Note: The following songs, originally on this CD, were re-mixed and included on the CD "Jacquerie":

Soul Rendezvous (The Lobbyist's Song)
Frogs Will Never Fall from the Sky
Highway 10
Ash Wednesday

Rooster Stories

For years, when I was doing a lot of home recordings, my family used to give me weird percussion instruments for Christmas. I built up quite a collection and became very interested in percussion as a way of coloring music and sound. One instrument was this cheap metal squeeze clacker with two spring-loaded roosters hitting a small cymbal a split second apart from each other. It was beautiful, noisy and annoying.

Until “Highway 10” I never found much use for it other than to irritate my cat Louie. That song is a mess of noise— grocery bags played like accordions to replicate goose-stepping Gestapo, tea canisters full of dried kidney beans—anything that could create an atmosphere of war trash. The ‘rooster’ was used in the chorus/prayer and was a cue for Bill to put the faders up on the full complement of war trash percussion. I had a different arrangement for certain sections of the song, however; so at a specific point I kept telling Bill, “It (a sub-mix of the rest of the trash percussion) comes in after the second rooster.” I said it enough times for him to say, quite inspirationally, “Ed, that’s what you should call the CD.” Brilliant!

I knew from my Catholic upbringing, my reading of Shakespeare, my love of Walter Wangerin’s The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Sorrows, and a slight familiarity with Buddhism, craving and waking roosters and the cocking of the crows have prominent places in literature and mythology. I could not resist. Steve and I went to work and found all sorts of graphic representations—from the Rooster Man to an abandoned frozen rooster farm in the bleak Midwest.
The CD itself was an exercise in serendipity and the title, artwork, and lasting admiration I now have for roosters is evidence of the beauty that is strangeness and how it connects us all and gloriously overpowers us.

I originally planned on recording thirty-plus songs for Trepanning, as I intended it to be a double CD. Even as a single CD with nineteen songs it was too long, but I said nearly what I had to say, leaving some of the religious themed songs off because the whole affair was becoming just too abstract and esoteric. I didn’t know what to do with the leftovers, so I decided to mix what I had in its unfinished state and keep it in my underwear drawer. However, Bill Mason, good friend, fellow tunesmith, and the owner and engineer at Second Story, was very enthusiastic about some of the songs and encouraged me to develop them. So I tinkered with the lyrics on some songs, rewrote entire tunes and re-arranged other recordings through the magic of digital editing. As a result, in some ways I am happier with Rooster than with Trepanning, as the collection is more emotionally manageable for me.

The songs are simpler and uncluttered and look back less literally and more figuratively. Though the Bush Administration is gone and some of the songs on both recording projects seem dated, for me they stand as a history of this wretched period of political and immoral excess. I know I broke a lot of cardinal rules in regard to how songs are supposed to embrace a universal appeal and not speak to a specific age, but I really wanted a record of this era from my point of view. Legitimate art or not, I don’t care. The Bush years were a cancer on America and there was little poetry to it.

One of the greatest offenses of the Bush era was its assault on the concept of faith itself. As an atheist, I have little patience for the mumbo jumbo of organized religion. But I do have an abiding curiosity about things that lie beyond the grasp of reason, or beyond the grasp of my limited understanding. For instance, I’ll never understand the process of inspiration, but I often feel inspired, and it is a palpable feeling which eventually finds its way through the creation of a song and a lyric— concrete things, but fired up, it seems, in the random kiln of the imagination. Logically, I know it’s not that random, as I’ve accumulated enough experience in literature and music to concoct words and music, but the elusive tenets of melody and the abstractions inherent in compressing language into poetry are hard to quantify by experience. In terms of rational or irrational behavior, I don’t know what triggers courage, but the complex array of emotional and logical switches that make people risk danger to act selflessly for the sake of something or someone beyond themselves is a mysterious process. But I don’t think it’s driven by a god-machine directing us—it’s a human- machine; and I really am quite comfortable with that and want to gravitate in my acknowledgement of that instead of attributing it to something outside of the greater potential and the grace of humanity.

Cheap Grace

Speaking of grace, this CD is subtitled Cheap Grace. It was inspired by one of the greatest sins in religious history: the Vatican’s refusal to condemn the persecution of the Jews during World War II. As a result of this moral indifference to the Holocaust, German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, publicly characterized the Catholic Church’s claim to Grace on Earth as one of ‘cheap grace’. For this, the church turned its back on him and the Nazis imprisoned and eventually murdered him. I use “cheap grace” more humbly here because my lyrical tango with faith and religion is inconsequential in comparison. Yet, I needed to write about religious alchemy and its putrefying effect on America these last several years because it was brought to the forefront of national politics and was used to arouse a frustrated constituency. Clearly, Bush and his policy apostles exploited the religious right for political advantage, and they, in turn, institutionally exploited those who may have genuine core beliefs regarding Christian dogma. [To know that Karl Rove was caught privately snickering at this constituency did not surprise me in the least.] Bush belongs to a long pedigree of demagogues who use religion to scapegoat, divide and construct the visage of the ‘enemy’ out of the Other—the stranger, the immigrant, the minority, the disbeliever, the loner, the freak, the fringe dweller; to the authentically conservative, the homosexual, the liberal, those who sympathize with the poor, the DISSIDENT.

After reading James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, I began to understand the nefarious architecture of building a modern political base on fundamentalism and using it to draw in money and the collective emotional support around core issues to grow a grassroots movement of moral and social change that could institutionalize an acceptable disdain for the Other. As Carroll explores the rotten underbelly of this fundamentalism through the history of anti-Semitism and its current incarnations of Evangelical exceptionalism and homophobia masquerading as pro-family and pro-marriage zealotry, one can see how conservatism is newly defined by this narrow paradigm. Furthermore, Bush’s mantra—“You are either with us or against us”—was not just a rallying cry for his “war on terror,” but a rallying point for the larger tent of narrow, bigoted conservative ideas regarding patriotism, now baptized in the ancillary mantra of “god and country.” Ironically, in effect, he gave religion the bad name it so often historically continues to deserve. Religion in Bush’s world is de-institutionalized and made more palatable as “faith-based.” Who can argue with the benign concept of faith? The argument is loaded with endless loops of metaphysical feedback and the avoidance of logic in preference to platitude.

Politics and religion are naturally divisive. Too often to talk about them is to offend. But to not defend one’s political or religious beliefs is offensive. Faith is also sustained by the possibility that what one knows might be wrong and that knowledge refined is wisdom newly discovered. If wisdom is at the heart of faith, stubborn ignorance cannot be the default position of those who will not argue their faith. I hope my songs contribute to this argument.