Salon de la Guerre’s latest album, Fire Regime, has just hit the streaming services, and it’s an album of acoustic guitar songs, some folky and some poppy.
Every couple of years I find it’s worthwhile to get away from my Midi software and electronics and try writing simple songs on a guitar the way my ’60s folk heroes did. Changing the style up and going back and forth among mediums keeps me creative so I never run out of ideas. If I’ve got nothing in my head. I just let my hands start strumming stuff, and my body remembers what my head has temporarily forgotten how to do.
And while it would be pretty silly to think of me as a people pleaser (check out how often I change music styles and how detrimental that it is to my fan base building) I do have a few friends and confidants who simply like my acoustic guitar stuff better. And so in the interest of fan service, I like giving them something they’ll enjoy every couple of years.
I had different ambitions for this project—my original plan was to weave electronic arpeggios from my software into my John Fahey-style guitar tunes. But the results of these lab experiments were iffy and I decided to instead get out of the way and let the songs just be what they wanted to be in their purest form.
My acoustic guitar albums are also the only projects on which I write lyrics first. In other words, I write poetry and then I write music around it, something I could not do until fairly recently. When I saw Bob Dylan do it in the movie Don’t Look Back, I was in awe. How do you write a guitar part around an existing verse and meter, especially something emotionally complicated, while keeping the song moving along and keeping the listener hypnotized? It took me years to feel comfortable writing that way.
Lyrically, the new songs are kind of dark, as they always tend to get for some reason when I pull out my trusty dreadnought. I usually conjure up dark characters that I might otherwise slap into my fiction and let them speak their deluded truths. They are often people seeking some sort of spiritual plane to reach even as they toil in the worst of human muck and give in to their basest desires. At least that’s my take when I read these lyrics back and try to figure out what I meant.
This is Salon de la Guerre’s 48th album, and contains my 600th composition. If you’re in a fact-checking mode, you can go to Bandcamp and count (and thank you for your due diligence).
Eric R. Rasmussen is a novelist, composer, journalist and filmmaker. He is the author of ten novels, including the three-volume work The Ghost and the Hemispheres. He is the sole force behind the musical act Salon De La Guerre. And he is the writer/director of the online Web comedy series “The Retributioners” starring Stephanie Faith Scott.
Beauty is Imperfection 