Yesterday I received a text from a friend that I hadn’t hung out with in a while asking what I was doing. She suggested Molly Malone’s so I took her up on it and we met at Molly’s around 8. Its a new theme on Monday nights where musicians around town will come and sit in and do a song, so each night is kind of a random show of whoever comes down. Adjoa Skinner who was hosting the event and playing most of the songs asked me to do one but having just played a show and in need of a break from my rigorous live schedule I politely declined wanting just to watch and relax secretly hoping that she would call me up anyway.
So as my friend and I are watching Adjoa mentions a few names of people that are going to be coming up and among them is Daniel Bedingfield. Not quite sure that I heard right I turned to my friend and asked her and come to find out that she knew about it all along and that’s why she chose Molly Malone’s. Daniel soon came on and did 3 songs by himself on the piano to a room of no more than 30 people. He also did a song that he had only played once previously live. The whole thing was awesome. I never really listened to him before this, but I remember hearing him in my friend Dave’s car in Atlanta.
After his set Daniel ran up and kissed this girl on the cheek that was sitting beside us and then ran off, and she ran after him. On the way out my friend made a comment about how that girl annoyed her, and I called her out on being jealous and she said no and that the girl was squirming too much throughout the show but I still think she was jealous. All in all a very cool night.
Download/Listen: California
Lyrics:
You can tell a bitter man by the way he drinks the scene in California
What happened to his hopes and dreams?
They’re realized in hopeless schemes in California
Everybody wants to be someone special someone free in California
Chasing what they’re wishin’
Wishing they were differrent
Well carry on my friend as long as you have the strength
You seem to say “My God, my God” with the look on your face
There’s nothing you can chase that won’t make you hate
What you wanted so badly
Well you’re on your way, the day is beautiful
I can see you from the second floor
There’s an orange in your jacket pocket
Cause its a long way for a man to walk it alone
A landscape so crowded you can’t find silence in L.A.
A whore unembarrassed dances on the corner to a tune
Now a singer takes the stage, a man who has smoked his whole life through
Most of the time he draws his breaths
And with the rest he says what he needs to
Insight:
Despite what you might initially think this song is not about me. I wrote it about some of the things and people that I’ve seen here in L.A.
Nicholas Alan Live at M Bar
Thursday, May 15, 7:30pm
21&up, $8 cover
1253 N Vine St
Hollywood, CA 90038
M Bar website
Directions
I was pleased to stumble onto a leaked track from Scarlett Johansson’s “Anywhere I Lay My Head.” A huge Tom Waits fan myself and a fan of Scarlett as an actress I was very curious to hear it. “Falling Down” has a neo-Brian Wilson style of production and Scarlett’s vocals remind me a little of Sinead O’Connor. What I love about Scarlett’s way of doing Tom Waits is that it comes across comfortable and peaceful and it feels like home. I don’t really know how else to say it. Tom Waits is a brilliant writer, but sometimes the beauty of his songs is hidden behind his rough voice and intense delivery. Words that have so much depth and serenity are only available to those who can see the beauty behind the pain, and I think that’s the way Tom likes it. His voice and performance is beautiful in itself, kind of like watching a dying animal is beautiful, but it’s only a select few who will see it in that light. Its nice to hear this song out there and vulnerable, tender and consoling, the way the song seems to be at heart. Scarlett doesn’t have a classically great voice, but its nice, its unpretentious, its sincere, and its unique. I’m really looking forward to hearing the rest of the album.
