I can barely remember where the first droplet of this song came from. But I think it went like this:
My computer takes a bit of time to boot and have a habit of doodling at the piano while waiting for the sign-in message. Sometimes this produces the musical version of gibberish but every so often…
Anyway, it’s my opinion that the genesis of this song, that opening piano figure, was a lightning strike and not a light drizzle. You may see it differently. But after I had the piano figure, the whole thing came in a downpour. The first line led to the second which suggested the third and pretty soon I was at the chorus. I will admit that a line from Bob Marley’s Small Axe inspired the hatchet and the tree in the second line, turning Bob’s message of oppressed populism into something pertaining more to carnal justice. Thanks, Bob. You kept me rolling right to the last line of that chorus.
And that’s when it happened. I’ll admit it, I opted for an invented word.
There is no such word as Clandestiny, it’s true. But it just seemed to fit; everything in the lyric that comes before it is like a cloudburst of explanation, as if the definition came before the word instead of after as it does in the dictionary.
Clandestiny is the fate that befalls someone who chooses a life of secrets or more likely of deceipt. That’s how I see it. It’s not a real word but it should be.
The rest of the lyric, with the exception of the chant, just followed from there, like the low rumble after the lightning. I whipped up a quick rhythm track (piano bass drums) so that I could remember the thing. Then I played it to Buck at the end of a session for something else.
I should mention that Buck’s lovely snaky electric guitar line came from something I call blind tracking, meaning that he heard only the groove and not the tune and most certainly not the lyric. Sometimes I do this to try to shake things up—” play whatever you want wherever you want. If I don’t like it, that’s why God made the mute button!” If the player feels the track, you can get some great stuff even without all the elements present. I may have la-la-laed the tune in the room once or twice as he played but I sure didn’t sing the whole melody with a lyric.
Why, you ask? I was not yet committed. I had a lyric with a made-up word, for heaven’s sake! What if Buck hated it? What if I hated it by the next morning? So the blind tracking had two benefits— it freed Buck to play in a looser structure and it saved me from presenting the lyric as finished.
Which, as it turned out, it was not. I wanted something to summarize the distain the singer had for his subject but also something that conveyed the fact that the dread she felt was the product of her own actions. Hence, the “Somebody knows..” part. When I had that, it was then, and only then, that I decided that I had a song. With a made up word… for the title, if you can believe it.
David Partridge