Caja De Huesos translates as ‘Box Of Bones’, and this particular Box Of Bones is a collection of old songs written at various times between 1998 – 2009, but recorded here for the first time. I wrote many others through those years, but the songs I chose for Caja De Huesos are some of the more enduring, tunes I had performed enough over the years that they had settled into their shape, and felt habituated. Almost all of them were responses to turbulent relationships, but over the years they’ve become untethered from their original context or catalyst, and (with one exception) they no longer belong to any one person or event. They exist simply as songs for the sake of their own songness.
Throughout 2023, a key theme in my process was one of reviewing and reassessing my life, sifting through the stories I tell myself, to heal & let go of internal narratives that have outlived their usefulness. Musically, I’ve been exploring this process through archiving old recordings & projects, as they represent windows to my former selves and significant times in my life – my musical photo albums.
The first compilations in this archival process were Ramshackle Alchemy and the Burn That Ukulele! series. I experienced healthy measures of embarrassment, acceptance, surprise, appreciation, release, and self-affirmation. If I cringe at my younger selves in places, it’s an opportunity to reflect with the compassionate intelligence and insight of my older self, to release the old judgments and comparisons, and appreciate it all as the natural trajectory of a creatively explorative life. In my tiny bubble of existence, I’m still amazed at how much diverse music I’ve created in my lifetime, despite not having a recognisable ‘music career’.
As I embarked on this process of review in 2023, I noticed I no longer felt the urge to create any new music. It wasn’t that I felt bored or uninspired; I was just done. Creative cycles are often like that.
This coincided with the closing of an intense & complex period of my life, almost a decade long – many layers of grief, depression & suicidality, withdrawal from the world, a string of physical health challenges, feeling at the mercy of external forces in my life. It has also marked the careful & confusing closing of a relationship cycle with my partner of the last decade, with whom I have shared a profound soul connection. Throughout this larger life cycle, musicking at home was my creative coping mechanism, my deliberate alchemical work to transmute the extreme challenges I was experiencing into something of transpersonal value. This ‘musical urgency’ resulted in 70+ albums, the bulk of my Bandcamp catalogue.
In recognising that these two cycles (life / music) mirrored each other, it was easy now to close the door on that body of work and prepare for a new cycle in my creative life, musical or otherwise.
My only urge to do any ‘new’ musicking was the group of recordings I made over May / June of 2023, which became the Caja De Huesos album. It was interesting and oddly fitting that this album would close the 9-year musical cycle; the material was old & almost too familiar, yet here recorded for the first time, and in many cases with a completely different musical interpretation. And whereas my musical output since 2017 has been almost entirely instrumental music, the Caja De Huesos recordings all feature vocals. A curious convergence of old & new, not-old & not-new.
In the preceding decades, I had tried my hand at songwriting many times over, in various styles, and with varying degrees of creative success. Since childhood I’ve enjoyed words & language, wordplay, puns – and while I’m not drawn to reading poetry, I do enjoy a poetic turn of phrase, or a poetic articulation of an idea. So naturally I would want to combine two of my creative loves – words & music – and experiment with the process through various forms. As a performing ‘songwriter’ I was mostly known for humourous lyrics, witty, whimsical, irreverent, often self-effacing or taking the piss (Spondooli Brothers, Limited Emission CD, Burn That Ukulele! Vol 1); but I had also accumulated an eclectic repertoire of ‘serious’ songs that found an appreciative audience from time to time.
While my songwriting received ample positive feedback, ultimately I became frustrated with my own creative limitations / expectations. I wanted to write profound songs that could reach straight into the core of the listener, songs that would be devastating in their emotional transmission, their depth and universal truth! But the experiences I wanted to articulate seemed too ‘big’, and words too inadequate a medium. Language and meaning are such a responsibility!
Eventually I recognised this was the realm of the master songwriters (eg not me), and so I relieved myself of the responsibility forthwith. Instead I focused on exploring pure nonverbal instrumental music – no need to communicate meaning or message, just painting impressions in sound, texture and atmosphere, the energies of sound. Meanwhile, the old songs – my creative offspring, my progeny – remained, unfulfilled, silently asserting their presence at the edge of my consciousness…
So in early 2023, as I looked back over these dusty artefacts, a few things converged:
These songs had once aspired to full musical realisation – input from other musicians, with particular styles, flavours or flourishes in mind, harmonies, production – but most never got further than a solo acoustic recording. I now recognised I’d never get round to satisfying my original visions for them, but I could still honour them with some kind of ‘official’ recorded version. I do have a somewhat Autistic ‘completist’ streak, after all.
