Category Archives: Music

Patrick Brayer SHV60 My Sixtieth Shadow

04 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by in Music, Secrete Hits

≈ Leave a comment

To purchase or sample this collection go to: https://patrickbrayer.bandcamp.com/album/my-sixtieth-shadow

1913 is my dustbowlian stab at the Steinway. I was trying to conjure the spirit of Thelonious Monk without letting talent get in the way. Let’s call it Thelonious Monkey. The piano is the only instrument my mother wanted me to play as a child growing up on a desert egg ranch. So hence I never really played it until after she passed. But it got me to capture a mood I could get no other way, so more or less I am just pretending to play the piano. When we listen to music, although we probably don’t know it, we often think that we control it. I was taking all of that away from you in the sonic dialogue between the keyboard and the voice, forcing the listener to relinquish control of the song, as the bottom dropped out, until you have no choice but to be present in the tragedy. It all just sounds like a joke to speak of it but if you listened to the original recording by Woody Guthrie you will find by comparison that I had indeed moved some molecules around, as well as paying an ancestral tribute to my grandparents who were present there on that very day in history.

Continue reading →

Letters To Hardy

19 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in Correspondence, Memoir, Music, Songwriters, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

PBPh Hardy White Horse neg copy

What comes to mind first when I think of Jack Hardy is “original song”, which is not, as it is often mistaken for, an ‘original sin’ that you can tap your foot to. It is often mistakenly thought that if you wrote the song that it is an “original song”. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  If you pen a song that is no different than any other, then it is not original, it is a fraud.  Jack Hardy showed us a major lesson when he gazed beyond our fraudulent works, not in dismay, but as if he saw the true thing hovering behind, puppet like, in waxen shadow.  We had just brought the wrong thing frontstage.  But like all other magic acts the masters make it look easy.  That spoken, I found Jack Hardy to be sweetly, and dangerously original, so to, to the detriment of his own deserved acclaim.  I and hundreds of others have benefited grandly from his generosity.  When I was penniless and nameless, on the merits of a bedroom labored cassette tape, he flew me, raw boned and blowzy, from my tumbleweed steel town digs in Fontana, California, and plopped me down on the time-honored stage of The Bottom Line in New York City.  It was there and then that I took my place amidst a bevy of real bona fide songscribes, and now I’m proud to say, after what seemed like a dream, the Smithsonian Institute is now grappling with the residue of those tin-horn performances.  Hardy was a perfect representation of himself.  What came so easy to him brought out the compassion to help others, and he kept that up until the day he died. Ultimately Jack Hardy owned a unique style of community that he purposely allowed to overshadow his craft as songsmith. 

He could kick your ass at songwriting, and he could then hang you out to dry if you though to yourself, maybe more creatively than your song, that you might be more compassionate.  The sound of his voice, which of course haunts us a little bit now, was most often that of heart-torn crooning, sometimes like a character actor from an RKO film noir, and yet other times even like Winnie the Pooh picking up gravel with a steam shovel.

Continue reading →

Bouquet of Pitchforks: Lyrics

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

 

SH-V59 Bouquet cov.jpg

 

The only guy who’s honest is the guy who sings in the shower.  Everyone else is a prostitute.

Kim Fowley

 

The collection here, Bouquet of Pitchforks, was recorded in the years 2017-2018 in Ontario, CA (Wrongtario).  In the mastering process I was forced to evaluate a place for a two year body of work (who does he think he is, Cool Hand Luke in prison sweat?).  I sense it might be how maybe an actor feels watching themselves on film (how would he know?), that is to say, at first embarrassed. The struggle is then to stand back (back back a way back) and hear the salty characterization embedded in the song and not of ones own self, barking out bleeding heart insecurities as the whole world’s whipping boy.  The songs are humbly backed by a plethora of imaginary sidemen on steel guitars, fiddles, Weissenborns, and Peruvian charangos.  A band that likes to call itself, The Shadders (Shadows is what he’s a’tryin to mispronounce).  I don’t know off hand who this annoying other voice is over my shoulder constantly but I just can’t seem to shake him (good luck trying).

Continue reading →

Wreckrium: Lyrics

01 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Music

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

SH-V58 cov 72d copy.jpg

The cover image for Wreckrium is one I culled from a Facebook feed of my friend Dieta Duncan.  It was an image that a friend of hers had taken out a backdoor on a ridge in Tennessee during a lightning storm.  I took it and squared it and thought I would try to recreate something with a similar feel.  You can see the wonderful ghostlyness of it. Then I thought why not just ask if i could use it.  I didn’t know, it could be a famous photo, or one taken by a famous photographer.  I contacted Dieta and she said she would contact her friend. The next day she got back to me and said that her friend said to “go with God” concerning the photograph.  Well I translated that to either mean it’s o.k. to use it, or that she would rather see me dead.  I opted to believe the first.  Then I researched the photographer, who’s name was Melonie Cannon, only to find out that she just appeared in a duet with Willie Nelson (To All the Girls…), and that her father was heavy weight record producer Buddy Cannon, who just finished producing Alison Krauss’ upcoming offering, Windy City.  Even before i knew all of this I was already contemplating wether it was wise to use an image that was so much better than the album. Then I thought, hey, you only live a bunch of times!

