Take “I Been Around,” a wild and otherworldly stomp that arrived in Julie’s brain one night. “I was asleep upstairs, and Buddy was downstairs in the studio,” she recalls. “I got up, walked downstairs, and sang a few notes for him to play on guitar. I sang the whole song in one take, then went back to bed.” She promptly forgot all about it. Buddy tinkered with it a little more that night, then he too forgot about it. “It almost got thrown away,” he says. “I only found it by accident, when I was erasing some old sessions. If it'd been erased, it would have been like it never even existed.” He loved what he found, which he describes as a “spontaneous mess,” like a signal from another world. Julie was less impressed. “I didn’t have any memory of it, and at first I wasn’t about to let it get out! But we played it for some friends and they all liked it. So I just gritted my teeth and let it go.”
... [T]he lurching carny sideshow tremors of Julie’s “I Been Around” lumbers through a ragged street corner stream of consciousness that suggests Tom Waits’ Mule Variations.
“I was aghast and horrified, but it was so spontaneous and free,” she says of the latter.
“It sounds like a mess,” Buddy admits with a smile, “and I made it sound like more of a mess. Once I found the riff, and it took a while because Julie wants it the way she hears it. We were doing a North Mississippi All-Stars radio show, and she’s like ‘Play this!’ We had a floor tom with a towel over it; she sang it once. But, man…”
Thanks, I hadn't caught up with that album yet. Great track, and the comparison with Mule Variations sounds about right. Songs like this, that actually sound like they've come from the netherworld of dreamtime, don't need to be about dreams. They're closer to the non-dream-themed Dylan tracks I mentioned and perhaps hearken something dreamlike for us listeners.
I haven't listened to the entire album yet, but I like them, and the story of that song is a memorable one. I like your description of feeling like the song comes from a netherworld -- it doesn't feel _shaped_ in the way that most songs do.
Another nice example. Taps into a favourite theme of mine: how songs outlive the people who write and sing them (but still need writers and singers and listeners, of course!).
Thank you Richard. I was saving this until I could give it the full and proper time and attention it deserved, and today was the day.
Midway through the reading my mind wandered over to Harry Nilsson's "Remember (Christmas)" from "Son of Schmilsson," the flawed but fascinating follow up to his most successful album. Although the title and first verses speak directly to memory and what it can contain, the bridge/transitive refrain invokes dreams, and suggests a linkage between dreams and memory, and the further contention that "love is only in a dream," and that "life is never as it seems" in the dreaming reverie of memory. The deliberately slow piano based arrangement, probably consciously evocative of the intro to his cover of "Without You" from the previous record, sets the languid pace that encourages this memory/sleep/dream to mist together as a pleasant miasma.
Since I'm also obsessed with song in ways that I likely don't fully understand, I appreciate these deep dives into what songs can contain, can be "about," and certainly your writing about songs captures my attention and appreciation. A couple of years ago, when I attended the Nowhere Else Festival organized each year by Over the Rhine, Linford Detweiler suggested in a songwriting discussion that "songs are prayers,' relative to their intentions, and perhaps their origins. As an agnostic individual, I tend to agree with him, and might further add that, for me, perhaps songs are prayers that embody our dreams, particularly since our dreams move far beyond what happens in sleep and are also the term for what we call our highest waking aspirations.
Thank you, James. I hadn't thought about those Nilsson albums for ages. I'm going to cue them up tomorrow. I really like the way you've described the dream aspect.
I also like that description of songs as prayers and agree with you about dreams being more than things we do when asleep.
Another one that fits into the Dylan portion would be an outtake from the dreamlike 'Time Out of Mind' sessions, "Dreaming of You". Actually many of Lanois's aura experiments have the effect of a foggy, yet beautiful dream.
Wow, brilliant and extremely insightful article, Richard. I had to go back and re-read, listen to some of the audio, and absorb everything you brilliantly laid out for us to comprehend. I also like that while you pose questions, you ultimately leave it to the listener to consider their own ideas and thoughts.
Of course, coming at it as somebody who has a very sizeable psychedelic rock collection, dreams and hallucinations show up in many albums from that era. However, I also approach your article as somebody who studied visual art, makes art, and now teaches art. So, I immediately think of dreams within the visual arts (I have to point out the obvious Marc Chagall reference to Wyatt's 'Shleep' album art). Surrealism is obvious, and we all know the art of Dali, Magritte, and Kahlo. However, I also think about the dreamlike photos of Dora Maar, Man Ray, Bellmer, Julia Margaret Cameron, and my personal favorite, Francesca Woodman.
Yet, we can't just limit ourselves to Western artists; in many indigenous cultures, dreams are gateways to ancestral spirit worlds. The obvious ones to state would be the Dreamings and Dreamtime paintings in Australian Aboriginal culture, which are absolutely incredible, mysterious, and deeply profound. What looks to our eyes as dots and abstract art is, in fact, rich in deep spiritual meaning and stories that have been told for thousands of years.
Dreams are a fascinating and rich topic that influences so much literature, art, music, film, dance, and theatre. While the Western world may not have the profound spiritual depth of dreams as say Aboriginal Australia, dreams are still something that leads to much wonder and creativity.
