Our Village Band

Adventures in Community Music

I recently hit the jackpot and moved a few miles away to a little village that actually has something resembling a community, with enduring groups and active organizations and recurring events and people who say hi to each other on the street and where you actually run into people you know.

And since I really believe in all that community-music stuff I blather on about here, I decided to seek out and join, join, join. My two choices were a community choir and a weekly old-time folk jam. And these commitments have taught me many things.

1. The Community Choir

First, I have learned that I am apparently a tenor, which makes it all the more hilarious that I’m supposed to be the lead singer for a sea shanty band (Bass or Baritone being the more standard choice).

Second, I have learned that reading music is too hard and I don’t want to do it, but also that reading music can become a crutch and I’m glad I don’t. When a group of singers just brings their music sheets to practice every week, their mindset is: read and sing the notes. But I’m used to a very different mentality: learn the words and notes in advance and then sing your fucking heart out, dammit. Large choirs full of note-readers struggle precisely because their members learn to think of themselves as transcribers rather than singers. This is a crutch. My experience in the Dreadnoughts means I’ve just listened to and memorized the harmonies, and I find myself wishing that others would drop the damn books and spread their own wings a little bit. Though of course not everyone can, and I’m still amazed at the sound we can produce together.

Third, even though we don’t sing religious music, I’ve realized that our centerpiece song, The Times They Are A-Changin’, is a religious song. Here’s us practicing:

Yeah, that’s a hymn, right?

Having sung it in this lilting choral style many times, I’ve looked again at the lyrics and realized that you can understand a lot about modern society by reflecting on the song as religious, as expressing a faith in a mythology.

It’s not just that Dylan sings “The waters around you have grown” (flood) and “the first one now will later be last” (prophecy). It’s that there is a story in the song about moral progress and about young people leading us toward justice. MLK said that “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice”, and Dylan adds that youth is the prism through which this bending will take place. As a culture we are obsessed with progress, with overturning dogmas, with replacing the old with the new, and when older folks complain about any of this, what do we say?

don’t criticize what you can’t understand
your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
your order is rapidly aging
please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand

In other words: “OK, boomer.”

And if you want to understand recent political changes, this is a really useful lens to view it through: many people are losing the faith expressed by Dylan and MLK. New things don’t seem so progressive to them anymore, no matter what their age. Institutions seem completely broken. Young people hate the world they are supposed to inherit, and they don’t seem like they’re capable of carrying this colossal historical weight on their shoulders. The fact that the hippies grew up and became hedge fund managers makes us wonder why anyone ever thought that this burden was a good idea. In short, there is a cynicism that certain politicians are good at harnessing. Dylan’s prophecies are not coming true, and so a message of “hope” gets drowned out by a message of “tear it all down”.

So when we sing this song, the folks in the choir (in their 60s and 70s) experience it as a kind of revival, a message of hope and renewal. I do not. I experience it as a funeral dirge, sung for a dying religion.

2. The Folk Jam

Here, I show up to the dive bar with my accordion and just start playing and singing. No sheet music, no rehearsal, no set list, nothing. People just go. And it’s all led by a fiddler with a ton of energy and a great talent for building camraderie amongst the musicians.

And since I am about a C- accordion player, it is crucial that the jam is something I can sort of play along to. It’s not super complicated, and a lot of others (fiddlers, mandolinists, guitarists) can plonk along as well. As much as I love a really good Irish pub session, the tunes are often terrifyingly difficult and fast, and there’s not nearly enough singing to bring in ordinary musicians. This blues/country/celtic/bluegrass thing is way more inclusive and I love it. Here’s me trying my very, very best to play along to some relatively easy tune:

And as I’ve written before in a different context, the accordion is goddamned hard to play. When you grow up on a stringed instrument the switch is just a nightmare. I’ve had no lessons or anything, I just try try try every now again.

But recently, after an hour or so in this wonderful session, I was asked to take a solo on some mournful folk waltz, and I closed my eyes and just went for it. And then the weirdest thing happened: my brain suddenly decided to do a long fast run up the G scale ending on a harmonic 3rd chord, something I couldn’t do in the studio if you gave me 1000 takes. And I absolutely nailed it. And so I was reminded that music is actually kind of magical, that it wakes up parts of you that really need to be awake. And with all the focus on the band, on making the new album work, on getting a goddamned label to release it properly (ugh), on booking studio time and worrying about marketing and attendance at shows, and on assholes asking us for money, sometimes the Dreadnoughts really do get in the way. So it’s nice to also be a choirboy and a stompy squeezeboxer, too.

Anyway. Give me money.