A Bothersome Injuries Forty (Vol. 7) - EP

by James O'Brien

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1.
Something Else Broken (Live 2002) 06:20
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I dreamt I slept in a field of amputees. Holding up white hospital sheets, I block the view. Nothing like this will greet you when you awaken. I dreamt I wrestled with base mechanics while a line formed of everyone you knew; they filed past you, watering at the eyes, and kissing your forehead like a pope. The human clock is not inaccurate Twenty-four-point-two hours built into every brain Biology got it right on that part But the rest is something else broken I read every sign along the avenue. Considering clouds, I said, “No rain today. No rain.” You think, you say, “I feel like I just moved here. I don’t know anyone. I don’t know anything.” The human clock is not inaccurate Twenty-four-point-two hours built into every, every, every brain Biology got it right on that part But the rest it is, the rest it is something else broken The rest it is something else broken
2.
Orbit of You (Live 2002) 04:49
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I feel you on a train, I feel you in my clothes, I feel you like an accident, I don’t know you very well. I feel you at 600 miles, like a power of the occult. I feel you when you’re close enough to breathe, being difficult. So, whatever they’ve told you whatever you may do as I drown myself with words here I expose every truth There’s a long distance between resistance and the orbit of you I am stripped down to my anchors. I am stripped down to my bolts. Like a rabbit in the God machine, I’m holding on for hope, for spirit, withholding nothing. So, whatever they’ve told you whatever you may do as I drown myself with words here I expose every truth There’s a long distance between, between resistance and the orbit of you the orbit of you Willpower like a fist, exposing my condition; I hope he finds you like the elements and without inhibition lets you drown him, lets you blow his world away. ‘Cause it’s you that does this to me with your eyes of radiant grey; I’m going to write you out of my system, maybe today. So, whatever they’ve told you whatever you may do as I drown myself with words here I expose every truth There’s a long, long, long, long distance between resistance and the orbit of you the orbit of you the orbit of you
3.
Andale (Live 2002) 04:30
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When they come, they come in numbers. They come on bleeding steeds. They check you in the aisles, and they sweep you at the knees. They say, “Sign and live forever. Decline and die like this.” Well, it all comes down to seconds, trapped there in your fist. Andale Andale Andale I’ve seen more than enough I’ve taken all I think you’ve got to give and I ain’t giving up [Gallipoli narrative] Well, the deal is like a doorway, where you stand ‘til it’s your time. You turn and say, “I’m going.” I look, and I say, “Fine.” You said, “You could come in with me. We’d be like two fiery gas giants.” What, burning up the system? Well, those are my lines. So, you go on ahead. You do what you must do, but whatever happens, here, it happens to you. Andale Andale Andale I’ve seen more than enough I’ve taken all I think you’ve got to give I ain’t giving up Well, the lucky get the virus. It gets them in their hands, and lying in the darkness, they begin to understand. It strips them of their hunger, and it strips them of their need. It leaves them saddened and empty but stronger and free — like a leopard! like a leopard! Andale Andale Andale I’ve seen more than enough I’ve taken all I think you’ve got to give and I ain’t giving up Andale Andale Andale I’ve seen more than enough I’ve taken all I think you’ve got to give I ain’t giving up
4.
Mrs Potter (Live 2002) 04:53
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Hello, Mrs. Potter: I am writing you this letter for your son lay dead at six o’clock this morning. Hung there by his belt strap in a ring of his own suitcases, he was packed well for the journey, I assure you. There’s no sense in sending flowers; there’s no forwarding address, but you’ll remember him in your prayers, I imagine. Me, I’m out here on the highway, my truck is cold by mid-day, I have tried to fix the heater but it’s not warming. Sometimes I think I see him in the small hours of the morning — the snow it’s almost blinding — just floating on the shoulder. In my experience you can sleep don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream Tell me, Mrs. Potter, was he far out when he left you? Did you think to check his van or in his bureau? Did he try to give you warnings? Were his ways unto you cryptic? Make you want to hire a detective? And, well, did you? Did that psychiatrist you visit ever tell you the one about walls? How to climb them to look over? How to listen at them for whispers? In my experience you can sleep don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream So, I’ve told you, Mrs. Potter: locked inside him was a clown; locked inside him was an actor or a stunt man. But he was a fall guy for the warehouse back room, fall guy for the vodka, a fall guy for the parking-lot shopping-cart collections. Me, I’m hauling on the highway, my truck is cold by mid-day, I have tried to fix the heater but it’s not warming. In my experience you can sleep don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream In my experience you can sleep but don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t you dream
5.
In My Head (Live 2000) 03:20
