the brief

a moody blues-ish meditation on the roots of the planetary, political and societal crises in neoliberal capitalism

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I got several stubs during the first phase, bits and pieces of lyrics that didn't go anywhere at the time. One of these seemed to be about some kind of spiritual place called the 'fold'. Unlike most stubs, this one came with a sense of melody — a moody-blues/pink floyd-ish tune that lifted in tone across the first two lines in each phrase, then dropped to emphasize the last word.

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before there was light
before there was dark
before time
before there was hate
before there was fear
before crime

we've got to get back
got to get back
to the fold
we've got to get back
got to get back
to the fold

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I don't recall much about how this song started. It would have been sometime after I got Then i have to ask, the first stub to become a full song in the third phase. I was searching youtube, looking for potential asynchronous tracks and, yet again, found a Yanni song that 'spoke' to me, and reminded me of the stub because it had a similar lifting up | drop down pattern.

With a little shuffling, the fit between stub and async track was immediately apparent. But the lyrics were already changing, fleshing out.

Getting a bit wierd too.

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way back way back way back
upon a time
before there was fear
before there was hate

before crime fiction

we've got to get back
got to get back
to the fold

way back way back way back
upon a time

like penitent stickmen in a 2D world
we've got to get back
to the fold

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As a practicing idiot musant, I sometimes have trouble 'getting' the structure of a song. Especially when the song's structure is unusual, not your bog-standard verse / chorus // verse / chorus etc.

To the one who knows was one of those. It was chorus / verse / chorus — and then it mirrored itself — chorus / verse / chorus. (I suppose an argument could be made that it merely repeats itself. I just prefer the mirror image.)

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The lyrics and delivery of the four choruses largely came together easily, with variations on the 'way back way back' and "penitent stickmen" lines; enough that I could sense the overall arc of the song, and that the final message would be "there's no going back to the fold".

Whatever that meant.

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But there were two large gaps in the song — the verses. And they stayed gaps for a long time because I couldn't work out the structure in their music. I could feel the rising, the building of Yanni's marvelous slow crescendoes but it was like waiting for a gap in traffic. I could not hear anyplace that I could jump in with lyrics.

So I didn't have a structure into which I could fit the lyrics that were coming, and they just jumbled up, not pegging precisely to a point in the music. For months, I understood the arc of the first verse but I could not get it out.

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there's a place in the human spirit
that i call the fold
it's that place we can no longer see past
where reason and faith diverge

where we become blind

I think of it like a fold in a 2D world where
to any stickman observer
the laws of time and place, cause and effect
would break down

the universe itself would appear to fail

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Ah! Now I got the penitent stickmen reference, but I was still expecting a song with a spiritual message or maybe some bit of esoteric sas.* And the first verse lyrics supported that expectation as they finally clarified and I 'figured out' how to jump into and swim in the song's building crescendo.

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for stickman, it would be a wondrous
mystical experience that he would always crave
so he would always be wanting
to get back to the fold

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And here, I knew, was the money shot. The point of the song. (If I was right about the point of the song.)

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and whatever he thought he had found there
in that blind zone
would become truth, the only possible
impossible to question way

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But I wasn't right about the point of the song. At all. It wasn't a spiritual song, or a nice little bit of sas. It was an eco/poli-flavour karosong.

Oh joy. Last one took 2 years.

But I jumped ahead. So I'll jump back. We apologize for the rough segue. Gravol anyone? No? Gravox?

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I had sensed the first few lines of the second verse for quite a while, and knew they would provide the connective continuity from the first verse. But the rest of the second verse had just been nebulous bits and pieces that didn't cohere.

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i bring this up because we are facing
a fatal fold in our reality
for behind that fold we've created a fairy tale . . .

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Then I finally 'got' the point with just one word. The song was about a fairy tale economy that was eating its own existence.

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. . . fairy tale economy
based on a happy myth of endless growth
except there's no happy ending here . . .

on that myth we've built a casino of greed,
ecological ruin, and the exploitation
of the vast majority
by a tiny ruthless elite

NeoLiberal Capitalism, late stage. Terminal.

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I struggle with eco/poli-flavour songs. This was the third of these, and they had become increasingly direct, pulling no punches. And even though I agree with their messages, even though I have watched our economic and political elites make economic pillaging the be-all and end-all of our societies, these songs push against a still residual sense of journalistic balance from my working life.

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On top of that struggle was the traffic problem redux. A part of my musical disability is the inability to generalize what I've learned. So 'getting' one verse means nothing to getting a different verse. I have to learn each new verse on its own. So I had the same problems working out how to jump into Yanni's music and get the lyrics started.

And those problems were amplified again by the complexity and length of the lyrics trying to crowd into the second verse. In comparison, the first verse was simple.

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and because that system refuses to accept carbon reality
and the limits of a planetary existence, that fairy tale economy
is killing everything it touches, leaving an increasingly dead world for our heirs

it can not last. it won't last. it must not last.

there's no going back to the fold

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Like the other songs in the 3.1 set, Got to get back was a youtube song that came during the period my home studio was packed up and in storage. It was mostly finished by the time I was setup and recording again in spring 2019, but I still struggled to work out the delivery of the verses so that they finished before the next chorus started.

About two years had passed before I thought the song was finally complete.

Wrong again.

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Towards the end of the full karo emerging in 2020, I went back to this song and 'discovered' that I was starting the verses too late in the transition from the choruses, by a couple of bars. Why? Because that was how the song had come originally. Now I found that if I started the verses those couple of bars earlier, the lyrics fit the music comfortably.

I also realized that there are two slightly different styles of spokesong that derive from my background as a poet and educational television writer. ONe style is more like poetry while the other is more like voice-over narration. The verses in this song are the latter type.

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* sas — self awareness shit, gordon's one time pet-peeve name for the teachings of the meditation in his life. Now just a pet name.

No hyphenated euphemisms here.