Crying for water: an interview with Michael Lewis
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| The Men that Man the Life Boat by John Morgan |
Michael Lewis was kind enough to spend some time with us for a phone interview about his song “Nantucket Sleighride/The Essex,” which we introduced in the previous post, and also include below. How does a tale like that of The Essex cry out for re-telling through song? How does the artist, and in turn the listener, enter into such a story and connect with the tragedy and horror, the impulses of raw survival and the sometimes distant call of civility and self-sacrifice?
Murder Ballad Monday: Tell me a little bit about Traveler’s Dream and your music.
Michael Lewis: I started playing guitar at age eight, and took lessons for a very short time. I realized early on that I had a good ear and so I learned to play mostly by listening to records and picking out the guitar parts, figuring out different chord patterns, voicings, etc. This, more than anything else, really shaped my writing process. My three rules for songwriting are: 1.) Never write a song using an acronym! 2.) Pay attention. 3.) Be yourself. You have to listen carefully to figure out what someone else is doing on a recording and you have to pay attention to learn to correct chords. Then the magic happens. You make it your own. It’s a circle and not a square. I don’t think in terms of notes. I think in terms of instinct and feeling. It’s rather like reading Virginia Woolf’s fiction – how the words sound and how they make you feel is almost more important than their meaning. It’s a very emotional approach.
In 1988 I moved to Lafayette, IN to join a folk trio called Stone Soup (which was Carrie Newcomer’s band). After the band broke up I played with Carrie as a duo for a year or two and then started playing solo. I spent quite a few years after that just writing and not playing out much at all. During this time my writing style began to gel–my songwriting becoming more honest, my playing more crisp, and my poetry coming to the forefront.
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| Traveler’s Dream |
In the fall of 2000, Denise Wilson moved back to Lafayette, and we began seeing one another and playing music together. Soon after we formed Traveler’s Dream. Denise played mostly traditional music, which I listened to but had not spent much time playing. The more we played the more I liked the music, so Traveler’s Dream just took off. In the last 12 years, we’ve recorded four cds and have played at hundreds of venues across the US.
We’re still playing as a duo but have made some changes in the last few years. We both realized that we missed writing our own music and that we really missed the act of creating songs that can impact, change and move our listeners as well as ourselves – not that traditional music can’t achieve this, too, because it can and does. It’s just that we wanted something we could really sink our teeth into musically and thematically. We’ve come full circle now, and we’re doing just as much singer-songwriter material as we are traditional folk.
Now we’re both pursuing solo careers as well as performing as Traveler’s Dream. I enjoy the opportunity to play strictly my own original material. It’s a very different experience for both the performer and the audience. A different type of sharing occurs here – one level deeper – which makes everyone a little more vulnerable. The beautiful thing is that when we allow ourselves to be more vulnerable, we also open ourselves up to the possibility of change.
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| Margie Piercy |
Marge Piercy once wrote, “A pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.” I get this. I have really missed my songwriting over the past 12 years. It’s who I am, how I define myself and the world around me. It helps me make sense of things. Music is really just a melting pot. My original songs are flavored by traditional music and the songwriters who have gone before, and our traditional music is shaped by our contemporary musical sensibilities. It is, of course, the folk process. I love how music can change.
Murder Ballad Monday: What inspired you to set the story of The Essex in a song?
Michael Lewis: I wrote “The Essex” in October and November of 2006, while reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea. The writing of the song was an isolated event in two ways. First, I wasn’t doing a whole lot of songwriting at the time. It was also isolated in that I read almost entirely fiction—Dickens, Hardy, Virginia Woolf, John Fowles, Joanne Harris, Michael Ondaatje, et al.—and very little non-fiction. Somebody apparently did their job correctly at Barnes & Noble in how they positioned the book on a store display, and the book just grabbed me for whatever reason.
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| Nathaniel Philbrick |
About a quarter of the way through the book, I realized I was going to write a song about it. Specifically, I realized it when I read Philbrick’s phrase about the way the harpoon thrower could hear the whale’s “hollow lungs roar.” It put me in the boat. I was not only reading the story, but I could smell the ocean, the sweat, the fear and excitement. My senses were awakened and I was there!
It’s funny. I was editing the song as I was reading the book. Normally, when you write, you don’t edit until you’re done. This was an isolated experience. It was bizarre. Reading a book, but also editing what I’m going to use for the song.