In revisiting the songs after so many years, I was bringing an entirely different depth of personal and musical insight to their interpretation. For starters, with my enhanced musician superpowers I could now at least create the illusion of other musicians in a recording…just not quite the calibre of pianist / cellist / violinist / horn player / vocalist I’d originally ‘booked’ for the sessions…
My older self is also far better equipped to let go of the usual identities I’d attached to the songs, along with all the old expectations, hopes, inner narratives; this mirrored my overarching process of loosening up my relationship with everything in my life. I decided to reimagine the songs, retaining the integrity of their melodic structure, but giving myself freedom to experiment with the musical atmospheres, the rendering.
Creatively, this allowed me to approach them instead with more musical curiosity and a little less gravity, before laying them (and the prior selves that created them) to rest for good – a sense of giving them a proper burial.
Some creative parameters organically emerged for the process:
1. Textural palette: I’d recorded a couple of musical sketches using a battered old nylon string guitar, combined with the coarse-grained electric guitar textures I explored on Burial Grounds a few months earlier. These sketches became Caja De Huesos‘ bookend tracks The Way In and The Way Out, and set the textural palette for the songs – ragged & dusty, warm & close, some rough edges & some rough finesse.
I’d been listening to American songwriter Howe Gelb (Giant Sand) and was inspired by his own loose artistry, alongside longtime ragged favourites Neil Young, Tom Waits and at least in terms of musical / philosophical playfulness, Leonard Cohen. In fact it was Howe’s loose artistry that reminded me I could approach these old songs with a more spontaneous, exploratory attitude.
2. An actual recording routine: I began each recording with the acoustic guitar as the foundation. All these songs were originally written & played on steel-stringed acoustic guitars, but all I had on hand now was the nylon-string. The warmth of the nylon-string had an important tonal influence on each song, and in general it leaned them more into a kind of Alt Country feel.
Next I’d record some lowkey percussion if the song wanted it. Sometimes I’d record the vocals at this point, other times not until I had more instruments to bounce off. After this came the most creatively rewarding stage, developing the cello bass lines and the electric guitar tracks. It was fun to flesh the songs out beyond their usual sparse guitar & voice.
Once I had the main shape of the song in place I was free to play with extra textures depending on what the song suggested – kemenche, underwater piano, sampled instruments (horns, accordion) & touches of electronics here or there. And of course, in amongst & after all these stages, there were the countless hours of editing, sculpting and entweakening that are the artist’s lot, the hermetically-sealed, invisible life spent in private work, tending to the million fine details that can’t be left undone.
3. Vocals: I set myself the parameter of singing each song in as low a register as I could comfortably manage, while maintaining the integrity of the original melody. I also ‘whisper-sang’, quietly and very closely-miked, deliberately trying to find the edge of the voice where the rasp, the grain, the sandpaper and crackle live. This was a challenge on songs I had either previously sung in a higher register or with more volume. So even though the songs were extremely familiar to me, I was getting to know them quite differently.
Singing again was the most confronting, frustrating & uncomfortable part of the process. It’s many years since I’ve sung for public consumption. All my internal voices of self-criticism and judgment came to the surface. The pressure of creating an indelible stamp in Time with your voice can drag all kinds of baggage with it. I’m still not happy with my singing on this album, but I allowed myself some sloppy patches in the overall process of letting go. I care far less now than I might have done a few years ago. It is what it is.
THE SONGS:
Two tracks are not old songs: the improvised instrumentals The Way In and The Way Out, which bookend the collection. I imagined The Way In as the entry point to a kind of self-contained dimension, part museum and part mausoleum, containing my process of revisiting and reimagining the past through these old songs. The more upbeat and playful The Way Out is pointing down the new road, the unknown horizon, happy to leave the past in its rarified dimension and step forward, like The Fool in the Tarot, into the freedom of Not Knowing.
I selected songs from four different periods in my life. Many other songs were written during these periods, I just chose a few favourites.
The Hellenic Period (1998)
Through the late 90s, while my listening tastes were as eclectic as ever, my musicmaking was almost entirely centred around rhythm, tribal drum traditions and percussion, rather than guitar. But in 1998, one particularly brief but intense relationship – or rather, the cathartic process initiated by its abrupt ending – led me back to guitar and songwriting, and opened up new depth in my playing & creative expression that took me by surprise. Emotionally, I was in a state of breakdown, not functioning at all well. Given how brief the relationship was, my response to the separation seemed disproportionate in the extreme, but clearly the ending activated some deep layers of past pains that needed to surface and be processed. I was a mess, but self-navigating as consciously as I could, with the tools I’d acquired at the time. In addition, and unexpectedly, songwriting became the creative vehicle that helped me transmute my experience.
