The snow comes down, the road to town is covered up completely: your dreamy evening won't be soon. True grit don't freeze, though: get your skis and see if someone's lazy. The circuit waits: behind that gate, a kind of love. Chorus: Lai, lai, lai, lai, lai, etc. This represents my last but by no means my least commission: to get the capital I needed to make a return journey to Russia in 2008, I twisted the arm of a good friend who used to work with me at the On-Site Inspection Agency portal-monitoring facility (whew!) in Votkinsk, USSR ... now in the Udmurt Republic of the Russian Federation. I had been hired in October of 1989 as an interpreter-inspector at the facility (which had been established to make concrete the notion of permanent arms-control inspection facilities in Cold-War combatant countries – whew!), while he had been hired to work there in the original crew, from 1988. He found his priorities being changed by the fact that he had very romantically fallen in love with a young lady from ‘the other side’, and realized that his only way to make an impression or her and/or their circumstances was to quit the US government job and make his way in the new Russia as an entrepreneur of sorts – in other words, live by his wits, which he has managed to the present to do, wonderfully well, having gained the partnership of his true love, and most of the fruits of things like intelligence and energy. There was to be a 10-year reunion of as many people from both sides who could make it back to the Portal in 2008 ... and it was quite good enough a reason for me to return, since I had followed his example back in the early 90s and quit the job in order to marry another lady from ‘the other side’ (the object and/or source of most of my songs from 1990 on, including Prayer for Love, Queen Love, The Answer, Lacomcaliu, Gorgeous and Bright, Low Blue Drum, Now High Now Low, Buck Blues, Magic All Around, Love is Right, Keep This Thought, Life Ahinge, Man Alive, Lad No Longer, Tom-Fool, The Mayfly and the Stone, and not least Kosmos Cafe ... which was the restaurant in Votkinsk town where most of our nefarious (if relatively innocuous) international plots were first conceived – ‘cheek-to-cheek disguise’. God bless us and save us, as the Irish say. Or used to say ...
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Kosmos Cafe
KOSMOS CAFE
As prisons go, this one's to know:
a paradise of waiting
for what's undone, what's yet to come.
Look up, look down, look all around,
it's what you're paid to do, here:
just keep your gaze off of the ladies
down the way.
Chorus:
Lai, lai, lai, lai, lai, Gypsy Kings, and tipsy things.
Oh, Friday night, and she'll be there,
and you'll be right
to dance the world away at the Kosmos Café:
words to the wise in cheek-to-cheeky guise,
cheek-to-cheek disguise.
Across the road, another load
to set the boys a-buzzing:
fits and starts and do your part.
Drag the wagon, man the scan –
and when the work is over,
it's back to waiting for the glimpse
to start your heart.
Chorus:
Lai, lai, lai, lai, lai, etc.
Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Tom-Fool
TOM-FOOL
Here's what to do: if you
think you're a fool—keep rolling;
God loves the fool, they say,
so keep on rolling…
Roll till the break of dawn;
roll till you can't roll on.
Winning is what you want, so roll on.
The Fool's going to roll away,
he thinks it's his lucky day;
his mind was never strong, anyway.
Mind was never strong, anyway.
Bring on the night,
throw down the fool his lifeline.
It's the full of the moon, and the
mountain is there for climbing.
At the top of the hill she waits,
the queen of love and fate; he's
bound to find out in spades
where he's wrong.
Yes: the Fool's going to climb that hill,
do what a tom-fool will,
maybe he won't be long on the hill.
Maybe he won't be long
maybe he won't be long, on the hill.
Fool with a tune: he's
caught by the moon and crying.
Fool with a sigh: he
probably thinks he's dying.
But that plaint will turn around:
funny old thing, that sound:
blues bring love to town, after all.
Yes, the Fool's going to sing along:
he thinks it's a happy song.
Maybe he's not so wrong, after all.
Maybe he's not so wrong,
maybe he's not so wrong:
maybe he's not so wrong, after all.