Thank you for this article. It's been a joy to read, and I will no doubt keep coming back to it as, just like our dreams, there is a lot to consider and muse upon.
Oh, and...I need to look for that bottle of Port. Brilliant packaging!
Thanks, Michael, for this detailed response. I was thinking a bit about painters while I wrote this. On my desk I had books I'd been recently studying of art by Leonora Cunningham and Remedios Varo, as well as some of Varo's writings which are often about, or informed by, dreams. I decided I couldn't do justice to those sources this time around, though I'd like to return to them in some future writing. Same with the connection between Dream Time and the Songlines. I wondered about including Kate Bush's The Dreaming as a way of connecting to that, too, but again too much to think about and, besides, that wouldn't be the best way to do justice to a complex culture. INteresting, though, how dreams and dreaming can potentially become a way of translating human experience across cultures.
And psychedelia, well that would be another fascinating road to follow. As well as the imagery, timbre and sound effects, it would be interesting to listen to something like those Grateful Dead song transitions as analogs to the shape-shifting world of dream logic. And jazz would be a good way of thinking about dreamlike metamorphosis too. Fuel, perhaps, for future posts.
Hey Richard, I just wanted to let you know how much I loved your exploration of the connections between dreams and songs in "Thoughts in Lotus"! Your writing is really insightful and beautifully done. The way you blend musical analysis with reflections on the dreamlike qualities of songs is just so captivating. I thought it thought-provoking and deepened my appreciation of music's mysterious and evocative power. Great work!
Thanks for those kind words, Jon. I'm glad it came across okay, as I was starting to feel I was losing control of the ideas the longer it got - a bit like a dream!
Wow! Quite an interesting post! I'd never considered the question, "How many of us sing while dreaming?" I don't know that I ever have but I've certainly awakened to a song in my head that seems to have arrived out of nowhere.
A fascinating post -- long, with a lot to chew on, but appropriately so.
One of the first things I thought of, reading the opening is this story about Buddy and Julie Miller writing "I Been Around" which is an example of a song written during sleep which doesn't feel peaceful or dreamlike -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQOquxf18wM&list=OLAK5uy_kv9VYmpxF9FQZpQzSiaWdkV6EDVdv-KtI
https://www.buddymiller.com/about
----------quote-----------
Take “I Been Around,” a wild and otherworldly stomp that arrived in Julie’s brain one night. “I was asleep upstairs, and Buddy was downstairs in the studio,” she recalls. “I got up, walked downstairs, and sang a few notes for him to play on guitar. I sang the whole song in one take, then went back to bed.” She promptly forgot all about it. Buddy tinkered with it a little more that night, then he too forgot about it. “It almost got thrown away,” he says. “I only found it by accident, when I was erasing some old sessions. If it'd been erased, it would have been like it never even existed.” He loved what he found, which he describes as a “spontaneous mess,” like a signal from another world. Julie was less impressed. “I didn’t have any memory of it, and at first I wasn’t about to let it get out! But we played it for some friends and they all liked it. So I just gritted my teeth and let it go.”
-----------end quote---------------
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/buddy-julie-miller/buddy-julie-miller-in-the-throes-interview
--------------quote---------------
... [T]he lurching carny sideshow tremors of Julie’s “I Been Around” lumbers through a ragged street corner stream of consciousness that suggests Tom Waits’ Mule Variations.
“I was aghast and horrified, but it was so spontaneous and free,” she says of the latter.
“It sounds like a mess,” Buddy admits with a smile, “and I made it sound like more of a mess. Once I found the riff, and it took a while because Julie wants it the way she hears it. We were doing a North Mississippi All-Stars radio show, and she’s like ‘Play this!’ We had a floor tom with a towel over it; she sang it once. But, man…”
------------end quote--------------
Thanks, I hadn't caught up with that album yet. Great track, and the comparison with Mule Variations sounds about right. Songs like this, that actually sound like they've come from the netherworld of dreamtime, don't need to be about dreams. They're closer to the non-dream-themed Dylan tracks I mentioned and perhaps hearken something dreamlike for us listeners.
I haven't listened to the entire album yet, but I like them, and the story of that song is a memorable one. I like your description of feeling like the song comes from a netherworld -- it doesn't feel _shaped_ in the way that most songs do.
The other song that I thought of which relates to writing songs in a dream is Joe Jackson's "The Man Who Wrote Danny Boy" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-RyzO56vCI
Another nice example. Taps into a favourite theme of mine: how songs outlive the people who write and sing them (but still need writers and singers and listeners, of course!).
You might appreciate Walter de la Mare's book Behold, This Dreamer: Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death
Thank you Richard. I was saving this until I could give it the full and proper time and attention it deserved, and today was the day.
