Dave's Music #117 Eyes Volume 2
Here's a portion:
Last time I saw you were
Lost in a word devotion
Chopping and choosing
A mixed salad of emotions
Have you written it down?
You are so good with words
I’m sure I’ll be edited out
You wave that pen as a sword
You looked up with those
Black holes of eyes
Pulling out my sadness
Leaving me an empty prize
Today's playlist will dive into how Eyes are used in the descriptions of hurricanes (of course on all of our minds lately) and used as adjectives to stay on track (Eye on the prize); ultimately I wanted a playlist to listen to one of my favorite long song from Bob Dylan
1) The Eye - Brandi Carlile
This starts a trio of songs about hurricanes, but they say save the best for last... sorry ladies first.
The eye of that hurricane was a pretty inviting place. It was fun to play with the difference in intensity of the two conditions, calm, peace, respite, reassurance, contrasted with rage, storm, lightning, wind, waves, and fearful darkness. In workshop sessions we talk about sitting down with the pen and paper and listing all those terms on both sides of the question, and out of that exercise, it is hoped that language will emerge which has some power in the song. ‘Rain’ is a good rhyme for hurricane, and a good pairing with ‘wind and rain.’ So that one stuck. ‘Tempest’ and ‘tossed,’ ‘drenched’ and ‘raging’ all made the list. ‘Calm’ says a lot and sings well, and lends itself to a cogent last line of the chorus, ‘It’s an angry sky, but it’s calm in the eye of the hurricane.’
Central to this work is the choice of making the song a love song. Still, there was the wish to have drama and intensity lending urgency to the love theme. In retrospect, all these years later, and far from the heat of the Nashville lottery, it might seem a little silly. Or, at least pretentious. For my part, I freely admit that some of our efforts to have an effect, might have landed a little wide of the mark. There’s always another song on the way. (Read the rest here)
Has anybody here seen Roberto Duran?
I met him once, yeah I shook his hand.
I looked in his eyes and now I understand,
Yeah, the love and the anger in the eyes of Roberto
Duran.
She lives up on third street in her own little world.
A saint in the window, and the rosary beads in her
Hand, yeah, the smile of an angel and the eyes of
Roberto Duran.
But he’s earned huge respect from fellow musicians, played with and/or had his songs covered by multiple heavyweights within the industry, and in the late 1990s wrote an improbable song about the former lightweight (and three other weight classes) boxing champion of the world, a taciturn Panamanian with a smoldering countenance and a legendary moniker, “manos de piedra” (“hands of stone”).
Watching Roberto Duran box in his relentless, brawling style obviously left a lasting impression on Russell, and the fact he was able to make music from it represents his peculiar songwriting genius on a couple of fronts.
One is that he connected Duran’s fury as a boxer literally fighting for his life every time he stepped into the ring with that of Russell’s Mexican girlfriend when she’d been provoked. No shrinking violet, apparently, and Russell honored that quality in her (“the woman I love”) by making it into art.
The second point is more subtle and psychologically acute: that he had sensed within Duran not just the hardscrabble upbringing in Panama City ghettos that fueled his savage, angry eyes and brutishness in the ring, but that behind all the woundedness lived, of course, the need, the urge, the fractured expression, of love, deeply buried.
In Russell’s girlfriend that love is evident—she sinks nightly into saints and rosaries and the smile of an angel, after all.
But to see it underneath the rage of a fierce boxer and then loop that dual nature back in musical homage to his beloved is a feat not only of pure poetry, but also great insight and compassion for just how complicated human beings can be—Roberto Duran included.
How we’re always more than meets the eye—our own eye or anyone else’s.
She was plainly ordinary
No silver wings, no big dreams
She never bothered anybody
No gamble, no risk
No clenching her fist
When you close your eyes
It won't help you forget...