For this process, four main songwriters were my musical guides, my ferrymen & companions through these dark waters: Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits (Rain Dogs album), Nick Cave (The Good Son album) & Australian songwriter Christopher Marshall (Strange Waters, Small Mercies album). All used evocative, poetic wordsmithery to articulate processes of existential darkness, the facing down or surrendering to the Abyss.
I plunged myself into the world of the E minor chord, musically & emotionally the lowest reach of the guitar, to hit those deeper resonances of Self. Mssrs Cohen & Waits were masters of dark wit, while Mssrs Cave & Marshall brought a certain majesty to the emotional rawness. For the first time, I discovered Latin-tinged sounds on my guitar that I’d previously never imagined I could play. I also discovered, thanks to my integrative experiences a few years before with the TaKeTiNa rhythm process, that I could coordinate a different level of complexity in the combined actions of playing guitar & singing.
The process resulted in a handful of 8 songs, each song mapping a different stage in my catharsis & metamorphosis. It also marked a new phase in my musical life, a breakthrough in my musical expression, and a completely new relationship with my guitar-playing that continues to this day.
The first few tunes were eloquent howls of pain, impassioned declarations of the heart, railing against the grief & despair, and utterly melodramatic. Of these I have included Diamond, one of the more subdued, and actually an affirmation of my determination to persist in life.
Further along the process of grief, as my descent into the Abyss deepened, I hit a vein of strength through anger – the transformative element of Fire. Sometimes the Fire is there to help us fight back, give voice to, or have some sense of control over our experience. With Leonard urging me on over my shoulder, I wrote Remember Me, a poison pen letter to the archetypal ex-lover, the Betrayer. The transformative core of this song’s process was in relishing the creative wordplay and black humour of it. I made a rough recording of it at the time, and remember bursting into laughter as I listened to it properly for the first time, the laughter of release. Psychologically this was a major turning point: I was remembering to laugh into the Abyss, and of course at my own pathos. I felt as if I had reached the ocean floor, the Deepest of Deep, recognised the absurdity of my condition and could now begin my gradual spiralling ascent to the surface.
Bolstered by this renewed strength and humour, the next song I wrote was The Unwanted, a rollicking tango cabaret piece written from the perspective of the Void itself, lamenting its own Unwantedness. I haven’t included it in this collection because two fine recordings of this already exist on A Month Of Moonbeams and Gringo!, but it was also a pivotal song from this period, and marked an important stage in my recovery.
The song that completed the suite of 8 songs from the Hellenic Period, and marked the completion of my cathartic process, was Moonlight. Whereas its predecessors had elements of me tearing my thumping, bleeding heart from my chest in a burning purge, Moonlight was forward-looking, an unapologetically Waits-ian poem to the dark beauty & mystery of love. Lyrically it remains one of my favourite songwriting attempts, and was an enduring part of my live repertoire in later years.
Why the Hellenic Period? Her name was Helena, a dark beauty of Scorpionic depths. I was pulled inexorably into the velveteen Void of her mystery, she felt like Deep Space, like the infinite black that births the clear light of the Moon. Our time was brief, but her Plutonic presence unexpectedly catalysed a creative turning point in my life. As a footnote: during the weeks of my cathartic breakdown, Helena had deflected all my attempts to contact her, which further activated my feelings of abandonment, pain & insecurity. Once I had emerged out the other side of my process, which included the completion of the suite of songs, I asked her if she would allow me to at least sing her the songs, by way of a shared closure. This time she agreed, and I have a very heartful memory of us sitting in her backyard one sunny afternoon, me sharing my heart with her via the songs, and her shedding gentle tears (a rare moment of vulnerability for her at the time) as she felt the depth of my emotion through the music. It was a perfect way to appreciate each other one last time and be done.
Bruny Days (2002 – 2003)
After the ‘Hellenic’, my reconnection with guitar and newfound interest in ‘serious’ songwriting continued as a regular feature of my musical practice, and propelled me into a prolific burst for many years. Most of the songs I wrote back then will never see the light of anyone’s ears, but there are still a few album’s worth that might.
In 2001 I moved from Melbourne to Southern Tasmania, and settled on Bruny Island. Despite (or thanks to) the isolated rural setting, life was busy and creatively diverse. I was studying singer / songwriters from all walks and trying my hand at any style I liked the sound of. Having received much positive encouragement, I began performing at local open mic nights around Hobart. It was wonderful to discover a really supportive culture among the local Tassie songwriters.
Tincan Heart was one of several similar tunes from that year, probably inspired by listening to the likes of Ron Sexsmith – a little sunny, a touch of melancholy, the bittersweet; there was a lot of that kind of acoustic songwriting around at the time.
