{"id":5242,"date":"2015-07-28T18:58:14","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T18:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5242"},"modified":"2015-07-28T18:58:14","modified_gmt":"2015-07-28T18:58:14","slug":"author-and-critic-david-hajdu-turns-songwriter-with-waiting-for-the-angel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2015\/07\/28\/author-and-critic-david-hajdu-turns-songwriter-with-waiting-for-the-angel\/","title":{"rendered":"Author And Critic David Hajdu Turns Songwriter With "Waiting For The Angel""},"content":{"rendered":"

\"illustration<\/a>
CD cover illustration by John Carey<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nI\u2019ve known David Hajdu<\/strong>\u2019s words for decades now as among the most articulate and nuanced in the overlapping fields of music criticism, culture reporting and nonfiction books.
\nIn the pages of The New Yorker, in many other publications, and online\u2014and currently, as music critic for The Nation\u2014Hajdu has considered songs of many musical styles as well as the lives, times and talents of those who play, sing and create them. His 1997 book \u201cLush Life\u201d stands as the definitive biography of one of the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s great composers of song, Billy Strayhorn.
\nWhen I last ran into Hajdu, he had just completed the manuscript for a forthcoming book “Popped Up: Popular Music and What It Means to Me,\u201d which he described to me as befits its subtitle\u2014a personalized tour through decades of songs and the circumstances surrounding them.
\nHajdu seemed far prouder of another accomplishment\u2014again focused on songs, this time from a new perspective.
\n\u201cWaiting for The Angel<\/a>: Songs with Words by David Hajdu,<\/strong>\u201d due August 28 on Miranda Music, marks Hajdu\u2019s debut as a lyricist and songwriter. These 11 songs represent songwriting collaborations with pianists Renee Rosnes<\/strong> and Fred Hersch<\/strong>, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule<\/strong> and composer Mickey Leonard<\/strong>. The performing cast includes Rosnes and Hersch, along with other New York all-stars such as trumpeter Steven Bernstein<\/strong> and drummer Carl Allen<\/strong>. The songs are sung by a distinguished trio\u2014Jo Lawry<\/strong>, Michael Winther<\/strong>, and Karen Oberlin<\/a>.<\/strong>
\nSuddenly, I find myself encountering Hajdu\u2019s words\u2014a voice I know well\u2014in a new and freshly gripping way.
\nOne tune, \u201cSuffer,\u201d set to music by Rosnes, is a dedication to Strayhorn, whose world Hajdu inhabited for more than a decade while working on his book. Yet if there\u2019s a patron saint here, it\u2019s Lorenz Hart. When I interviewed him about this new CD, Hajdu posed the questions that, for him, most animated this new project: \u201cWhat if Lorenz Hart lived in the 21st century and had a contemporary frame of reference, a 21st-century view of the world?\u00a0 How would he write?\u201d
\nI\u2019m not sure Hajdu gives us the answer to those questions, or even really tries. These songs sound nothing like poses or play-acted speculation. Instead they come across like clear, present and first-hand joys and anxieties set to music, major-chord realizations and minor-key moments that likely have played our in Hajdu\u2019s life or rattled around his mind after he\u2019s completed listening to and commenting on other people\u2019s music.
\nHere and there a truth gets unfurled\u2014\u201cgood things happen slowly but bad things happen fast,\u201d goes the refrain of one song. Hajdu packs a lot of good and bad, slow and fast, in here. Mostly, though, he gives us the many shades of in-between that make for what we seek from a lyric when we listen to new songs.
\nA CD release performance<\/a> is planned for Wednesday, September 2 at Rockwood Music Hall.
\nHere\u2019s the text of my interview with Hajdu about \u201cWaiting for the Angel”:<\/p>\n
\n
\nHow did this CD project come about?<\/strong>
\nAbout five years ago, Jill Sobule and I cooked up an idea for a project to do together\u2014a song cycle inspired by a vintage charm bracelet that she got as a gift.\u00a0 Our idea was to imagine the life of the owner from the material evidence of the charms, with a dozen different writers contributing lyrics about a dozen of the charms.\u00a0 We reached out to a group of writers we both liked\u2014Luc Sante, Jonathan Lethem, Mary Jo Salter, Sam Lipsyte, and others, and I wrote lyrics about two of the charms.\u00a0 Jill wrote all the music.\u00a0 The album was called “Dottie’s Charms,” and it came out last spring.
