I am very proud to announce the latest alternative-rock album by Salon de la Guerre: It’s called Standing Close To Power and Catching Its Cold, and it’s now available on all the major streaming services, including Amazon, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and Bandcamp, as well as other places where music is (still) sold.
Like all my albums, this one is available only digitally.
I’m also proud to announce that with this release, I now have 500 copyrighted songs in circulation. I’m chuffed about this for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that even though I’m an aging guy, I feel like I’m in my creative prime. When I was in my 20s and confused and sad and unproductive most of the time, the conventional wisdom says my art should have been much better. And yet most of the art I made in my 20s was horrible shit.
Things got better in my 30s, really good in my 40s, and now here I am in my 50s, a husband and dad, churning out stuff that I think rocks pretty hard and certainly sounds like the best stuff I’ve ever made. I feel more lyrically focused too. And dare I say it, as someone who never thought of myself as a singer, I now don’t hate my voice anymore.
The new album was designed to be punk rock with two guitars trading off leads. That probably puts me closer to the Replacements than the Ramones this time out. There are a couple of notable exceptions in the stylistic approach: The first song, called “This Town Needs Secrets,” is my first ’70s style power pop song. I did not make it that way on purpose. Sometimes, as you’re producing a song (or any piece of art, really), putting together the random pieces, you realize what it’s becoming, and at that point it’s your job to just get out of the way and let it live.
The last song on the album, “The World’s Pain Leaked Through Her Shirt,” is an electronic piece composed on Apple’s Logic Pro X. It wasn’t guitar rock. In fact, it was more like an outtake from a previous bunch of songs I made two years ago when my mindset was more about the Talking Heads. But the song seemed flippant enough to qualify as punk.
The lyrics seem to be (since I don’t plan those either) about the desires and angers that seethe in domesticity, as well as sexual politics and gossipy little towns (not unlike one I used to live in). I’ve thrown in some allusions to my favorite poets for those interested in hunting for that kind of thing.
As always, the album was written, performed, arranged and produced by yours truly at my home studio in New York. I’m responsible for all the guitar parts; the rest of the sounds were made with my terrific Logic Pro software. (I also designed the cover.)
Facts are poor and pissing things Lost in a green lawn Where the pool was shocked For eyes to be stung Facts have no meaning unless shrieked Screamed so loud they stress the picture window and its scoop of suburb to point of fracture A scream smoked and peaty and single malt “You kept sleeping you bitch when you heard our daughter had snuck out. Get out of that bed now.” And then a gun made its appearance Oddly shy and quiet the .357 Serving as punctuation, an exclamation point On a husband’s scattered thoughts Words too fussily labored over This fact gone went missing amid the ph-balanced water Gushing the next day from the side of the pool Like innocence aborted Forgotten, all this that happened, In a Sunday scrum over a steaming fowl.
Sights of minnow, despair Fish dream to nonaction The rudderless course of a ship Its hull beating against a manless dock
Upended cups on bollards Cranky pier beams And glinty eyed gulls Are harbinger of somebody’s breakfast
Mere muff grazers Spill onto the dock Warning of a fatuous Sunday Afternoon When the boat will be full But not full of anybody Willing to say what needs to be said
One thought is embarrassed to death In a throat Because the men want what they want And you will have what you have
Late in the day Jackson lost on the beam One thought parts Into milk and cream
Your eyes too full of pain and fear You couldn’t tell me the truth right then Not about anything Not right here
Curses spilled from her mouth And milk leaked into the shirt The baby biting hard at new blood And macrophages Baby still colostrum-laughing Licking poems off her pages
A poem of milk Is to be consumed by whomever needs it And blood is fed Brain, stomach and heart The whole water bed
And even light can cut And conjugate Talk soft to The Earth that was its mate
And even life on Mars In tiny yurts and huts Can’t lose the link to Earth Still stirring in our guts
Breaking news, Anne Sexton died almost 50 years ago Jar lids were pulled off With rubber grips in Mourning The wings beat at the dozens per second And the peroxide told its secrets to hair
Dogs have powerful bone jaws And scrape metaphors off ribs And they eat us out from the inside With ravenous disloyalty On Moloch lakes Where former angels watched Their wings become ash and turds
Another day a mind contends with Living in flesh Flued and sooted But loses And forgets itself Dissolves Into heroic glands
Talk to them Not to me
I’ll be new tomorrow We all are Until ossified And broken as news
Watered with limitless Liquor Amber ton’c Profane as a red sky Tonight you laughed so hard You made a faint vasovagal syncope on the Seraglio toilet The head Selim Ghazals rushing from bibulous skull When a sultan thirsts Apollyon cracks Visions of Greeks escaping Wooden smack Skin flayed Eyes on Famagusta Eyes on the Pale Spaniards And Venetian’s Every lipstick, a traitor Every betrayal, a bath A mouth minty With curses. A seaman by nature Is impulsive; In dream canals, He smashed his navies. Under arched eyebrows, A grand vizier birthed Serb Bosnian Who laddered the bones of The fratricides Mapped around the lake, “Sappers sell to Volga and Don Janissaries mail for the water Communication,” said A shaved beard grows faster Than a severed arm. Lent his lettered brain for a Sot writing about orgies during his orgies While their Mustafa Was lent Cyprus ears and noses To harvest rape grape And vintage vine And the sot Wrote poems of heedless love As hateful history somehow left the bastard happy innocent Dying in her behind.
This corn must know it’s growing Near a chocolate factory Must smell the smokestacks And know its own good murder
And we walk a chocolate town Known by its chocolate river And its invasive bugs, red on its Underwings, stretched across The calligrapher’s book to write its Invasive thoughts upon, Looking up with its orange eyes In hopes of devouring the corn And leaving its prolific eggs
The kids and the corn and now bugs know again They are growing near a chocolate factory And who slaved for what is sweet
D.H. Lawrence wrote of a sensual need for justice
And likewise The beautiful red-brown lanternfly is smashed under thought Blue Converse and mandate of state law Just as the bug serves his own mandate To devour the Pennsylvania picture at night
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 