[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
You're really the Christopan, something like a mamba guy that lets some flower bez my poison but I'm firing.
Is our new theme song penetrating your subconscious yet?
If not, it will.
Soon enough.
When Christy Wampol and I decided to change the intro music of entitled opinions back in September,
some 17 shows ago, it was a risky proposition.
If you listen or is applauded the change, you were likely to confess that you never liked that old
and Nick Matoon anyway, which would not have pleased me.
By contrast, you may have trashed the new song and that would have not pleased me either because,
well, how shall I put this?
Because I'm the one who composed the new intro music.
Not only that, the voice you hear singing in the background, that's our production manager, Christy Wampol.
So, both of us were putting ourselves on the line somewhat while we cast this song into the world unmixed and unprotected.
It could easily have been trampled to death if only by accident.
And by the way, this guitar solo coming up, that's yours truly as well.
Narcissus, anyone?
[Music]
Looks so good, it looks so cool.
Your pleasure lives in tooth or pulpit.
Don't give men, don't be a fool, that's how you're about that water.
Here are the fact, friends.
This theme song is called Echo, based on Avids myth of Echo and Narcissus.
The band is called Glass Wave.
And the album, which came out a month ago, is also called Glass Wave.
A number of our listeners have discovered the existence of this CD and are curious about its origin, its concept, and my own role in its creation.
So, we've decided to devote a special show to Glass Wave.
And this show is dedicated to all you listeners who have been following entitled opinions and who have written in to express your appreciation.
Why to you? Because it's unlikely that I would have ever have ventured to make a musical CD, had it not been for the fact that some six years ago, I started a radio show without any prior experience in radio broadcasts.
If I am to believe those of you who have written to me over the years with heartfelt expressions of gratitude that Endeavor has been a success, had entitled opinions been a flop, I would probably never have embarked on making a musical CD without any
prior experience in this domain.
The following special edition of entitled opinions is hosted by my friend and colleague Rush Rem, who is a professor in the Drama Department here at Stanford.
One day soon I'll have Rush on entitled opinions to discuss Greek tragedy, but today I have called on him to conduct the following interview with the members of Glass Wave, including me about our musical project.
Enjoy the show.
[Music]
Hello, this is Rush Rem guest host for entitled opinions here at KZSU on the Stanford campus, and it is my pleasure to discuss the music that you're hearing and other songs from the new album Glass Wave.
A classic cerebral rock visitation and interpretation of some classical text of Western literature.
This is an extraordinary album and I emphasize the word album.
A connected, thematically related sequence of songs whose whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
We have a thought-provoking, poetically rich, musically exciting exploration that draws on and develops many significant themes, bringing together what might appear to be very different stories, poems, novels, sounds, and putting them into a meaningful dialogue.
The pleasure to this album are ongoing, the more you listen, the more you realize its manifold delights.
There's no wake we can cover this material in one, two or three settings, but I'd like to allow you today to taste and even savor some of its riches,
and to do so we have some members of the band Glass Wave with us, and I'd like to talk to them about their songs, about their inspiration, and about what they were trying to do with the album.
But before we bring them in, I'd like to comment briefly on this album as an album.
The title is Glass Wave, itself a provocation drawn from Ezra Pound's second canto, and I'll just reach you a little bit of that and then go back to the first canto to give you some sense of where this album seems to be going.
The old minute in the Iliad book three are talking about Helen and her impact on Troy, and of course the album will feature a song about Helen.
An impound shifts to a story about Poseidon raping a mortal, and it goes as follows, and by the beach run, Tyro twisted arms of the sea god,
Liza sinews of water gripping her crosshold, and the blue gray glass of the wave tense them, glare azure of water cold welter close cover.
We have an image of a wave that both encompasses and covers, but also reveals its glass and one can see through it, and in some sense this album is about, and
and Igmas underwater under glass visible, but also disappearing.
This picks up I think the great opening of the canto's, which I'd also like to read to you.
And then went down to the ship, said keel to breakers forth on the godly sea, and we set up mast and sail on that swatch ship,
bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also heavy with weeping and winds from sternward bore us out onward with belly and canvas.
