12. Dear Mongolia

...how to begin?

Like You Really Care > Really Wish I Could > Who Can Say? > My Father's Hat > Gordon Matta Clark > Mar y Cielo > Vibrations > This > You Know I Know > Who Can Blame Me? > Astray > Dear Mongolia • Mar y Cielo (reprise)

So, here we are on the last song of the album. We saw this as the finale, the final battle, with Mar y Cielo (reprise) as the music for rolling credits.

Here's the final track :

if you're having trouble with SoundCloud :

The Story

The immediate inspiration for this song was the Letters to Mongolia that Amy sent me. I hadn't gotten through half of them before I started writing the song. The lap-lapping of it.

The Letters were in one of the many magical packages we've received here from Amy over the years. To begin to detail these collections would take weeks. They exist as a kind of inspirational stand-in for Amy K. Mimi Allin, an integral part of our family though we have not seen her for more than a decade. She plays the role of our non-resident shaman. She is a poet and artist living in Seattle. At this moment (end of Aug 2016), she is in the middle of performing a piece called In Search of Bas Jan Ader, a 33-day journey in an open boat through the Salish Sea in British Columbia with a letter to Bas Jan Ader on her hull. The artist, Bas Jan, disappeared at sea 41 years ago while performing a work called "In Search of the Miraculous." Amy's piece is part of a multi-year investigation called The Clown which includes her attending clown school in France, and ultimately practicing as a clown in Mongolia. For me, that is the real journey told in the song. The trip that never leaves port yet travels half way around the world just to exercise the yearning for the destination. As many have remarked to me, hey, Mongolia has no shore to land on. It's entirely land locked. Well, guess that makes the journey that much more difficult.

Amy wrote these letters during a residency where she lived in an art gallery in Seattle. Here's how it was described :

HAM--Hold, All Movement is the title of Allin's project, for which she built a 8' x 11' hold (think of a ship's hold) within the P:SA studio & outfitted it with a cot, teapot, personal library & communications station (shortwave, marine VHF & HAM radios). She then earned her Technician's Class Amateur Radio License (in 2 weeks she'll be issued a call sign by the FCC!). An official Ham, Mimi is now residing full-time in the hold, listening to radios by night & turning that info into gestures by day. Radio gestures. At the end of her residency, she'll present this work in 3 public shows. O yes, and she's been eating ham (pink organic meat) everyday during her residency. Mmm.

Informed by Amy's own South Sea voyages, the letters describe, in sometimes beautifully mundane detail, months at sea on route to a shore that doesn't exist. This is a story of mutual longing : the dreamer for the dream, and the dream for the arrival of the dreamer.

If you want to get things done, you've just got to start doing and hope you get lost.

Here's the original demo, just piano.

The Recording

This may be the messiest song of the lot.

The original idea was to start tight, in the hold, in the fevered mind of our dreamer, and then expand it out over the ocean, until it sounds as if he were roaring his love adventure in song out to a dark tavern full of drunken sailors, recounting his journey, then realizing he'd actually never left and had imagined it all. So, I think Jon was on tour and we thought we'd try recording this one in The Audience Room where the visual drama is high and there was an excellent piano and perhaps the best tracker pipe organ around. Andrew geared and engineered in that crazy space, and after a long and beautiful day, we had the major dramatic gist.

Carla Kihlstedt was in to lay those strings on Like You Really Care at Brick Hill and I thought she could bring a little color into Mongolia. Instead she strode onto the deck of this old junk of a tune and, in one take, took the helm. Check out everything she's done including her sharp work with Tin Hat and this recent concert with Jeremy Flowers.

One of the first exchanges Jon and I had when I first visited the studio was my remarking on the "thunder drum" he had. He said that thing ends up in every recording somewhere. And the last thing we did was to add the "thunder drum" to the final half of Dear Mongolia. Like the guy in the front of the viking ship calling out whatever is Norse for "Stroke!!!".

I know it's a bit of a mess. I know that this may all be my own fevered head hearing what I want to hear in this. But even if I can just glimpse the shore of what I had wanted it to be, well, that's my Mongolia.

Lyrics

Not yet, Not yet, Not yet begun.

How to? How to? How to begin?

Somewhere, Somewhere where everything

is what it is, is everything

Dear Mongolia, I'm on my way.

cut the lines....

............

Coffee, a radio, a porthole, a pen,

violin, Tolstoy, a destination

Wring! Wring! Wring myself dry.

So as to be able to drink the more

So as to be able to drink all the more.

Dear Mongolia, I'm on my way.

............

I'll be, I'll be down in the hold.

Hold me, hold me, so dark below.

Hanging, hanging up there so far

not saying much, just like a star

too close to touch, I hear the sharks.

I'm keeping watch, and I'm on my guard.

Dear, dear Mongolia, I'm on my way.

............

Of course, I'm off course

Plugging the leaks

So sick, I'm so sick

I feel so weak.

Hold on, Hold on, just close your eyes

I'm there already, just like a dream

I shall want nothing, you're everything

my sails may be empty, but I still believe

............

Let me, Let me knock at your door

the Ocean is dancing me into your shore

Why you? Why me? They all want to know.

Because you are tough, because you have time

Because you are simple, because you are mine

The Desert surrounds you, your door's open wide

You're so temporary, your house is so round

Because of the journey, your ocean so brown

Because you are far, so far away

Oh, because, just because, no reason at all

The cold wind is full, full of your prayers

Dear, dear Mongolia, I'm on my way.

Not yet, Not yet begun. Dear, Mongolia, hold on.

music and Lyrics by Humberto

based on Letters to Mongolia by Amy K. Allin

Carla Kihlstedt : violin

Humberto : piano, pipe organ, vocals, thunder drum

Aaron Mayo : guitar

Jon Evans : bass

Jim Snider : bass

Andrew Fietek : drums

Iain Ellis : drunken sailor

Piano, Pipe-Organ, Guitars and Drums recorded by Andrew Fietek in The Audience Room, Yarmouth Port.All else Recorded, Produced and Brought into a safe harbor by Jon Evans at Brick Hill StudioMastered by Coast in Berkeley, CA

I've set a couple of Amy's poems to music before including this from the Like...This disc :

Walk Toward This Moon :

it was a moon to follow

it was a moon to swallow

it was a hairless moon

the barnacles and seaweed stripped

this last ocean dip must have been acid and turmoil

so walk toward this moon

with your paper cup

and fill it with water

walk toward this moon

with your heavy soul

and sand your edges

such a fool to walk toward this moon

that chalks you and makes you human

walk toward this moon

LISTEN TO THE WHOLE ALBUM : : : AND NOW AVAILABLE ON iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, and all other music platforms.