Anne Ruthmann

Alan Williams
Writing The 2-Hour Song!
Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133 http://www.scribd.com/SongwritersMonthly

Imagine, if you will, a remarkable
convergence of lush, patient music and
intriguing poeticism performed with
conviction and grace. Now, picture this
exquisite magnum opus bound in
artwork so fitting that it gently radiates
the same tender glory as the music.
Stop fantasizing and indulge
because . . . it’s real!
Annals of My Glass House is the
astounding 25-song, 4-CD boxed set
release from Birdsong At Morning that
mastermind, Alan Williams, has
referred to as a “2-hour song.” In an
age when art is virtual and temporary,
Williams has created a tangible
masterpiece that can not only be
displayed on a coffee table, but should
be treasured like a Boticelli original.
Alan was gracious enough to talk in
depth about the conceptualization and
execution of this precious work that
encompassed several years of his life.
We also mulled over a few more
philosophical aspects of music and
songwriting.
Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133
Bob Hannan
Songwriter’s Monthly: This is a big
project!
Alan Williams: (Laughing) You didn’t
strain anything lifting it, did you?
SM: When did you know it was going to
be a boxed set, that wasn’t the original
intention, was it?
AW: Actually it was . . . which is a little
bit odd. We came about the strategy
after a very long dry spell of not
making music or writing at all. We
formed this group and then this whole
chunk of material started to come
forward, so we tried to wrap our heads
around how we wanted to make it
available to the public. This is all
happening, of course, as the record
industry is collapsing and reconfiguring
and internet delivered music is taking
hold. I talked a lot with Darleen
[Wilson] and Greg [Porter] about
whether anybody would be even
remotely interested in any of this music
and, if they were, how would they want
to access it?
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One of the options we discussed was,
“What if we took this chunk of material
and broke it down into smaller portions
and released it as EPs?” We could let
people get it in those smaller portions
that way and we could group the
material together so that each EP had a
kind of a vibe to it or a theme behind it.
Then, if we put out these little EPs and
grouped them
together in a box, we
could present it as a “There’s
single body of work.
something
SM: I noticed there is
a kind of dynamic arc about that
that starts with disc 1
[Bound] and ends moment in your more lighter, upbeat
with disc
[Lumens]. For
4
life when you soverwhelmed
example, the opening
track on disc 4, are forming who m o r o s e s t u f f
“Velvet Indigo,” has a
bit more of an you are . . .” (laughing), so we did
aggressive edge to it
than the songs on the other three EPs.
AW: It does, which is kind of
interesting since all of the drum tracks
— the ones with Ben Wittman anyway
— were done in the first day and a half
way back when [Aug. 2008].
SM: Was that dynamic arc created with
conscious effort or did it just happen?
AW: There’s probably a tiny little bit
that’s conscious, but most of it’s
probably unconscious. It’s probably the
result of gaining confidence and clarity
as we progressed. Most of the material
was in some form of completion all at
the same time at the outset, but
finishing the tracks didn’t happen until
Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133
we got closer to each recording
completion date. When I look back at
the writing of it, the most recent
material tends to have a little more
confidence in it — not feeling like I
needed to wrap up every loose end air-
tight so that no one could accuse me of
being a lame songwriter. The delivery of