And they're describing a trip encouraged by seersy, a seductress on other theme in the album, to head to the underworld to find out what a disease's future might be by going back to his past, and in a way glass wave, the album does this, because it resurrects reinterprets, reinvigorates these great classic texts.
Some of the themes that are dealt with, and they are wonderfully integrated, the most prominent as I suggested already is that of the sea out of which we grew, and back to which we'll return, in some sense it's not dust to dust, but water to water that is our fate.
But the sea is also a world of danger.
There's danger in this watery element, the danger of reflection, of seduction, of seeing oneself in the mirror, and of seeing something else in the mirror that is attractive.
Or that draws you down.
Depth and depth charges, I guess one could say.
We have Narcissus falling in love with his own image in the album, a failure drowning, where we dig, bringing down the peak quad.
We have Frankenstein's creature, ranging over the frozen Arctic, hunted by Frankenstein, and also hunting him, hunting his creator, head-lend launching a thousand ships over the Aegean.
The sea is a medium of invasion, and the strange kingdom by the sea of Annabelle Lee, a man who's in love with a woman who has died in love with death.
There are many, many images in the album of doubling, a kind of double-ganger.
It's already mentioned Frankenstein and his creature, a man who makes something in his own image, but is horrified by what he makes.
A poet who falls in love with his own picture, his own image.
Humbert Humbert in a leader, a leader falling in love with an image that he's sort of created of a young girl, who's an perhaps not who she, who she really is.
What Lolita says in the song, and I'll talk to Dan Edleston who wrote it later, isn't this what I was supposed to want?
Like you want me, my oh my, who am I to be?
There's doubling in the sense of Ophelia, who goes crazy while Hamlet Fain's madness.
A wonderful play on the real thing and its inauthentic enactment.
You get it in King Lear 2 with poor Tom, who pretends to be mad and Lear, who goes mad.
Underneath all of this, and it's actually appropriate for an album of rock and roll, is Sex and Desire.
The great staples of rock music and also of lyric poetry.
We have no cigar in Homer's Odyssey longing for a man she cannot have, a disheous.
The creature wanting Frankenstein to make him a mate to provide someone with him who will reduce and remove his loneliness.
The poet, as I mentioned, who cannot abandon his dead love and a belly.
And all of this connected in a song about Freud, Freud, who championed the link between Eros, love, passion, desire for another, and Thanatos death, losing one's self in another person, is another way of dying.
And this, of course, linked to the mother image, the mother who gives us birth, the mother who's lacking in Frankenstein, and the mother in one of my favorite songs on the other.
I also like to say that the album celebrates the power of storytelling, told and shared and primarily heard.
There's a powerful, as I wrote, to be in a rock album, oral component.
"Character Freud" says in the song Freud, "It's me who turns it all into a story that's all you ever wanted all along to be the little hero of this song."
Or Helen, in the song about Helen of Troy, who sings, "What's left our stories, myths, our histories."
Finally, I would say that all of these stories are written around and surrounded by a greater story, that we talk about and try to shape, but we can't control.
And that's suggested in the opening, Balena, which is a song of the whale.
And in a enigmatic song from the depths, sad, mournful, hard to interpret, but we can all catch its beauty.
We get it, we hear it.
And of course, we trouble it as they have does in Moby Dick, the closing song on the album, and the underwater force rises up and the rest of silence.
As Robert Harrison writes in that song, I took them down without a sound. They can't be found.
Well, those are some of the delights in my view of the album, and now we get to talk specifically with some of it, well, with its creators.
And I'd like to start by talking with Robert Harrison.
Hello, Robert. I'm glad to have you with me.
I'm glad.
That was very eloquent introduction, Rush. I appreciate it.
Well, thank you. I want to play a little bit of the first proper song on the album after Balena Echo, develop from Avid's story of Echo on Narcissus.
And I'd like to pick up the song near the end of it, because there's some lyrics and music I'd like to hear your opinion on what you were thinking when you wrote it.
You got it. I'll start it just at the end of the guitar solo that my listeners are well aware of by now.
Good.
[Music]
Looks so good. It looks so cool. Your pleasure lives in tooth or pulpit. Don't give me a full-
I'll tell you about that water. It's cool.
