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Listen to the Song

Please give the song a listen while you read further.

Credits

Song written by Tony Garone
Lyrics by Scott Harris
Guitar solo composed by William Brown
Vocals by Tony Garone
Guitar, drums, keyboard, and bass by Anthony Garone

About the Recording

Like any other obsessive-compulsive creative type, I go through phases of enjoying some creative work incessantly until everyone around me hates that particular work. Sometime last year, I was thinking a lot about this old song my father, Tony Garone, wrote when I was a little kid. There exists an original recording somewhere in the annals of my Dad’s work, but there’s also a version he recorded with his old band, Heresy.

The version performed and recorded by Heresy is on their second album, entitled A Far Cry. It’s not available for purchase anywhere, but maybe it’ll eventually get posted online for digital distribution. Anyway, that version was done in the late 80s (I believe) and is about 60% synth and 40% rock. I wanted to flip the balance wayyy in the rock direction. Hence my version.

Because I don’t like covering a song so it sounds just like the original, I also added some time signature twists in the last verse. It’s a repeating 6/4-5/4-6/4 time signature, which ends up pretty cool over a standard 4-measure phrase. That’s actually my favorite part of the song.

Album Cover

I was out for a walk with my family around Christmas 2011 and saw a few beautiful gazania flowers growing in the cracks of the sidewalk. I happened to take some pictures and I liked the quality enough that one of them became the photo choice for this single.

Lyrics

I have found myself repeatedly seating the card upside-down into my carefully-organized wallet for several months. This was a “problem” I didn’t have with my expired former card:

It’s taken me about 6 months to realize why I could not resist this subconscious urge to place the card in my wallet upside-down. It’s likely you’re more observant than I and perhaps you can identify the issue right off the bat.

See the words “DEBIT CARD” in the upper right? That’s the problem. Had Bank of America placed that stupid silver tab on the upper left and rotated the text 180 degrees, I would place the card correctly into my wallet. “Why’s that?” you may be asking (but probably are not).

Typically, when I put the card back into my wallet I see that tab and the orientation of the text. Its design contrasts highly with the red background, catches my eye and I orient the card so the words “DEBIT CARD” are readable like words on a page. Holding this card is like holding the page of a book 90 degrees clockwise.

To me, this is one of those things I imagine designers/deciders in large corporations often miss. They don’t handle the card before they print ‘em. They probably just print the proofs and some executive gives the go-ahead. And it goes. Flawed.

Even looking at the card in the image above, I want to rotate it 90 degrees counter clockwise. It drives me crazy. Maybe I should occupy the Bank of America debit card design team… or just write them an email or something.

Reticence generally prevails when it comes my personal life and my beliefs. You may have already read of my heartfelt adoration for The Prisoner and thus gleaned my tendencies toward privacy in light of an ever-expanding government with increasing power. This website is reserved mostly for writings concerning my creative endeavors or my appreciation for others’ creative endeavors, but I’ll officially come clean in this post: I am a Catholic.

When I say I’m a Catholic, I don’t mean it in the same sense in which I usually hear: “I grew up Catholic.” I don’t mean it in the cultural sense like saying I used to live in New York and am thus a “New Yorker.” Rather, I mean that I’m a committed Catholic who attends church weekly and donates my time and money to the cause. I am a Catholic Christian. I cannot say that I wholeheartedly agree (yet?) with everything the Catholic Church says, but I’m probably closer to it than a lot of people.

I must also say that I’m an inquisitive thinker, although a more suitable analogy might liken me to an avid sports fan as opposed to the person on the team playing the sport. Oftentimes, I am considering answers to the big questions of life: Why are we here? How did the universe begin? Is there a God? etcetera. This “intellectual” side of me is in constant battle with the “religious” side of me, especially since I’m more of an interested observer in the intellectual discussions as opposed to being an active participant.

Hugh Ross, an actual intellectual, has written several books about theistic evolution and the Big Bang as it relates to the creation story of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. He has stated that Christians should have no fear in modern scientific discovery because nothing will be discovered that will disprove the existence of God. If anything, it will answer the “how” and will never clear up the “why.” The “religious” side of me agrees with that.

Stephen Hawking, another actual intellectual, has a significantly larger following and is now using his general unifying theories of the universe to distribute a message of philosophy stating that there is no God, not unlike some Trojan horse. Richard Dawkins, another incredibly smart guy who gets way more press than Hugh Ross, is a vehement atheist. The “intellectual” side of me hears what those guys are saying and finds it hard to disagree with their arguments against the irrationality of religion and using a god to fill in the gaps of our current knowledge of the universe.

