT SET OF LIPS: But not for too long…this romantic but sweetly intense work could be used as backdrop to most relationships I’ve screwed up over the years.

3. THE NAKED READS: Let get this long-ass piece out of the way. Dozens of poems, from softly romantic to gently erotic. Ear candy with a pillow-talk sensibility.

4. STRANGE, BUT BEAUTIFUL: Wow. That piece gets me every time I listen to it. I don’t know where I pulled it from, but I am glad to be able to claim it as my own.

5. TEXTURE OF YOUR TONGUE: I was on the fence about this piece, then the other night this beautiful young woman, giggling, kept asking me to read it to her, then chickening out. I must have done something right, eh, Jaz?

6. KISSES FOR KARMA: In the atom bomb that was NEMICORN, many have forgotten this piece from THE LAST ROMANTIC VERB…upbeat but unremittingly romantic. Yes, the horns are a bit much, but…

7. A PASSION, UNRELENTING: Like nothing else I’ve ever done, this piece just come from a space I cannot define. The music and the words just fell into place.

8. THE NOSFERATU’S QUANDARY: Who says this guy can’t funk it up in a good way? All we missed was Prince, shrieking in the background.

9. BEASTS OF LEGEND: The second longest arc-work from VERB, the bridge before RADIANT TIGERS alone is worth the price of admissions.

10. WORDSLINGER: At just over 18 minutes, an hellaciously long poetry arc, but when keystone phrase of IN THE MEMORY OF LOVERS, "I will take no pretender, again, to my bed", kicks in, you know who is shaping this universe.

There you have it…about ninety minutes of experimental madness. And there’s a whole new year out there, waiting.

And I feel better.

I hate dealing with press releases about my work or my books and CDs. My reasons are manifold. Including one related to that last sentence.

1) I hate being involved in my own promotion. The "champion" in me can only really engage all the gears if I am doing what I am doing for someone else (see "Muse"). Thus I have to struggle to not feel guilty.

2) Press releases invariably have to be ineloquent. Thus, words like "manifold", "ineloquent" and even "thus" are stripped from my considerable vocabulary.

3) I can’t read editors’ and publishers’ minds. If I am writing a poem to woo a woman and I see a change in her expression on a key concept, expression or word, I can adapt. I get little feedback from editors. The last press release that was put out under my approval, the local newspaper ran sections of it verbatim under the "People You Know" column, along with news of someone getting a new title at a local fast food restaurant. Hey, at least they used it, and in a timely fashion. I have seen them print press releases, verbatim, for events at the local Barnes and Noble a week after the event they were to be advertising..

4) Once it is out there, it is beyond your control. That is actually a good argument for paid advertising, for marketing. At least there you control the message when you are paying for dinner. Think of it like hiring a hooker, you can be pretty sure if you pay the money you have a sure thing on your hands.

5) Given the choice between being the pimp and being the prostitute, I’d rather kill myself, as I am too much the romantic to survive, emotionally, being the latter, and being the former would invoke my self-destruction clause under the Nosferatu’s Dream. I hate feeling like I am pimping myself every time I give a quote or an interview. Why can’t reporters do their own legwork and actually read a poem or two? Recent studies have shown that many of the quotes in movie advertisements were actually written by the movie studios, then given to the magazines and newspapers, who in a lazy effort to save time and reporter salaries, just reprint the studio fluff.

6) Press releases rarely get you laid. Let’s be honest and earnest. I like stuff that gets women riled up in a good way.

7) There are people much better than me at editing a press release. I’m secure in my poet. I know Larry Jaffe wasn’t kidding when he called me "the greatest living poet" a few years ago. I have the quotes. As a poet, I’m a "master", a "living legend", the "catalyst poet of the digital renaissance" and "the god of sex" (oops, that last one wasn’t about my poetry). As a press release editor I am some guy who doesn’t want to be bothered by it all, but too cheap and controlling to farm it all out and sit back and let others run with it.

I am staring at the first draft of the press release about the book and CD release party on the 14th of this month, knowing it needs to go out to the Daily Athenaeum, The Dominion Post, the Times-West Virginian, Graffiti and the local radio stations (who won’t read it anyway). And I am loathing seeing the final draft, loathing waiting to see if it appears in any of the local outlets, loathing the time I am spending writing about how much I loathe spending time thinking about how I loathe being involved with the publicity process.

I think I have issues with self-promotion. Which, if you are going to have issues with something, beats the living hell out of most aversions.