[Music]
To hunger as a weird,
being whole,
in waste of greed.
You wanted him,
and I wanted him,
to you.
[Music]
He said farewell,
farewell,
[Music]
So, Robert, the question I wanted to ask is as follows.
This seems to be a song about falling in love with a visual image, in this case,
not just as as image of himself, and kind of doubling of his own,
this is I guess. But it ends wonderfully with an echo, an acoustic echo, not a visual echo.
And I wanted to know in what ways the difference between seeing something doubled,
and hearing something doubled matters to the album.
To the album as a whole, or in this particular song, and then go on.
Well, the phenomenon you're describing, I think, is right there in Avid's source text,
when he decides to tell the story of Narcissus, who is doubled visually,
with a nymph who is in love with him, who is condemned by Juneau to merely repeat the last
syllables of the words that she hears. So, she's lost her power of speech,
so she can only echo the sound. So, it's Avid who first brings the audio and the visual doubling into play in his own myth.
And so, the song tries to bring that out in various ways.
First, by having the song be told in the voice of Echo,
and having some musical effects of Echoing, starting with the opening guitar,
or strafing, that's already an Echo effect there. And you have the singing voices echoed.
And of course, Echo is trying to get Narcissus to tear himself away from his own image,
and look at her, and it's a hopeless sort of endeavor on her part.
And it's true that it ends up being an opening song for the album as a whole,
because as you mentioned, there are so many doubling effects in the stories themselves,
from which we derive all the lyrics of this album,
in the musical arrangements that we tried to give to these, the retellings of these stories.
And, you know, finally, to that notion of everything ending in a kind of silence towards the end of the album.
Well, that's terrific. There's some line that I particularly loved in this,
where Echo sings, "I love you, boy, and you love you, too. You love you, too."
So, Narcissus is a "you" loving himself, undifferentiated from himself, you love you, too.
But then it shifts. You wanted him, and I wanted him, too.
And all of a sudden, Narcissus is no longer a "you," but a third party on him, you loved him.
And I was intrigued by that in the sense that I wondered in what way, no matter how one tries to get a perfect replication of something,
it always ends up being objectified and differentiated.
And at this differentiation, this doubling with a differentiation seemed to be part of it,
and I just wasn't intrigued by why you, if that was what was going on, when you shifted from "you love you," too.
Yeah, that pronoun, that shift of pronoun, is kind of inevitable reification, objectification, that takes place through the phenomenon of Narcissism.
And I don't want to max, wax, metaphysical, or sociological, but I also believe that we live in an era,
which, for which Narcissism is the biggest pathology of a certain kind of consumer society,
where I remember asking a student what would happen to you if your Facebook page disappeared?
And he said, "I think I would cease to exist."
And this is just an example of how Narcissism hides in very many places in our own kind of world,
where the self is thrown out there in various forms of objectification.
And the one who is trying to break through it in a kind of declaration of love to that person,
more often than not these days, it seems to me it has to negotiate the narcissistic quotient in the other.
And it's both ways, it doesn't have to be only one way or the other way.
And in that regard, we're kind of all cut in this trap where the "I" becomes "you,"
Narcissism speaks to himself in the second person.
And the "you" becomes a "he," so there's an underlying, you know, these lyrics,
there's a kind of broader horizon of reference.
Well, that's terrific.
Also, I must say as an opening, the first lyric song in the album,
that it ends with Echo having the last word, even though as you point out,
an Ovid Echo can't help but have the last word, but in the song,
because Echo is the narrator of the singer, in some sense, Echo trumps the narcissism,
that the acoustic, the word, the lyric, the ongoing sound is going to beat anybody trying to fall in love with a picture.
And it just seemed like a wonderful way to start an album.
On the same topic, it's not that we're going to only stay on the land of lyric analysis,
because the music on the album is so wonderful.
But I'd like to ask Dan Elesdin, who wrote some of the songs on the album,
a kind of follow-up question to the same idea of this doubling.
And one of the things I noticed in your lyrics, when I wish I could quote many of them,
but what I would call, I guess probably everybody would call it, internal rhyme,
couldn't we possibly be lovers, or every power wants its hour in the sun.
Now, Rock there is always rhyme, I'm almost always rhyme, but that's that rhyme.