There are other very smart Christian guys, like John Lennox and John Haldane, who are highly-respected intellectuals that have publicly debated Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and other vocal atheists regarding the existence of God. I’m glad these Christian intellectuals are out there fighting this fight, if anything to offer a counterpoint to the vehement atheism of Dawkins and the like. Competition is to the marketplace as peer review or devil’s advocacy are to the think space. It would be disingenuous of me to say that Lennox/Haldane are on equal footing (in terms of buy-in from the broader scientific community) with Dawkins/Hitchens considering the disparity of credence lent to them in the mainstream scientific media. Rather, they are generally made to look rather foolish standing in the shadows of these intellectual giants.

When the two sides of me (the “religious” and “intellectual” sides, or better: the metaphysical and physical sides) argue, I face nightly small-scale existential crises. Thoughts of death and the afterlife, the surrealism of it all, the reality of it all, the inevitable consequence of living, and my own love of self run rampant, bouncing around my skull like never-ending fireworks. And it all just terrifies me. It’s the scariest stuff I can think of because it’s rooted in the fear of the unknown and knowing that death is an experience everyone must face alone. It is said that public speaking is the biggest fear for most people, but I have no problems with public speaking. It’s the fear of whatever happens after dying that literally keeps me up at night.

Thankfully, I started reading G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy recently (for the umpteenth time), which always allays my fears and not for reasons you’d probably assume. Chesterton doesn’t prove anything about the afterlife one way or the other–although he makes a great case for Catholicism in the book. Rather, he proves that the lives and worldviews of avid skeptics and atheists can be, well… boring.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

That! That is the pattern that has been keeping me up at night. It’s this notion of understanding that which cannot be understood. The universe is infinitely large. It’s foolish of me to think that I can comprehend it, but it’s easy to believe that I’m capable of comprehending it in this day and age. There’s even a TV series on Netflix called How the Universe Works. All I need to do is watch a few episodes and I understand how everything works in all the latest scientific vernacular, right?

But when I get around to reading Orthodoxy, I realize that Chesterton’s writing and philosophy embodies how I actually want to live my life. He doesn’t convince me one way or the other about the origins of the universe, but he convinces me that it’s a pretty meaningless thing for me to believe I need to figure out. Chesterton was a man who enjoyed his life and he enjoyed not knowing everything. Despite his constant self-deprecation, the man was absolutely brilliant and such a gifted–albeit verbose and confusing–writer.

Reading Orthodoxy, I start thinking: “Man, that’s how I want to talk about my life.” It’s not the vocabulary or the syntax or the diction or any of that. It’s the fact that one can quickly and easily tell that the man knew how to live life to the fullest. Judging from his beyond-portly stature, it’s clear he did some things to the fullest better than others. Nevertheless, it’s his personality that convinces me to stop thinking about these eternal questions.

Despite all that, you shouldn’t think that I’m saying that Chesterton couldn’t wrap his head around such big ideas and he was blissfully ignorant about such things. That is not remotely true. He actually presents logical, astute counterarguments to each of his philosophical opponents with incredible wit and clarity. For example:

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is “unique,” and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), “All chairs are quite different,” he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them “all chairs.”

Or…

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Chesterton was a jovial man who publicly debated frequently and joined his opponents in a bar afterwards for drinks. He maintained friendships with men with whom he disagreed.

His obesity notwithstanding, Chesterton is a hero of mine, if only for his writing of Orthodoxy. He penned many, many other books and I’ve yet to find the time to read any of them. Every time I start one, I just get distracted or go back to Orthodoxy. There’s enough in the book to last me a lifetime of learning and correction.

You can download Orthodoxy for free via Project Gutenberg, or on any of the major online e-bookstores (iBooks for instance).

If you are further interested in this type of heady reading, please check out Charles J. Chaput’s supremely excellent essay Being Human in an Age of Unbelief.

My teenage years were also the height of my guitar discipline. I didn’t have access to real music notation software and for a long time, I didn’t know that you could import MIDI files into notation software, so I learned everything I could on the guitar by ear. I also began to compose all of my music as basic piano parts, which is something I still do all these years later.

Long past my teenage years, the world has changed and so has the Internet. There are now too many avenues by which I have access to new music and incredible performances. Occasionally, I will peruse YouTube searching for some of my favorite piano pieces. Tonight, I came across this wonderful performance of Chopin’s waltz from Opus 18:

And, of course, I had to go and find the PDF sheet music, which led to a night of brushing up on my music notation reading, which led to learning new things on the guitar. This waltz has always been one of my favorites and I can even play little bits and pieces of it on the piano. The melody is so sweet and Chopin is so playful in this composition. One of my favorite parts is with the series of cascading grace notes that sound like falling drops of water. It sounds incredibly difficult to perform on the piano, which means that it should present its own unique challenges to the guitar, right? Now you see where I’m going with this…

This post is going to focus specifically on page 5 of the aforementioned sheet music. The melody in this part is rather unusual and is even stranger with the grace notes. Let’s tab it out without the grace notes…

It appears that the tablature stuff broke when I upgraded WordPress… Give me a little time and I’ll get this fixed.

