‘Final recording’ is the catchphrase
from which no producer
can take away a marketable
set of ‘tunes’ song-structure
compliant; no shifts that shape
a song of evocation
and durability, not even
‘jam’ to prompt others
into making a show of it.
After the ‘boogies’, I am
back to where I started
with Syd in the late 70s —
‘If You Go’ when you’ve
never arrived, the vocals
lapsing silent, unspoken
between strings stretched
to surface a muddy puddle
in Wandlebury Woods,
and the ‘Ballad Unfinished’
is why voices emerge
from the mixing desk,
a slide from neo-romanticism
into neurodivergence.
But vocabulary doesn’t
have to be time-sensitive,
and I see robins from Wandlebury
hedgerows almost as I hear
the effects of red-capped robins
locally in a revelation that can’t be;
‘If You Go’ back
for a second
reckoning of sap splash
to paint the floor
of a wooded area,
resonant between branches,
flexed by wind in the crowns.
Here the songs forming,
the quotes and variations,
motifs and counterpoints,
caught behind the bars.
Praise John Lee Hooker!
But can I be there where
you are everywhere,
and so were they
whose going
ended the delay,
the hopes of reverb.
But fast or slow,
birds know they are safe
in the head, a wave
across the sound-
box lilt crying
wah-wah, wah-wah.
.
John Kinsella
.