by Howard A. Landman
This song was begun as an attempt to satisfy the conditions set by Laurie Anderson in her web page "Here". (Note: You will need the ShockWave plug-in from MacroMedia to view the most interesting features.)
Basically, the challenge was to write a song using only the 258 most common words in the English language. This is harder than it sounds, because most of these words are simple articles (a, an, the) or prepositions indicating relationship in space or time (at, to, between, after). There are very few verbs and nouns.
As the song matured, I found that it wanted to go outside that boundary in a few places, and eventually I let it. Still, the incredible creative tension of trying to live within them led me to write something very strange, and very different from my other songs. Even now, I find some of the lyrics mysterious and weirdly resonant.
To enhance this oddness, I play the song in open D5 tuning (DADDAD), which is a tuning I have never used before. It's kind of a "slack key" variant on open E5 (EBEEBE), which a friend of mine in high school used to like. This very drony tuning gives a dulcimer-like quality to the guitar, and allows simple fingering of many 2-note chords (any 5th chord and any 2-note chord including D).