November 21, 2003

changing tunes

Yee-hah and hi-yah! I am now OFFICIALLY a Black
Belt
!

Phew. One weight off my back. I'm sure they'll find a new one to replace it shortly.

I've been listening to two albums lately (because one is in the little car and one in the truck) that have me thinking about how singers change their songs over time. The two are by the same singer-songwriter, Alex Bevan. One album is a tape of a tape of a record (remember those?) that I've had since college; it was probably recorded twenty years or so ago. The other is a recent CD. Both are live and they have several of the same songs, including my two favorites of his, Carey and Grand River Lullabye. It's interesting hearing the difference between them that have sprung up over that twenty year span. There are some technical ones; the CD has far better quality than the dub of course, but the earlier tape has some incredible guitar work on songs where he's greatly simplified the arrnagments on the later disc (though it does have some songs where he proves his playing hasn't lost a thing over the decades). He's clowning around much more, in a more broad style, on the later album. More than that, on the early versions of songs, he sings the song plain and pure, while on the later version he camps it up here and tweaks the rhythm there.

You probably haven't heard of him unless you're in northern Ohio, and quite possibly not then, but I think it's a more universal thing. I have a bootleg tape off the radio of a couple interviews Gene Shay did with Joni Mitchell, one right after she'd finished writing Circle Game. (No, my tape's not that old. Shay rebroadcast the interviews in the late 1980s and I taped it then.) When she sings it there, she sings it very simply - actually, if you've heard Judy Collins' cover, it's similar to that. In the later interview, a few years after, she's bending notes, adding phrases, and playing with rhythms.

I have to confess I generally prefer the earlier, simpler versions of both her songs and Alex Bevan's, but I think I can understand why they'd want to vary the performances. It has to be a bit weird, as a singer/songwriter; you write a song and you think it's really good, so you sing it a lot. You're very happy when other people seem to like it too. And then ... time goes by ... more people like it ... and you realize you've created a monster and now you're never allowed to leave a stage without singing and playing that song, that song that was your truth when you wrote it but now it's years later and maybe you'd sort of like to move on a little. And so you do move on and you write new songs, and they're good songs and people like them, but still you can't ever step off a stage without singing that song. No wonder they play with them a bit.

I keep thinking of something David Bromberg says on one of his albums, while introducing Mister Bojangles, about his time playing backup to Jerry Jeff Walker: "We played that song every night and I never got tired of it. Jerry got a little tired of it, though..at night after the shows we'd take it out and do horrible things to it."

Posted by dichroic at November 21, 2003 01:59 PM
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