Saragossa

Time for another video album, this time focusing on my 2017 album 'Saragossa', which is a strange but mostly relaxed series of vaguely nautically themed songs. By this time I was getting pretty comfortable with themed albums, having done many in both blues and prog. Trying to branch out and test myself, I had done a Latin themed album, augmented by a few pieces of world music. Time to expand beyond my comfort zone.

The single biggest influence on this album was going to Antigua repeatedly over a number of years. The wife and I found our happy place in the Caribbean and spent at least two weeks a year there. We'd tried Mexico, but to really relax on the beach, float like a jellyfish in the water, Antigua is the place. It's beautiful and different, actually partially desert. The people are friendly and intelligent, and even more important they want you there.

We go on the off season, not being anywhere close to high rollers. That means not being there in the high season, December 15 to about April 15, but it also means not usually being there from June through October, the off season. We sneak in during November or early December or early May, still nice but affordable. It also means sometimes being there when the sargassum hits the shores.

The Sargasso Sea is a weird global phenomenon that has been around since recorded time, yet it seems to be getting worse. Depending on your belief in Global Warming, this is only to get worse. The established fact is that is has gotten worse in the last few decades. The Sargasso Sea is the only ocean in the world that does not have a shore, being completely within the North Atlantic. It's a huge 500 mile wide batch of seaweed created by the doldrums, not the kind of place you'd want to steer your boat into.

As the oceans warm, the Sargasso Sea has expanded. The real problem is twofold. First, there are more hurricanes flying across the Atlantic, and those that don't threaten land tend to hit this giant clump of weed, breaking parts of it loose, sending strands floating with the tide. But there is also a second giant batch of weed forming in the Southern Atlantic as a result of all the nutrients being released by the Amazon and all the exploitation happening up stream.

What this means to me is that a couple of times I have been in Antigua when the Sargassum arrives and litters the shore. It depends on what side of the island you are on, whether you are facing into the trade wind, which means you are vulnerable, or whether you are leeward, which means no wind and no weed. We like the wind, and the Atlantic is a little rougher and wilder, but the Caribbean side is calmer and has it charms as well.

Some people freak out when the sargassum hits, but the place that we stay has a bay as well, not to mention a lot of pools, so I tend to just have another drink and sit it out. It can get bad enough to close the beach, and it doesn't smell very nice. I have been there when it has been a minor nuisance and when it has hit really hard. It can close resorts for months at a time.

When I am in Antigua, it can means that I have just finished a recording project. If I have two weeks away, I'm smart enough to realize that it often - although not always - all the momentum to make music comes to a crashing halt. There have been times, particularly in May, when I either start after I return or can pick up where I left. I use the down time to listen and write about what I have just created, often doing the sequencing using a tablet and headphones. It has proven invaluable to clarify my thoughts about what I just produced, enabling me to see both the big picture as well as the immediate problem of putting together albums out of anything from 45 to 60 different tracks.

It's not the only thing I do. Most of the time, I'm partying with the wife and the Brits. We are lucky, being included as the token Americans in a large group of English and Scottish couples. Antigua was part of the British Empire until the 1960s and is a well know place for middle class couples to get some sun during the long winters. There are people we meet nearly every time we go, and sometimes we even share a two bedroom villa with another couple to cut costs.

I've learned a lot from the Brits, especially on how to plan and enjoy a vacation. They think that Americans are crazy; we get vacation a lot of time but don't use it all, feeling guilty if asking for two consecutive weeks. Since the wife and I were at the tail end of our career, we had no problem and asking for two weeks. You could see our bosses trying to figure out a politically correct way to get us to change our mind. No way - put it writing.

So Antigua was a frame of mind as well as a place, and I wanted to explore trying to do that in music. A new approach, something different. Not really reggae, although it could make an appearance. There could be progressive elements, but more like Ravel doing program music, telling stories through sound. And there might be a few cover songs that would have to be chosen.

'Saragossa' is a rare case of the lyric coming first, then having to write music to fit the words. Often I'm not even sure if words are needed, and they can be like pulling teeth. Here. I had a poem that I kept humming to myself, having to come up with an arrangement. I kept this one very light and airy, trying to set up the mood for the rest of the album.

Definitely heavier, 'Flotsam' was an instrumental that just had the rhythm of the sea in it. Plus, the bass in one part really felt like a nautical theme. I'm using an orchestral drum kit, which has deep toms, almost kettle drums, as well as splashier cymbals. Another one where I think things turned out very well, building to a very effective climax.

'Open Water' just came to me one Saturday morning, drinking coffee and playing. I was deep into the sessions, popping up with a quick idea early in a weekend day is nothing unusual. This one was recorded, at least the acoustic guitar part, very quickly. The ska drumming took a little longer, but not much. there was maybe two hours total from sitting down to having a mixed master, the most spontaneous track on the album.

