Episode 188: Hell's Own Ice Cream Parlor

Thirty minutes at 170, and it started where a lot of things start around here: a bluesy riff I have been hammering for months. I am sure I have used it before. It has never once come out the same way twice, so I have stopped worrying about it.

This one drifted. It leaves the EDM pocket early on and spends a good while sounding like something else entirely — piano solo, organ solo, trumpet solo, the horn section doing what a horn section does — and then the drum and bass walks back in and takes the rest. The analysis says the same thing in numbers: E minor for the first twenty minutes, out through B minor and D major in the middle, and then A minor from twenty on, holding tighter the longer it sits there. It never comes back. Whatever left at the twenty-minute mark decided not to return, and I like that better than I would have liked a resolution.

Twenty-seven tracks, and exactly one of them is a loop I did not make. There is a seven-piece jazz section in here out of the library — two trumpets, two trombones, alto, tenor, baritone — and I played the trumpet myself anyway, twice: once straight, once printed wide to get filtered and smeared across the far channels. That is either stubbornness or the whole point of doing this at all.

If I had to pin the shape of it to a picture, it is a triptych. Three views of one subject. Like standing in the three mirrors at a good tailor's, where you see the suit from every angle at once and not one of those angles is the front.

Then this week several different people sent me the same photograph — Tom Waits, mid-seventies, the cover of the Ice Cream Man single — and told me he was copying my style. Fifty years early to be copying anybody. So there I am in the tailor's mirrors, looking at three of myself, and what looks back is Old Scratch. Hell's own ice cream parlor. Three scoops, and the parlor was always the point.