Whaling and the whaling culture around Nantucket were things I didn’t know a lot about. I was intrigued that many of the New England whalers were Quakers. They had a passion for this lifestyle and were ruthless hunters, almost spiritual in their zeal. This really made the story even more interesting, more complex. It was almost a crusade – this quest across the long silence of the ocean in search of a demon hidden in the deep.
I was also thinking about the contrast between this huge sea and the situation the men found themselves in. One might go out to sea and feel lonely and isolated. But this wide open space became their prison – like a miniature death camp. How ironic! In an instant, nothing matters anymore – nothing except survival.
Murder Ballad Monday: What do you think the song accomplishes that a book like Philbrick’s does not?
Michael Lewis: Think of a poem and the beauty of a poem. A poem often has a very complex idea or concept, but is conjured down into this 15 line grouping of words that can change your life in seconds, minutes. A person could lecture passionately about the idea and not change your mind or heart at all. But the grouping of just the right words in a poem can change your life.
A song can do this, too, of course. In this case, I had this story to tell, full of lots of incredible information. I had to choose the specifics, distill the story down to its essence, decide how graphic I wanted to be, etc. I had to choose all these options, and yet still tell the story. This is where the music comes into play as it helps me in this process by creating the emotion needed to make the tough editing choices. I almost always write the music and lyrics simultaneously, unless I’m specifically writing a poem. They work and play off one another and in the end there is a sense of togetherness, of cohesiveness that bonds one to the other.
There’s certainly plenty of emotion in the story, itself, but music and words together allows for the mind to wander, allows the listener to form his or her own scene. I put the two instrumental breaks in the song to focus attention on the emotional state of the men and of the situation they were in. This being a typical sort of murder ballad, the song soon became very long-winded, because there’s a lot to get out. The musical interludes help shape the emotional landscape of the song. They create waves and rage like a devil before all goes still.
Murder Ballad Monday: I’m interested in how we might identify the genre of the song. It’s not really a sea shanty, but it definitely evokes a seafaring feeling.
Michael Lewis: Think of it as historical fiction! I certainly tried to be in the voice of a sailing person, and use the terminology that made sense to them. The refrain at the end of the verse is a combination of sounds used in shanties. French Canadian music uses the same kind of thing. I actually had a hard time after I thought I was close to being finished with the song because I wanted to convey the emotional state of the pre-disaster experience to the listener. The tune “Nantucket Sleighride”– just kind of popped out as tunes often do, and it gave me a way to get the song started. It expressed for me the excitement of going on a voyage. “Man, we’re just a day away from this big adventure…” I also put in that slow counter-melody which I think suggests that more is going to happen than you’re banking on.
Murder Ballad Monday: In writing the song, how did you decide what portions of the story to hide and what portions to reveal?
Michael Lewis: It was mostly a pragmatic thing. It’s a huge story and long song. One must simply roll up one’s sleeves and begin editing. I did something similar on our first album “The Road Home,” in a song I wrote about the Lewis & Clark Expedition called “Waterway West”. What to leave in, what to leave out? It’s moving, in a way.
Again, I write by instinct. More than anything else, that’s what landed whatever phrases or parts of the story on the page. I go with knee-jerk reaction, and let it fly. But, generally I just rely on my instincts.
The first instrumental break is just after the ship sinks and they’re in these three tiny boats. OK, something is very wrong here. This seemed like a natural pause in the story. Reality kicks is and they each have to come to terms with their situation. There’s real desperation after their first act of cannibalism and I worked hard to bring that out. Philbrick wrote that it was basically an assumption during this period that if you were at sea, you had resorted or would resort to cannibalism.
Murder Ballad Monday: We’ve talked with other songwriters about murder ballads and the creative trial it is to put yourself in the position of the murderer. Were you able to put yourself in the position of these men?
Michael Lewis: Yes and no. I was definitely a viewer, a chronicler. It’s almost impossible to imagine what changes the body goes through when you’re deprived of water for that long, and what changes happen to the mind. From my cozy desk chair, I can say that I would not have joined the men in their cannibalism. But then comes the reality of the situation, the sense of desperation. The truth is, one never really knows. This was part of my original interest in the story – the “human” interest, if you wish. I like the looking back on it – the storyteller’s look back on it.
Murder Ballad Monday: Is that why you chose to tell the story from the Cabin Boy’s perspective?