'Land Ho!' is a slightly obscure song by the Doors, but it is from my favorite album, 'Morrison Hotel'. It wasn't planned; in fact, I was playing electric slide for a blues song when I started playing this by accident. Figuring it out fairly quickly, I gave it a shot, and it worked. 'Horse Latitudes' was perfect for the sequence, and remains about the only poem that I can recite from memory. The entire song is a radical re-arrangement of the two pieces, but it flows well.

'Adrift' is what I like to call a conceptual piece, something that was planned almost philosophically instead of musically. Going into that 'Amazing Pudding' Pink Floyd territory is much more difficult than you realize; keeping the drums floating would be perfect for the album, but creating interest in that environment can be a struggle. I've tried this type of song since the very beginning, maybe half a dozen variations,. This is the first time that I really nailed it, throwing on more subtle guitar overdubs, making the song build to a big finish.

This being the very middle of the album, it usually is time to 'hinge' the sequencing, putting something in that completely changes things up for a few songs. 'Kraken Attack' was perfect, a brutal instrumental that I had been playing around with, adding new bits to the middle to make it more interesting. The Sargasso Sea has it's share of monstrous legends, so this could fit, adding heavy prog right in the middle of some softer sounds. It becomes the centerpiece, every other song revolving around it, a key sequencing trick.

'Trade Wind' was the genesis for the entire 'Saragossa' project, written right as I was taking a ten day vacation in November 2014, ending a mammoth recording project. I vowed not to record anything more, although I immediately wrote two songs that hung around for three years. That extra time enabled me to develop this piece into a very intricate chamber piece, somewhere between creepy and a Bossa Nova. I'm most proud of this recording on the album, a perfect realization of my concept. Nice video, too.

'Tidal Surge' is the best performance on the album as opposed to the best composition, although both songs are a close one-two in both departments. This time I'm able to really pound the drums with complete abandon. There's a great deal of melody as well, a hard trick to pull off when things start to get heavy. Another fabulous composition and performance, it was here that I knew things would come together for a complete album.

'Rippling Reflections' was created late in the recording process, when I realized that I needed a song that was more about soloing than ensemble playing. After throwing together a chord progression and then finding a few progressions to keep it interesting, I chose a specific sound for my guitar. I'm borrowing the sound of Robert Fripp's solo on 'Sailor's Tale' from King Crimson's 'Islands', although I wasn't aware of the nautical references at the time. That shattered glass effect, a very quick and fast digital delay, was perfect, and it let me fly with some tasty guitar licks.

In an effort to give the album more of a sense of spontaneity, I let loose on the drums in isolation, creating a song on top of my rather frantic beat. The result was 'Surfing Chaos'. The electric piano and bass came early, and after listening to it for about a month, I felt it needed something.  The slide, surfing across the chord changes, came much later, but was a perfect addition.

'Tales of Brave Ulysses' would be the perfect song to finish the album with, but I had serious reservations about my ability to play the song by Cream. I gave it a whack anyway, and after some massaging, it came out alright. People respond to it, thinking it a great cover, and I'm not inclined to disagree, although I usually deviate more when doing a cover. But it was the perfect ending for this project, bringing things to a successful conclusion.

Finally, mention must be made of the title of this album, where I got things so wrong that it turned out all right in the end. There is a Polish novel from around 1815 called 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa' that was turned into a very strange film called 'The Saragossa Manuscript' in 1965. I have both and both read the novel and watched the film multiple times. Both come highly recommended, but both are very unusual.

The novel starts out in the Napoleonic Wars, with a retreating officer finding the manuscript. As he reads it, we keep going from one reminiscence to another one to another one, each inside the previous, until the reader is hopelessly lost in a maze of flashbacks. The novel seems an exercise in not just creating an unreliable narrator, but an unreliable world. By the end, after byzantine adventures with a giant casts of characters, very episodic, things come to a quick conclusion, as if the writer just needed to get the thing tied together.

The movie retains a few of the plot points from the opening and closing, then jettisons the middle. It' more of a misadventure than an adventure, with our main luckless hero stumbling from one disaster to another, yet he remains likable. At the end, after many topless or near topless women,  a real eye opener back in 1965, he winds up winning great fortune, mostly by sheer accident. Both the movie and book have very circular plot structures.

How I confused 'Saragossa', the anglicized version of the Spanish town Zaragoza, and 'Sargasso', remains a mystery. Even more miraculous is that it doesn't really matter. As I've said before, Sargasso doesn't scan and would be a bitch to sing. Saragossa has a musicality than made it easy to write a song about. Anyway, the entire thing is really about a magical state of mind, being relaxed, away from the troubles of the world (although troubles may come up from the deep), so naming it after an imaginary place in the Caribbean is probably better. Who needs an album about seaweed?

Anyway, that's my story and I'm stickling with it. Enjoy!