Death Waits I Music & Fine Arts
Songs inspired by the lives and works of Will Oldham, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Alberto Giacometti, Richard Wagner, Don Carlo Gesualdo, Michelangelo, and Sappho, with adaptations of songs by Jacques Brel and Henry Purcell.
(Digital Version)
David Bowie - Back To Earth
David Bowie’s ascent to overnight super-stardom took several long years. But Bowie had conviction, and “never did anything by halves,” as the English say. Throwing everything behind the song Space Oddity and timing its release to coincide with the first moon landing, Bowie was gambling big at a critical point in his career, but it paid off. Extra-terrestrial themes recurred in Bowie’s work. His Ziggy Stardust character became such a powerful force that it subsumed its creator. Paranoid, estranged, coke-addicted, for a while Bowie became an alien to himself. But unlike Major Tom, Bowie did not drift off into the stratosphere. He came back.
Death and the Muse - Death Waits I
Death Waits I is adapted from Jacques Brel’s song “La Mort,” with new music, and revised and extended lyrics.
Don Carlo Gesualdo - The Prince of Darkness
On October 16, 1590, Italian prince and madrigal composer Don Carlo Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover in cold blood. He went on to remarry, and was unfaithful and abusive to his second wife. Gesualdo also created devilishly beautiful compositions, introducing new and dazzling chromatic harmony, the like of which would not be heard again until Wagner, two and a half centuries later.
Richard Wagner - The Sun Deceives
Does death promise truth and release? Has the sun deceived us with its warmth and light? Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan Und Isolde throbs with the dark shades of Schopenhauer’s grim philosophy: that while we strive endlessly for happiness and satisfaction, we strive in vain. Isolde attempts to poison Tristan, her mortal enemy, but her spell reverses, instead causing them to fall in love. Cursed in this life to be kept apart as mortal enemies, only in death can they be free, finally, to love.
Will Oldham - Again
We are not the same person we were yesterday, an hour ago, a minute ago. Our cells age, die, become replaced. Our thoughts and feelings shift. Events modify our place in the world. In “Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy,” Will Oldham describes the feeling of newness and unfamiliarity that sometimes inhabits him when he faces a new day. And if we have no sameness, where is the path? Do we have a path? Oldham asks and avoids answering, answers and avoids asking. And yet in his music we hear always the clear, intelligent voice of an individual.
Michelangelo - Just A Lombard Cat
Michelangelo’s mother fell ill and died when he was a child. His father sent the boy to live with a stonecutter and his family. “Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer,” he wrote. Michelangelo always considered himself a sculptor rather than a painter. But he could not refuse the commission of Pope Julius II to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The commission stretched into a four year labor of incredible scope, beauty, skill, and torment. Hung beneath the ceiling for hours at a time, forever spattered with paint, Michelangelo became contorted, “like a cat from Lombardi.” But the physical indignities paled in comparison to Michelangelo’s fear that he was unequal to the task at hand: “My painting is dead,” he lamented in a letter to a friend, “Defend it for me, Giovanni. Protect my honor. I am in the wrong place — I am not a painter.” The song references, in part, Michelangelo’s poem The Lover and The Sculptor.
Sappho - Song Before Dying
We don’t have any record of Sappho’s music, only fragments of the words she sang. But according to Stobaeus’s Florilegium, Solon once asked his nephew to teach him a song of Sappho’s that the boy had just sung him. When asked why, Solon responded “So that I may learn it, then die.” In the lyric fragment, Sappho 31, as Sappho sings to newly-weds in their nuptial chamber, her words betray her feelingtoward the bride. Song Before Dying refers to Sappho 31 and adheres to the form of the Sapphic stanza.
Lou Reed - The Thistle And The Thorn
In the song Perfect Day from Lou Reed’s 1972 solo album Transformer, time stands uneasily still as Reed and his lover enjoy a listless day together, visiting the zoo, drinking Sangria in the park. The implication of perfection is unreliable: “You made me forget myself,” Reed sings, “I thought I was someone else, someone good.” Lou Reed made art from imperfection, exploring the uncomfortable no-man’s-land between what is and what might have been. When he visited Taormina thirty two years later, Reed stayed in a four star hotel, nestled in the hills high above the Sicilian coast. Idyllic, perhaps, but, for Reed, one can imagine that it was not perfect.
Alberto Giacometti - Insubstantial Man
A trip to Padua as a young man kindled Alberto Giacometti’s love of art. It became his obsession to show reality not as it could be measured but as it appeared, whittling away at his early works until they were no more than matchsticks. Giacometti’s tall, impossibly thin sculptures (Walking Man, Man Pointing, City Square) emerged as products of his nocturnal and contracted existence in Paris, as a mature artist. They seem to shrink from the eye, refracting the gaze, and emphasizing the space around and between people. (Caroline was a Parisian prostitute who fascinated Giacometti and became his muse and his mistress. Giacometti was dedicated to his younger brother, Diego.)
Notes On The Death Waits Recordings
Several years ago some of these songs existed in a rudimentary state. Bringing them to fruition seemed to require just a bit of expert arrangement and production for which I turned to Jimi Zhivago. If we’d known then that we would be spending hundreds of hours recording, rerecording, and for my part writing and rewriting the music that you hear today, working through bitter winters and sweltering summers in my basement(s) and various recording studios around New York, perhaps we would have thought twice about it. But we didn’t. Thank you, Jimi, for your fellow naivety, your boundless creativity, and your endless encouragement.
Credits
Production: Jimi Zhivago
Arrangements: Zhivago / Walker
All songs: Walker
Vocals: Walker
Guitars, bass: Zhivago (except Lombard Cat, interlude Walker)
Keyboards, piano: Zhivago, Walker
Hammond B3: Zhivago
Drums: Tony Leone (tracks 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10), Blake Fleming (tracks 1, 7, 9)
Percussion: Leone, Fleming, Zhivago
Illustrations: Eric Collins