I’ve been a boy since 17 separated by a set of strings
On this guitar, on this guitar
And then what happened early morn
21 passed to a notebook on the floor
It says Elizabeth I’m sorry
Things didn’t turn out how we thought they would before
A pocket of flowers dissolved, devoured
“A World Like Ours” a barricade
A satchel of resolutions traded for refrains
Elizabeth, you’ve been a girl since this began
To let you grow would be a sin to better days
Now just who am I trying to hide
You and me from the bitterness that’s left with us now being 25
You threw a towel on the floor
Spotted black from all the masks you’ve worn before
You wonder if life is only
That from body to eulogy goes history so let it be
Still
Looking in the mirror I can see her thinking of the day
You just wanted to go home but dad had gone away
So now you sleep around in hopes that he is found
Making mistakes in the superable way we carry on
You wouldn’t tell me if what they said was true
But that’s cause I know you
Your honesty with friends never was that good
It’s a shame you’re so tired so soon
It’s a shame I sit in my room writing just to deal with you
“Being 25″ is my quarter-life crisis song about dealing with adulthood. It talks mostly through the 1st verse of my tendency to write about problems rather than dealing with them, to write about desire rather than acting on it. The line “you threw a towel on the floor spotted black from all the masks you’ve worn before,” or the imagery of the line comes from having shared a bathroom with my sister, and sometimes seeing a towel on the floor spotted black from makeup. In the song though the line is referring to giving in, trying to figure out who you are as a person, etc
Teitur’s new album “The Singer” seems to cause time to stop, like after experiencing something tragic or those rare times when every little detail seems right. At those times you seem to exist outside of time and only in peaceful observation. I feel like this throughout the entire album. Needless to say “The Singer” is beautiful.
When I first heard Teitur I was playing a bar in Columbus, GA called The Loft where Teitur had played the night before. The bartender played me some live cuts of “Amanda’s Dream” and “Josephine” and I was hooked. Teitur just had this way of removing any barriers that exist between the artist and the listener, and with “The Singer” Teitur really takes this to a new level.
The production on “The Singer” is like “The Island of Misfit Toys.” Its like if you strip the song of everything except the voice, then you let all the production ideas that were overlooked, forgotten, and less favored creep back in, and the effect is this spacious and beautiful setting.
One of the tracks is a letter that Teitur received from a friend, and he sets it to music on the album. It requires a very asymmetric music structure with phrases of various length. This style of writing seems to resurface throughout the album, especially on the title track. The effect for me is that I feel almost as if I’m being talked to, personally as opposed to hearing words and phases that are filtered and reshaped to fit a mass-produced, cookie cut common time song.
I like when an artist progresses to get at an expose their utter self, and that’s exactly what Teitur is doing.
Nicholas Alan
www.nicholasalan.com
Wielding the acidic tongue for someone I gave up on last November
Stab them with my teeth ’cause I have nothing to believe in this December
Love to live though tear apart this life to find the prize that lives inside it
And smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes in snowmen
Yesterday 3 women carried groceries on their head
Down a stone path imparting such a life as they have lead
Some alive though some instead will suck the life of everyman
Who they let dance upon their stead, so empirically fantastic
A small town would be quiet when the darkness shuts you in
If not for the stray dogs that would wander, they’re howling in the wind
Or the town square that is speckled with a mass of angry men
They are drunk again, they are drunk again
And smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes in snowmen
January holds the key for people anxious for a chance resurfacing
And smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes at snowmen
About the lyrics
I wrote this in the early Winter of 2006 in the same month(s) that I wrote “Being 25.” I was transitioning from one job I hated to another I would come to hate and I knew it. The 1st 2 lines of the song references a period when I wasn’t as close with some friends as I used to be, in a time of year that can feel either the loveliest or the loneliest.
“Love to live….prize that lives inside it” comes from something I read. The article referenced a French philosopher or child psychologist who studied and wrote about children’s fascination with objects, but their deeper fascination to know what’s inside. Like an easter egg for example. Little kids are fascinated with the bright & colorful egg but are willing to destroy it to find out what’s inside of it. This made me think of the way some people exist, so in love with truth they abandon any chance of a peaceful or comfortable existence in search of truth.
The songs bridge is full of images that I came across while visiting my brother in Honduras during September, 2006. The line “smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes in snowmen” talks about my brother and I standing outside of his rented house in Honduras, smoking cigarettes and feeling indifferent & apathetic.