After the hiatus of 2001-2002 that I described in the material accompanying track No. 1, Lad No Longer, and that song had come tumbling out of me willy-nilly, I quickly found myself coming up with another confessional song, this one a redux of my song about re-acquiring some kind of faith by being (rather foolishly) on the top of a mountain in Ireland in the middle of one windy night. That song was Still Believing, which was the first track on the Midnight Well album of 1977. Despite the self-denigratory tone of both songs, I valued and still value the experience of that night as the most important of my life ... giving me a certainty about my insights that meant I could avoid consideration of things like commercial success as a validation for what I do. This certainty irritates any number of people who regard it as my excuse for a whole bunch of lollygagging and inattention to the details of commercial success, not least a lot of visibly hard work ...
I used to tell myself that, as a one-time Catholic, I could bring myself to pray for the ability to write songs, a skill that had eluded me until I was nearly 26 and studying for my master’s degree in Slavonic languages at the University of California. As a Catholic – lapsed or not – I was too deeply instilled with the shame of asking God for any kind of financial reward. That was just beyond the pale; think of all the starving Armenians/Chinese/Africans/etc.
This is probably the biggest reason (well, along with the laziness, etc.) for the stops and starts of my ‘career’: am I a Russian translator and interpreter ... or am I a songwriter ... or am I an English-language theorist and teacher and student? I belong to the Irish Interpreters’ and Translators’ Association, a full professional member; I belong to the Irish Music Rights Organisation, likewise full professional member; and I taught English grammar and punctuation at Merit College in Van Nuys, California, for seven years, and then English syntax and intonation at the Udmurt National University in Izhevsk, Russia, for another three years. Go figure, as the people of Brooklyn are said to say.
Etymological note: Tom-Fool was the original of the phrase that is most commonly used in the United States as ‘damn fool’, denoting someone with little or no common sense; but it survives in all dialects of English in the word ‘tomfoolery’. Nuff said.
Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Big Love
BIG LOVE
What every mummy knows
is where the big love goes: and when the cold winds blow, that's time to let it show. 'Cause when the north wind blows it's when the birds fly home, you know: and any freeze or snow is when the north wind blows. Even when it's hard to sleep, and storms outside will make you weep: you're where the big love goes, and that's what every mummy knows. And when the south wind blows, they say it comes from France, although what every mummy knows is that's the time to dance. When winds come from the west and time has come to rest a bit, our mummy always knows what time for that is best. Even when it's hard to sleep, and storms outside can make you weep: you're where the big love goes, and that's what every mummy knows. When winds come from the east, and smell like stormy seas, we're tucked in tight, at least, and mummy stays to read. Even when it's hard to sleep, and storms outside can make you weep: you're where the big love goes, and that's what every mummy knows. What every mummy knows is where the big love goes: and when the stormy winds are blowing, 's when she'll let it show. Sometimes people are sufficiently impressed by what I do that they commission me to write a song. This doesn’t happen very often, of course; but even when it does, I don’t regard the commission as any kind of cheapening of what I do as a songwriter. I never write about something that I don’t believe in, and I never turn over to the commissioner anything less than what pleases me, in every respect. More often, though, I’ll write a song because I think it will please someone. If it does, then I am doubly lucky. I’m thrice lucky if somebody asks me to write a song for them, or for someone: then I have to please, first, myself; then the person who asked; then the person or persons on whose behalf the request was made. I think I achieved all of those things in this song: a wonderful, energetic, and lovely neighbour of mine, named Frances Lane Burke, tried to tell me over the telephone one day in 2008 that something we had discussed on occasion, the cancer from which she thought she had recovered, had returned in full force … and she was not far from the end. At this point in the conversation, she asked me, emotionally, if I could write a song for her two daughters, whom she was raising in as musical a tradition as she could. She didn’t say it in so many words, but she was hoping I could create something that would help cement the bond between her and her soon-to-be-bereft girls. I did my best, but vicissitudes of various kinds kept me from producing anything more than a piece of sheet music for her daughters. I didn’t actually get to finish this version of the song until she had already gone. Her husband told me he was pleased with it, though … I only hope it is worthy of such a woman.
Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations No Arrows
No Arrow
No arrow, but some kind of dove
is targeting hearts just for love.
O people,shout for the prize
that comes when this dove takes the sky.
In the aether of all, where no wall stops her flight,
no banner or cloud here can hide you from sight.
Your heart is her bead, and it goes on the string
that's fashioned for love as the greatest thing.
No arrow, but some kind of dove,
come target my heart just for love.
I need it, I shout for the prize
that comes with this dove on the rise.