those songs allowed for communicating
a little more nuance
in interpretation in a
way that maybe the
first batch didn’t.
It was also clear to
us — as with many
writers — that the
tuff is often
by the
amount of more
figure, “Let’s end on
a more positive
note.” The first EP starts off with an
opening song that’s very warm and
romantic and everything is good. It’s
talking about how we’ve come so far,
it’s wonderful! But then it quickly
digresses into darker stuff. The third EP
is the darkest/slowest of the batch. We
sort of spec’ed that out, as well, so that
we could take a listener around the
world, maybe get a little bit dark, but
make sure that we give him some
sunlight at the end.
SM: Even though the songs vary from
track to track, each EP manages to
maintain it’s own individual flavor. It
really helps hold them together as
separate but individually unified
chapters.
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AW: I love records where I can hit the
start button and kind of sustain a mood
all the way through rather than having
a jarring sort of juxtaposition. I love
being able to hit play on ASTRAL WEEKS
[Van Morrison] and just know I’m in
that groove from the beginning till the
end. There is supposed to be a little bit
of fluctuation within each chapter, but it
needs to be a fluctuation that adheres
to the internal logic of each chapter. It’s
a weird thing . . . there’s a Kate Bush
record, H OUNDS OF L OVE , and the
second side is this long, tied-together
suite that ends on this upbeat note of
the sun coming up. That song was
always so musically jarring for me that
I didn’t want to hear the track, I would
almost run over and hit stop before it
got there. I know she wanted to end on
an upbeat note, the long dream/
nightmare is over and here we are, but
I was content to stay in the dream/
nightmare. I wanted to have our
records not have that jarring moment
Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133
in them, so
Anne Ruthmann
hopefully the
fluctuation is
there, but in a
pleasant way.
SM: Each EP
contains one
cover tune,
how did that
come about?
AW: I’ve
always been
intrigued by
cover versions,
especially when
they have some
interpretation
that lets me hear the song in a different
way. In fact, when I was in my
undergraduate days at a conservatory,
we had to do this big senior recital and
what I did was I tried to condense the
history of popular music — not the
Richard Thompson version, but the
post-rock history of popular music — to
tell a story about a relationship that
had gone bad. I didn’t do any original
compositions, but I radically rethought
most of the material that we did. I did
lots of Ives-esque mash-ups . . . and
this was in the days before the “mash
up!” So, covers have always been a
part of my musical world.
The first cover we did [for the project]
was “Dreaming.” That came about from
just noodling on the guitar and
stumbling on the little opening riff and
realizing it was a Blondie song. I
started playing through the chords and
singing it and I thought, “Wait a minute
this works, this really works!”
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Covers are also a way of trying to
define yourself as an artist. You can talk
a lot about how important musical taste
is and how we use music to identify
“Most of us are
really reluctant to
expose our true
feelings about
they represent me as much as anything
I would write, myself.
SM: Non-musicians do that, too. They
find songs that resonates within them
and those songs become the
soundtrack that they carry with them
throughout their lives. I know a lot of
people who secretly enjoy a certain
style or genre of music from when they
were younger, but they are afraid to
admit it, they feel a need to represent
themselves through “serious” music.

