Sea Change

From the 1998 EP Wafers and Wine: Music from Apartment D, A Film by Carl W. Liss.

Pictured: "Come Unto These Yellow Sands" by Richard Dadd.

PSST: You can download and listen to Seachange at Bootleg Blogging.

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Circa Spring 1997.

Wake up. Half asleep. Three a.m.? The first line, the melody, the opening chords just pop in my head:

'She's the girl with the pearls, she's the girl with the propane.'

Where the hell it came from I'll never know. I reach for the guitar next to the bed (without getting out of bed, which is no mean feat) and try to make out the fingering for the weird second chord I'm hearin in my head.

Stream o' consciousness lyrics. Grab the little grey tape recorder by the bed. Make sure I'm not erasing anything important and get it down. Roll over and go back to sleep. I'll deal with it in the morning.

Duh - it is the morning.

* * *

Next day: propane becomes cocaine. and the line about the 'pearl' makes me want to reference The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, and the line: 'Those are the pearls that were his eyes.'

Of course. Eliot himself stole the line from Shakespeare's The Tempest, but I can't remember the scene or anything - or even the jist of the play itself, since I last read it - nay, crammed it the days before my English comprehensive exams in college - so long ago. And unfortunately I'm away from a computer with Internet access so I can't search the text of the play online. Notebooks from college don't do it. Eliot's notes to the poem don't do it. I can't even find a reference in my version of the facsimile of the original Waste Land poem. (Yeah, I'm a bit of a fanatic.)

So instead I do it the hard way: I grab my hardbound Complete Works of William Shakespeare, a notebook and a phone, and I head to the library.

Yeah, that library. Seats one. If ya know what I mean.

So why am I going through all of this? Because these bizarre words I've come up with sound cool but they ain't got no meaning.

I'm looking for meaning.

It's during the second low-tech scan for 'pearl' (eye on the finger, line by line) that I find Ariel's song, and it all comes back to me: Ariel and the sprites are singing to Ferdinand about his father the sailor, lost at sea years before.

No, not dead dear Ferdinand, they seem to say. Take comfort in knowing that he lives on as part of the sea itself.

Father. Sailor. Lost at sea.

I laugh. The phone rings. Caller ID. says it's Carl. So I answer.

"G Money!" he says.

I laugh again.

"What's so funny?" he asks.

"I'm in the can writing a song for your flick."

"How appropriate," he replies.

So now we're both laughing.

It's bizarre that he called when he did, not because I was in, uh, the library, but because it wasn't until that very moment that I realized that the song I'd come up with while half-asleep would be about Casey.

Whose big issue in Carl's flick is her absentee father.

An airline pilot.

A modern day sailor, if you will.

I started modifying Ariel's song for the bridge - and soon I had a chorus, too. And a title.

And that's that.

The moral of the story: If you're going to sample anybody, do it like T.S. Eliot did and make sure it's a public domain dead poet.