Keegan DeWitt
Love's Lovely Turbulence Backed By Such Strings And Beauty
Sep 16, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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The Floor Above
original version appears on Islands
Simply put, this song is about being in love with someone who is destroying themselves. The words are relatively abstract and all relate to one final evening with this person once they've come home from a night out. This piece is loosely informed by Philip Larkin. The first influence being "Sad Steps", where he addresses the romantic image of young love, and in some ways longs for it, and in others, calls it's on it's falsities. The second being "When First We Faced and Touching Showed", which talks about finding the recklessness in love after many failed relationships.
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Stormy Weather
original version appears on Islands
Simply put, this song is an ode from one best friend to another. When I was traveling, I met a girl substantially younger than myself, and we became best friends, mainly because we both thought it wouldn't be appropriate for us to be in love . I spent one of my favorites years in Los Angeles with her, hiking around the mountains, taking photos, reading WH Auden, driving up the coast in the middle of the night to go swimming. These are some of my very favorite memories. She would tell me stories about her childhood, her family, we'd stay up all night and stay at each others houses. It was one of the strangest and most unique friendships I've ever had. In the midst of all this, there was a real sense that we were in love, in a strange unmentionable way. We were so close, and because of our age difference, neither of us ever talked about it, and it forced us to grow a truly unique bond. As time passed, we both met other people and I left to go back to New York, and this set off the balance of our tender relationship, and we lost contact. This song was a way for me to say sorry, that maybe we could have been together, and if nothing else, she wasn't alone, I had felt the same way and still thought about her very often. She had been a formative person in my life, and we had spent a little under a year together. This song is an apology and a thank you, using some allusions to her favorite poet, WH Auden, throughout.
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Complicated
original version appears on Islands
This is about an old relationship. We had fallen in love while she was with another man. She left him and we lived together for 2 years. This is about the end of that relationship, or any relationship that was born out of complication. You conquer tough times and you are bound by them, and then... eventually... you change and as much as you love one another, things are different and you have to separate. There is a nod to one of my favorite writers ever in this song, Burt Bacharach, when I say "My hands are shaking...." ("This Guy's In Love").
Nashville musician Keegan DeWitt came to us earlier in the spring, all weary-boned and saggy lidded, having driven straight from Nashville, Tennessee, for this taping and a show later in the evening at the pizza parlor below our humble confines. He then got into the van to drive straight back home through the night so that one of his travel partners could be at a nannying gig at 8:30 a.m. and they needed every second of available time to get there. He brought with him a quartet of string players and it brought up a very good point: A man, with the Randy Newman-esque voice and husky love-abiding lyrics of DeWitt, should make every effort to do all of his traveling with similar company, even if one-fourth of that traveling company would make a return trip nearly obscene. His band of pretty ladies, with their arched fingers and their cathedral tones, were the most pristine complement to the innocent and sweet words of love's lovely turbulence, which boomed from his throat like a dessert car on a locomotive. The combination of sounds - DeWitt's voice, the stringed harmonies, the backing vocals, a wood-fire guitar pushing out its kisses and bear hugs - is spellbinding and knee-locking. It makes you stand there, slack-jawed and wobbly as if the room were filled with aerosol gases and solvents. It's the kind of natural high that springs from a day of dipping into a crystal clear lake with friends, a relaxing piece of conversation and a drink, then falling hard away to a well-earned and satisfied slumber. It's in seeing a blinding bit of sunlight cutting through the clouds and opening upon a scenic view that spreads out for dozens of miles and there's not another sound around, but the shuffling of your own feet and pockets. You can see the trees down that gully and they look like pillows, not anything that would scrape the skin from your forearms if you were to jump into them. It's the beauty about the distance, how it softens everything and creates an inviting landscape that might be drinkable. DeWitt writes his songs with such a gentle touch - the odes and the ballads that wave like flannel sheets drying in the breeze - that they buzz down to you, swooping into your cheeks and for ear whispers, the way fireflies might if they were more social. The songs are mystics themselves, making times of sweetnesses and golden lights, asking us to just pull up a chair around the glowing and the flames, all of which is good for us, all of which will make our skin shine and be more elastic. They are pieces of music that offer a redefinition to a head and a soul if a day is going into the gutter or if it's already there. Somehow, no matter if you're a believer, as far from one as possible or you split the difference, they make you think about an afterlife where there are trumpets, no stains, pleasant smiles and green, green grass at every turn. DeWitt sings, "Where are all the hidden tongues that speak to me," and he can't be meaning snakes or the other forked tongues that are famously out there speaking under their breaths, but rather the angelic forces that he pays the most attention to.
Keegan DeWitt Official Site