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| Thomas Nickerson |
Michael Lewis: Yes. I chose Nickerson for two reasons. First, he was the last living survivor. But second, I think Nickerson, the Cabin Boy, was the most affected by this episode, but was somehow elastic enough to see it through. He was only 14 years old! He didn’t have the life knowledge the other men had. He only had so many skill sets in his 14 year old existence, so he’s just kind of watching the men act. He learns early on how complex life can be, how the unthinkable can become something to be voted on.
Murder Ballad Monday: So in a way, you were the chronicler’s chronicler—perhaps two steps distant.
Michael Lewis: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes. He was my safest way in. He managed to keep his head and live a pretty good life after that. I suppose I was unconsciously keeping myself at a “safe” distance from the story.
The choices of the men are striking, as are their characters. They’re greedy enough for life that they decided to eat each other. You could even start with the context that this is also the kind of greed that led them to fish all the whales out of the North Atlantic. That’s why they were in the South Pacific to begin with! There is a fanaticism in these men and their work – a real stubbornness and fierce pride. It took them months to get around Cape Horn, including multiple failed attempts to round it. You bet that guys like that are going to survive no matter what, and maybe just to be able to get back and tell the story! And so I could not resist telling the story yet again.
Murder Ballad Monday: There have been contrasts drawn between the civility that characterized the passengers’ actions on The RMS Titanic and the frenzied scramble for survival on The RMS Lusitania, and the conjecture that it was the relatively slow sinking of the former that allowed people to recover their sense of morality and decorum. I was struck by the episode where the survivors in the Captain’s boat draw lots to decide who will sacrifice their life and their body for the survival of the others.
Michael Lewis: I wonder if the Captain’s presence induced the decorum.
Murder Ballad Monday: When do you perform this song? When you do, what songs do you typically perform before and after it? Why?
Michael Lewis: It’s probably the song that I’ve played out the least, of all our recorded songs, and certainly of the stuff I’m playing now. This is one place Denise and I differ. Some like set lists. I don’t mind a list of songs, from which you can kind of pick and choose. I like to put myself out on a wire when performing—both in terms of what I say, and in what I choose to play. Sometimes she and I will take turns choosing. You’re forced to multi-task within the song. You have to be fully invested in it, but you’re also thinking about what’s going to follow.Although the song is long, I always give a long introduction. There are so many amazing parts of the story. I describe the “Nantucket Sleighride,” the wild ride the men in the whale boat experience as a newly harpooned whale attempts to flee. I say, “Here’s how big the boat is” and I pace it out on the stage.
When I’m playing out, “Nantucket Sleighride/The Essex” has to be followed by something lively, and usually something short.
Murder Ballad Monday: What songs do you think dig in the same proverbial field as “The Essex”?
Michael Lewis: My new solo CD is called The Natural World: lyric-driven songs of the borderlands. The borderlands are the gray areas of life, whether it’s in the emotional, spiritual or physical realm. It’s the times between day and night; the edge of the field and the wood; the bend in the path, etc. I’ve always been drawn to these places and often find my creative stride when I’m alone in them. Yeats called it “fire in his head” and I understand what he meant. When I’m in the borderlands, I’ll sometimes feel a sensation and then know the creative energy is present in the myth and magic of it all. This is where my music comes from and it encompasses nature, society, culture, history, the past, the future, life, death, reality and the unknown.
All of the songs on the album reflect this concept and I think there are parallels in each song to The Essex. There are always choices between good and bad, right and wrong, reality and myth and any song, any story or any life truly lived contains any or all of these.
Murder Ballad Monday: The Essex was something of an off-limits topic in Nantucket following the tragedy, but are you aware of any other songs from that time or soon after that discussed it?
Michael Lewis: No. “Nantucket Sleighride,” by [the early 1970s Long Island band] Mountain was just brought to my attention at a gig a few months ago. A librarian in the audience asked if I had heard it.
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Thanks very much to Michael Lewis for taking the time to explore the process of creating a compelling song out of such tragic circumstances. We’re grateful for his time and his thoughtfulness, as well as for providing the lyrics and an on-line recording of “Nantucket Sleighride/The Essex” for our readers and listeners.
I’ll be back in a couple days, I think, with some further reflections on the Essex episode, the song, and other musical responses to such tragic events. Thanks for reading.