The NEMICORN comes into the world, long live the NEMICORN.

Here is the final track list for my new CD, NEMICORN, available starting this Friday, November 3, either through the City of Legends Bookstore, or through the publisher (lulu.com) or you can hope to snag one at any of my public events. Ten bucks, 17 works, that’s a pretty good deal.

I’d like to thank two sets of people. First, those whose inputs were so crucial to my making the final few tracks decisions, Matt Hinton, Daleen Berry, Alan MacDonald, Aberjhani, E.J. and Pam Fries.

The second group is perhaps even more essential: People whose inspiration, directly or indirectly, lead to the works contained: Nancy, Peri, Nordette, Carole, Mary, Jennifer, Sarah, Ann, H. R. Giger, Kristina, Crystal, Jan, Jade, Brigit and Karla. I pray long and joyful lives for you all.

Here’s the final list of tracks (followed by duration of final version)

Damascus 3 (1:09)
The Nosferatu’s Quandry (2:37)
Right Set of Lips (2:12)
Falling and Fallen Angels (2:59)
Brisant Revelations (3:10)
Joining the Machine (2:42)
Texture of Your Tongue (2:40)
The Faerie (Strange but Beautiful) (3:15)
Theocricide (5:02)
Thunder Out of Valhalla (3:28)
Pink Jade - Soft as Dawn (2:16)
Love Gods (Multivox) (3:58)
Thetis (3:06)
Wild and Defiled, Along the Way (4:04)
Darfur (Jesus Wept) (3:55)
Once Again, The Nemicorn (4:08)
A Passion, Unrelenting (3:00)

Total running time, just a hair under 54 minutes.

There it is. Thanks to all. Now to finish up THE NAKED READS. So many projects, I shall never reach my nunc dimittis.

Early returns from the panel previewing the tracks for Nemicorn:

Locked in:
Darfur (Jesus Wept)
The Nosferatu’s Quandry
Pink Jade - Soft as Dawn
A Passion, Unrelenting
Right Set of Lips
The Faerie (Strange but Beautiful)

Definitely there:
Fallen and Falling Angels
Damascus, Movement 3
Love Gods (Multivox)
Thetis
Thunder Out of Valhalla
Wild and Defiled, Along the Way

Maybe there:
Theocricide
Amomancy
Texture of Your Tongue
Again, the Nemicorn
Brisant Revelations
Joining the Machine
Brigit

So, what does that mean? Nothing. Yet. I am waiting for further input before making any final decisions and will release the lineup on November 1st. The CD will be available for order on November 3rd.

Nordette Adams sent me an advance of an article she is doing on me. Lovely, but I am not sure I recognize that guy. To me, I will always been that gawky kid who had to ask 12 girls to get a date to his church’s "Sweethearts Banquet" in high school, not the guy who gets indecent email propositions from strange but beautiful women, with pictures.

I’ll post a link when she finalizes the article.

Tonight’s the night I am boycotting NBC’s programming because they spinelessly refused to run ads for the documentary "Shut Up and Sing". I will miss "Heroes" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"…but such is life.

Without complex comments, just wanted to reflect on the 18 tracks under consideration for "Nemicorn". A simple 1 to 10 scale (10 being the highest) which is a combination of the technical merits of the piece, the artistry and creativity and my own opinion of my performance (weighted, as I generally do not like my own voice):

Damascus, Movement 3 (01:09) I give this one a 7.
The Nosferatu’s Quandry (02:37) An 8.
Right Set of Lips (02:12) Hmmm…another 7.
Fallen and Falling Angels (02:59) Let’s give this one an 8.
Brisant Revelations (03:10) Tough, but a 7.
Joining the Machine (02:42) I have to give it a 6.
Texture of Your Tongue (02:40) Another 6.
The Faerie (Strange but Beautiful) (03:15) A nine…edging towards a ten.
Theocricide (05:02) A seven.
Thunder Out of Valhalla (03:28) An eight, almost a nine.
Pink Jade - Soft as Dawn (02:16) An eight.
Love Gods (Multivox) (03:58) An eight.
Thetis (03:06) A six.
Wild and Defiled, Along the Way (04:04) A nine…but just barely.
Darfur (Jesus Wept) (03:55) A nine…almost a ten.
Brigit (03:35) I’m giving this one six.
Amomancy (19:04) Tough, it is so long and changes flavours so much…but an eight.
Again, the Nemicorn (04:08) An eight.

Remember, these are not judgements on one aspect, but my overall take.