A simple chromatic melody, playful in its waltz time. Easy to play, no? Well, let’s make it a bit harder. But, first…

You need to know about grace notes. What makes this next passage technically difficult is that each of the notes above is preceded by a grace note. You might be asking yourself: “What is a grace note?” It’s a note that is played so quickly it has no discernible length and is usually illustrated in notation as a very small note just to the left of another note. It’s like a blip of a leading tone. Because the software I’m using to render the music notation is incapable of rendering grace notes, I am instead splitting each quarter note into two eighth notes, the first of each pair being the grace note.

And here’s a video of me explaining how to play the whole thing:

The musical effect of this passage is that each note is playfully skipping along a path as opposed to trotting its way confidently. I’ve not attempted to play the passage on the piano myself, but I can imagine that it’s quite difficult. It’s not easy on the guitar either. See the following video for a brief demonstration of how to approach the passage.

There are plenty of other grace notes and little melodic flourishes throughout the entire song, but none so complicated as the passage above. If you end up being able to play it well on the guitar, please share some audio or video with me so that I, too, may learn.

What I’ve most appreciated about this passage–and the rest of the song–is that I’m getting back to my former disciplined, practiced self. Generally I try to learn the gist of a song and play it well enough to get by. This song is not so gracious in affording lackadaisical effort. Thank you, Mr. Chopin, for restoring my need to practice technique in a musical way!

Please purchase Hark! the Herald Angels Sing / O Come All Ye Faithful on iTunes and support independent musicians like myself.

Listen to the Song

Please give the song a listen while you read further.

And feel free to purchase Hark! the Herald Angels Sing / O Come All Ye Faithful on iTunes.

About the Recording

For December 2011, I am releasing a Christmas song (no surprises there). It features the incredimazing Rob Müller on drums and is a mash up of two of my favorite holiday tuneage: Hark! the Herald Angels Sing and O Come All Ye Faithful. As Rob so adeptly put it when I was describing my drum track feel, I am going for the “feel-good Christmas song of the year.” It really turned out quite nice and it is always such a pleasure working with Rob, although it’s even better when we aren’t 1000+ miles apart. C’est la vie…

Believe it or not, I am most proud of the rhythm accompaniment in this song more than anything else. I simply love the feel of the acoustic and bass parts together. The bass has the crisp, fat sound of brand new strings on my Carvin 5-string Bunny Brunel model rolled all the way into piezo mode. It’s really as big as a house if you don’t EQ the tone a bit. What a great instrument.

Rob’s drum parts are unsurprisingly great. What a privilege to work with such a talented musician. Please check out his music on SoundCloud. He recorded the drum tracks with a nice 3-mic setup in his basement. I normally love the big, roomy, airy sound of recorded drums, but I had to compress his stereo track to get the tight kick/snare sounds.

The lead parts were recorded direct into Logic Studio 8 using the built in Guitar Amp plugin with no additional effects on my Babicz Octane acoustic/electric. The rhythm acoustic was recorded with the MXL V67 on the fretboard and a DI track. The rhythm electric was recorded with my Ibanez Jem, again direct into Logic using the amp plugin. Everything was mixed recorded, mixed, mastered, and bounced straight out of Logic.

And just in case you’re interested, the album cover is a photograph I took of an ornament from our Christmas tree a few years ago. If you look closely, you can see me behind the camera lens in the reflection of the bulb.

I am not a particularly reminiscent person, but listening to Gentle Giant’s In a Glass House brings me back to a magical time from my childhood. In particular, I remember driving around Long Island, New York with my father in his early 1980s Dodge Colt hatchback. The audio cassette tape copy of the record was black with a TDK sticker, gold with slight water damage. Certain songs on the album still evoke visions of old New England Victorian houses, dead trees, winter weather, and cemeteries filled with rows of repeating white gravestones. That’s not to say my childhood was macabre, but these are the things I remember about listening to the tape in the car with my dad.