Our hearts are her bead, and they go on the string
that's fashioned for love as the greatest thing.
But, if we block her art with closed mind or cold heart,
she won't thread the bead and the chain will part.
No arrow, but lashings of doves
are targeting hearts just for love.
No eagle, no raptor of skies,
can capture these doves where they fly:
In the aether of all, where no wall stops their flight,
no banners or clouds here can hide you from sight.
But, if you block their art with closed mind or cold heart,
they won't thread the bead and the chain will part.
Probably the most interesting thing about this song is the provenance of the melody. It can be a long story ... why not?
Most people are aware that Hebrew was a liturgical language, and a long-dead one, when the state of Israel came into existence in 1948; but the mostly European-derived original ‘settlers’ spoke Hebrew as an official language, reconstituted and revived for political reasons. In the meantime, though, most of those European-derived Jews spoke a German dialect called, naturally enough, ‘Yiddish’ ... since that is how you would transcribe the German word ‘Judische’ from the Hebrew lettering that was and is traditionally used to write the language. What people largely don’t know is that the Jews of the Diaspora had a number of languages in which they conversed and expressed themselves: not just the vernaculars of their places of habitation, like Russian or Ukrainian or Polish or Serbo-Croatian or Turkish or Arabic ... but distinct dialects of existing languages, like Yiddish for German ... and Ladino (a Spanish dialect) for the Jews expelled into the Muslim world from their ancestral homes in Spain ... and for many Sephardic Jews in the Middle East and Central Asia, a form of Farsi that is perhaps best characterised as ‘Persian’.
The original of this melody (much different from this) was first encountered by me in the mid-60s, in the singing of the Israeli Geula Gill. I loved the song she sang, Azizam, and learned to sing it, but when I finally did in front of people who were familiar with Farsi and related languages, they told me that this was a severely distinct kind of Persian spoken by Jews from areas of Uzbekistan and surrounding areas ... particularly Samarkand. That sounded sufficiently exotic to me to be terrifically romantic ... and this would be an attempt to render that original appreciation in a song about peace on earth ...
Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Alana in the lane
Alana in the Lane
Alana goes her way,
down Ballybrooney Lane,
and back again.
She walks me slowly now,
always the same thing:
my mind is on the day,
and Alana in the lane.
To the Manor House we go:
a field of cows up there
all stop and stare.
They scare this tiny thing
who clings so close to me –
all hides and horns and eyes!
– but Alana doesn't cry.
The future's full of questions now,
all of them with rain.
The farmer and his famous cows,
and Ballybrooney Lane.
No need to cast around:
a grown-up holds her hand,
she's safe and sound.
To make her feel at ease
I laugh out loud, so proud
to be the great big man[alt: ‘the one to stand’
with Alana by the hand.
Then somehow comes the day
that nothing in the world
can keep away.
And all that's left to do,
as much for me as you,
is to hold the mem'ry plain
of Alana in the lane.
The future's full of questions now,
all of them with rain.
The farmer and his famous cows,
and Ballybrooney Lane.
The particulars of this song are written down elsewhere. Alana was a real little girl who lived her short life in Co. Mayo, in an environment of deep but despairing love. One of her parents’ friends is a friend of mine, as well, and he wondered if I could transform a poem he’d written as a tribute to Alana into a song. It took me awhile, but this finally resulted. I am as absurdly proud of it as my friend was to have known her. I hope this song becomes a favourite of many of the people who value the sentiment of love for one’s children, and its being beyond the everyday, in every way.
The ‘alternate’ line occurred when the lovely Canadian singer Tara MacKenzie wondered aloud to me about the possibility of a sentiment less obviously masculine, for a female singer. The tune employed as the basis for the song is not Irish: I’m told by people who were acquainted by me with the original that it in no way resembles that one. I will leave it to the sleuths to figure this one out, too.
The most current contact for helping people and children in Alana’s predicament is the website/contact for the Crumlin Childrens Hospital (or more properly ‘Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin’): The Children's Medical & Research Foundation.
Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Cavan Girl
Cavan Girl
As I walk the road from Killeshandra,
weary, I sit down,
for it's twelve long miles around the lake
to get to Cavan town.
Though Oughter and the road I go
once seemed beyond compare,
now I curse the time it takes to reach
my Cavan girl so fair.
