Day 1: The Fall
“The mere idea of you,
the longing here for you,
you’ll never know how slow
the moments go
’til I’m near to you...”
Today’s Song:
The Very Thought of You
Ray Noble, 1934
You’re scared to believe it could be true.
You don’t know for sure - maybe it’s nothing.
Maybe you made it all up.
But that smile, what they said… what if it were true?
It’s a perfect day for walking to and from the corner store - there’s a soft breeze, so you pull your sweater a little more tightly around you- like a hug- but the sun is shining so, and these butterflies have you feeling so tingly, you couldn’t possibly be cold.
You’re all swoony, and you can’t wait until the next time.
Maybe tonight?
Today’s Cocktail:
Blackberry Bramble
Reason:
Today we’re diving in. Syrupy and deep, dark and luxurious, the bittersweet depths of the blackberry/sugar combination make you almost entirely forget the herbaceous gin and sour lemon at play.
Very much like romantic interludes, just beyond what is delicious and delightful can really pack a punch.
Recipe:
3/4 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz berry liqueur
1/2 oz simple syrup
1 1/2 oz gin
combine simple syrup, berry liqueur, and gin in a cocktail shaker with ice
strain into drinking glass filled with ice*
*optionally, muddle fresh blackberries into bottom of drinking glass with ice and lemon before pouring in the rest of the cocktail
garnish with any fresh blackberries, a sprig of mint, and/or a twist of lemon rind.
For a non-alcoholic variation, sub sparkling water for gin and pomegranate juice for berry liqueur. additionally, garnish with a few juniper berries for gin-like aromatics on the nose as you sip.
The Very Thought of You
The very thought of you
and I forget to do
The little ordinary things
that everyone ought to do
I'm living in a kind of daydream
I'm happy as a king
And foolish though it may seem
To me, that's everything
The mere idea of you
The longing here for you
You'll never know how slow the moments go
'Til I'm near to you
I see your face in every flower
Your eyes in stars above
It's just the thought of you
The very thought of you,
my love
Words and Music by Ray Noble
1934
SONG ORIGIN
The first version:
My favorite version:
This pop standard published in 1934 was first recorded by the orchestra of the songwriter himself, Ray Noble- with Al Bowlly offering the vocal performance. This Victor release reached number one on the pop charts.
An instrumental version was used in the 1934 Warner Bros. film A Little Lost Lady starring Babara Stanwyck and Frank Morgan.
The Very Thought of You has been performed by countless artists including Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Harry Connick, Jr., Natalie Cole, and Michael Bublé and is considered a staple in “The Great American Songbook,” despite the writer’s british origin.
On Recording (and re-recording, and re-recording…)
Alone for a While
Each month, I create a special cover video dedicated to my ongoing Vault supporters.
While working on this album in September of 2020, one of those videos was a version of The Very Thought of You.
At the time, I lived in a 400 sq ft tiny house from the 1930s, and I had only a small 6 by 4 foot area to work out of (recording, live streaming, package fulfillment, everything)!
It was a challenging constraint, but I am so grateful to have had this cozy space to keep me and my little family safe during the pandemic.
However, the thin walls, little insulation, no isolation/doors to close, and loud neighbors did not make for a conducive recording environment (and that’s speaking nothing of getting performances or takes I could live with!).
I really struggled to get the album finished and ended up recording and re-recording many of the tracks until I could land on something I could stand. (That’s my destructive perfectionism for you, right there.)
This video was filmed and distributed at some point during that torturous process of creating the album.
swan dive
At least a decade ago, I was basically homeless. Really drifting. I couldn’t even live in my car because I didn’t have a car.
It all really started because of a housemate struggling with addiction, and it got to the point that I didn’t feel safe there. So I crashed on someone’s couch for a spell.
Then I was gone a lot off and on, touring, and then going to los angeles to participate in the voice, and then touring some more, and then doing the voice again.
It took a while for me to find my footing… for me to be “home” in austin, tx long enough to really rent a room.
I was really lucky that some close friends of mine had a little house on austin’s east side. Then, it was just starting to be gentrified, and a lot of people I knew or hung out with (mostly artists and musicians living below the poverty line) lived there because rent was cheap there in those days.