Looking at the image of the cover art reminds me of the old record sleeve. The sleeve itself was black with a cellophane cutout, which had the black silhouettes of the band printed on it. Inside the sleeve was a white cardboard paper insert that had the grey silhouettes of the band printed on it. The earlier CD prints (at least the import I bought from England) had the black silhouettes printed on the transparent jewel case cover and the booklet had the grey silhouettes. And the 35th anniversary reissue has a clear plastic cover on the CD booklet with the black silhouettes. But, I digress…

Gentle Giant

I would be hard-pressed to name a band I respect as much as Gentle Giant. This band laid the foundation for my own musical tastes and idiosyncracies. For most of their career, their music was uncommercial enough to never become wildly famous, but listenable enough that they had a string of great and interesting releases sustaining their full-time craft over the course of their 10-year history.

Each member of Gentle Giant was a multi-instrumentalist. Correction: each member was an unabashed multi-instrumentalist. Their live performances featured each member of the band moving from one instrument to another, often mid-song. Watch the following videos for rather breathtaking examples:

There are so many aspects of this band and it’s musicians that I cherish dearly. I often blame their influence for the odd timings and harmony of my own music. Their music ranges from chaotic discordance to hard rock/blues to beautiful and delicate medieval treasures… Sometimes in the same song!

From everything I have heard and read about these guys, they were extremely intense and critical about their performances. I think it’s a level of perfectionism few bands are able to achieve, let alone maintain and mature over a career. It’s clear these guys poured their hearts and souls into performing and writing, and probably to a fault. Near the end of the 1970s they entered a “commercial rock” period and quickly disbanded. My guess is they were frustrated at their lack of well-deserved global admiration and fame. I also guess that it’s the band’s own doing considered how overly-eclectic and complex their music is.

Let’s just say that whole notion resonates with me and my musical pursuits, although I could never write and perform music like these guys did.

The Runaway

The album opens with a distinctive sequence of shattering glass sounds that phase into a rhythmic loop, which then cross fades into an arpeggiated synth sequence. It’s not unlike like the beginning of Money by Pink Floyd, but I think GG’s version is cooler. The opening song is called The Runaway and clearly features the “Canterbury Rock” style of the band. Gary Green’s electric guitar part is more like a harpsichord backing lyrical story-telling of a man on the run.

Not long into the song are interweaving synth parts, recorders/flutes, soft-sung chant, and odd-metered almost-blues riffs in a cascading fugue-style rhythmic cycle, all followed by a wicked vibraphone solo. Ridiculous. Sometimes, it’s difficult for me to grasp whether the band was just so capable that these over-the-top combinations of rock and classical instrumentation and arrangement came simply to the band or if they were intentionally trying to set the bar higher for themselves and other prog bands.

Inmate’s Lullaby

Vibraphone, timpani, Rhodes keyboard, oddly-EQ’d vocals, strange harmonies, and lyrics as a first-person perspective of someone recently committed to an asylum. I think this is a rather wonderful piece of music, theatrically developing until the song ends in a din of vocal oddness and what sounds like the death of a timpani. Not being a person particularly attached to lyrics, I’m surprised at how often I think of the lyrics in this song. Perhaps it’s because I live and work among mad people who don’t yet realize they’re mad.

The overall feeling of this song is creepy/haunting. The subject matter isn’t terribly cheery either, but the tonality of the vibraphone and the periodicity of the phrasing is hypnotic and weird. “Jarring” is a good word to describe it.

Way of Life

Man, I just loved this song as a kid. Now as an adult, I am surprised at the speed and virtuosity portrayed by the various band members. Especially the bass part! (It does help that Ray Schulman played with a pick…) And the song so quickly transitions from speed-rock to whole-tone creepiness, then back to speed-rock. The second half of the song demonstrates one of Gentle Giant’s greatest strengths: the majestic power ballad. Rarely does the band evoke actual emotion, but when they get into ballad time, they tear the genre to pieces.

For more ballad examples, check out Last Voyage from Freehand or Think of Me with Kindness from Octopus.

Experience

Experience is my favorite Gentle Giant song, if only for the first half of the song, which I think reveals why they probably had a hard time generating much more than a cult following. Experience is complex to the point of being uncountable, has such a great groove, has perfect sound texture and blending of instruments, and is just beautiful. The reverb and the intro keyboard sound stir indescribably resonant feelings in me, especially with the lute-style acoustic guitar chord strums. I love everything about the song until it gets hard-rock-y. Then it kind of loses my interest.

That’s not to say that the rock part of the song is bad. By no means! It’s good rock music. Rock music just doesn’t keep my interest as much. That’s the funny thing to me about Gentle Giant. They constantly struggled between rock and odd prog stuff, like some sort of schizophrenic genius. Unsurprisingly, they go back to the awesome medieval stuff at the end of the song and close it out correctly.

