I promise to collect 

Sun is setting over Catskill creek
Mama, please come home
Father Time is starting to creep
Mama, please come home

Oh, the stars are showing one by one
In a big old northern sky
I don't wanna wish upon one
Until I got my mama by my side

So c'mon

Train leaving right on time
Mama, please come home
Heading up the Hudson river line
Mama, please come home

Mama, please come home to me
Please come home to me
No, I don't wanna be alone
Mama, please come home

Sylvia

I woke up, a guest in an empty house
Determined to see what the fuss was about
I called out to my host at the foot of the stair
But no one replied, there was no one there

So I packed up my bag with all of my things
My books and my hopes, my guns and my dreams
But I left that bag at the foot of the bed
And went out into the world empty handed instead

The house stood nowhere on a nameless street
I felt so alone I couldn't feel my own feet
I looked up at the sky but there was no sky there
The sun was too heavy for the horizon to bear

Have you seen Sylvia dancing in the rain?
Have you see Sylvia riding on a fast train?
Have you seen Sylvia chewing sugar cane?
Have you seen Sylvia? Has Sylvia changed?

Now a dark cloud of angels had gathered around
They spoke without voices, they stood on no ground
They wove me a web out of worry and woe
I was caught like a fly, I couldn't let go

Then the lightning spoke and the thunder agreed
I felt the stirrings of hope deep inside of me
I called out to Sylvia, my voice wove round a song
When I opened my eyes the angels had gone

I saw an old man, I said "Can you show me the way?"
He said "Wherever you're going, you'll get there one day
Stop working for glory, stop working for bliss
Keep working on deserving Sylvia's kiss"

If you see Sylvia dancing in the rain
If you see Sylvia riding on a fast train
If you see Sylvia chewing sugar cane
If you see Sylvia, tell her I've changed



Last Call

Please understand I'm an actor
And this is all a show
And when the show is over
We're all going home

I need to speak to the policeman
Sitting with his mistress in the gods
Everything happens for a reason
Against all of the odds

It's coming from beyond the beloved
From where beauty's a distortion of form
The old man torn from his mother
The boy reborn in the storm

It's coming from the top of the summit
It's an order that none can ignore
Drink up, all ye self-professed prophets
Last call

Everyone here is a drinker
Addicted to the elixer of life
But out there in the dead of winter
There is a glimmer of light

So let's lift a glass to the landlord
Let's banish the shadow of doubt
He opened his heart to us outlaws
Now he's kicking us out

It's coming from beyond the beloved
From where beauty's a distortion of form
The old man torn from his mother
The boy reborn in the storm

It's coming from the top of the summit
It's an order that none can ignore
Drink up, all ye self-professed prophets
Last call

 The first jazz record I ever owned

So I left an iPad in the back of a cab. I’d grown rather cocksure with my mobile technology after loosing an iPod in Central Park only to receive a message on Facebook a few days later informing me that it had been found. The person who’d found it, on a bench near Bathesda fountain, had guessed my identity after browsing the playlists and discovering my own recordings. She’d been become a fan, she said, and wanted to come to a show! Also, where should she send the iPod? Thinking how this would be a deliciously serendipitous way for the universe to introduce me to my future wife I immediately befriended her on Facebook and perused her pictures but quickly began to feel ashamed as one does whilst engaged in this pathetic post-modern method of wife shopping. Also, she was a good Christian woman who’d performed a selfless act of kindness and I was scruffy busker shaking down tourists in Central Park with folk songs about how I’m a lone wolf and you better not try and change me baby because in the morning I’ll be gone. So I sent her my address but somehow managed to muddle up the house number (I blame it on an undiagnosed case of dyscalculia) and the iPod was returned to her. Not to be discouraged (by this point I was quite sure she was too good for me) she asked me for the correct address and sent it again. I finally had the iPod back in my possession only to loose it again a couple of weeks later, for good this time.

When I left the iPad in the cab I managed to persuade myself, after fifteen hot minutes of trying not to cry, that it was ‘meant to be’. And, in retrospect, it probably was. At the time I was engaged in an intense period of writing and recording with my friend and co-conspirator of the Midnight Crisis band, Irakli Gaprindashvili (a.k.a Dr. Duende). He hated the iPad. All I’d really been using it for was to retreat under the duvet of my Brooklyn futon and watch romantic comedies on Netflix, so much so that a new sub-heading of suggested movies began appearing when I logged on; ‘Films She Might Like’ His mistrust was well founded. I thanked the iPad for the good times, surrendered to the unknowable wisdom of the universe and got back to work.

We’d just released ‘The City Is King’ record and in order to raise funds to print and distribute it and gather awareness about its existence we’d worked with the crowd funding website PledgeMusic on the ’50 Songs in 50 Days’ campaign. These 50 songs were the ‘blongs’ I’d been stockpiling over the last few years and the Doctor and I were working hard on new blongs every day, writing, recording and uploading. For various reasons the work meant a lot to us both. We finished off the year and took a break for Christmas.

