In February 2021 my songwriting collaborator (and great friend) CP Butchvarov sent me some mp3 files that he had newly mixed from original recordings going back a lot of years. Among them was a song called “Pastry Blues” that I had completely forgotten about, until I heard it again. “Pastry Blues” is both hilarious and horribly tragic, with a gut-punch final line and an astonishing vocal performance by CP’s one-time musical partner Jo Flagg. It probably dates back to 1979, and I’m not boasting when I rave about it, because I had nothing to do with writing it.
Simply hearing a really good song is sometimes all it takes to kick my songwriting spirit into gear. I get a feeling reminding me that this is so rewarding, and so much fun! I’ve written before in this blog about my songwriting collaboration history with CP, so I won’t get into the weeds on that again.
There was an instrumental among these new mp3 files, and I thought I might try to write lyrics for it. I took the title, altered it slightly, and came up with maybe the most ethereal, wispy set of lines I’ve ever written. There might have been twenty syllables total in this all-but-vacant draft. They matched the music, and I could clearly hear them in my mind. But CP could not figure out how these lines in my head were intended to be sung against this guitar backdrop. There’s one of the major difficulties with long-distance songwriting collaboration.
I dashed off a couple of other proposed lyrics around the same time, and sent them to CP. One was a rant about technology surveillance, a pet topic of mine, obviously a major theme of my novel Wash Away. The song lyrics were heavily influenced by the schizo-cyber noir FX series “Mr. Robot,” in which most of the world’s financial data has been wiped away in a hack gone way haywire.
CP took two sketchy verses of these lyrics, originally called “All Will Be Made New,” and whipped up an arrangement with organ, bass, drum sequence and snaky electric guitar. As always, CP took ample liberties with the words as written. He changed them to fit into a rhythmic pattern, he jerked rhymes from place to place, and he found phrases that he thought were worth repeating. He also had the brilliance to change the word “destroyed” to “deleted.” Occasionally CP’s wholesale cosmetic gutting of my lyrics irritates me, but it’s better when I adopt the attitude that the first set I write is just a starting point.
I wrote four more verses once I understood the pattern of the lines CP had in mind. About half of those ended up in the song as CP developed it.
I believe that CP intended to re-record this song with a live drummer, but it didn’t come about, and he sent me this final mix the other day. He also suggested to me that “you might care to put the song on your website, perhaps with a discussion of how you and I manage to create such masterpieces.” All I can contribute to a discussion like that is what we did, as related above; “how” we manage to do it is, and always has been, a great and ravishing mystery to me.
All Made Equal
Your own self-image is nothing but crude
Surveillance reveals the digital you
Firm data points replace memory scan
The last generation of unenhanced man
Synthesized music to match your taste
Selling your eyes, your attention, your face
When only machines discern what’s real
Algorithm understands how you feel
Bulletproof code of false review
Upcoming wipe where all’s made new
All made equal, all deleted,
All made equal, all made new
Manipulated pixels will make you feel better
Generated thoughts agree to the letter
Comparing results of a trillion samples
Outlying results negated and canceled
Minutes and hours of stuporous murmurs
Transferred to bits on distributed servers
When only machines reveal what’s real
Algorithm understands how you feel
Bulletproof code of false review
Upcoming wipe where all’s made new
All made equal, all deleted,
All made equal, all made new
Street cams recognize you by your walk
Find your crouch from the sentient flock
Head bowed, phone cupped in your hands
The last generation of unenhanced man
Compliance rejected, objection abandoned
Scatter point plots paired against the random
Throw your body on the gears of the wheel
The algorithm understands how you feel
Bulletproof code of false review
Upcoming wipe where all’s made new
All made equal, all deleted,
All made equal, all made new