I’m about to do something very un-Dr-Bobish. Rather than review a CD, I’m going to review a single song. I’m doing this because every so often a piece of artwork passes through my ears which is so stellar that it instantly captures a seat in my lineup of all time one hundred favorite folk and acoustic songs. This is such a time. The song is LIFE IS, and it is the title track from Scott Golblatt’s CD of the same name. And it’s just one person with one guitar, three chords, and one of the most fascinating compositions I’ve heard in years.
On the surface, like the real thing itself, LIFE IS does not appear to be a complicated piece. Yet, if still waters run deep, this song is so oceanic in the breadth and depth of its composition, style and structure, that it reaches song writing heights even Dylan and Young only achieved on rare and remarkable occasions. While I could expound volumes analyzing and critiquing this monumental work, I’m just going to present three facets of this compository gem’s structure: repetitive phrasing, anticipatory pause, and grand summation.
Now, one of my favorite hobbies growing up was an insatiable interest in rare, used books. Not rare as invaluable or expensive, but rare in terms of they were hard to find because few people were ever interested in, or even read them. Surprisingly, these are exactly the types of things pre-Barnes-and-Nobles bookstores used to have in their dusty, back room used books sections.
One such find I discovered while haunting such places during my late teens and early twenties was a work on music theory by Sir Lewiston Obsmith Cromwell. It was all about his concepts and intuitions regarding music theory and structure. Probably the only thing Lewiston had going for him when he wrote this tome was that he was wealthy enough to publish it himself in 1959. Beyond that, it is quite possible he and I are the only people who ever read it, and he never attained even the slightest recognition from it within the pantheon of music education and performance. However, Lewiston did have some interesting ideas about what made a good song, and three of these were repetitive phrasing, anticipatory pause, and grand summation. So, I’m going to invoke an incredibly obscure author to describe an astonishingly great piece of music.
Lewiston’s repetitive phrasing is common to many music pieces today. It’s simply that repeated part within a song that we like to hear over and over, most commonly as the chorus. While LIFE IS does have a formal chorus, Scott has also embedded an additional repetitive phrase that is incredibly soft, yet indelibly sophisticated. You can see it typed in capitals in the first two verses:
Linda she’s been talking bout
Moving to Atlanta
Needs a change of scenery
Not sure what she’s after
THERE’S TALK AMONG HER FRIENDS
Gonna miss her dearly
Been worrying bout her drinking
And does she see things clearly
Danny’s he’s been working
Down in Miami
Lives up in Boynton
Hardly sees his family
THERE’S TALK AMONG HIS FRIENDS
There’s gotta be a better way
Before he knows it
His kids are gonna fly away
Now I’ll come back to this second verse shortly for an entirely different reason. Keep in mind that this embedded, repetitive phrases is present in all four verses of Scott’s song, not just the two above. By using this obsmith technique *, he has established a secondary chorus within the corpus of each and every verse by repetitively declaring the unbreakable personal connection between the characters in his songs and those who love them. In gently clanging this heart throb bell of loving relationships, Scott wells up deep harmonic and emotional reverberrations between himself, his characters, and his listeners.
Next, LIFE IS blossoms with an incredible anticipatory pause during its chorus. Now there are many obsmith styles of anticipatory pause: the suggestive anticipatory pause, the normative anticipatory pause, the delinquent anticipatory pause, and so on. Undeniably, the greatest use of anticipatory pause in modern times was when Tim Curry employed the leading variant during The Rocky Horror Picture show while singing his leitmotif Sweet Transvestite. Near the end of this denouement, Curry uses the obsmithian leading anticipatory pause to cleave the very word antici…. PATION with such spitting, climactic, sexual thunder that one felt obliged to immediately run into the movie theater lobby and smoke a cigarette, even if you didn’t smoke.
Now, rest assured dear reader, Scott Goldblatt is not trying to start you down the road to any bad habits. And to whit, he does not use the leading anticipatory pause, but the more obscure and difficult paradoxical one. The paradixical anticipatory pause occurs when you are made to believe you are heading in one direction, yet after a moment of brief self assurance (the pause), you suddenly find yourself somewhere entirely unexpected. As I stated, this occurs during the chorus:
Life is what you make it
Got to take some chances
Find what you believe in
Don’t have all the answers
Got to listen to yourself….(pause)
NOT those who love you dearly
As you’re moving down the road
Let the sunshine guide your vision
I have capitalized the key word above, and I assure you that had I not spoiled this moment for you, on first listen you would have heard AND instead of NOT, and have been left there as I had wondering why a tingle had just shot down your spine. It’s because in switching these essential words, Scott has exposed the essential, life defining paradox between the desire to follow those you love versus the internal imperative to be your own person.
Again, there are many, perhaps nine or more obsmiths present in LIFE IS, but I’m going to close with just one more: the great summation. Let’s go to the fourth and final verse to explain this one:
Steven he’s a lawyer
Right out of college
Passed the bar his first time
Now he s got a challenge
There’s talk among his friends
Will he find employment
So many goddamn lawyers
Chasing too few dollars
A great summation occurs when a songwriter manages to encapsulate and summarize another famous writer’s work within a few lines of his own original work. Here, Scott has undoubtedly and grandly summarized all of the Rolling Stones Sympathy For The Devil in just a few words: he actually makes you feel sorry for a lawyer. How great of a summary is that! In addition, he does another grand summation in the second verse:
Danny’s he’s been working
Down in Miami
Lives up in Boynton
Hardly sees his family
There’s talk amongst his friends
There’s gotta be a better way
Before he knows it
His kids are gonna fly away
If the last line of this verse doesn’t encapsulate all of Harry Chapin’s Cats In The Cradle, then neither Lewiston nor I have a clue about what we’re talking about (oh, but we do!). Even the third verse uses this obsmith:
Susan she’s a waitress
Working at the alley
Got lots of blues there
Changing every hour
There’s talk among her friends
It’s time to go out dancing
Heard it on the radio
There’s a big party happening after hours
This is clearly a song writer’s Cliff Notes to almost everything Bruce Springsteen ever wrote: the exuberance, longing and desire of youth that made it all happen at that big party one special night.
So there you have an introductory review of a master piece of music. Scott Goldblatt’s LIFE IS certainly belongs on every acoustic music chart that exists, and perhaps in stores one day as a boxed set with Lewiston’s book attached. When you find it, listen, read and revel in the joy of true art.
Dr. Bob
* – Obsmith is a word I use to describe any technique of musical composition I learned from reading the works of Lewiston Obsmith Cromwell.