During these years I had allowed myself into a new relationship, but two beautiful children later we were in a very toxic dynamic. In the absence of communication within the relationship, and having no trusted friends to confide in, songwriting became a necessary tool for processing the strain I was living in from day to day. Extrapolator is describing the alchemical processes of self-transformation under pressure, like the contractions of a birth canal, or the moment of cracking through the restrictive barrier of an eggshell. I didn’t realise at the time that I was in a state of depression, nor did I understand until much later that I was experiencing the isolation of living with a narcissist. I had no supports and had to perform this deep transformational work alone – a testament to my inner fortitude, my autistic tenacity and my natural commitment to always Reach Deep and Learn.
Family Xmess was another response to the complete absence of communication in the relationship. It may be the only song I’ve written that explicitly tells a story from my life. Our daughter was barely a year old when her mother announced, two weeks before our first christmas as a family, that she was leaving to visit her mother in Western Australia – indefinitely. No contact number, no explanation, no discussion. I was devastated. I was also left to mind her aging dog, who pined so badly that it lost the will to live, and on Christmas Day I witnessed the moment of the dog’s life force tangibly leave its body. It was a powerful experience, and steeped in symbolic, emotional & metaphysical complexity. It seemed to sum up so many things. I initially wrote the song in the days after burying the dog; a year later, after the birth of our son, and the relationship disintegrated into trench warfare, I added the final verse.
The Valley (2008)
Unsurprisingly, in 2006 that relationship came to an explosive end. Whereas I had previously experienced an especially traumatic separation from my first son in 1989, his mother and I still cared enough for each other to navigate it together with a degree of understanding over the years. But nothing prepared me for the emotional devastation of this latest separation. I had no desire for reconciliation with the mother; her narcissistic behaviours escalated, leading to many years of distressing legal interactions, and she spent the next 15+ years driving a wedge between the children and I.
Being forced away so aggressively from my young kids, as a middle-aged father, nearly destroyed me. Apparently ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, but resilience has nothing to do with it. It’s a matter of willing yourself to find any internal resource that will enable you to live another day, or even another moment.
For the first couple of years I retreated to a small cottage in a hidden valley on the outskirts of Cygnet, and sank into deep clinical depression. This was a far more debilitating process than any I’d faced before, and it has completely altered the shape of my life.
Some part of me still engaged with that profound darkness with a will to Deepen and Learn. For a long time I might as well have been dead. Waking in the morning was a crushing nightmare. Sometimes the only thing that got me through a day was repeating to myself ‘This moment will pass’. It’s often tossed around as a platitude, but in times of darkness & pain that one small phrase can literally be a matter of life or death.
That will to explore led me to information on neuroscience, brain function, the chemistry of emotions, and the emerging findings (in 2007) that playing an instrument is the most holistic brain exercise we can engage in. Music became my intentional daily practice for mental health. I recorded the instrumental album Marzipan during this time, and my love affair with ukulele began to blossom as well, through which my songwriting continued in a deliberately lighter vein.
At the same, I continued trying to hone my ‘serious’ songwriting on guitar, usually drawing on Alt Country and Americana stylings. For this album I’ve selected two: Too Long I’ve Waited was a kind of dark folk / Appalachian-tinged lament on the ravages of love. Threadbare Moments, with its slow country waltz drift matching the slowing of time in my depressed torpor, was describing my process of digging deep, of embracing my Dark Night as an enrichment of Soul, my commitment to the Light even when I couldn’t see any. I’m especially happy with how this version turned out.
Eggs & Bacon Bay (2009)
Sometime in 2008 I moved from my Valley hermitage to a riverside shack in Eggs & Bacon Bay. I was still managing depression but had better access to my kids, and had begun to reconnect with my work in the world ‘out there’. This move marked the beginning of another 9-yr cycle in my life. Musically, ukulele became my primary instrument, and I have documented that musical thread elsewhere in the Burn That Ukulele! series, and on the albums Limited Emission CD, Pigbox & Co and Skedaddle!
While I continued to write songs on ukulele, I rarely played guitar and this was around the time I gave up trying to write ‘serious’ songs. Instead my songwriting attempts focused on wry humour and whimsy, or just plain silliness. About the only guitar song that stuck around from that patch was Existential Cowboy Blues, a tip of the hat to my favourite Australian (Tasmanian!) songwriter, Glendon Blazely of Grumpy Neighbour. It still pretty much sums up my existential bafflement ie life just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I did record a version of it in 2018 for my Gringo! album, giving it the full spaced-out Johnny Cash treatment, but for Caja De Huesos I decided to try it in a moodier minor key – more High Plains Drifter, tumbleweeds blowin’ through the canyons of your mind. I like ’em both.