Obligatory Road Song
so my friend
david gans heard me say -- well, he *read* me say, since this was online -- that years ago i'd written a song that mentioned Barstow, California in the first line. "Bishop, Boron, Barstow... Miles on the desert..." he says he wants to hear it. here you go, david:
"Obligatory Road Song".
this song was a favourite when
Black Orchid used to perform it. it was one of very few pre-written, non-improv songs we'd ever do. this particular version is just me & a 4-track (okay, a 3-track, cuz one of the tracks wouldn't work), one of those "i'm in my warehouse all alone late at night with the candles and a very tiny amount of astonishingly low-quality musical gear, drinking red wine" kinds of recordings. the song itself & the bits of story in it are from real life. even the waiter's penis.
seeping ectoplasm
if you do any sort of creative work, you know what it's like out there. people wanna stuff you into a genre. they don't want your music, your words, your piss & blood & ectoplasm oozing out from the box of definition.
you have an identity, a name, a word, a marker, a symbol that somehow stands in for "you" and the work you create. you've probably been informed that you should attach that signifier only to certain Creative Products. this simplifies matters for audiences, critics, and marketers alike.
in real life, some artists & musicians aren't particularly fond of being penned in like pigs, knee-deep in their own genre slop. writers of literate and literary prose that spans genres are sick to death of having their work belittled as "genre" or condescended to as "regional literature" if they don't happen to follow the narrow guidelines that constrain the ironic, clever, often soulless or willfully inaccessible, predictably elitist New York scenester lit that calls "literary fiction" its own smug title. musicians are bewildered by having to select from drop-down menus of cosy genre descriptions that don't appear to represent the mood, intention, sound, or focus of their actual music.
so welcome to my little world. it's littered with zillions of projects, live & dead. they're very untidy. zines, music projects, performances, events, poems, shows, blogs, communities, books, & plays. my musical tendencies have been toward ethereal improvisations on the one hand, and singer/songwriter material on the other, with experimental, country, cuntronica (electro-country), industrial, choral, classical, jazz, & lounge thrown in for good measure. the pigs have mated with the cows & the farmer burned all the fences down.
Passiflora is the name i sing and play music under now, after being in bands and sitting in with many extraordinary musicians and groups. i originally wanted to restrain Passiflora, confine her to a box, bind her wrists to the latches with strips of gauze. it would be so simple if she embodied only drifty & dreamy music, only ethereal improvisations & extemporaneous spoken words. i found myself shying away from having my real name associated with her. shouldn't she just be separate and mysterious? i wanted to attach her to certain images, faces, & costumes. as though she were a project, a character, a marketing object from within.
i'm not a marketing project, and my musical explorations are not a character in some play. i'm just going to give up. i'll post whatever kind of music i do here, however badly it seems to fit in with the rest of it. i'll admit that i'm me,
tiffany lee brown, and i'll admit that Passiflora is stuck with being me, too. hopefully the occasional listener, walking by at a festival when i happen to be playing, clicking a random mp3 to download, running across a CD, will have some kind of delicious experience with the music i've created. they won't care whether there are genre names for what i do. they won't care whether my name is Passiflora or George W. Bush. they'll just let the ectoplasm seep.
that's the best wish i could have. please enjoy.
xoxo
tiffany