Someone kindly suggested that it might be better served if it had an image of my face on the cover.  “That would be false advertisement”, I responded.  My face is not what’s on the inside.  A big lightning bolt in a pissed of sky is way more accurate as to what you’re getting for your money.

Continue reading →

Craig Smith / Rounder Records CD 0357

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by in Music, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

craig smith : liner notes / patrick brayer

Craig Smith yng-2.jpg

When I think of the city of San Bernardino California, I think of a desert dust devil at a yard sale flinging a tattered moo-moo into a sun streaked sky. My suspicion towards divine intervention was once coalesced through that same paradoxical valley of smog and hard wind, amidst the early seventies, when I met a 16 year old Craig Smith. What could be more unlikely, I questioned, seeing the Virgin Mother of Guadeloupe in mud on the door of a Buick Riviera, or an Inland Empire surf rascal with shoulder length blonde hair being in love with, and mastering an Appalachian syncopation, alone and in the dark of his room. I have come forward to give Smith his due credit for the years of working with a clock maker’s precision at his craft, in the humblest of self defined manners. The musical notes are just the residue of the dedication. An applied dedication to create something mysteriously transparent to everything but the heart. That long drawn byproduct is manifest in the commodity called “tone”. Try to steal it and it turns and follows a tumbleweed up the San Gabriels. Segovia had tone, Django Reinhardt had tone, God knows Earl Scruggs lathered with tone. And tone comes from one place, and that place, my life of contemplation tells me, is “the house of process”. The love of the process of music is so much bigger than the music itself, that when the material tries to stand on it’s own, it is almost always considered illusion.

Continue reading →

Brayer Archives Signed Instrument Museum

05 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by in Instruments, Music

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

,

I’ve always allowed the musical instruments of my life to influence me more than I did actual people. Then at one point I thought to maybe somehow join the two, to adhere the human influence with the tone wood. When they are all put together like this I feel that they tell an extra-dimensional story to and beyond me, which affirms in it’s own biography, of what I have been pointing myself at, and into, as far back as I can even remember, that maybe, just maybe, all this is not a fluke.

When debating with long time friend John York about the subject of what we ourselves are actually doing in the arts, we kept coming back to the same conclusion, that what we do is plain and simple “beauty recognition”. There is no higher job, nor one more transparent to the ego. Just even the story of the history of the luthier’s craft here, and the voice given to a sawn tree, should be enough in itself. But I like layers and layers there are. For me, it’s not just the fact that they represent periods of American history, they are embedded with my own particular time phases, and then, not to mention the songs I’ve written on them, which there contain little head-of-a-pin portraits of threadbare family and foothill friendships, swaying naturally, because no one is watching. All this ending in, or bottoming out, in a sort of mythological lore.

Sometimes I was inspired by the shear humor of it, like getting author Joan Didion to sign my Dan Electro Longhorn bass. Still profound, perhaps diamond witted, but it was worth it just for the devilishly sweet cut-eye look in her eyes.

bradbury-chirango.jpg

Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and The New York Times once heralded him as “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.”

Continue reading →

You Gotta Start a Trinity Somewhere

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Music, My Journal

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , ,

One electrifying set of childhoodish memory came rushing back to me today as I sat to watch a documentary film celebrating the career of record producer Ahmet Ertegun. The 1969 memory in question was presented to me via an old stand up, spring-motor driven, hand cranked, rosewood cabinet victrola that was stored in my grandfather’s house. I was fifteen years of age and just noticing, frightened by the stillness, how lonely it was in his empty house after his passing. I then happened across the player, and a clumsy black stack of musty shellac discs. It became my secret place of solace, and I hid in the listening, and it became the soundtrack of my life because nobody else wanted it. When you have three other siblings, and no money, you acquire your power where ye may. It was there that I stumbled across one particular 78RPM recording of one Big Joe Turner doing, Shake, Rattle and Roll on Atlantic Records.

img_0662.jpg

Continue reading →

Video

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Music

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

This is the song adaptation chronology of my slide guitar version of, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn.

My first experience with the tune was in my teens from the Harry Smith LP box Collection on Folkways Records, a folk goldmine which my brother Mike and I would wrangle from the Fontana Library every chance we could.  The song was originally titled The Lazy Farmer Boy.

Here’s a link to that first influential 78RPM recording, which was recorded for Columbia Records in 1931 by Buster Carter and Preston Young

Continue reading →