impressed as i am with how easily my friend joey accesses his songwriting with the slightest prompt, i tried "the joey method" using a painted board art piece by l.v. hull, that i bought in 2007 at cat head in clarksdale, mississippi. it reads "have faith in jesus friend hard to find cook some green and cornbread sit down"
i dug my notepad out. i've tried a bunch of tools for writing poetry and songs over the years but nothing works better for me than a notebook (typewriter is a close second, but they don't fit in my edc) because they don't crash, run out of batteries, lose my files and i have a physical artifact, made by my own hand, when i'm done. there is something spiritual about "blackening the pages" as leonard cohen put it, with a pencil.
it was clear i was writing a gospel blues, so: i started with l.v.'s lines as my prompt and scratched out five verses. ended up pulling from Revelation, Amos, Acts, and an old spiritual
i made sure to mark it "after l.v. hull" because i'm riffing on her words. she passed in 2008, which i found out just tonight. here's more about her if you don't know her work and name.
once it was done enough, and typed up, i decided to try it using the old music i came up with that i used to use for the hellbusters' version of "jumper on the line". a couple of rehersal passes and i got the phone out. the mics are getting so good on these things. ran it once w the recorder, added a little reverb, took the gain up, and uploaded it to dropbox.
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