In my song "Ghost Writer" there's a line "Been writing down these old stories now / about 18 years or so." Even though I was exaggerating for effect at the time, I wrote the song in 1976, so do the math.
As a matter of fact, do all the math: I was born in 1943 and just turned 70. A New Yorker to the bone, I grew up in Sheepshead Bay and went to Lincoln High School. After graduating from Syracuse in 1965 I did a few months at The Institute of Fine Arts toward a graduate degree in art history before chucking it and trying to make a go of it with music. I was hanging out in the East Village, selling posters with Peter Max, playing The Bitter End, Hotel Diplomat, Kenny's Castaways, Gerde's Folk City, The Gaslight Cafe and The Moravian Church, anywhere I could. A little later I was at Reno Sweeney on West 13th, working with blackface masks and my rag doll Ramon. My first record was on Vanguard in 1969 with my band Grinder's Switch and featuring the late great Stan Szelest on piano and organ. I cut "Garland Jeffreys," my debut solo album in 1973, exactly 40 years ago.
So I've been at this a long time, but the process of writing songs is still pretty much as mysterious to me as it was in the beginning. The tune, the words are still rattling around somewhere inside me and I just need to locate them. I'm often alone and very sensitive to when I'm getting close because a little bit of hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck excitement begins. It can be just a few stray words to signal the song, but I don't presume I'm anywhere, yet. The line, back to the line — could it be the title? I go back to it and worry it, but have to remain patient, talk to myself, for I could still be nowhere. Slow, easy, cool down. Rushing can ruin the whole thing. If my humility is there I have a chance of maintaining the delicate atmosphere and getting started.
Since putting out "The King of In Between" in 2011 I've been writing like crazy. I write on acoustic guitar and record ideas on hand-held battery-operated cassette players because I love their compression. There's always a machine or two sitting out on the table and I put one on whenever I pick up the guitar, but since I never get around to labeling or dating any of the cassettes, when it came time to think about choosing songs for the new record, "Truth Serum," every single one of the approximately 75 cassettes had to be reviewed.
I had to go to B&H to buy a different model cassette player with a counter on it in order to track the songs. The young guy at the counter was amazed anyone would want such an antiquated machine. Two days later I bought another one in case they decided to stop making them.
One of the songs that I'd completely forgotten about was "Far Far Away." Usually I'll come across numerous versions of songs, with different tempos, lyrics or even genre changes of the same idea on different cassettes over many months, but this one was unusual in that it was completely finished in one sitting and the only version we uncovered. I never came across any written lyrics, which is really odd since there are always tons of those. Playing it back there was a feeling of dislocation, almost as if I'd woken up in the middle of the night and stumbled over to the guitar and recorded it and then went back to sleep, but clearly there was another person accompanying me on guitar so it had to have been done while sentient. It sounds murky and dark, like a Pandora's box of my unconscious:
Take away my troubles
And put 'em in a secret trunk
Dump 'em in the river
And when the trunk is sunk
Clear the air of all concerns
Start everything anew
Where everyone is happier
And all good things come true
I can visualize someone (myself?) standing alone on the bank of a narrow river at dusk and lifting a heavy, crusty old steamer trunk and heaving it into the water and watching it sink slowly to the bottom and walking off with a feeling of lightness and freedom. I seem to be referring to a desire to remove myself from difficult family members with "Far far away / Make them distant relatives" (a kind of unintentional pun) and I can only guess that I was alluding to a very old hurt: the fact that my parents separated me from my sister, Cecelia, when we were very young. My parents split up and she went to live with my father and I stayed with my mother, making her a literal distant relative. I never saw her again and reunited with her two years ago when her grandson tracked me down on Facebook which was pretty mind blowing. I had no idea I had three grandnieces and two great grand nephews Getting to know Cecelia and filling in some of the blank spots in our memories was and continues to be a revelation. I'm actually not sure if the song was written before or after we found each other again.
These kinds of songs are often my favorites — the ones with lines or ideas even I don't quite understand. One I'm particularly fond of is "afro picks in the sand" from "I Was Afraid of Malcolm"; a vivid image but I have no clue what it means. In "Far Far Away" I'm still not sure which family problems I was referring to when I wrote it, but knowing matters less and less. The older I get the more it's about the feel and letting listeners draw their own conclusions.
It's a monolithic song, with basically two chords. Though I liked it a lot, I wasn't sure it would hold up. In the studio Larry Campbell (who co-produced the last record and played an integral role in this one) said kind of ruefully, "We're going to have to do a lot to make this into something." The players laid down a gorgeous basic track with a kind of stately, rocking tempo and a few days later James Maddock, my great pal, fell by the studio and gave it a more layered sound, with the string pad and a ringing, anthemic five-note motif in the chorus. We added only male background voices on the chorus, which are unusual for me. Andy Taub, the engineer and mixer at Brooklyn Recording, dusted off a glockenspiel and showed his surprising chops.
The vocal in particular captures exactly the feeling that was there on the original demo, a kind of inchoate longing for freedom and escape from emotional strife.
A song like this is a kind of exorcism, and on the rare occasions it comes off it's better than a thousand hours of therapy.
Garland Jeffreys is a New York City-based musician and songwriter who has released 13 albums. His most recent is "Truth Serum."
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