When we reconvened in January we managed to record one last blong, ‘Until It’s Spring Again’, before my audio interface (the magic box you plug into your computer that converts audio sound into digital information) finally gave up the ghost. On top of that my eight year old G4 Mac was wheezing like an emphysemic bookie and moving slower than his worst bad bet. Again, I took several deep breaths and told myself that everything happens for a reason. In fact, I had begun to feel I was repeating myself with the blong formula. An important aspect of the blong is that one writes, records and uploads as quickly as possible in order to return to a place (or no-place) of emptiness and possibility, a fertile void, where a new blong may be allowed constellate. In this way, blonging is a form of meditation! The danger of this is that you let a song out into the world before it has time to fully form. Songs are living things, ever changing, and I was becoming more and more interested in what happens when you allow a thing to develop, leave it in the dark, and fight the urge to immediately share what you have created. The ego wants it! Look everyone, I’ve made something!

My search for emptiness through blonging had led me to just that; emptiness. But inside the emptiness, like fish invisible below the surface of the water, life is teeming. Instead of catching a fish, eating it, excreting it and moving on, what happens if I put it back in the water? When I would fish it out again after this period of gestation it would arrive strangely transformed. I would know instinctively, like an inner chime, if it needed more time, if it was asking again to be given back to the unknown. Something happened to it below the surface of consciousness that I was unable to do with my conscious mind.

Also, the sound of the blongs had grown stale for me. I’d fallen into comfortable patterns, the same old reverb, some mellotron clarinet here, a bit of fuzzed up B3 organ there. It had all started to sound the same and the fact that my equipment was dying at the same time I’d entered this new way of thinking about song-writing felt like synchronicity to me. It was yet another lesson in letting go.

I’ve recently acquired another iPad and have so far managed not to loose it! My time without blonging coincided with a period of personal depression, I think largely because I underestimated its value as a meditation tool. I use Garageband on the new iPad with the internal microphone, no outboard gear at all, (not even the magical interface!) which is quite different from the Logic Express I was using on my ailing G4. For a start, you only get eight tracks, so are forced to think about the recording you are making in a whole other way as you commit to ‘merging’ the tracks and turn down roads where there is no way back. With Logic on a powerful machine you have a potentially infinite number of tracks. There’s also the fact that Garageband on the iPad is considered a ‘toy’, which is something I love about it. It is very intuitive; a three year old could make something sound good. This is the classic blessing/curse for professional singer/songwriters. On the one hand, anyone with a few fingers and some sort of a brain can create something and distribute it on a wide scale, clogging up the collective ear-hole and making it difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff. On the other, affordable technology gives creators access to a new universality, and the universal is at the heart of all great music. Everyone can play, everyone can meditate, everyone can blong.

Blonging is meditating for me. What I’m also discovering is that it is a way of visiting that mystical place where a song meets it’s sound, where a word turns inside out and spills its music into the heart like light. For comparisons sake I attach links to ‘Until It’s Spring Again’ and a new blong, ‘Pack Up My Heart (And Go)’, with lyrics below. We’ll see where this phase of the exploration leads us, I hope you enjoy the journey.

Long live the blong!

'Until It's Spring Again'

soundcloud.com/freddie-stevenson/until-its-spring-again

Do you ever get the feeling
That you’re going round the bend?
The heart, it hurts from beating
Love letters never sent

Are you trying to deceive me?
Are you my dream come true?
Darling, please believe me
I will never speak the truth

There’s nothing I can do
I’m waiting here for you

Until it’s Spring again
I’ll wait for you my friend
Through the long and lonely winter
Until it’s Spring again
I’ll keep the faith my friend
Until it’s Spring again

Darling, won’t you dance me
Through this magic veil of tears
We’ll spin eternal mysteries
And weave them through the years

Our heart are like the wind, babe
Our souls, two birds in flight
We were born on the same day
On the other side of life

But you’re fading from my sight
I must keep this love alive

Until it’s Spring again
I’ll keep the faith my friend
Through the long and lonely winter
Until it’s Spring again
I’ll wait for you my friend
Until it’s Spring again


'Pack Up My Heart (And Go)'

http://soundcloud.com/freddie-stevenson/pack-up-my-heart-and-go

There’s still belief in the orphan’s eyes
But stark relief beneath august skies
Being bold, trade the world
Let the sleeping cat uncurl
I’m standing by the river, gotta get to the other side

All aboard the Restless Pearl
On the human shore a waif-like girl
Stoops to bathe, time to save
I’d best be on my way
Slip me a dollar for the trip to the underworld

And let me pick up the pieces
Laying on the floor
I don’t need a reason
I’ve done this before

I can turn this sorrow
Into solid gold

I’m gonna fold up my love
Sweep up my soul
Pack up my heart and go

I understand you’re out of range
A holy land shaped by grace and rage
Blow by blow, skin and bone
Forever on the way back home
Look me up when you’re ready to turn the page

And let me pick up the pieces
Laying on the floor
I don’t need a reason
I can see the door

No heaven above me
No hell below

I’m gonna fold up my love
Sweep up my soul
Pack up my heart
And go

There’s nothing left
But useless steel
Slips of the tongue
And expensive meals

We stripped the night
We were so real
When we did it right
We re-invented the wheel

Let me pick up the pieces
Laying on the floor
I don’t need a reason
I know the score

There’s no holding on now
There’s just letting go

I’m gonna fold up my love
Sweep up my soul
Pack up my heart and go