For more “schizophrenic” songs like this, check out On Reflection from Freehand or Peel the Paint from Three Friends.

A Reunion

This song has sentimental value for me because it’s one of the first songs I learned on my dad’s acoustic guitar. I don’t remember much from my childhood but I do remember him showing me how to play this. The guitar was way too big for me and I could hardly use both my hands at the same time, but I leaned it nonetheless. I was probably 10 at the time, even though I had little personal interest in playing guitar at the time.

The song, outside of my reminiscence, is a pretty good, simple song. Probably one of the simplest Gentle Giant songs in their catalog. And it’s even a song my wife likes, so double bonus. The only complaint I have about this one is the “queer, quivering vibrato” (hat tip to Greg Koch there) of the violins, which I find to be somewhat unpleasant.

For a more beautiful, though darker, and still completely consistent listen in this style, check out Aspirations from Power and the Glory.

In a Glass House

What a great close to this album. Like An Inmate’s Lullaby and A Reunion, this is one of the internally consistent songs on the album. Cohesive from start to finish, this is a great acoustic/electric rock song. It took me many years to learn the acoustic guitar parts in the song, and I remember as a child thinking how virtuosic the parts in this song were.

Other Favorites

Other favorite songs include:

1. Design from Interview
2. The Power and the Glory (the whole album is great)
3. Advent of Panurge from Octopus
4. Too many others…

If you have Spotify, all their stuff is up there. So, check it out!

My love for Ibanez guitars started in 1995 when I received the 1995 Ibanez guitar catalog at a local music store. The body shapes were sharp and distinct. They didn’t look like Gibsons or Fenders and I felt that they better conveyed the attitude of rock music. I hadn’t played an Ibanez guitar, but I knew I wanted one.

The Ibanez guitar catalog impacted me monumentally. I carried it around with me everywhere. I learned about musicians I would otherwise have never heard: John Petrucci, Paul Gilbert, John Scofield, and others. I spent all my spare school time reading through the catalog, memorizing every specification of each different model, drawing the guitars in art class, telling my friends about these awesome guitars. One guitar in particular caught my attention: the Steve Vai signature Jem7vwh.

I cannot understate how much I adored that guitar.

Until I found out how much it would cost. Then I fell in love with the less-expensive Jem555 (with basswood body, rosewood fretboard, lower-end inlay, and lower-end tremolo, etc.). Of course, even that guitar was too expensive for me and my parents, but a boy has to dream.

Christmastime 1995 came around and my parents said they could spend up to $300 on an electric guitar. I was dead-set on an Ibanez with the pointy-horned body shape, but every guitar shop we visited couldn’t meet that $300 number. About to give up, my father and I visited one last store and I saw the Ibanez RG565 in Candy Apple red. I fought against my discouraged self and inquired about the guitar.

It was used! It was $300! It was mine! I was overjoyed.

As of this writing, the guitar is now 20 years old. I’ve owned it for 14 years. It still plays like it used to, although I’ve certainly worn down the finish and introduced several wounds into the paint and wood. According to the 1991 Ibanez catalog, the guitar features:

• Basswood body
• 1-piece maple neck (the old super-thin Wizard 1)
• Ibanez SB1 and SB2 humbucking neck and bridge pickups
• Edge tremolo
• Steve Vai’s signature on the back of the headstock

In picking up this particular guitar as I write this particular article, I am reminded of the thousands of hours I dedicated to playing this instrument. My bedroom had rather large loudspeakers and white Christmas lights everywhere. I used to shine this guitar up and stare at it in the light, like some lustful teenager looking at an illicit magazine. Having my own guitar was such an incredibly beautiful thing. Most guys my age wanted a car, but I wanted a guitar.

You have to realize that this guitar literally changed my life. I spent no less than 8 hours every day throughout the summer practicing on this instrument. I spent every waking hour learning, writing, performing, and recording music with it. Having this guitar taught me how to take care of an instrument, how a floating tremolo system worked, and how to save up for the essential accessories (strings and picks, mostly). I learned that a pencil eraser can clean the electrical contacts on a pickup selector switch. I developed all of my chops on this guitar.

What’s also funny about the guitar is that it’s red. And it’s got red plastic inlay dots. And I hate red. Red is the default color for everything. The guitar I was borrowing from my uncle before I bought this guitar was red. My first new car was red. I still look at this guitar and its plastic dot inlays and laugh about it.

Despite its redness, and despite its early 1990s reverse headstock, this guitar has always been faithful. It earned me a “best instrumentalist” trophy in the Chandler, AZ talent show. It got me through my first major live performance at 1996 and 1997 Jethro Tull Conventions with my dad’s former band, Heresy. It got me through years of high school jazz band. Heck, I used it to record nearly all of my first album, Hansel Vs. Gretel.