Now autumn shades are on the leaves,
the trees will soon be bare;
each red-gold leaf around me seems
the colour of her hair.
My gaze retreats to find my feet,
and once again I sigh,
for the broken pools of sky remind
the colour of her eyes.
At the Cavan cross each Sunday morning,
there she can be found,
and she seems to have the eye
of every boy in Cavan town.
If my luck will hold, I'll have
the golden summer of her smile,
and, to break the hearts of Cavan men,
she'll talk to me awhile.
So Sunday evening finds me, homeward,
Killeshandra bound,
to work the week, till I return
and court in Cavan town:
when asked if she would be my wife,
at least she'd not said no,
so, next Sunday morning, rouse myself
and back to her I'll go.
As I walk the road from Killeshandra,
weary, I sit down,
for it's twelve long miles around the lake
to get to Cavan town.
Though Oughter and the road I go
once seemed beyond compare,
now I curse the time it takes to reach
my Cavan girl so fair.
Aside from compelling the eminence grise of the first few Cavan Song Contests, the hallowed Jimmy Kennedy from Portrush, author of Harbour Lights and so many other hits of the 30s and 40s, to press the jury to award me both prizes (A and B: a real pop song, and a song about Cavan), this was the first ever song of mine that had an entirely fictional, or at least not personal, background: I never trudged from Killeshandra to anywhere, let alone in search of fond but futile love. It was also, I thought, an ‘original’ melody, until someone pointed out to me, years later, that it was remarkably similar to The Lake of Pontchartrain ... which left me gob-smacked, until I remembered a Joan Baez song from her first or second album, called Flora, the Lily of the West – and the penny dropped. It turns out that there are several hundred versions of the song in the USA, all of them of some antiquity ... and the one performed by Paul B. And Christy M. is not in any sense an Irish song. Whereas the lyrics of this, while only antique in detail (I wrote it in 1978), are rather convincingly Irish in feel and tone. Once again, the Knight palely loiters ... and La Belle Dame Sans Merci bids him dance to her tune. Well, Keats wasn’t Irish, but he is compellingly romantic.
There was a version of this recorded by Pat Boone, of all people; and there’s even a French version, translated and recorded by Seychan Renaud, in 2009.
Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations Man Alive
Man Alive
Large job; don't fail:
tote that barge and lift that bale!
(You've got to) Stay strong, you hard nail,
or love’ll come along and bust your tail.
Man alive, honey in the hive,
birds singing 'bout everything—
when the sun shines and the rainbow climbs,
grass is growing over wiser minds!
Dark woods, big bear;
Girls looking good but they don't care
(about you). Do right, and they will stare:
bring them his hide, ev'ry pitch-black hair
Man alive, honey in the hive,
birds singing 'bout everything—
when the sun shines and the rainbow climbs,
grass is growing over wiser minds!
Spark holds, wood burns;
the boy that's bold is the one who learns
(the diff'rence): Sap flows, and leaves turn,
love that you get is the one you earn.
Man alive, honey in the hive,
birds singing 'bout everything—
when the sun shines and the rainbow climbs,
grass is growing over wiser minds.
It has long been a peculiar habit of mine, when I use a tune that is very close to its parent, to include one of the more common names of the traditional tune in the song somewhere, either as its title or repeated prominently, in order that I shouldn’t be thought of as a sneak thief. This occasionally has its weirder sides, as in the opinion of some traditional fans that I am truly remiss to maintain that my song The Scholar, say, is the definitive version – of course it isn’t a patch on the original reel – but at least I included the title in order to show, as I said, that I was conscious of my debt. That can sometimes be next to impossible, as in the case of this tune, which I first heard in the playing of Paddy Glackin on the wonderful Hidden Ground album that he recorded in 1979 or thereabouts with Jolyon Jackson of fond memory: but I defy any songwriter to use ‘The Bank of Ireland’ as a title or line in a song. The closest I could get to any banking in this song was the reference to a beehive ... which was the logo of the now-defunct 1st Active building society. Aside from that detail, this song is clearly an attempt to philosophise about what was just previously described as a man’s ‘duty’: work hard, ‘kill that thing over there’ for any worthy woman who asks ... and bear in mind that love, like anything important, has a transcendence that makes it worthwhile ... unlike cruder pursuits, like sex, etc.
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