If I knew I was going to be around for a bit, the friends with the house were kind enough to let me stay in a spare room for a small part of their rent. Other friends’ homes, bars, little eateries, a wine shop, and a corner store were all within walking distance.
For context, it’s probably noteworthy that I mention: most of my childhood was spent moving around so much that I didn’t really get to make many serious friends, or I lived in a sprawling rural area where no one was close by. As a teenager, again, I lived pretty far away from most people I went to school with, and, due to some -in my opinion- overambitious parenting I wasn’t allowed a lot of social time outside of school.
That’s probably a big part of why I felt compelled to strike out on my own just before graduating from high school - I was so exhausted by the isolation, from feeling “separate” from my peers. All I knew about who I was was in my songs, in my journal. I wanted to start living my life outside my lonely tower.
Thus, living in this particular neighborhood in austin at this particular moment in time was something like I had imagined how growing up with neighborhood kids might have been.
If you had an afternoon off, maybe you’d go over to someone’s place, knock on the door, and see if they were free to chat. Or ask, “have you had lunch?” and your day would take on a beautiful ambling life of its own. spontaneous. collaborative. whimsical.
During this period I had also taken to picking up more jazz gigs to support my folk-singer-songwriter (i.e. non-existent) income (and whatever I was bringing in from the part-time day jobs I’d have, then have to quit, between legs of tours) - and while doing that, a mental lightbulb went off. I’d been doing the wrong thing all this time.
I realized my raison d’être was singing these songs- interpreting them and creating my own arrangements- of taking a piece of music written 70 years ago and putting something of myself in it, into making it new.
In the midst of this fresh and exhilarating discovery, I’d acquired a mostly-platonic, though-often-on-occasion-questionable, admiration for a mentor- who, in retrospect, probably should have been kinder to me. At the time, though (and, even I catch myself sometimes now), all I wanted to do was to please and impress him.
There was a sort of electricity when we were together, not because of any romantic implication necessarily, but because we were making things together. I was learning and growing, and getting close to someone. Someone was really getting to know me.
Particularly after a recent, devastating, and abrupt end of a heavy romantic entanglement, this new friendship helped build me back up. To recognize and explore my potential in emotional places where I had become indifferent or even hopeless.
Most nights you’d find me either with or without this friend in the dingy watering holes and jazz spots around town, closing down dives and immediately reconvening in the deepest part of the night with the other wayward souls out so late because we were all seeking something.
Often we’d end up somewhere playing music, in a sort of creation of stolen moments… fantastic transcendent minutes of collaboration that only maybe some of us would sort of remember later. But those highs were so extraordinary that the miserable next-days and lost weekends seemed worth it to me then.
In the years since, I’ve come to recognize the role of this mentor in my life as something of an allegorical Henry Higgins (a character in George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion which was later adapated for broadway and film as the classic musical “My Fair Lady”). In greek mythology, Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has created.
There are many variants of the original grecian story, but, in My Fair Lady, the “sculptor,” Henry Higgins, is a phonetics professor who boasts that he can make a proper lady of a poverty-stricken flower-girl in post-Edwardian London. After succeeding, and subsequently ignoring the part the flower-girl had to play in her transformation, he is infuriated to find she has taken what she learned from him to empower herself. When she asserts herself to him, he negates her feelings and accomplishments, and she moves on.
There is a thread throughout the story though, which implies that beneath the surface, there is a sweet, pure, and true affection and affinity between the two of them… even if they never can see eye-to-eye…
Embarrassing Bonus Videos
Because I felt so desperate to be cared for, to be recognized during this period, it’s no surprise that I added Someone to Watch Over Me to my repertoire. In fact, it’s one of the first songs I learned on the ukulele when I picked it up in 2010. This first cringey video was filmed right about then, during a little solo segment of a full-band Lex Land show here in Austin, TX way-back-when. (For the record, if you asked me to play this song on the ukulele now, I couldn’t do it! 🤣)
Just a couple years later, I was taking learning how to play jazz -and learning its standard catalog of songs- a lot more seriously.
Remember, this is early days of youtube, so the video is basically terrible, but mostly they all were then.
I filmed this in the little back shed at my friends’ east austin house where I was staying at the time. I spent a lot of time back there writing and practicing and learning music, and apparently making a few weird videos like this in the hot stagnant summers while I was waiting for the evening to fall…