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Nobody wants your diagnosis. Twice tired of your double talk (sing, sing, take a walk, that was me on the bus). Your tone’s accusatory (like the joke in the return address of the letter that you sent that I did not find funny). Hey, hey, what you doing in my dream In the spaces between Poetry in my head What’s this? Were you lonely for a moment at the end of the night with the winter outside and the wild lights? You remind me of someone I once knew (or someone that I meant to). You’re a lion’s tail around the corner. You’re a cardinal out the window. Hey, hey, what you doing in my dream In the spaces between Poetry in my head In my head What’s this? Are you making for the door with your eyes like a dancer, with your knuckles cut up like a boxer? It’s the sweep of the back of your neck. It’s the color of your skin, the way you stop me sometimes when I begin to talk too much. (I talk too much, I know. I talk too much. I talk too much, I know.)
6.
Sometimes / Chelsea Hotel / End Transmission (Live 2000) 08:46
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I’ve seen some people sing some songs sometimes that come out like cannonballs, tear a hole down the middle of the room, leave a pyramid of arms against the back wall. I’ve seen some people sing some songs sometimes that come out like pheasants and everyone drags out their twelve-gauge and has a shot. I’ve seen some people sing some songs sometimes that come out like doves, perch there on the end of the microphone stand for ten or fifteen minutes, preen themselves and fall asleep. No one minds too much those songs they hear from time to time, from place to place. I’ve seen some people sing some songs sometimes that come out like eagles, find the nearest opening — be it door or window — make their way out into the black of night. And the next day, when all the drones are walking to work with their briefcases in hand, well, their necks are craned back and they’re searching the sky, be it blue or gray, blue or gray, they’re searching for the song they saw and heard the other day. They’re searching the sky that way. There’s a song up there, just circling, circling, circling. It’s a song circle. I’ve seen some people sing some songs sometimes, from place to place, from time to time. I’ve seen some people sing some songs sometimes, from place to place. Do you like my face? Here I am on the third floor of the Chelsea Hotel, again. Outside the window, across the street, there’s Tong’s Tailor, where an iron steams lonely into the night, gently and completely obscuring with its moisture-tongue the “o” in the word “Tong” — “o” in the word “Tong.” And now I’m bathing in the cold blue snow of television, my feet up on a coffee table where a bag of American dreams spills out — yellow and green and yellow and green and yellow and green. And the phone rings, down the hall (the one I thought we had uninstalled). It’s your voice coming, tinny, through the receiver. Do you believe her? Do you believe her? “What you doin’ out there? What you doin’ out there?” I said, “I thought I told you never to call me.” She says, “I know, but I’m bored and it’s the only number that works anymore. I know, but I’m bored and this is the only number on my phone that works anymore.” I said, “All right. I don’t want to fight anymore, anyways.” She said, “Why don’t you sing me a song like you used to? I could sing along.” I said, “No. At least, not mine. Not this time. But I’ll sing you someone else’s, OK?” And her silence means concession. I still smell tobacco on my fingers My breath reeks of pot and wine and sex My eyes open up like they haven’t in years So I won’t miss whatever happens next Call me a thief, well, all right I’m a thief Grab your summons, come and ring my bell I’ll be making love with to my baby in the Chelsea hotel Making love to my baby, I will, in the Chelsea hotel I told you to meet me at eight o’clock Well, I’d be drinking in the bar I drove all day between Newark and LaGuardia Trying to return this rented car Well we keep missing connections today Oh, tomorrow is just as well Please don’t contact me in the Chelsea hotel Please don’t contact me Don’t contact me in the Chelsea hotel It’s just as well, baby … this time I can hear her gentle breathing out there on the far edges, the perimeters, of the fiber optic — the telephone line. I walked through the neighborhood Of my former love She was far away and it saddened me, that time There were rain clouds up above I hope you’re happy, whatever you do And I hope you’re doing well Meanwhile, I’m back here composing and thinking all these things at the Chelsea hotel I think a lot of things, these days, and nights out here at the Chelsea hotel I was starting to think The world would end when the calendar turned But now you’re here; those thoughts are gone, Maybe we let that calendar burn I put out a casting call, you cast a spell We’re practicing for the millennium, now, at the Chelsea hotel It’s new love it’s beautiful; it’s new love and it is sad It’s new love that reminds you of all the old loves That you’ve ever had And you can stretch it out a long time Or you can keep it short and neat (neat cut) but practice still at our Chelsea still We practice still, silent, at the Chelsea hotel “What do you think of that?” She says … and nothing happens but the long slow hiss of sleep as translated by the Bell Atlantic keepers of the sounds deep down in the trunk lines beneath the Atlantic and the main line over the Midwest. She could be calling me from anywhere. And I think, well, it’s cold and it’s blue, and it’s like a test that happens over and over again. I don’t hang up so much as press my thumb down gently on the pink plastic button at the top of the cradle and listen to the quiet firm final snick. End transmission.