But you have a lot of internal rhyming in your writing.
And of course, perhaps thinking too hard on this album, I got intrigued by that,
and I thought, so what is internal rhyme?
What's it doing?
And so I just opened it up to you, I mean in some sense it sounds good,
but I'd just like to hear what you thought you were doing and how that might relate to other issues of doubling in the album.
And the album.
Loth, that's a great question, and I'm not sure I have a great answer.
I think there's something about internal rhymes that makes me think of monologues
and interior monologues, a kind of muttering to oneself,
and sort of constantly going over the same words, the same topics, the same sounds.
And pretty much all of the songs I think that I wrote on this album are really characters talking to themselves,
and even in Ophelia, there's a shift from an initial...
I mean, there is an address to Hamlet, and yet it's to an absent Hamlet.
And Helen is much more in this meditative mode, thinking back on her own past.
And I guess I've just always thought of internal rhymes in this sort of under your breath talking to yourself kind of way.
So you're saying that it's a part of a kind of process of thinking out loud?
Yeah, and maybe of doubling of the self within your own speech, that you're addressing, you know, yourself at another time,
as in Helen's case, or an Ophelia's case, maybe addressing a scene or a version of herself.
I like that.
So as soon as I'm talking to myself, I've already turned myself into a third party, and I have to listen, so I can... Nice.
While we're on the subject of some of the songs you wrote, talk to me a little bit more about Helen.
I know the elia didn't also Helen pops up in Greek tragedy, and I quoted some part of the canto, second canto where she appears in some way.
And you make her a woman who's bored, and out of boredom wants to start a war.
And where do you get that?
Because I don't think I find it.
Well, to be honest, I actually get this from Rassin's "On Romach", because in Rassin, he tells the story, actually, of another character,
Rarmach, another survivor of the war.
And in his case, and Rarmach-E is constantly lost in this new world, a world of history, really,
and thinking back on a past world, a world of myth, even going too far as crying all the time, as if she's trying to distort what she sees,
so that she can imagine that she's still living in the past.
And that was really the way I think about Helen and more generally about the Trojan War, that it's sort of the moment in which myths become history,
and we're no longer in a timeless age, an age which ultimately could be very boring.
In "Elo-temporé", if nothing happens, then you might want to jumpstart things.
And so that's...
So it's Helen wanting to move from Mr. History?
Yeah.
No, it's just so funny, because there's a book six, as you know, in the earlier she's interviewed by Hector who's talking to her and Paris,
and she has this wonderful self-deprecating soliloquy where she says, "Oh, dogs that I am.
Why did I do this?" Well, Zeus must have had this in mind in order that Paris and I would be heroes, and about in future song,
that basically it's not so much out of boredom, but some divine inspiration to have something remembered as art.
Well, I think that's...
Once you've moved from a world of timelessness and of perhaps just a ritual, and you enter a world of history,
maybe that's necessary in order for the very idea of art to emerge, something that would be more about memory and about trying to relive the past.
When the past is seamlessly part of your present, then you don't need that kind of echoing again.
Nice. One other thing, because we're hearing some of the track underneath our conversation.
This one opens unlike any of the others with some trumpet.
And one...
Listen to the album, told me one, "No, that's the war trumpet, but it's Hans to me sort of mariochi."
So I wanted to...
What are these trumpet?
Well, I think, musically, I was more inspired by the sketches of Spain, by Miles Davis, and yeah, it is a kind of a more of a mournful trumpet.
I can't say that it really has a clear interpretation in my mind. It just seemed to work there.
Nice. Well, while we're on your songs you wrote, I wonder if we could shift and talk just quickly about a failure,
and maybe in the background play a little of that song in particular.
So what I'd like to ask now, Dan, is the way you worked with Robert.
You wrote the lyrics of this song, but there's a part in a failure in which it sounds to me, as a non-informed cure,
that she's losing it. And she's losing it not in her language, but in music.
And since I guess the guitar is indicating her frame of mind or loss of mind.
And I ask a question because I'm intrigued by how people collaborate on a project like this. Clearly there's a lot of it or it wouldn't be so integrated and connected.
