The Tarot of Songwriting - 01 The Magician

Sondheim, Desire and Slob Dylan

Thank you all for joining me here again. To get access to acoustic songs, future guitar tutorials and more please consider becoming a paid subscriber:

The Magician

The week before I met my partner and the father of my child, I was doing sketches for a comic strip I was working on called Slob Dylan. For whatever reason, I made some adjustments to the appearance of the main character I had drawn hundreds of times at that point. I decided to give him a haircut and a baseball cap. This was 2016; I was living in Los Angeles then but was back in the U.K. briefly to support Neil Young on the European leg of his tour. I had arranged an apartment in north London as a base between shows and intended to fly back to LA at the end of the two weeks. We spent a lot of time together in those two weeks. One morning, over coffee, noticing my sketchbook, which lay open at the end of the table, GJ was confronted with what was quite clearly a drawing of him. I don’t remember being embarrassed; I’m surprised, recalling it now, that I wasn’t. I explained to him it was a character I’d been drawing for over a year and we took the coincidence in stride, obvious as it was to us even then that by some stroke of luck, we had found each other. And the rest, as they say, is history. I have enough interest in woo-woo to believe that something of premonition secured our union. I basically never went back to LA. And now we have a child. In absent-minded moments, I have wondered what my life would be like if we had missed each other, if we’d never been in the same place at the same time, if he had only ever been a picture I drew for a project that never went anywhere; It brings a tear to my eye, I don't like to think about it. Instead, I like to think of it as evidence that there is potential all around, borne in all creative acts — I had drawn something down from the ether and touched it to the earth, and on the journey, it had caught life. The intended target - the comic - was never fully realised, a failed venture, but it had brought me to the great love of my life. This is the spirit of The Magician. 

Before you quite reasonably strike me off as a deranged narcissist - GJ had his own woo-woo plot line that preceded our meeting. Though we had friends in common, we had never met, and he’d not really heard my music (rude) before my 5th album, Short Movie, with which I had a difficult relationship. I never felt it was my best work, and I’d had a relatively disturbing aborted first attempt at making it, which never saw the light of day - it was a protracted process and drained me of any ability to bond with the finished product. Not helped by the fact that, midway through, I had shaved my head in a moment of third-wave-feminism-induced madness, and it had not, in fact, empowered me as I had hoped. I felt dimmed and alien to myself and my work. I couldn’t have known then that the currents were moving, and somewhere across the Atlantic, GJ would be listening. He would later tell me that it struck him with a feeling - a sureness, in fact - that we would meet and fall in love. And we did, only a year later. I saw him one evening, having never laid eyes upon him before, and just remember clearly thinking, there he is. (In case that isn't clear, this was the story behind the song For You.)  

The idea of manifestation is mucky to me, fraught with suspicion and self-importance. That’s not to say I dismiss it as unfathomable. In common parlance, the concept seems too reliant on the idea that the individual is narcissistically powerful, which, in nearly all circumstances, is a recipe for disaster. The unknowable currents of the universe are powerful; we as individuals are passing conduits, struck at random by its shuddering, awesome will. Our desires are powerful, but they are also hard to control - and most of them are mindless, uninspiring and implanted in us by the many and varied nefarious interlopers of late capitalism. The best outcome for desire is that it inspires you, which can feel like it catches its own wave. Love feels like this. That’s why so many great things come from love. The worst outcome is that it annihilates you, torments you and that you become addicted to the torments of your desire. It is for this reason that I am cautious about the songs I write, I check over the fresh ones to make sure nothing got through which could turn on me over time - because they are really incantations, and let me tell you from experience, if you write your own tragedy and then have to sing it every night for a few years, it’ll start to scramble ya. The best songs are written against your will - with minimal intervention, because you happened to have one hand up in the air while the other touched the ground and were alive with desire. One just has to be cautious about what flavor of desire you're cooking with, I suppose. This is what The Magician represents, in my understanding.

---

  

The Magpie

Some enchanted evening

You may see a stranger,

You may see a stranger

Across a crowded room

And somehow you know,

You know even then

Some Enchanted Evening, Rodgers and Hammerstein from South Pacific

Like so many things, I never fully appreciated the beauty of these lyrics until I reached the point where it became clear that there is no time to waste. South Pacific was a favorite in our household growing up, but nothing of the profundity of the song writing really struck me until I heard the Bob Dylan version on his 2015 album, Shadows In The Night. Perhaps listening to this song, both the original and the cover, set the stage in my heart to accommodate what felt like the miraculous appearance of GJ. Whatever it was, somewhere in my mid-twenties, I softened and became a romantic. Now I can’t listen to this song, and many others, without crying. 

Some enchanted evening

When you find your true love,

When you feel her call you

Across a crowded room,

Then fly to her side,

And make her your own

For all through your life you

May dream all alone.

Once you have found her,

Never let her go.

I love the use of the word feel where you might expect hear, and the image of flying to someone’s side, as if carried by an unseen force. Such beautiful, mystical descriptions of what love feels like. And the consequence of not heeding the call - to dream alone.  

It was string arranger to the stars, Rob Moose, who introduced me to Shadows in The Night, while we were making Semper Femina. In the same breath he also made me aware of the Tom Waits version of Somewhere, from West Side Story. It’s almost the inverse of Some Enchanted Evening. Waits’ labored sibilant drawl reaches through an invisible screen to reassure the listener/lover that whatever possibility for love has been missed in this lifetime will be fulfilled in another. I actually put it on sometimes just to indulge myself with tears. Have you ever met someone and known that in another life, under different circumstances, you would have seen through on your love? This is your song. 

There's a place for us,

Somewhere a place for us.

Peace and quiet and open air

Wait for us, somewhere.

There's a time for us,

Some day a time for us,

Time together with time to spare,

Time to learn, time to care.

Some day,

Somewhere,

We'll find a new way of living,

We'll find a way of forgiving.

Somewhere,

Somewhere . . .

Somewhere, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim - from West Side Story

On the day that Sondheim died, I was in a studio in Los Angeles with Blake Mills and Phoebe Bridgers and we just so happened to be discussing his genius. We stepped outside for a break and noticed a rainbow in the sky. Blake checked his phone and saw the news that he had passed away. It was a strange coincidence. Life really is full of them.

---

Guitar Practice

Speaking of Blake, I always enjoy torturing myself by pouring over videos of him playing his own songs and trying to emulate his frankly inhumane guitar skills. It’s inane and obvious to say but his melodic choices and voicings are extraordinarily inspiring if you're a guitarist. My guitar playing improved tenfold just by being in his presence for the month we spent making Semper Femina. I’d also never truly appreciated the importance of tone until I met Blake - always assumed tone had more to do with playing electric guitars than acoustic, but perusing his guitar collection while we were working together he would select an instrument based on what would best fill the sonic hole we were looking to occupy for a specific song. As a songwriter, this had never occurred to me. After we made the record I sold a bunch of guitars in my collection which were all in similar tonal range and added a few to broaden the palette. 

The key to players like Blake, as far as I can see, is that they speak the language so fluently that they are able to make jokes and double entendres (which is the hardest thing to do in a second language). To even attempt to start gaining a fluency like that I began practicing the voicings of one chord at a time the entire way up the fretboard. Or playing a scale in chords up the fretboard. That’s how I ended up writing my song “Fortune” which begins with the first few chords of E major.