Will My Lord Be Gardening?
shaking
get the leaf off
caterpillar moths, it’s that time
(for questions)
shake me
fellow blossom, falling’s awesome
when is mine?
(please answer)
still i think the best of you
even your worst will do
even when you do more than you should
i’m thinking: can you show up and not start?
you can’t walk through Hunting Park without finding the dark.
you can’t go without losing anything but your first start
you can’t come to Hunting Park without getting married
to the wind and rain and the dark.
LILYS Will My Lord Be Gardening?
The lyrics above aren’t complete. Or maybe even completely correct. I should put this in my Muxtape so you can hear it if you haven’t. Even people who’ve loved Lilys at one time or another have sometimes given up on buying new CDs because of Kurt Heasley’s stylistic changes. With one album you’ll swear he’s overdosed on My Bloody Valentine records, and with another you’ll swear to the gods that he’s only listened to old Kinks, Love, and Zombies LPs.
The problem is, he’s too smart, he’s a chameleon, he’s probably a little crazy like most musicians, he moves around a lot and uses different people as musicians, and therefore his sound changes.
There’s something beautiful on every record he puts out. Sometimes it’s so sublime, like in the song above, that I find it hard to believe a human being wrote it. He goes up and down from his regular singing voice into a falsetto that makes tears come to my nipples. Or eyes. Or something.
Not the Jeff Buckley “I know my voice is an instrument and I’m going to astound you with it for the next few seconds” kind of falsetto.* It’s the Smokey Robinson sort of “I really fucking mean this from my heart and I’m soaring to the heights to try to put it across to you” falsetto. Yeah, those are two official kinds of falsetto. Or falsettos. Or whatevers.
One time my band Cinnamon Toast had a freak rave review, saying we sounded like kids trapped in a garage who had only been listening to the first Cheap Trick album over and over. Or something like that. There was a Lilys review below it for their greatest album, and while it was positive, it wasn’t as rave-y as ours. A travesty, if you ask me. When I finally met Kurt, their gigantic 6’8 genius singer/songwriter/guitarist/etc. I introduced myself and he said, “I always wondered who the hell your band was.”
Anyway, I’m going to add the song to my Muxtape when I can, because you should hear it. Over and over. Hundreds of times. It’s the only thing besides a certain voice that has brought any happiness into my life today.
Supposedly he says the song is about:
a) being in love with someone who’s losing it.
b) scoring drugs in Hunting Park in Philadelphia.
More later. I love you. Mean it.
*-and I mean no disrespect to Jeff Buckley. I met him many times, got to hang out with him, have pictures of him no one has ever seen, have been with him when he recorded in the studio, had him hang out with me on the air on the radio station because he was bored, blah blah. I’m just trying to prove a point. Not that I met a famous deceased nice guy, but that I honestly liked him, but I’m making a point. About purity. Or something. Read the post. Me don’t talk good.
