Years ago, my father told me of the summer he worked “on the line” at Chatham Steel — across from his father. Dad told me of the oil baths that his father would dunk the molten steel into — after the formed metal parts came out of a pounding press. My grandfather was very deaf, by the time I knew him, because of that pounding noise. Dad said that when he looked up one day, at that factory, and saw his father’s face drenched in oil an sweat, he knew “why he drank.”
title track “Totem”
I flirted with the idea of calling it Totem (Titanic). Ultimately, I did not. It’s a song that “appears” to be about the fated musicians who played on the HMS Titanic. It is not. It’s about my feeling that my own “musical ship” is sinking. In truth; it is not.
What it is is me, in an unprecedented way, exalting a song and statement of my own. (How dare I point a finger to work in this way?) No. This is me daring to give voice to a part of myself that longs to be heard — a personification of “I sing what I can’t say.” And I answer the song’s final question by uttering the question, “Who am I playing this for?”
Like those musicians, knowing they were about to die, I dare say, “I play this for me.”