Sorry for not getting back on this a little sooner. Having some health issues of late, frequently putting things aside.

The lyrics are exceptional! You have a real gift that most songwriters can only wish they had. I'm really glad you provided the pdf, I had missed a lot of what's there from only listening to the recording.

I think if you're trying to pull something together with the singing you're on the right track. I would try that for a few months, then re-record the vocal if possible, and let the community take another look and see if there's some improvement. Given your gift for words, you have every reason to be motivated towards elevating your singing.

I was thinking about the whole Dylan-y aspect of our earlier comments. I don't know how old you are, and know nothing of your music background/experience. For me, I found myself thinking of artists that came out with records who music critics and record-label-hype-machines conferred "the next Dylan" status upon. None of them turned out to be "the next Dylan". There never has been a 'next Dylan', I doubt there ever will be. That, in and of itself, is a good reason not to overly emulate his style. It's kind of a 'no-win' proposition.

That said, you might find it interesting to check out some older recordings of artists who were given that "next Dylan" tag. Interestingly, none of them appear to overly emulate Dylan's mannerisms. They were hyped with that status generally because of the quality of their lyrics. Hopefully there's something in that for you to think about as you're working out your path.

Here's a few you can check out if you care to..

John Prine -- John Prine 1971
John Prine -- The Missing Years 1991

Steve Forbert -- Alive On Arrival 1978

Bruce Springsteen -- The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle 1973

Forbert was probably the weakest of the bunch and his career slowed down after a couple of years. None of the three were great singers by any means, in large measure it was the quality of their lyrics that got them going.

Also, very much worth a listen --
Rickie Lee Jones -- Pirates 1981

They would have called Rickie Lee "the next Dylan" but in that era women weren't allowed on the list. Her career died down way too soon due to heroin abuse. But she's a terrific example of great lyrics meeting a style of her own, and the production of that recording is truly a thing of beauty. You can find the above records on Pirate Bay. If you're having trouble locating them let me know and I'll message you the magnet links.

Hope this helps, stay in touch, and most of all, best of luck with your writing!

P.S. Please, whatever you do, don't start playing harmonica on your recordings

 

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@Bennett.Jackson .. "the next Dylan" has only been Dylan himself as he goes on and reinvents himself throughout his remarkable career as an artist. Beside his own music he now is doing a podcast where he curates as a DJ an incredible and deeply encyclopedic knowledge (his own influences) of blues, country and folk music which is in itself to me and his performance a true work of performance art, his narration authority in at least in the one that I listened to. Here is the link https://www.themetimeradio.com/all/

I'm going back for more.

 

Hi ya BJ, sorry to hear about your health problems. Hope you're coming through the other side fit as a fiddle, strident as a symphony.
Fortunately for me I've never been an entrenched Dylan freak- lyrically yes- musically not so much though I immediately wholeheartedly recognise his genius. His musical evolution just didn't captivate me as much as say Bowie or Tuxedomoon.
Lyrically, I feel aligned with Waits, Reed, Cave, Kurt Weil, Jacques Brel and Bob, though feel I am deeply respectful towards songwriters like Janis Ian. I will check out those artists you referred to. I can grab whatever I don't have already via SoulSk.
I've struck up a good rapport with Amore_de_la_Vida who's very kindly offered to have a shot at mixing/tweaking Jig (pitch correction bedamned). Singing teachers I'm be appraising over the next few days.
I've got two songs I'd be happy to pass over to an ASx member who's up for a musical adventure. I've been really impressed with the tenor of knowledge, experience and 'integrity' members have shown. I've got to get stuck it my fiction in the coming months (and singing) so I'm hoping some bright spark will take up my offer.

One, There's A Man They Call Tomorrow is a shadowy, dense electronic piece about the vagaries of life and is based on a short story set in Tokyo in the early 90s about a soul-saving friendship with a free-wheeling Italian who the main character discovers has a revolting past.

eg Chorus
There's a man they call tomorrow
And he stands upon a hill
You can drag your sack of sorrows
And he'll stare you down dead stone still

The other- The Circus Animal's Desertion- is not related to my fiction and relates the demise of a bunch of freaks who are supplanted by digital media and political correctness. It's as epic as Jig and though I have the melody for the lyrics I haven't started work on composing music for it but am hearing simple arrangement with piano and strings.

eg
With the circus animals' desertion
Kids jam their heads into playstations
The ringmaster cracks his whip
Thats bites as hard as a kitten's lick

Still not completely sold on the last two lines though. The tragedy and humour are- I hope - nailed with couplets like

Dodgem cars are mounds of dust
Parents sued for kids concussed
Ferris wheel’s clogged with crime scene tape
Its panoramas determined fake

Yup, Bob's radio show is a must for his followers but also anyone interested in the history of music. Personally, I was hooked on Lou Reed and Hal Wilner's show before both went on to the great gig in the sky.