So could you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, I think what we wanted to use, especially the solo part of this song, was to sort of fill in the storyline.
I should say that we played around a lot with the structure of this song. There was actually a third verse where we were literally quoting the Shakespeare, but everyone kept on saying that we didn't know that it was from Shakespeare.
It was with this third verse, it's on the strain. So, boy, William got the axe.
But then Robert really, you should talk about the solo, because he didn't really, the work of turning this into an interpretation of her mental breakdown.
Yeah, well, that's in the case with many songs of Dan's word. There was a solo that was expected.
I thought long and hard about the theme of the song and tried to reflect the theme in the way I composed a solo.
In the case of Ophedia, I tried to have a solo that was very suggestive in terms of being on the edge of order and disorder.
And introducing subtly, not over dramatically, various dissonant notes within the pentatonic scale, in order to create the sense that there's some imbalance.
And beginning with the kind of tremolo effect, and actually we can give a listen to the solo, which is coming up right now. Terrific.
[Music]
Terrific.
That was with guitar and piano too at a certain point when the tension gets very high, the piano and the guitar are actually in perfect
synchronous key, I think.
And Dan, you do the piano, right? Yeah. Wow. All right. So, it's a move from, sorry for my bifurcated mind, but to move from the music to the lyric.
After that, sort of dissonant solo, Ophedia says, "Why can't you decide which hero to be, presumably addressed to Hamlet?"
And I was intrigued by that line, Dan, because I guess I'm just intrigued by the question of, well, okay, how much choice is there involved?
No, I know Hamlet's simply emotional choices, but to decide what kind of hero you want to be, that's different from a standard choice.
Just decide what we're going to do with Hamlet gets to decide what kind of hero is going to be. So is this a heroization that a few makes of Hamlet or is it Hamlet's role?
Yeah, I guess Hamlet's problem was usually framed in terms of deciding on his general identity, but it's, does he have the choice of just having a normal identity or is part of the problem that he's stuck within these heroic options?
And I think what we tend to forget when we read the play as being just about Hamlet is that, sure, it's tough on Hamlet to have to make up his mind.
But it's also really hard to live with somebody who can't make up their mind. And he has this just generally unsettling effect on everyone around him.
And ultimately, the truly tragic characters are perhaps the secondary characters who have, in many instances, sort of the less heroic deaths too.
Hamlet gets to go a nice way, but a few of you are really...
Let's draw a suicideism, as I recollect this problematic for the church, it would have been her.
Right.
So, kind of some kind of weird limbo.
Can I move to a larger question, and I'd love to get you and Robert to talk about it, and I made some claims which I think are manifest in the album,
and intelligent design, that the sequence of songs is shaped that...
Although I didn't say this, I would say it now, that, besides the frame, the sort of river of ocean around these songs that you get in the shield of Achilles and book 18 of the earlier, the sense that the ocean is around all of this world in which we have our little moments in the sun.
And there are these almost paired antithetical movements throughout the album.
I mean, you have narcissists of self-love versus this creature who's longing for someone to be made that he can love, and of course is denied it.
You have Lolita, this little vixen constructed by Humberton, in a way, not sure she wants to play the role versus Nausica, who's dying to have this man who's fallen on her shores, as if a god by a god, and of course can't because he's already taken.
Helen, who wants to have a board and wants to have a war, followed by a failure who's mired in this, in some effort to replicate Hamlet's own madness, and of course drives her crazy.
Then you have Mrs. Bennett, the mother of all mothers, followed by Freud, very interested in the problems of the emerge out of mothers and fathers, and then ending up on the Erosantanatos of Annabelle.
Now, okay, so I've just given you a little tour, and then we go back to the moment again. So my question is, is this in my head, or is this in the album?
And if it's in the album, how did you put it together? Because it's a very intriguing thing, and it just for me, it just lifts this thing off the charts.
Well, Russia, you know, if there weren't any intelligent design before, there is now.
You have made it the fact of the album. I think that the coherence that you find in the lineup of songs is actually a lot of it is not as intentional as it sounded in your recapitulation.
But that's the way art works. Sometimes there is unconscious, subconscious things that are in play. I think when we were working on the songs sequence, I think it was Christy and I who did a lot of that deliberation about actually the musical moods of various songs, and not to have two abrupt transitions in the mood, but at the same time not have too many groupings of the same types of songs, too many of the mellows songs together.