Midway through the reading my mind wandered over to Harry Nilsson's "Remember (Christmas)" from "Son of Schmilsson," the flawed but fascinating follow up to his most successful album. Although the title and first verses speak directly to memory and what it can contain, the bridge/transitive refrain invokes dreams, and suggests a linkage between dreams and memory, and the further contention that "love is only in a dream," and that "life is never as it seems" in the dreaming reverie of memory. The deliberately slow piano based arrangement, probably consciously evocative of the intro to his cover of "Without You" from the previous record, sets the languid pace that encourages this memory/sleep/dream to mist together as a pleasant miasma.
Since I'm also obsessed with song in ways that I likely don't fully understand, I appreciate these deep dives into what songs can contain, can be "about," and certainly your writing about songs captures my attention and appreciation. A couple of years ago, when I attended the Nowhere Else Festival organized each year by Over the Rhine, Linford Detweiler suggested in a songwriting discussion that "songs are prayers,' relative to their intentions, and perhaps their origins. As an agnostic individual, I tend to agree with him, and might further add that, for me, perhaps songs are prayers that embody our dreams, particularly since our dreams move far beyond what happens in sleep and are also the term for what we call our highest waking aspirations.
Thank you, James. I hadn't thought about those Nilsson albums for ages. I'm going to cue them up tomorrow. I really like the way you've described the dream aspect.
I also like that description of songs as prayers and agree with you about dreams being more than things we do when asleep.
Fascinating piece.
Another one that fits into the Dylan portion would be an outtake from the dreamlike 'Time Out of Mind' sessions, "Dreaming of You". Actually many of Lanois's aura experiments have the effect of a foggy, yet beautiful dream.
https://youtu.be/63Hvny7pX8g?si=7z5UwXwf8RWdeMVU
Thanks Michael. Yes, you're right, that one should definitely be part of the discussion. I agree on the Lanois sound, too. More food for thought.
Wow, brilliant and extremely insightful article, Richard. I had to go back and re-read, listen to some of the audio, and absorb everything you brilliantly laid out for us to comprehend. I also like that while you pose questions, you ultimately leave it to the listener to consider their own ideas and thoughts.
Of course, coming at it as somebody who has a very sizeable psychedelic rock collection, dreams and hallucinations show up in many albums from that era. However, I also approach your article as somebody who studied visual art, makes art, and now teaches art. So, I immediately think of dreams within the visual arts (I have to point out the obvious Marc Chagall reference to Wyatt's 'Shleep' album art). Surrealism is obvious, and we all know the art of Dali, Magritte, and Kahlo. However, I also think about the dreamlike photos of Dora Maar, Man Ray, Bellmer, Julia Margaret Cameron, and my personal favorite, Francesca Woodman.
Yet, we can't just limit ourselves to Western artists; in many indigenous cultures, dreams are gateways to ancestral spirit worlds. The obvious ones to state would be the Dreamings and Dreamtime paintings in Australian Aboriginal culture, which are absolutely incredible, mysterious, and deeply profound. What looks to our eyes as dots and abstract art is, in fact, rich in deep spiritual meaning and stories that have been told for thousands of years.
Dreams are a fascinating and rich topic that influences so much literature, art, music, film, dance, and theatre. While the Western world may not have the profound spiritual depth of dreams as say Aboriginal Australia, dreams are still something that leads to much wonder and creativity.
Thank you for this article. It's been a joy to read, and I will no doubt keep coming back to it as, just like our dreams, there is a lot to consider and muse upon.
Oh, and...I need to look for that bottle of Port. Brilliant packaging!
Thanks, Michael, for this detailed response. I was thinking a bit about painters while I wrote this. On my desk I had books I'd been recently studying of art by Leonora Cunningham and Remedios Varo, as well as some of Varo's writings which are often about, or informed by, dreams. I decided I couldn't do justice to those sources this time around, though I'd like to return to them in some future writing. Same with the connection between Dream Time and the Songlines. I wondered about including Kate Bush's The Dreaming as a way of connecting to that, too, but again too much to think about and, besides, that wouldn't be the best way to do justice to a complex culture. INteresting, though, how dreams and dreaming can potentially become a way of translating human experience across cultures.
And psychedelia, well that would be another fascinating road to follow. As well as the imagery, timbre and sound effects, it would be interesting to listen to something like those Grateful Dead song transitions as analogs to the shape-shifting world of dream logic. And jazz would be a good way of thinking about dreamlike metamorphosis too. Fuel, perhaps, for future posts.
Hey Richard, I just wanted to let you know how much I loved your exploration of the connections between dreams and songs in "Thoughts in Lotus"! Your writing is really insightful and beautifully done. The way you blend musical analysis with reflections on the dreamlike qualities of songs is just so captivating. I thought it thought-provoking and deepened my appreciation of music's mysterious and evocative power. Great work!
Thanks for those kind words, Jon. I'm glad it came across okay, as I was starting to feel I was losing control of the ideas the longer it got - a bit like a dream!
No, it really is just the right pace and length. Keeps your attention.
Wow! Quite an interesting post! I'd never considered the question, "How many of us sing while dreaming?" I don't know that I ever have but I've certainly awakened to a song in my head that seems to have arrived out of nowhere.
Thanks! Roy Orbison claimed that 'In Dreams' came to him in a dream, but with Elvis singing it, which is wild.