October 1995
Walter Whitman (Where Are You)
“Musically, I grew up with the jazz artists of the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, all the singers from Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstein to Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald. My father turned me on to all those singers… jazz has always been touted as being uncommercial, won’t sell anything, but then Harry Connick Jr. came along and repopularized it. But I didn’t want to make a Harry Connick album, or a Natalie Cole album. I wanted to make something in that genre, but not a collection of old songs — it would be difficult to be inspired.
“Walter Whitman had touched something I was yearning to touch and that was a little more affinity and loving toward myself. If I must follow a form, let the form carry me, but if I have to be constricted, then I die. Whitman could not be constricted by form, he knew where philosophy, where religion, where politics should begin and end.”
Fallen In Love
“I thought, `I’d kinda like a drum solo in this song, but then again, no.’ Something about that track reminded me of a ’30s, ’40s Fred Astaire thing, who better to get than Gregory Hines? I don’t know him, I just got his phone number from his agent. I sent him the track, he liked it instantly, said he was going to be in L.A. So I went down with my brother Joe, we build him a stage out of two 4×8 sheets of plywood we nailed together, put a bit of sand on it, Greg walked in with his tap shoes and said `let’s go!’
“Lyrically, it starts out as a Cole Porter kind of thing, but then it gets into what I was pursuing. All the great minds chase the answers, but you have to ask of them: `dammit, if you’re so smart, how come you’re so unhappy?’ And that was the whole song: for a moment of love I’d give it all away.”
You Owe It To Yourself
“Sometimes people separate, go different ways, lead different lives, different passions and they just find themselves apart. I looked at my wife and wondered if she’d ever come to me someday and say `I need to do this, need to feel that way,’ like, `my life is too much around you and your career,’ which I’ve always felt a little guilty of. Could I turn around and tell her she’s free to experience what she needs to experience? Could I be big enough to absorb the pain?”
A Little Bit Of Judas
“An ode to my fourth-grade catechism teacher… It’s very liberating to be able to take potshots at your belief system without fear you’re going to be struck by a lightning bolt. It’s about taking the sacred names, places, personal places, sacred sites, sacred feelings and saying `hey, it’s all up for grabs!’ You can do this, that… not only is there Judas in us all, but one should be able to take these names out of a hat and say them without a qualm.”
Unbearably Blue
“Can’t help but have eyes and ears and see and feel… the tension is always there. The tension to want to stray, to let your magnetic impulses take over… “Unbearably Blue” does its best to leave no trace of a clean answer to such unsolvable mysteries.”
Jehovah and All That Jazz
“The lyrics needed an appropriate, fun track to showcase them… Many of the great artists, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and so on were highly intolerable demons to upright society, but they certainly infused that same society with life. What we attribute the works of the devil to is what gives God life. There’s nothing more touted in a Christian bookstore than Satan: how to deal with him. At some point you say: `I’m tired of that drama and I prefer another one. It’s becoming awfully myopic, it’s really hurting more than it’s helping and this is why people are giving up the whole thing. ‘ John Coltrane was a very troubled person and even felt personally that he was possessed by demons. It’s that wild energy, that crazy fool inside us that wants to be let loose and play. Without it there’s nothing to harness. The devil is that bucking bronco, and if there’s no-one to ride it, there is no drama.”
None So Beautiful
“I have deep feelings toward people who give of themselves, that are unnoticed, unsung heroes. I don’t know their names, I don’t know who they are, but I wish to suffer with them.”
I Die A Little More Each Day
“There were moments of great joy and great sorrow experienced in the making of this album. I didn’t know how to express my sorrow, I didn’t just want to say `I hate the world’ for what’s happening to it. I tried to find a way to express that sorrow in a beautiful sense. It comes from a sense of empathy, a sense of sympathy, fear, outrage that we’re taking something so wonderful for granted. We devour our host, thinking there’s a heaven somewhere else, but it’s not true. The kingdom has been given to us and we’re to experience it; not subdue it, conquer it, and deface it… the sudden realization that our mother called Earth is being raped makes me cry, it also makes me die, because my body and my nourishment comes from this mother. To see her in such a state simply hurts. I don’t know any other way to say it. The hurt is doubly painful because the finger is pointed at myself first.”
Come To The Well
“It’s about the sacredness of sex. I was always taught to despise my passions, my lust, to look very suspiciously on it. My lust is part of my creativity, my desire to live; what I do with it is quite another matter. That sacredness is a phenonemal gift. When sexuality is killed, or kept alive by pornographers, by those who imagine it to be deviant and who therefore treat it as deviant, when you can only find it in deviant places and buy it from deviant sources it makes it a dirty thing. The physical expression of love is sexuality, the spiritual expression of sexuality is love. They go hand in hand.”
Moon Over Madness
“The drama of feeling your heart, passion and reacting to your basic impulses, which in this case is hostility, is one of the great horrors and conflicts to be experienced; without which, there is no drama, in fact no life at all. I believe the enlightenment of this vampire first begins with his confrontation with his own dilemma. The struggle that follows is for the observer to be witness to, and be entertained by.