And now the guitar mostly sits in a case. Isn’t that the way it goes? While this instrument may have served me for a time, I believe it’ll be in regular rotation once I get our living situation figured out in this new house.

Please purchase Trust on iTunes and support independent musicians like myself.

About the Song

Trust is a magical song. I still listen to it in awe of having written such a powerful piece of music. The chorus is something I’ve had in my head ever since I was a child, never knowing that it was in 9/8 or that it would end up being something more than a simple melody I conjured. The verses leaked out over the course of a few years. Once I had composed the song, I enlisted the help of some of my most talented friends and the song took on a life of its own.

Chris Misterek, a ridiculously talented friend from church, contributed a very difficult vocal lead with subtle harmonies near the end of the song. Greg Iannelli, a friend from high school, composed the lyrics. Another high school friend, Daniel Shin, breathed life into the song with his incredible piano part. Before he recorded his tracks, the song was not much more than “interesting.”

I performed the remaining tracks.

Listen to the Song

Please give the song a listen while you read further.

And feel free to purchase Trust on iTunes.

About the Music

The song is in the key of G, but centers primarily around the Cadd9 and Dadd4 chord vamp. As mentioned earlier, it’s in 9/8, which I believe to be the best time signature ever. The chord changes

Lyrics

By Greg Iannelli:

I gave my coat when they killed him
To clean his face.
It’s raining now and I realize
It went to waste.

He’s two days dead and who will be
The greatest fool?
Thy kingdom come, the rising sun
On nothing new.

A broken man just hanging there
And points the way
To desert stones. They mark my bones
And my son’s someday.

I’ve no more time for magic tricks
And I’m too old
For happy lies. I’ve work to do
A wife to hold.

Just one more dead. Go back to bed.
Don’t cry like that.
Just close your eyes against the night
And say,

“Oh my God, more than this
Oh, this dying, God.
I will keep watching, but
I don’t know for what.

Oh God, reason we
Go on living
I will keep watching, but
I don’t know for what.”

It (almost) always begins with this:

Prisoner: Where am I?
Number Two: In the village.
Prisoner: What do you want?
Two: Information.
Prisoner: Whose side are you on?
Two: That would be telling…. We want information…information…information!
Prisoner: You won’t get it!
Two: By hook or by crook, we will.
Prisoner: Who are you?
Two: The new Number Two.
Prisoner: Who is Number One?
Two: You are Number Six.
Prisoner: I am not a number; I am a free man!
Two: [Sinister laughing]

The Prisoner, a television series created by Patrick McGoohan (1928 – 2009), is my favorite piece of visual media. Ever. It has had a profound impact on my life and much of how I live my life is based on what I have learned from this show. It is a 17-episode television series that aired between September 1967 and February 1968. It covers themes of liberty, identity, perseverance, the progress of man, man’s inhumanity to his fellow men, politics, war, philosophy, and more. It also features the Lotus Super Seven car in the beginning of nearly every episode, which is a major bonus.

The show is many things to many people. It certainly has a cult following that exists to this day, which includes an international fan club called Six of One that meets every year in Wales at the original filming location. It certainly is not entertainment… unlike McGoohan’s previous television series, Secret Agent Man (yes, the one with the famous theme song). It certainly is difficult to understand at times. McGoohan had to go into hiding because the series did not resolve many of the mysteries it introduced to the viewer, which is another reason why I think the show and McGoohan are so cool.

Where Am I?

A man known only as Number Six is kidnapped from his London apartment and brought to a mysterious island on which every person is identified with a number. Number Six becomes a “prisoner” on this island village and, while not confined by shackles or chains, he is not allowed to leave the island, nor is he afforded any personal privacy. There are cameras everywhere on the island watching its inhabitants, most of whom are seemingly not even aware that they are also prisoners in this police state.

McGoohan had a prophetic vision of the evolution of government coupled with man’s technological advances and its invasion into our daily lives. He used the penny farthing bicycle to represent this notion of “progress” wherein man had taken a perfectly good invention and made it ridiculous. Throughout the show, computers are made to look ridiculous and incapable of doing anything meaningful, used merely as invasive tools of voyeurism.

What do you want?

The people who run the village already know everything about Number Six’s life except for why he resigned from his position as a special intelligence agent for the British government. They are afraid of Number Six defecting and/or selling national secrets to another government or intelligence group. The people behind the village stop at nothing to get this information, including physical, emotional, and psychological torture/experiments on him. It is Number Six’s perseverance and commitment to personal liberty that give him the resolve to endure everything done to him.

