Recorded: 4-track cassette, 1991.
Originally Released: The Little Band (in a different version).
Now Available: Poison Against Poison, 2005.
Download: mp3
“Imagine You’re Flying” was the first tune I wrote after my first five good pop tunes that was any good. I haven’t played this live in years, but I can actually conceive of myself still doing so.
In the time between “One of the Lucky Ones” and this tune, more or less a year, I wrote a lot of pretty genuine crap. I turned very distinctly away from pop, and lyrically wrote only one piece that had anything to do with romantic relationships, called “What Your Heart Can See,” which I never really thought was particularly great but which had nothing wrong with it, and which came out on Duckweed Records’ Mind Monkey many years later. Lyrically, I wrote some sort of fantastic stuff, drawing on stuff I’d learned in school. Very good as an exercise in broadening one’s subject matter, but as it happened not much good for listening.
I have told people that the reason I made of point of writing good lyrics was fear of embarrassment. It’s not a noble motive, but in my case it got me through to a point where, having developed some technique as a writer, I could actually focus on more interesting reasons to write well, such as having something to say. “Imagine You’re Flying” is a perfect example. I was in my last semester of college and not simply not highly motivated but, taking it further, highly unmotivated in my studies. I took a creative writing class, thinking that, OK, this won’t be too taxing. It wasn’t, but I made a habit of writing my pieces for that evening class in a very dry afternoon history class that met on the same day. This was too much even for me, and the stuff I brought to the class stunk to high heaven.
One piece I wrote was about a guy who went to Tijuana for a bender and met up with a Mexican friend once there. This to me was a reasonable subject matter, as I’d known too many people who’d made a habit of doing that, growing up in San Diego. I knew nothing about it: I’d never done that kind of thing myself, and the notion that the San Diegan would actually have a Mexican friend was, given the context implausible. I got called on the carpet for shoddy craftsmanship and for misunderstanding the political context of the episode. I mention this because the germ of the idea later became “12 O’Clock Sharp,” very probably my strongest piece on the first (and only completed) House Carpenters’ record. It also bears mentioning because, having my tail between my legs, I decided to write something good.
Late at night, when the sun goes down
And the evening spreads its wings,
I’m sitting down upon the shoreline
Just a-changin’ my guitar strings.
I play, oh I play to the seagulls
Though they can’t know what I say.
It does not begin to bother me.
It doesn’t really matter anyway.
I left from the place where I came from
And I settled in the West.
It just happened like an accident.
It ain’t the worst and it ain’t the best.
The world, oh the world is a wheel
And it spun me ’round and ’round.
When I returned into my senses,
This was the place that I had found.Back at home, I’m a poor, poor boy
And I play for all the passers by.
When they tossed to me their empty pennies
I didn’t stop to even blink an eye.
My heart, oh my heart’s now a window,
My mind a hall of crystal mirrors
Because I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears.
I left from the place where I came from.
I try to tear it from my mind.
Today, nobody tosses me pennies.
It always seemed to me a bit unkind.
My name, oh my name is now useless.
For it is just another sound
Like my hand across my instrument,
Like the rain that falls upon the ground.
The line, “Because I live among the reeds and rushes” was if I recall the first put to paper, and I’d been listening a lot to Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints. The line came from the “Born at the Right Time.” I am not a Paul Simon fan, but I hadn’t realized that yet at the time. However one might critique his project (and demeanor), though, he can craft a tune and has a broad enough base of easily understood cultural references–referencing Moses without naming him allows the listener to feel educated, e.g., without needing much of an education–to give the impression of being genuinely impressive. What else can I say? I was only a kid and I believed Rolling Stone.
Many people have noted that I have a visual aesthetic in my tunes, but I didn’t always have one. I may have hinted at it in something like “Full Tank of Gas,” but it really started to come through here, in this tune. I didn’t care about the biblical reference in the Paul Simon tune, but I did like the way the reeds and rushes looked when I imagined them.
As far as the subject matter of the tune goes, I suppose it reflects the feeling of separateness that’s been too much a part of my world for too long, and also a healthy reading of the Chuang Tzu. Both were very much a part of me at that point in my life, and both were genuine.
A last note: this was the first time I ever double-tracked and panned hard left and right two solos on the same instrument. Of the different stock tricks I use in recording, this is one of my most effective. In this case I use penny whistles, but one can use anything. One records one solo, and then a second, with the first one muted. The two end up–because they are coming out of the same head–intertwining nicely but not precisely linking. It produces what some people might call a psychedelic effect, but while electronic devices are most often used today to make things sound “strange,” techniques such as this, that rely on actual playing, get much better results. The best example I can think of this is Kevin Shields’ work. He doesn’t use a ton of effects, but rather plays things in a particular way. In any event the title, which originally was “Imagine You’re Flying Across the Surface of the Ocean,” derives from the feeling I got when listening to the instrumental break with the penny whistles.
