Just a Spark (Part Four)

"Just a Spark" was a bit of hope after "Easy Way Out."  I'm sure it had a lot to do with the crush that inspired the song. There really was a leather queen, and a hngry wolf-pack following her around.  I could relate all the details, but I prefer the version in the song. All you need to know is that my first semester was colored by this crush. 

People seemed to like this song. I played it at coffee-houses, and this would often be the closer to my set. It's epic. I recorded it twice once for Lost and Found, and once for this album, and yet it's a strange song to merit such attention. 

For one thing, it's a long song.  Both recordings are over 7 minutes, but if you listen, you won't feel like it's a long song. On the one hand, not a lot happens in the song. It's like a portrait of a moment in time, but on the other hand the details are very revealing. 

It's funny, because despite having written so many songs, at this point in my life, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about what made them work.  I would just write them, and they either worked for me, or they didn't, but when I analyze this song now, I see that there are some unusual aspects to it. For one thing, the entire song is based on triplets instead of couplets. The rhyme scheme looks like this:

AAAB, CCCB, DDDB, EEE

Each triplet is tagged with part of another triplet. Robin Gager pointed this out to me, and this unusual structure wasn't something I had planned, so much as discovered. 

I played the song a lot my sophomore year. I played it as filler for Roundtable's second show my sophomore year. Despite being filler, Bert Tunnel had nice things to say about the song in his review for the Collegian. I found this ironic, because one of my first positive reviews as a songwriter, was for a play production. 

Of course, the unintended consequences of unconscious creation are very real. My room-mate Spencer pointed out that wolves don't bark, which I didn't know, or didn't really think about it, but maybe the wolves were dogs all along. 

For about a year of so, the song was an indelible part of my life, so many years later, after I recovered from cancer, and I had the chance to record Lost and Found, this song was on the list of favorite songs that had never seen the light of day. I'm quite happy with that recording, but this version fits better with the other songs on this album. They're all part of the same story. 

In fact, there was a moment when I considered making the leather queen herself the cover of the album.  The story itself seems central to the story of the album. I think this was the moment that I realized that I had the beginnings of an album, but I took break from it. In the next month or so, a whole lot happened.

UPDATE:

The phrase, "Just a spark," took on a life of its own after I wrote the song. I began to see the world populated by people with and without the spark. I never defined what having the spark meant in my mind, but I knew it when I saw it. Now, I might define it as someone who is both inside and outside the world. They have a burning desire to be in the world, and by fully being in the world, they must also be outside the world, because to be wholly in the world, we run the risk of being crushed by it. I'm sure that clears everything up.

The people that I seemed to fall in with tended to sparkle. I remember my friend Dave Bee nursing some heart-ache over a gal, and he asked me about her new boyfriend, and all I could say was that he didn't have the spark, and Dave seemed to know what that meant, since he had did. We were sitting on the back patio of Gund, and as we had finished our discussion, the gal walks by, and Dave stands up and without saying anything puts his hands up in a big gesture of a shrug so she could see.  I don't think he could have said anything as clearly as that moment. 

My friend Dave Le Compte pointed out that although it may have felt like I was going through this weird phase of being in and out of time, I was not alone.  Many of us were in that same moment of awkwardkness.  As I begin to look back, I see that many of the people that I spent time with, were going through similar torments. A whole lot of people didn't make it back to Kenyon the next year- many of them were from my dorm (Nick, Anthony and Chris). 

In astrology the moon reflects our emotions. It is our interior light, as opposed to the exterior light of the sun. I think of Shakespeare's phrase "star-crossed lovers" and it makes me think that we were all star-crossed lovers of some sort at that point in time. Somehow our stars were not in allignment. We were waging wars on private burdens, but we were all similarly afflicted, and we had no idea. For those that find the astrological reference a bit too much, you can simply see the stars as universal forces over which we have no control that appear to be working in the background. 

You could argue that I'm stuck in the past, but songs give me a magical ability to plug into a moment in time and re-enter my own headspace. It's like a living document to me. I often have a songwriter's sense of chronology. See, most narratives are linear, but songs are cyclical- they keep coming back to that some moment, the chorus.  So when I inhabit a song again, I am transported back to that moment. 

If a song is a moment, than an album is the whole story, and while "Just a Spark" feels central to the story of the album, it never needed to be placed in some prominent part of the album- whatever that means. I've tried putting songs in chronolical order, and it almost works. But songs reflect each other in unusual ways. Some songs cast long shadows over songs that come later, and others reflect ones that came before them.

I think Dylan put it best when he described the songs from Blood on the Tracks as if they were paintings. When you step outside, you can see the whole painting, but from the inside you notice the details.  Unlike a painting, songs have time. The chronos has logic, even if it isn't linear. It's a bit like a watercolor where there are many layers.  You don't seem them all at first.  A good album is like that. Each listen opens up a new layer.  When you first listen, the songs are completely new, but really every listen yields something new. 

I am not stuck in the past so much as unstuck from the present. I inhabit a lot of moments in time, because to have the spark you are both inside and outside time. 

Dewey Kincade: Vocals, keys, guitars, harmonicas

Jeff Faith: Upright Bass

Steve Sizemore: Percussion