McGoohan frequently demonstrates that raw data about a person only has so much value. A man’s intent, patterns of thought, spiritual and personal essence cannot be captured in data or quantified. We may each have an identification number and the “powers that be” may know nearly everything about us, but we are each unique and individual persons. Information allows a man (or machine) to make an educated guess or assumption about a person, but leaves out the critically important fact that people are emotional and capable of change, variability in behavior, etc.

Whose side are you on?

While living in the village, Number Six rarely meets an individual who decries the injustice of having his/her life stolen. McGoohan appears to do this for several reasons. In the episode “Free For All,” Number Six takes to a megaphone and yells at the villagers:

Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment and will die here like rotten cabbages.

When he tells them, “I am not a number, I am a person,” the listening villagers are silent and burst into laughter. Yet, in the episode “A Change Of Mind,” Number Six is deemed “unmutual” by his fellow villagers. Number Six becomes lonely and forlorn, which leads him to change his behavior to become socially acceptable once again. These examples raise the questions: Does McGoohan see most people as sheep living mindless lives or are they collectively more intelligent than Number Six gives credit? Is Number Six an extremist generally not worth paying attention to? Is his fellow man generally aware of his own imprisonment and accepts it for what it is?

You won’t get it!

I don’t want to spoil one of the greatest endings of a television series, but I will say that Number One is technically revealed at the end, but it’s nothing that’s easily understood or even acceptable. Certain other things are revealed to the viewer at the end of the show, but unsatisfactorily in most cases. The show closes in much the same way as it opens: with a lot of questions. And this is part of what I love about it.

The Prisoner is an exploration in human psychology and so many other things. It’s hard to define and it’s accomplished something that will never again be accomplished. For decades, it was the most expensive television show ever produced and yet it left viewers incredibly upset! I cannot imagine something happening like that again, although I have heard that Lost left viewers with a fairly open-ended ending.

All this to say: you probably won’t get it. And when you think you get it, you realize that there’s yet even more to “get” just a few weeks later. I call it “the gift that keeps on giving.” It has literally been food for thought in my life for 20 years and I don’t expect myself to ever stop thinking about it.

Who are you?

That’s a great question and one that a true Prisoner fan will continue to ask himself. It’s a question a true fan will ask of others as well. The show teaches the valuable lesson of looking inward and outward to understand the context of daily life, people’s expectations, yada yada.

The issue of identity is such a critical one in my life. Alongside my personal religious identity, which is the most critical aspect of my life, I have an identity that comes with a set of expectations, goals, behaviors, tendencies, and ideas. My identity allows me to identify the inputs and outputs of my life. It also determines which battles I choose to fight and which ones I choose to let slip by. Make no mistake, there is no shortage of battles in everyday life. Where there’s a goal, expectation, or idea, there is a battle to be encountered. Life stands in the way of our plans, but it is up to us to persevere.

Number Six does not compromise his identity once. Once of the most famous quotes from this show is:

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.

Nothing will stand in his way of achieving freedom, even if it’s an impossibly lofty thing to successfully achieve.

Who is Number One?

That would be telling.

But, I would like to take a bit to discuss the value of the individual in the context of this show. The individual is the penultimate archetype in this series. This has never been more true than it is today, although (as the show demonstrates) the true individual can often be detrimental to himself. To be an individual is something to be sought in a tempered fashion. The individual ultimately needs no companion or relationships, but this is contrary to human nature. I needn’t spend the time defending that statement.

We live in a society where most people shop at the same stores, watch the same movies, listen to the same music, etc. We need individuals to remind us that there’s something worth aspiring to. The individual is counter-cultural and mankind needs individuals to shape the unknown. The individual should also be consistent in thought, word, and action. I have no idea where I’m going with this so I’ll stop while I’m ahead…

I will leave you with the fact that McGoohan often said that mankind’s worst enemy is his own self.

“I am not a number, I am a free man!”

Have more heroic words ever been spoken? Honestly, this show is filled with statements that are ironic, humorous, courageous, heroic, and timeless.

Questions are a burden to oneself, answers doubly so.

A still tongue makes a happy life.

Number Two: I’m the boss.
Number Six: No. One is the boss.

Despite all this, the show is clearly a product of its time. It is unmistakably a show from the 1960s, which really adds character and even some (unintentional) levity. It’s ridiculously psychedelic at times. There is a monster on the island known as “Rover” that’s a giant white weather balloon that suffocates whoever angers it and gets in its path. Rover has the ability to also transport people by dragging them across water and has an angry roar. Some of the show is laughable, like all the lava lamps, but if you get past all the 1960s goofiness, you’ll find a timeless, precious gem of creativity and innovation.