This passage from Bob's chronicle's has been my guiding light over the last few months.

"I had no song in my repertoire for commercial radio, anyway. I sang about debauched bootleggers,mothers who drowned their own children, Cadillacs with only 5 miles to the gallon, union hall fires, floods. Darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers wasn’t for radio. There was nothing easy-going about the folk songs I sang. They weren’t friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn’t come gently to the shore. "


You've no idea how much that cheered me up.

 

If you're gonna have an influence when it comes to songcraft, Zimmer is the man. Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Hank Williams, Robert Hunter, Townes Van Zandt and Dylan amongst others float in the aethers and infuse in and with my own natent abilities in with whatever comes through when writing a song. I found my own voice I guess in my early 20's. It is a process which continues still into my 60's for me at least, to express as uniquely as an artist as I can unconsciously, which after 40+ years of doing my thing is very rewarding. If I do for instance a Dylan song like Easy Chair, it needs becomes my own without all the exotic Dylan spice...his vocal inflection or timing (he can deliver a line with the best of them like Sinatra, etc), and rather interpret the song through my own filter in the way I hear it at the time.

 

Gonna give Pirates a listen now

PS Scott Walker is another artist who wows me- The Drift is incomprehensible but unforgetable

 

Interesting footnote on Rickie Lee given one of your earlier comments... when she made Pirates her and Tom Waits were a couple.

Thanks for your above stated concerns regarding my current fragility. I appreciate it.

@Lois Lane I'm well familiarized with the podcast. It's an adventure and an education all rolled into one. Glad you posted the link, hopefully it will lead others to discover its inherent wealth.

 

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When I saw Ricky Lee Jones at The Bottom Line in NYC in the early 80's I had a seat close on the left of the small impromptu stage set up low on the right of the main stage (for some reason, never saw that before) and she literally sang every song to me while looking at me in the eye. It was like being in heaven. Who knows why, but I'll take it.

 

Actually it is the worst for an artist/musician to be told "You sound like ..... ........". !
I think you should not be a copy of someone, but the original.

If you cover an old original, you should enrich it with your own self and the most modern technology of today.
Old pieces of yesteryear are all recorded analog and usually a little too slow for our fast-moving time.

Here is an example:

Zager & Evans - In the Year 2525 (Original Year 1969)

Inner Sight - In the year 2525 (Cover Version Year 2008 - Band from Glasgow)

Visage - In the year 2525 (Cover from 1983)

 

Last edited: Jan 27, 2023

Gee, Haven't heard 2025 for yonks. And not a bad versions at all. For me the queen of covers is Nina Simone. Her interpratations were supreme examples of putting yourself in a song and flying with it to whole new territories.
BJ- don't think of going anywhere. Stay close with is and keep those appraisals and wisdom-dunks pumping.

LL: Covers can be lifelines to a song's inner life. Cohen wrote a great Hallejuah but I didn't really hear it until John Cale got hold of it.

 

Great to hear your song and read the lyrics. I have an affiliation with Alice Springs my self having wrote and recorded a "jingle" some years ago titled "On The Red Centre Way". On the subject of the next Dylan I recommend you google, "Searching for Sugar Man". The guy Rodriguez although a nobody in the US inspired a whole generation of people in South Africa. His voice uncannily echos Dylan very closely.
Cheers
Mal

 

Sugar man
Silver ships you carry
Jumpers coke sweet mary jane

Incredible how the lines of a song can stay with you for fifty years despite only very rarely replaying the song. Must be teenage hormones drenching neurons and making the song sink deeper into the memory brain.
Searching- A wonderful documentary- one of the best - up there with Straight No Chaser. Any chance to hear the Red Centre? It's a powerful place alright and I felt compelled to honour it with an epic. Now I've got to respect the song and get my voice into shape. Dear sympatico Amore_de_la_Vida is currently doing a mix.
Sugar man - outstanding instruments - strings- horns guitar weird whistles and spacey drugged out sections - a masterpiece

 

Worked on a project at Desert Park setting up Media display for the tourists. Was inspired by the content of the project to write this. It started as an acoustic Dylanish song originally, before my guitarist friend decided it needed remixing. Hope you enjoy

Yes it is strange how the lyrics of our younger days hang around in our heads so much easier than those as we age

 

Pretty good (except no didj was ever played in the Centre until many years after the settlers moved in). Generally, when it comes to places like Central Australia which only featured voice, body percussion, boomerang and clapsticks as instruments till the early 1900s, I feel acoustic instruments have a much greater role to play in historical potraits. Nice work, though.