about

The end begins where the beginning began: we are at Club Passim — now just Passim — in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is that same snowy, sloppy night mentioned in my introduction to “Last American.” We are somewhere deep into the set, and the song is “Something Else Broken.”

It’s worth noting that this was a somewhat narcotic evening. I’d awakened with some vague illness, watched a movie, waited for the daylight to leave the room that I was renting. I’d medicated with the cold medicines we all use. Add whiskey. Add wine. Add Vivarin. The mind becomes supple if the taker strikes the right ratios. The throat opens. In that way, “Something Else Broken” takes full advantage of the scenario.

The first two tracks here flow, one into the other. The strum intensifies. The open tunings veer dangerously into the soft shoulder of being out, but the song holds together. As an audience, now, listening back, I am on the edge of my mental seat, willing with my ears that the song should stay whole. It mostly does.

Willpower is very much what “Orbit of You” explores — a song of terrible moments, explosions of known worlds, the hurtling of the heart into whatever worlds await. Resistance. Denial of the flesh. You can hear Dylan come in with harmonies at about 2:20, and, as always, he lifts things to better places. This was the first song I wrote in an open tuning. There was a songwriter I used to gig with, Chaz was what he went by, who taught me these tunings. He wrote this tuning down on a Stick-It note in a lime-green kitchen in Allston, Massachusetts, where I lived with the person I was leaving right about the time I started these lyrics. I didn’t know I was leaving, at the time, but the songs could be confessions in advance. Sometimes.

Living in Clip, the live album that Ani DiFranco released in 1997, had a powerful effect on my thinking about how to strum. I worked on strumming fast for long hours in the Boston subways, trying to capture bursts of rhythm like the ones she recorded. Listening to this Passim recording of “Andale,” you can hear what I mean about the influence. You can also hear the degrees of separation that influences can follow. Listen to the guitar, here, on “Andale,” keeping Ani DiFranco in mind, and then listen to the way Dan Bern starts “Tiger Woods” on his post-Ani recording of the track on Smartie Mine (coming after Fifty Eggs, which she produced). I’m not saying that I was listening to these records and lifting directly from them. It’s that they were in the air around me, all the time, back in those days.

“Andale” was about something specific, I think, but I can’t remember what exactly. Its concerns smack of music-industry woes, I’m sure, but I never had anything to do with the industry. I watched others have something to do with it, I suppose. Any specific approach to the lyric and the song is too constrictive, in any case, for “Andale” traveled with me for years and it could be about many things over time. I’ve added the “like a leopard” line, which comes at the very end of this take, to the published lyrics on the Bothersome Injuries website. A real addition, real enough, stemming from the improvised spoken-word bit about the movie Gallipoli that precedes it. In the moment, it belongs.

Specificity and transformation. “Mrs. Potter” has its roots in a real person, a real suicide, but I was fictionalizing right from the beginning, blurring and expanding the details of a life so that it felt safe to tell the story on a stage. And then, the meaning changes over time, too. The ghost of that old friend still lives in the house that “Mrs. Potter” represents, but a lot of other ghosts got in. One ghost drifting to another. You can’t separate them anymore. They overlap.