Wonderfully, the entire series is available on Blu-Ray and the quality is unbelievable. Worth every penny. It really is a masterpiece. I can assure you I am not the only person out there who calls the show the most important/interesting/mysterious/progressive/prophetic/philosophical television show ever.

I should also mention that I am forever indebted to my father for exposing me to this show when I was pretty young (around 8 years old). Ever since, I have been infatuated with this show. I almost use it as a “friend barometer.” I’ll suggest it to a friend and see his reaction to gauge the level of depth at which we’ll end up conversing. I do have other metrics, but The Prisoner is an interesting place to start.

Please purchase Harnch on iTunes and support independent musicians like myself.

So as to facilitate actual completions of songs, I am going to post singles to iTunes until Jerk (my fourth solo album) is complete. It’ll cost me more money, but I’m already extremely happy knowing that I have something complete, online, and salable. You can purchase Harnch on iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 store, or you can stream it on Spotify. If you prefer some other digital music vendor, it’s probably available there too. Support independent musicians!

I originally wrote the primary theme to Harnch back in 2006 or so as a piano piece in some Lite edition of Finale. Over the following three or four years, the song kept surfacing from the back of my mind without my listening or particular instigation. When that happens, I know I’ve got something worth recording. And if I’m getting one of my songs stuck in my head, I’m sure someone else will have the same “problem” when they hear it.

So, sometime in 2009 I fleshed out the song a bit more and completed the composition in 2010. The guitar solo was added later to the middle section. It took some time to learn all the guitar parts, but the bass and drum parts came naturally in the space of one or two evenings. The guitar parts actually took weeks to learn and memorize due to the complexities in harmonics and time signatures. I like to call the licks in these songs “finger acrobatics.”

About the song

I’ve already given you the history of the song. Now let’s talk about the song. You should probably give it a listen first:

It’s predominantly in 5/4 in D mixolydian. My primary inspirations were Pat Metheny, Gentle Giant, Bill Bruford, and Al Di Meola. The guitar solo section is in 11/4 (don’t let the 4/4 drums fool you) and vacillates between D mixolydian and D harmonic minor. The outro is in too many time signatures to describe reasonably. The rhythm parts are probably as difficult as the lead parts. And there’s a heck-of-a-lot of syncopation throughout the whole track. It’s really a miracle that I was able to put something like this together. I can assure you, it was almost entirely a happy accident.

Vamp

The introductory vamp is really quite simple.

The Melody

The melody is not quite simple. It’s mostly finger acrobatics and alternate picking with the occasional pull-off/hammer-on. The notation below is broken into phrases and not into measures.

If that weren’t complicated enough, check out this next section. It took me days to play this up to speed, and I wrote the stupid song.

The 11/4 Part

At 1:24 into the song, a new section begins. It’s in 11/4 and is tricky for several reasons. The vamp begins with the turnaround, which is a very uncommon practice. I didn’t realize this as I was writing the song. Rather, I realized it when I was trying to teach my dad the song in an attempt to play the song live with a band. Furthermore, the drums play in 4/4 over the rhythm part and obfuscates the location of the beginning of each measure. Just now, I tried counting the guitar part out to confirm the 11/4 time signature and I could barely do it. Just stick with playing 8th notes (after the turnaround notes) and you should be all right.

I’ve notated the “turnaround” as its own measure below to help explain what I’ve just described.

Once that bit is played a few times, then a harmonic minor version of it is played:

The Solo

The guitar solo is pretty tricky because, at about 1:51, there’s an open D string being played at specific times, primarily dotted quarter notes. The notes in the higher register are being played with my middle and ring fingers on my right hand while hybrid picking. The notation would be too complicated to write out, so I’ll leave it to you to figure out if you feel so inclined.

The Outro

The outro is where the song gets awesome. Compositionally, it’s a set of arbitrary permutations of the main melody transcribed earlier. It sounds like a controlled cacophony of rhythms in the song, which I love.

When I listen back to this song, I still can’t believe I wrote and performed all the instrumentation (except the piano). Andy West, former bassist for the Dixie Dregs, tried learning the song and said: “This is one of the hardest songs I’ve ever tried to learn.” Coming from him, I think that’s a compliment.

Even though it took me about 4 years to go from idea to completed performance, it makes me excited to continue to write and record new material. Considering all the time and effort I put into it, I’d really appreciate it if you could threw a few dimes my way by purchasing Harnch on iTunes.

If you have any questions on how to play the song, please let me know.