A Few Thoughts On The Songs Of
"A Drought At The Fountain Of
Reason"
The Battle Of The Green
This was written after my 2nd or 3rd reading of "The Lord of the
Rings" in 1975 or so. I was in a band doing original songs along the
lines of Genesis and Yes and this was one of my two offerings. I remember
vividly sitting in the middle of my bed very late at night with a stubby pencil
and steno pad. I had literally JUST finished the final chapter of
"The Return of the King" and had read just a little of the appendices
when the idea for this song just popped into my mind. I was listening to
some King Crimson through headphones and was a little piqued at the need to
stop listening in order to concentrate on the rhythm! The vivid
landscape/army/war camp mind pictures from the book weighed VERY heavily in the
writing of these lyrics. I wrote the music for the lyrics over the next
week or so...
Hold On To Me For Love
Written in 1990 or so (shortly before the breakup of my 18-year marriage) for
my wife. A very personal lyric that was written to a chord change I had
been playing with for a while. A typical way of saying things too hard to
communicate in verbal prose
The Coolerator
Written in 2003 for this CD, the name is one that I've used before in a
published piece (a college Humanities Anthology)
It is far and away the fastest writing I've ever done...Chord progression idea
to finished song in about 1-1/2 hours!
Cry Rivers
This is one of my earliest attempts and most edited set of lyrics, another that
was the result of the chord progression and trying to fit a group of ideas into
a rhythm of the music. I was a pimply-faced 15-year-old virgin when I
originally wrote it!! Over the years, experience and understanding have
filtered out the most overtly juvenile aspects of this song, but I think it
still portrays a certain teen angst tempered by my life-long generally
optimistic views... This has long been one of my own personal favorites.
Hats Off To Mr. Faustus
This song was a direct result of the first really painful "breakup"
in my life - I guess I was about 19 or 20 and was just hopelessly in love with
a neighborhood girl who was apparently a wee tiny bit interested in me!
We went out a few times, stayed up and talked on the phone into the wee hours
for a week or two and then she started dating a friend of mine who had a little
money and a new car - the bastard!! Typically, I extrapolated our budding
friendship into a long love life when I started writing the song. There
have been very few very minor edits to the lyrics over the years. I've
always enjoyed doing this song live with a rock band at a slow liquid nasty
pace. Jamming on this chord progression is fun!
Well Allright!
Every musical collection needs a Polka! This is my contribution to the
world of polka music and modern society! Written for a good friend on a
bet (that I couldn't write - a polka) sometime in the mid to late 1990s.
Clearly just a bit silly in every way!
SLIPPING INTO SHELTER
First I have to say that the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King
Jr. affected my life unlike almost any other events, even the natural deaths of
family members. Political assassination, to me, is the single most
cowardly, stupid action a human being can make. Murder, in any form
(other that possibly as an act of passion/self preservation), has always been
the ONE thing that I find myself completely unable to reconcile in ANY
way. How can one human presume to take the life of another -- it's just
preposterous and un-nerving to me in a visceral way. That said:
Back in 1978 or so there was a made-for-TV movie about the Mass Murderer Ted Bundy. The program pointed out strongly how everyone who knew Ted thought that this couldn't possibly have been the "monster" who was killing all the teenage girls in 3 or 4 states. He was supposedly handsome, smart, very amiable and articulate. For some unfathomable reason, this revelation struck a nerve with me and I investigated the case a little bit at the library, mostly to see how accurate the depiction was. It was actually very very close to the truth in this particular part of the case!
Having grown up in Arkansas/Oklahoma, and lived a little in California and having traveled a fair amount following the GD, I considered myself fairly cosmopolitan and relatively savvy, but had never considered that there could be people so inwardly different from their outward appearance. I guess, in a way, this program was an eye-opener to the darker side of the human existence for a young, somewhat sheltered psuedo-intellectual! :o)
The extrapolation of the entire experience, for me, was... "What could possibly go through the mind of someone like this??" What could be the "world view" of someone capable of such gruesome, unthinkable acts to a fellow human being? I could marginally almost understand Charlie Manson's need for total power over a group of followers, but Bundy's extremely well planned and orchestrated mayhem seemed totally and non-sensically foreign to me... Of course, having no empirical data and no way to get a handle on these questions, I resorted to the Bluesman's tradition of writing a song about the things I don't understand...
Basically it's a group of thought's from the mind of a serial killer, trying to reconcile his condition with his world view...written by the most non-violent person I know!! ME! I wrote it in 1980 or 81. Somewhere in the years following the writing, I threw out 3 or 4 verses of a more graphic nature, enjoying the more enigmatic vignettes of the final song. Plus, I can actually remember the words to the 3 verses I've done the last 15 years or so! :o)
Cornbread And Whippets
This instrumental was written for my first attempt at recording on a
computer-based home studio setup. Not much to say about it except I
enjoyed doing the synthesizer parts immensely.
Doomed Voyage
Another song written during my stretch with the Progressive Rock band that
spawned "Battle of the Green". When I was a child, my first
love was books about the sea and sailing ships. I devoured Moby Dick
without a second thought about the moral simile or timelessness of the
prose. I read the Bounty trilogy before I was in the third grade and
could tell a frigate from a brigantine at a glance at the sails.
I read every book about whaling and sea warfare in the era of wind-powered
ships that I could find. I loved Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson as much
as Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the Flash - no, MORE!! Much of this
was because I was living in the middle of the American Continent (Oklahoma) and
tales of living in the South Seas islands and aboard pirate ships were as
exotic to me as science fiction. This song is a series of memories of
stories I made up when I was 8 through 11 years old. I always wanted to
write a book about Pirates, Gnomes and Mutiny at sea....This is as close as
I've come!
Locust Mountain Rag
This is a little Bluegrass ditty that I wrote in the early 1990s to play on my
mandolin. The nicest thing about this song is that I simply CANNOT play
it fast! It's one of the few Bluegrass songs that I don't speed up to
breakneck speed while playing!
Jim Skinner
January 2004
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