the brief

the second song in the lily genre, a bluesy 'bugger off, you're not welcome back in our lives' and the song that seems to give the genre its name (it doesn't)

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I had come across a youtube video of Candy Dulfur and David A Stewart performing their song Lily was here sometime in 2019, and just really liked it. The saxophone is a favourite instrument and the song had a very different vibe to my idiot musant ears. It felt like something out of a much earlier decade, though I couldn't pin it down. The 1920s? 30s? 40s?

Watching the video, I also couldn't figure out the song's intricate call and response between two guitars and two saxophones, in part because I found the video choppy and confusing. I'm a visually dominant learner, and the video's cacaphonous images overwhelmed my ability to hear and process the music. I couldn't 'auralize' how a vocal could possibly fit in, and almost gave up on the song until sometime during the fall of 2020 when I started closing my eyes to just listen.

That turned out to be the key to the song for me, and lyrics from the chorus soon followed.

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lily was here
lily was here
you can say i said to say
that lily was here

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It was the 41st karosong to start channeling, the first in the 3.3 set, and the first with a female 'collaborator'. It was also the 2nd song in the lily genre, though the song was finished before I figured that out.

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Along with the chorus, I also got a sense of the story, that "Lily" had come looking for a man who had abandoned her and their child. But the song didn't start active channeling until after that Christmas, during the pandemic lockdown winter when I'd completed the 3.2 set and started channeling the 3.3 set sub-vocally.

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and you can say i said to say
our little girl's fine
fact i'm glad to say
things are going real good for us now

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For a karosong, it came pretty quickly, almost all the lyrics in just the first two months of subvocal channeling. The more the lyrics came, the more I really liked the song's assertive, even — pardon the expression — ballsy narrator. Lily was a woman who had fallen apart, found her own way through, and was now setting down boundaries for what she would accept in her life. It was the kind of 'not gonna take no more shit' tune I could hear a Tina Turner sing.

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but when you walked out that door
i nearly fell to pieces
it was our little girl pulled me through

she was my rock
she was my star
leading me through the darkness
Into the light

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Not that I could sing it like Tina Turner. Still can't. Never will.

But You can say i said was one of four 3.3 songs coming at a time the whole/full karo was pushing forward and my vocals were improving rapidly. All four songs felt as though their purpose was in part to express those new vocal capabilities, to pull them out of the melody and lyrics, to find unexplored deliveries and nuances.

But which came first? The increased vocal capabilities? or the songs that demanded them? Not so much a rhetorical question without answer as a meaningless distinction.

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Many karosongs 'finish' but have one or more small sections of lyrics and/or delivery that elude me for weeks, months, even years in a few cases. These sections are often what I see as the song's fulcrum points, where the song shifts or otherwise reveals key parts of its narrative.

For this song, that missing fulcrum came at the end of the first verse, where the vocal throws to a thumping instrumental solo. I 'understood' that transition, could feel how the vocal had to be to make the transition work, but couldn't figure it out. I was missing something in the lyrics or the delivery.

Lily's assertive personality came through to break the impasse. It was laughter that was missing.

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neighbour said you came round the other day
said you wanted to talk bout getting back together

well listen buddy, maybe you forgot
it was you walked out
what makes you think you can walk back in?

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One recording session, I suddenly felt to start a smiling, almost a chortle, laugh on the "listen buddy" line and carry it into the next "it was you walked out" line. The new delivery felt close, so close, but there was still something missing. Some part of Lily's personality that still needed to come out.

Scorn.

I suddenly felt to transition the delivery of "what makes you think you can walk back in?" from that smiling laugh at the start to a suddenly dead-serious challenge at the end. Getting that transition right vocally took several sessions. It was challenging but quite fun to let Lily's voice come through mine.

And that was the throw to the instrumental, and the fulcrum to the second verse where Lily lays down the law.

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and you can say I said
don't come back around
far as me and the girl's concerned
you might as well be dead

when you walked out the door
you made a choice
we had to live with it then
now so do you

so go start your life somewhere else
we'll wish you luck with that
but if you ever turn up at our door again
well, there'll be words

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Post-script

Being the observant fellow I am, I noticed very early that the song's narrator was a woman. I wasn't surprised or taken aback. In my understanding of the universe, biological sex and social gender are just ephemeral identities that we put on for a given physical incarnation. At our deeper levels, we have been both male and female. And we have experienced every kind of socially-defined gender role. So to channel a song from a female point of view was not beyond the pale.

Then another song with a female narrator started to channel, Since you went away 3.3 (with Cancion Triste by Jesse Cook). It also featured the narrator speaking directly and bluntly to a partner about their relationship.

I first thought this might indicate another flavour of karosong, call it a lily-karo. But the songs were so similar that didn't feel quite right.

And then I remembered the 3.2 song As darkness falls (with Once by Jesse Cook). It also had a female narrator, something I'd known but not paid much attention to when it came. And it too had the narrator speaking directly to a partner.

The three songs were not a flavour, I concluded, but a genre, a specific way of telling a specific kind of story. Think film noir detective tales.

The lily-genre.