Pink Moon

I spent a majority of last year reading John Keats' complete poetry.  (Incidentally, I also have a blog where I talk about literary things.)  In September, I read "The Castle Builder" and noticed that two consecutive lines end with "pink" and "moon."

To-night I'll have my friar - let me think
About my room, - I'll have it in the pink;
It should be rich and sombre, and the moon,
Just in its mid-life in the midst of June,
Should look thro' four large windows and display
Clear, but for gold-fish vases in the way,
Their glassy diamonding on Turkish floor 

- John Keats - "The Castle Builder" (lines 24-30)

Because I'd heard he had liked the Romantic poets, I was suspicious that this is where Nick Drake got the phrase "pink moon" that he used for both a song and an album, but I didn't really have a way to prove that.  But yester-day, I looked up the lyrics for "Pink Moon."

Saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on its way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get ye all
And it's a pink moon

The "saw it written" gave me reason to say that I'm rather confident that Nick Drake did indeed take the phrase "pink moon" from the line-ending words of Keats' poem.  Later in the poem, Keats writes, "In letters raven-sombre, you may trace / Old 'Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.'" (lines 53-55)  These are the words that are written on the wall in Daniel 5 that - once interpreted by Daniel - tell Belshazzar that his kingdom will be given to the Medes and the Persians.  They're also words that inspired the phrase "the writing on the wall."  Drake's "saw it written" has the same idea as "the writing on the wall."  Also, the definitive declaration that Belshazzar's kingdom will be given to the Medes and the Persians bears some resemblance to Drake's "Pink moon gonna get ye all."  Neither of these are things that can be avoided.

I think it's too much of a coincidence that both the phrase "pink moon" and the idea of writing on the wall would appear in both Keats' poem and Drake's song, so I'm pretty sure that "Pink Moon" comes from "The Castle Builder."

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Collection Audit Update

Every other year since 2008, I've listened to all of the music in my collection.  When I did this in 2012, I had a few thoughts and wrote a few short posts about it, so I figured that I would put more effort into that aspect of the project this year and started an-other tumblr where I could catalogue the thoughts I had.  I'm not very far into the project yet (I'm going alphabetically by album [with some exception], and I'm about a fifth of the way through the Bs), but I've written more posts than I thought I would.  I went back and looked at some of the posts I wrote two years ago, and I was surprised by how simple they are.  I wrote a post about instrumentation in some of the Carpenters' songs and an-other one on how I was listening to Christmas music out-of-season.  Neither of which are very complex (and not even that interesting).

This year, I've already talked about record primacy, structural paradigms, allusions, musical impressionism, and studio effects.  While I am still noticing a lot of instruments that I had failed to notice previously, I'm also thinking about stuff that's way more complex than just instrumentation.

The thing is... I'm not sure what I should attribute this to.  Last year, I gave myself a lot of musical prescriptions in which I would listen to particular albums or pieces daily, weekly, or monthly.  That certainly made me more familiar with particular works, which would allow me not only to think about those pieces more deeply but also to compare elements of those particular pieces to other works.  The post I recently wrote about Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 is an example of this.  I noticed that it uses the same sort of parallel opening and ending as does the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (except, of course, that Beethoven used it earlier).  Because I listened to Days of Future Passed every week last year, I noticed what the Moody Blues had done, so it was easier to see that once I encountered it somewhere else.  I was already cognizant of that sort of paradigm.

Aside from all of that, I've been thinking about musical structures and studio effects and such without any referent because I've been putting more effort into making my own music.  Because I've been thinking about how I should structure my songs and what sort of instrumentation I want to use and what sort of effect I want to have (both in the sense of what I want the listener to experience and what sort of studio techniques I want to use in order to achieve that), I've been paying more attention to how other musicians have done it so that I have something on which I can base my own ideas.  I wrote a post about the stereo effects in Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's around the same time that I was thinking about how I could use stereo in different ways.  I was predisposed to notice stereo effects because I'd been thinking about them before listening to that album.

Regardless of why I'm having more thoughts (and more in-depth thoughts) about music, I'm glad that I am.  Not only is it an-other reason to love the music I already love, but it also has me thinking about music a lot more, which will hopefully make me a better musician.

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Fifth Anniversary

To-day marks five years of playing guitar.  I won't say too much about that because everything I would say is in the post I wrote last year.  Really, the only thing that's changed is that I've learned more about guitar chord inversions.

In order to mark this anniversary, I recorded the first song that I learned to play - Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'."  When I learned how to play it, I actually had not heard Dylan's original version; I was going off Peter, Paul, and Mary's version, so my version follows their arrangement.

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