Patreon Q&A #2 - Songs That Never Got Old, "Tanglewood Tree" unraveled, and "Perfection" in Performance (Patreon)

Hi friends,

Thanks again for these though-provoking questions. Once again, we have an audio file and a transcript, whichever you prefer. Please feel free to ask follow-up questions if I somehow missed the mark ~ tg

TRANSCRIPT: 

Hey everybody! Welcome to the second installment of the Patreon Q&A. In this one, I'll answer questions from Ron Greitzer, Robert Chandler, and Karl related to performance and songwriting and, specifically, the song “Tanglewood Tree.” So here we go!

Ron Greitzer asks: You told me once that in the Dave and Tracy touring days, it could sometimes be difficult getting into doing this or that song for the many-hundredth time. Was there a song you always loved to perform?

Well, Ron, yes. There were many. I always loved, and still love “The Mountain,” which has become kind of a soul song for me. And I always loved “Tanglewood Tree,” which started with Dave’s fantastic sermon and ended in stunning counterpoint vocals, always a show-stopper, always satisfying. There was “Farewell to Saint Dolores,” for the spare arrangement, the poetry, and the challenge of hitting those yodel harmonies just right. “Hey Conductor,” because it was silly and fun, and I got to switch from mandolin to violin in the middle of the song. And how could I not love “I Go Like the Raven,” written expressly for my voice and fiddle, and, I’m guessing, for my empowerment. “When I Go.” “Cowboy Singer.” The list of songs that never got old goes on and on.

But there were a few that I tired of. Cover your ears, Ron, you won’t want to hear this, but “Kate and the Ghost of Lost Love” actually wore on me after a little while. Its formal composition and rather desperate lyrics made it feel staid and even a bit saccharin amid the grittier songs Dave had begun writing. “Ordinary Town” was challenging because Dave wanted to play it much faster than I did, so we always had this little tug of war happening on stage over the correct tempo. And I had a weird feeling about “Disappearing Man.” Audiences found it powerful, and so did I on some level, but so much of our story seemed to be written into those verses. The yellow rags, the chasm. And what was I to make of that last line — “you don’t need him anymore?”  — when I knew full well Dave meant himself? Now the line seems prescient, and given my premonitions about his early death, maybe my reaction to the song makes sense. But that one always gave me a peculiar feeling.

All that said, the songs I loved to sing definitely outnumbered the others; I hope I’ve made that clear. Thanks for the question, Ron!

We’ll move on now to Robert Chandler's question, which relates to “Tanglewood Tree.” He asks, “How long does it take from first thought to concert level perfection of a piece like “Tanglewood Tree” and what are the stages?” Karl followed this up with: “Yes yes yes, anything and everything about “Tanglewood Tree,” specifically :). It was the song that introduced me to your and Dave's music many years ago, and it still seems so amazing to me!”

Well, Karl, it still seems amazing to me, too!

We’ll address the songwriting first — what Robert calls “first thought.” 

I can’t tell you about the moment Dave Carter conceived this song, but I can share with you something from an interview that we gave to Music Matters Review right around the time Tanglewood Tree came out. He was asked about this song in particular, and this was his answer. He said:

Love, in my experience, begins beautifully but very often turns complicated and constricting. It’s like a beautiful garden that usually grows completely out of control, and pretty soon your pleasant walk in the grove turns into a nightmare of clinging vines and poison nettles. Love begins in roses but often ends in thorns. That’s what the song’s about. And I just loved the sound of the words ‘tanglewood tree.’ I thought maybe the Everly Brothers, in some fantasy time and place, might be doing a song that went ‘love is a tanglewood tree,’ so I just wrote what I thought that song might sound like. Of course, I took it too far to have it still sound that much like an Everly Brothers outing, but hopefully some of the same essence remains.

Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer, Tanglewood Tree album shoot, Portland, Ore. © 1999 Brent Hirak. 

I had not yet met Dave Carter when he composed “Tanglewood Tree” but I wish I had. Then, maybe, I could give you more context for how the song came to be. If I’ve learned anything about art-making it’s this: there’s really no part of an artist’s life that doesn’t somehow find its way into the work. If I’d known what he was practicing or teaching or studying at the time; who his friends were, how he spent his free moments, and what he was reading, watching, or listening to; if I’d known what season it was, whether he was in a depressive or happy state, what some of his plans and dreams were, and whether there was a song or a snippet that came before that could be considered a progenitor, then maybe I could tell you more. For a short period of time, he was stalked by a woman who mistook his charming affect for flirtation; did he write this then? And how interesting would that be? But alas, these are questions I don’t have answers to. So we’ll have to be content with what he told us, and let the rest of the mystery be.

By the time I met Dave in 1996, he was already playing “Tanglewood Tree” with a four-piece band. I joined as the violin player, and at an early rehearsal he handed me the sheet music for the violin solo. I played it through a few times and soon had it memorized. You ask how we put these songs together for performance. For the Dave and Tracy duo, sometimes it was just that easy.

But early on, when we had a band, considerable work was involved. Dave had specific arrangement ideas — this was his compositional training coming through — and we were a very giddy, monkey-minded group. Our rehearsals in Eric Park’s living room often dissolved into gut-twisting laughter over just how badly we were botching Dave’s beautiful songs. The concert-level perfection of which you speak, Robert, was not ours as a group to attain. But we held rehearsals; we recorded ourselves on cassette and listened back for areas that sounded rough and needed work, if they weren’t already obvious. And then we played little cafe shows and Saturday Markets and the more we played, the more we gelled as a band, and the more we gelled, the more satisfying the performances became, at least to the extent that what was generally supposed to happen did, and there weren’t too many surprises.

Still, we never drew much of a crowd — I’m not kidding when I say that the five of us often outnumbered the audience — but we had fun. And there is a measure of perfection in that, isn’t there?

When the band drifted apart and Dave and I became a duo, I had a lot of new material to learn; namely, the harmony and counterpoint vocals. But from my time in choruses and small orchestras, I’d learned to pick out other sections’ parts because I loved knowing — and feeling — how the lines wove together. So I had this capacity for the kind of complexity Dave wrote into songs like “Tanglewood Tree,” and I’d learned many of the new parts by absorption well before we became a duo. 

As a duo, Dave and I rarely rehearsed. We had a decades-deep foundation of musical training between us, and because we both had roots in classical and country music, we shared a certain sensibility about instrumentation, arrangements, style, and vocal delivery. But most important was this unspoken agreement that our number one priority was to serve the song. No fancy licks, no showing off for its own sake; if a part didn’t elevate the story in one way or another, we didn’t use it. Concert-level perfection takes on a new meaning then: it becomes less about technical precision and more about questions like: Did we convey the story? Were people moved? Did the delivery feel compelling, aligned, and honest? Did we achieve total unity, becoming one with each other and one with the song? 

When conditions are right and the delivery aligns perfectly with intention and the audience is clearly in the zone — this is the moment of transcendence, and it is the best any performer can hope for. Such moments are rare, in part because there are so many factors in performance that are beyond the artist’s control, but the point is this: technical skill will not get you to that transcendent place on its own. You must show up with your whole soul and invest every cell of yourself into your performance each time you take the stage. You must go in service of something higher, and not give up when the magic seems elusive. It’ll come. It’ll surprise you. And once you have a taste of it, you will spend the rest of your performing life looking forward to the possibility it’ll happen again.

Thanks for the questions, everybody! I’ll be back with the third installment in a few days.

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