Letting Go, Holding On
My favorite song by War is “Slippin’ into Darkness” (1971), and one of the things I like best about it is the extremely spare horn chart. Spare but oh so funky. As the song moves along you hear a little more from the horns, and they repeat this little ascending four-note riff that always gets stuck in my head. Maybe it got stuck in Bob Marley’s head, too, because it’s the same four notes that he uses to sing “Get Up, Stand Up,” which came out two years later. And at the very end of “Slippin’ into Darkness” the horns play what would become the “stand up for your rights” part of the song. That’s a straight lift.
I’ve long wished that I could take the whole instrumental track of “Slippin’ into Darkness” and put it on a loop. It would be great music to work to. Similarly, My Morning Jacket’s uptempo song “Off the Record” has a long quiet mostly-instrumental outro, starting about three minutes in, that I wish I could extract and loop. I’d get a lot more work done and I would be both chill and funky.
But as I work I am enjoying Ghosts V: Together, the new record of ambient music by Nine Inch Nails — available as a free download. The first piece, “Letting Go While Holding On,” certainly has an appropriate title.
But thank god for the internet. What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be. At a time when politicians and many corporations have exhibited the worst instincts, we’re seeing some of the best of what humanity has to offer — and we’re seeing it because the internet exists.
John Gruber commented, “So true. Feeling isolated? Cooped up? Me too. But imagine what this would’ve been like 30 years ago. This sort of crisis is what the internet was designed for, and it’s working.” Is this right? Maybe it’s right. I do feel we’re probably better off than the people of 1990 would’ve been, because then people would’ve just worked themselves into a frenzy watching cable TV 18 hours a day. But then maybe after a while they’d have broken out some of their old VHS tapes, re-read some paperbacks, dig through their cassette of vinyl collection … it could be worse, you know. And while it’s nice to have Mo Willems teaching your kids how to draw, if parents take that an opportunity to go and yell at people on Twitter....
My friend Adam Roberts:
Because I could not go to Work —
I locked myself Inside —
The house — tho it held but Ourselves —
Was overoccupied.We slowly lived — We knew no haste
And I had put online
My labor and my leisure too,
By Interior Design —Since then — ‘tis only Days — and yet
Feels longer than an Eon
And I surmised that Twitter wasn’t
The best Platform to be on —
I am hoping and praying that when late June rolls around I’ll be able to help lead, as planned, Creativity Week at my beloved Laity Lodge — not least because I want to get some mandolin tips from Jeff Taylor. But in the meantime, here, from the Box Canyon, are Jeff Taylor, Buddy Greene on harmonica, and Andy Gullahorn on guitar helping Andrew Peterson sing his “In the Night” — a good song to strengthen hope in hard times.