So we tried to mix it up musically, but at the same time give a sense of a kind of unfolding on the musical level, especially on the second half of the album, how we would get to a crescendo, and what kind of final message we would leave listeners with assuming that listeners listen to albums in their entirety, which these days it's not a given at all, as you know.
I have to say I completely understand and respect the notion that a lot of things that happen aren't consciously planned. I mean, I work in the theater and it happens all the time. You think you know what you're doing and my goodness gracious, did we just do that? We did. Did we know we were doing that? No. Wow. In retrospect, look what we did. So I'm into that completely.
But it's intriguing. I mean, I listen a lot about Dylan and there's all these tapes and you know, but could keep coming out and songs that never got into the album and you go, "Why the hell didn't he include that song?" And I'm such a great song. So I guess in some times I'm wondering, was there anything on the cutting room that any songs you lost, you know, things that dropped out that, you know, got, looks sounded good at the time and fade away because it does, I must say it does feel planned, but feels not inevitable.
It feels not inevitable. That's not right, but it feels only the logical. It has an artistic logic to it. I guess I put it like that. Yeah, actually, it's interesting. You say that because we did leave a few songs out and I think it was because we felt that they didn't have a place on the album. Yeah, the genre was, the first song we ever did together, the lyrics written by Dan was a blues song called Gilgamesh Blues based on the epic of Gilgamesh.
And it rocks as very bluesish, but it, generically, it didn't seem to fit with the mood. It was a two abrupt kind of shocking transition of register. So, regretfully, we kind of put it aside and say, we'll save it for another kind of album where it wouldn't stand out so much. So we wanted, I think, a whole that had a certain kind of dominant mood to the song with variation in the song.
I guess what's interesting is that we also really did not go about looking for a single style. And I think on the contrary, each song we really tried to take in a pretty different direction. So in a way, it's quite fortunate that they did cohere in this way.
And we had it more of a central, you know, frugal approach to writing. That sounds like artists.
Any audience I know. Don't fence me in. Yeah. Well, I have to say that in my little reprise of the album, it emphasized sort of, I guess, intellectual themes.
But in fact, as you pointed out Robert, I think, the album has many, many musical pleasures and I simply, simply musical pleasures, wonderful instrumental work and all sorts of things. And I'd like to, in that regard, if we could, to play a fair bit of my favorite song on the album, if I'm allowed to have one, which is Mrs. Bennett.
I just say a little bit about Mrs. Bennett. She's the last character in the world you'd think would be the central figure of a pop song. I mean, she's this talkative, not particularly intelligent to a woman who's trying to line up rich husbands for her daughters and the lyrics of the song take her to be also someone with a with a sexual lie. Not only looking at their pockets, but, you know, what's underneath their pockets.
And we kind of wall over they packing and it's quite wonderful really. And I love the music. So I hope we could play some of that maybe talking about it in that.
We can play it. Let me just say a word about Mrs. Bennett. It's the one song where we felt that we were getting very heavy and many of the other ones that we needed a few songs that would lift the spirit a little bit.
And so this is one of the few songs that actually has a element of parody in it because one of the real things that we wanted to avoid is the notion that we're academics. We're engaged in a side operation and that basically don't take us seriously. We're just having fun and parody is a way of self defense.
We didn't we wanted to be taken seriously. And Mrs. Bennett though is the one song that flirts with the ironic parody. And it's about a mother who in the history of literature, there's not been a
one character who has been more successful in her endeavors or his endeavors than this woman that everyone loves to hate who.
The end of Pride and prejudice is beyond any possible dreams you could have had when the story began where she gets not only Bingley married to Jane, but she gets Darcy to Elizabeth.
And then her youngest daughter, Lydia, is already married to this scoundrel, Wickham, but there's a suggestion in Jane Austen that she has a particular identification with Lydia, the mother, and that she was a Lydia when she was young and she was also a uniform chaser.
And so she has a particular kind of weakness for Wickham. So that's maybe we can. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, let's listen to this. And the guitar is wonderful. This is a really fun song.
[Music]
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