 

Yep was aware that the didj was out of place historically, but figured the target audience (foreign tourists) should still enjoy the uniquely Aust sound as part of their experience. Personally I was raised much further north and nodded off to sleep many a night with the didj droning in the background.
Cheers

 

Wow, raised in the north ? Whereabouts?
Yeah, ity's tricky one dropping in the didj for any piece of film, radio, music, audiobook, toothpaste, t shirt about 'Indigenous Australia" /this great and ancient continent. Sensitive to the cultural nationalism of Indigenous mob, I prefer to avoid mixing the music of salt water, freshwater and desert groups. Besides there's a special facination presenting the music of a people who had such limited musical instruments. But when dealing with tourists you've got to watch that slippery slope, alright.

 

Big Rivers country. Raised on cattle stations in Kath Region in 50s and 60s. Our mob had Song, Didj, Tap Sticks and sandy ground to dance on. Yes you are right about the slippery slope, but at the time I was most interested in getting down lyrics to mesh with the themes of the display project with little experience in song writing and being a musical novice (3 chord campfire guitar). I was most happy with my mates assistance in making it sound musical (drums, electrical guitar and didj)
Anyway lets stick with your thread eh! Hope the various feedback you got has spurred you on.
Cheers

 

Last edited: Feb 7, 2023

Modern lyricists.
BJ
John Prine. Now there a writer! One not afraid to take chances. To hear that country and western drawl paint pictures of 'Daddy with a hoel in his arm" was startling and brilliant. Thanks for the intro.
Springsteen. Never really been bowled over by his music but can appreciate his lyrics - good old hard arse American rock n roll just aint for me

To take a short trip over the Atlantic puddle, can I recommend

Clive James

SUDDEN ARRIVALS
Sudden arrivals mean early leavings
Short blisses and long grievings
And you were the kind who appears on the scene
In a shower of glass, looking dauntless and keen
Footloose and fancy free
Fancifully free with me

Sadly, the music of Pete Atkins - for me- doesn't come close to the brilliance of the lyrics but still well worth checking out
​

Tiger Lillies (an acquired taste for some but if you're a Waits fan you'll dig em, exquisitely idiosyncretic)

And so your life
Your life has failed
You've made the progress of a snail
Don't worry you'll get your revenge
For we're all equal in the end
The small and mighty all the same
This life a shallow, facile game
Where every empire turns to dust
And every ego will be crushed
​

Florence and the Machine ( quite heavy on the big sound ultra pop style - Sia et al - and not averse to flash her cleavage and play the sexy siren but lyrically she's got cudos)

All of his questions, such a mournful sound
Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground
'Cause I like to keep my issues drawn
But it's always darkest before the dawn
​

As for contemporary lyricists blowing me out of the water?
What stories can you tell musically when you're still at home at 30 and got your head stuck in Facebook?
Lester del ray? On a good day, yeah.
On a bad? hmm umm.

 

A very enjoyable 10:50 minutes of the day. Thank you!
Of course all the opinions expressed here have merit re the mixing, vocals etc and if you wanted things could be 'improved' but I personally wouldn't change much if anything at all. What appeals to me is the rawness, honesty....and the artistry. If things sound a 'bit off' at first after a few listens that becomes less and less important and then 'normal'...at least to me. These days i look for music following a bit of a unique path or that is not pro produced etc. even if its heavily influenced by other artists and styles. If i stumbled upon this song and you as an artist on Tidal i would definitely heart it for future following. What I really like is that you are a storyteller!

 

Last edited: Feb 7, 2023

My shout for a debauch at the Animal Bar( a dive of ill repute in Alice) .
Great pictures, A.
Yeah, story-telling- at least in song it seems to be a dying art. Check out Clive James 'Beautiful Stranger' and Tiger Lillies. Some powerful undiscovered work there.
Keep posted for a magic realist song based on solo travels through Papua New Guinea in the 90s.