A bit of feedback and the dream turns blue. It fades from the moment. “Mrs. Potter” is the last track I’ve selected from the concert at Club Passim that composes a good deal of these volumes. The lights of the night get distant. It is time to slip back to an even earlier moment.

The year is 2000. This is the end of the late-night impromptu session at the empty Club Passim that captured “Colorado” in Volume 6. There might be three or four people in the darkened room. I played three or four songs. It wasn’t a concert. Just musicians and friends on the off ramp from a night at a bar.

If my assessment of “Orbit of You” is that it’s a snapshot of relationships exploding, people colliding into each other, then “In My Head” is the bewildered tumble through months that follow when the pieces are still drifting out of the cloud that the end of everything created. Similar to “Something Else Broken,” this one illustrates the use of space in these earlier works. The guitar is a textural thing, not a locomotive but a wind chime or a humming bird, a honey bee on a flower.

There are different roles the guitar plays, across this volume, but in the end it comes down to what happens on the sixth track: the strings rumble and pop in service of a story. What I cannot remember, in 2018, is whether this was the first and entirely improvisatory recitation of “Sometimes.” I might have had it with me in the subways. The framework established, this could be a relatively practiced version. I know that I was flirting with a kind of “Sometimes” in the coffeehouses. The Chelsea Hotel bit, in particular, emerged during hours and hours of sets at all-night bookings in Connecticut — coffee shops in New Milford and Danbury and other places over the course of months in 1999 and 2000. It was down there that I started working Dan’s “Chelsea Hotel” into a form that I could sing and play — all this by ear and in the moment during those gigs. It was a way to own a song, to shape it to your own voice and hands.

In some ways, this last track is a summation of all that has gone before. And it is also a photograph, in sound, of a time that existed for all too short a span. In this early, early recording I am alive and I am in strong form, playing and playing with the material for the only people who knew about it. One night, out in the dark, young and able. It turns out I was making a goodbye note to myself, and to you. Not a forever goodbye, perhaps, but it is an ending for this series and a final thank you for making this effort real.

Thank you, every one of you. You have listened and I have felt it. I have listened as well. And I am listening, in return.


All these tracks were mastered in 2017 by Matt Girard.

The artwork is by Joe Kowan.

credits

released March 1, 2018

Something Else Broken: 2002 ; Drums: Dylan Callahan ; Recorded/Mixed by: Steven Friedman, Melville Park Studio ; Venue: Club Passim, Cambridge, Mass. ; Mastered by: Matt Girard, Transference Audio, 2017 ; Artwork: Joe Kowan

Orbit of You: 2002 ; Drums: Dylan Callahan ; Recorded/Mixed by: Steven Friedman, Melville Park Studio ; Venue: Club Passim, Cambridge, Mass. ; Mastered by: Matt Girard, Transference Audio, 2017 ; Artwork: Joe Kowan

Andale: 2002 ; Recorded/Mixed by: Steven Friedman, Melville Park Studio ; Venue: Club Passim, Cambridge, Mass. ; Mastered by: Matt Girard, Transference Audio, 2017 ; Artwork: Joe Kowan

Mrs. Potter: 2002 ; Recorded/Mixed by: Steven Friedman, Melville Park Studio ; Venue: Club Passim, Cambridge, Mass. ; Mastered by: Matt Girard, Transference Audio, 2017 ; Artwork: Joe Kowan

In My Head: 2000 ; Recorded/Mixed by: Matt Smith ; Venue: Club Passim, Cambridge, Mass. ; Mastered by: Matt Girard, Transference Audio, 2017 ; Artwork: Joe Kowan

Sometimes / Chelsea Hotel (D. Bern) / End Transmission: 2000 ; Recorded/Mixed by: Matt Smith ; Venue: Club Passim, Cambridge, Mass. ; Mastered by: Matt Girard, Transference Audio, 2017 ; Artwork: Joe Kowan

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James O'Brien New York, New York

James O’Brien toured the U.S. and the U.K. from 1998–2004 playing politically aware songs, sometimes solo and sometimes with a band, sharing billings with artists such as Hamell on Trial, Dan Bern, Michael McDermott, John Sinclair, Bill Miller and Freedy Johnson.

In 2017, after a 13-year hiatus, he began to release archival and new material, expanding his catalog to fourteen albums as of 2022. ... more

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