music.” AW: We don’t have to defend our taste,

it’s always valid no matter what.
ourselves, but most of us are really
reluctant to expose our true feelings SM: Is there any part of this project
about music. A band that makes that came out better than you
specific choices about the covers that expected?
they want to do risks revealing all sorts
of biases and pigeonholes. AW: Hmm, that’s an excellent question.
My marker tends to be more about
I was talking to Greg about this and we problems that I’ve been grappling with
realized that all of
the songs that we
covered came from
this little window
from when I was in
high school; either
it ’s music that
came out while I
was in high school,
or it was a record
that was new for
me at the same
Bob Hannan

time all this other

stuff was on the
radio. There’s
something about
that moment in
your life when you are forming who you or things that, as a musician or a writer,
are as an individual and these songs are hard for me. If I can overcome
have a fairly deep resonance within me; them, break through a little bit, then

Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133 http://www.scribd.com/SongwritersMonthly


for me that would be what was
important. “Those Beautiful Words”
would be one because it was one of the
first songs that sort of came in a burst
and was fairly fully formed. The bulk of
that song wrote itself in about 20
minutes and that has rarely ever
happened to me. That kind of signaled
that maybe something was happening
musically for me and necessitated
continuing to write, forming a band and
going out and doing it.
Another one was a song on the second
record called “Light In The Window.”
Lyrically, I was able to do two things at
once: convey this feeling of emotional
distance and work in the metaphor of
astronomy, the heavens and the planets
in a way that didn’t feel labored over.
I’m really proud of that song. I don’t
know if it’s a song that everybody else
responds to, but for me, that was a
really good one to get done because it
gave me a lot more confidence as a
writer.
SM: You use a lot of science words in
Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133
Bob Hannan
both that track and throughout that EP,
what kind of science background does
everyone have?
AW: The answer is . . . none! Once we
had started talking about a boxed set
and started thinking about what kind of
visual images we wanted to use, I said,
“ We l l t h e r e ’s t h i s w o m a n [ J u l i a
Margaret Cameron] whose photography
I really love . . .” So we began pouring
through her images until we realized,
“Wow, we’ve got a cool album cover,
now we gotta write a bunch of songs
that fit that image!” In the case of that
second EP [HEAVENS], the album cover
is a photograph of an astronomer. The
song, “Astronomy,” was written because
I knew we had that theme. You know a
lot of songwriters, me included, tend to
phoneticise a melody. The tune of the
chorus went something like “Uh-lah-
dah-dee.” “Astronomy” fit. It had the
right rhythm and the right sound. It’s
great to be able to work within
structures.
SM: Concerning the titles of the EPs, I
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noticed they might not actually mean
what you initially think they mean. For
instance, the first EP is entitled BOUND
and that word has two very different
meanings.
AW: Exactly!
SM: But I didn’t realize that I might
have misinterpreted the title until I
listened to “Velvet Indigo” which is on
the 4th EP.
AW: Exactly! I purposely put
“bounding” in the lyric because we’d
already put out that first EP [BOUND]. It
was a way of saying, let’s make this
clear that we are bound together and
we are headed somewhere; it’s both!
The nice thing about a boxed set of
material, this large chunk of work, is
you can start making internal
references that tie things more together
or illuminate little corners that you feel
might be getting overlooked. The titles
of each EP are meant to reflect what’s
in there, but indirectly so that we can
Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133
have multiple meanings. LUMENS, which
is the last one, is again multi-layered.
Theoretically “light” is the theme of that
record, but we don’t want to call it
“Light,” so we call it LUMENS which is a
measurement of light. But light
meaning what? Does it mean light as in
sunlight or is it light in terms of weight?
It’s trying to be both those things at the
same time. I started writing the lyrics
knowing each one of these songs would
have light as a word or a theme in
them. I also wanted to have some
multi-level interpretation in each. That’s
the benefit of having the structure in
place while you’re still finishing off the
material.
SM: While researching, I discovered
that “lumen” is also the hollow or open
part of a cell or organ, like say, a blood
vessel. I was wondering if “hollow” was
another intended meaning behind the
final chapter, as well?
AW: Wow, that’s good. No, I didn’t
know that.
Bob Hannan
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“We don’t have
to defend our
taste, it’s
always valid no
matter what.”
SM: Is there anything you wanted to
bring up or point out? Anything we
might have neglected?
AW: I’m not sure that we talked a
whole lot about songwriting, per se, but
maybe we did sort of elliptically?
SM: It seemed to me, as we were
talking, the important part of this
project was the creation of the whole,
more than the individual parts.
AW: Yeah, I think that’s probably right.
There’s the ambition of trying to write a
two-hour song that we kind of got
around by breaking it up into little bits.
There are some writers who are kind of
writing the same song all of the time,
not in the repetitive we’ve-heard-this-
before-from-you way, but more in the
sense that there’s a voice that they
write in and it’s always going to be like
that. I think, for better or for worse,
that’s where I am. The next batch of
songs will be different from this
grouping, but at the same time, they
are not going to be radically different.
It’s “art” as long as you put a frame
around it, you know, so when you wrap
a particular grouping of songs together
in a cardboard box, you do allow for the
illusion that you’ve created a little
Songwriter’s Monthly - Feb. ’11, #133
world. You can inhabit different pockets
and corners of it at will, but everything
is relatively familiar. I like that we did
that because it takes the weight off of
any one song to somehow be the
singular thing you are trying to
communicate. Taken as a whole, it
communicates way more than any one
element could . . . that’s the hope
anyway.
Annals of My Glass House is a
cornucopia of communication. You could
spend countless hours searching for
Alan’s clues, following conceptual
threads and riffling through multi-
layered tapestries of meaning and just
when you think you’ve got it all figured
out, you discover some tiny aspect that
somehow manages to change
everything. A fabulous work that
unfolds a little more with every single
listen. For more information, visit:
http://birdsongatmorning.com
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