\nOver the course of working on this, Jill and I talked a lot\u2014a lot, a lot\u2014about song craft.\u00a0 I had been writing about <\/em>music my whole life, since I was a teenager.\u00a0 I care a great deal about songs, and I think about them all the time.\u00a0At one point, Jill said to me, “You know, you’re pretty good at this.\u00a0 Why don’t you write more songs yourself?”
\nI said, “I don’t know.\u00a0 I guess I just don’t have the calling,” and Jill said, “If thinking about something all day and night isn’t a calling, I don’t know what is.”
\nSo Jill and I kept working together after \u201cDottie’s Charms\u201d was finished and released\u2014her with her guitar and me at the piano, because I can play passably and know some music theory.\u00a0 We wrote a song called “The Angel in the Attic,” a pretty little lullaby about sexual abuse and suicide.\u00a0 We played it for a wonderful singer named Marissa Mulder, and she sang it at a club.
\nSomething just clicked with me.\u00a0 I don’t know if it’s a calling or what.\u00a0 But something clicked. Jill is a wonderful lyricist herself and doesn’t really need a lyric writer.\u00a0 And I know that I’m limited at the piano.\u00a0 So I turned to a couple of the composers I most admire in the world\u2014Fred Hersch and Renee Rosnes, to see if they’d want to try writing some songs, and they both did.
\nBy the end of about five years, a little catalog of songs had taken form, with the music written by Fred, Renee, and Jill, or Jill and me composing together.\u00a0 A great many of them have been sung around New York over the past several years-by singers like Kate McGarry, working with Fred, Hilary Kole, Mary Foster Conklin, and my personal favorite, Karen Oberlin.\u00a0 Yes, she’s my wife.\u00a0 I’m a lucky guy, and not only a lucky songwriter.
\nWill this experience change the way you write as a critic about songs and composers?<\/strong>
\nI think it will, yes.\u00a0 It has already changed the way I think about the songwriting process.\u00a0 I’ve never thought of it as an easy thing, but I realize now that it’s even harder than I thought.\u00a0 It took me several weeks\u2014in some cases, several months\u2014to write the lyrics for each one of the eleven songs on the album.\u00a0 In many cases, there was lots of back and forth with the composers along the way, too.
\nI teach a seminar in arts journalism at Columbia, and one of the things I have the students do is spend an entire week making art\u2014they do printmaking, under supervision at an art studio\u2014for a full week before they attempt to write about art.\u00a0 I want them to try it themselves to shake out unfounded presumptions about the creative process.\u00a0 As a music writer, it has always helped me to be able to read and play music myself.\u00a0 Now, I’ve begun\u2014though just begun\u2014to grasp the demands of song craft.\u00a0 It’s hard to do.
\nIs there a little Billy Strayhorn in your approach?<\/strong>
\nOn the level of technique and ability, not at all.\u00a0 Strayhorn was a genius.\u00a0 He wrote in his head and then sat down at the music paper, as if he were taking dictation from the muses, and masterpieces flowed out.\u00a0 I’m a struggling laborer at songwriting.
\nI did write a lyric dedicated to Strayhorn, though.\u00a0 It’s called “Suffer,” and the music is by Renee Rosnes.\u00a0 She did it in D-flat, the key of “Lush Life,” and it’s infused with musical suggestions of Strayhorn’s sensibility, in the same way that, say, “Chelsea Bridge,” is infused with suggests of Ravel.
\nWho else are models and influences?<\/strong>
\nLorenz Hart, for sure\u2014for the extraordinary union of playfulness, bleakness, and mordancy in his lyrics.\u00a0 In fact, I’ve had in mind to do a specific thing in the songs I’ve been writing, and it’s connected to Hart.\u00a0 I’ve thought, what if Lorenz Hart lived in the 21st century and had a contemporary frame of reference, a 21st-century view of the world?\u00a0 How would he write?\u00a0 Thinking that way got me on my way to finding my own voice, my own way of writing.
\nWhat’s your favorite song on the CD, and why?<\/strong>
\nOh, I don’t want to pick one that I did with one collaborator and hurt the feelings of the other two composers.\u00a0 So I’ll say that the first one written for the album has a special place in my heart\u2014”The Angel in the Attic.” \u00a0The title of the record, “Waiting for the Angel,” comes from the lyric.\u00a0 It’s a strange and grim little song that leaves you humming.\u00a0 It’s unsettling.\u00a0 I like that.\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve known David Hajdu\u2019s words for decades now as among the most articulate and nuanced in the overlapping fields of music criticism, culture reporting and nonfiction books. In the pages of The New Yorker, in many other publications, and online\u2014and currently, as music critic for The Nation\u2014Hajdu has considered songs of many musical styles as … <\/p>\n

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