After playing in parks and open mics abroad over the summer to get fit, I’m back in the New World and excited to report I have a proper gig coming up. Am I ready to play for two hours? (Just flew in from Nairobi and boy are my arms tired, ba-da-boom-crash.) Guess we’ll find out!

‘Hey Bill, I don’t really know what kind of music you play.’ Good question, it doesn’t fit a neat genre. All original, I call it future-folk. I mean it’s indie rock of sorts played on acoustic guitar, not much actual folk in there. But they are songs that strive to reflect the times, carry us forward, and help imagine the future.

My musical ambitions are way different than when I was younger: now it’s not fame but the doing. Art at the community level. IRL. An element of storytelling. An element of art-warrioring in our current moment. The way making music makes me feel as a whole body-mind-spirit endeavor. And of course any shows should be nice and early, especially on a weeknight.

It’s also about resistance. As I’m reading right now in the book “How to Fall in Love with the Future”, artists must be part of imagining a positive future and helping us get there. I just read a part early on about a 95-year-old woman who was part of the French Resistance. She said her comrades had one thing in common:

“They were all optimists”.

If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll join me, I’m hoping to help activate Takoma Bev Co as a low-key music hub, in a 60s coffeehouse spirit. It’s perfect for it.

My life has always been a push-and-pull between photography and making music. I’ve played in bands my whole life but solo-Bill started with my 2016 concept album New World Voyage, about the first people to leave Earth forever for Mars.

Spoiler: a terrible idea (Mars, not the album).

One song imagines the morning/mourning of departure, the crew getting their heads around the enormity of what they’re doing, of the whole human enterprise coming to this point:

I send my soul

Amended heart

I know there'll be a place for us

To start anew, I couldn't without you

From the shore

Through a forest of fallen gods

Is this the only path for us?

A way to pass through, on our way to You?

It’s a music album but also an art project. There’s a 40-page PDF booklet about their journey, using my photos, NASA photos, drawings by my daughter, and a ‘communications log’ suggesting more about their fate.

https://billcrandall.bandcamp.com/album/new-world-voyage

WAMU wrote about it at the time:

http://bandwidth.wamu.org/space-isnt-the-place-mistochord-scores-a-fraught-migration-to-mars/

I wondered who would do such a thing, leave Earth? I imagined one crew member as a formerly trafficked woman trying to get as far from her demons as possible:

Feeling a landslide

Bartered and sold

Once in a nighttime

Waits to be told

Wants to love again

To take control

Wants to break this ordinary hold

My thesis was the crew would be semi-deranged by the time they arrived, hallucinating and speaking in gibberish. Dealing with injuries or deaths or pregnancies on their one-way, months-long journey. But the biggest challenges being psychological as they grow increasingly numb and lose their shit:

Hold my face

Stood and found a laden dog

Cool eyes wait

Dead he said and walls that talk

I don’t know how much I care

I don’t know how much I can understand

One of my self-imposed concept parameters (ok, that we didn’t fully adhere to) was that it should be conceivable that the music you hear was made aboard the ship. Meaning they may have smuggled in a guitar or a mini-keyboard but there wouldn’t be, say, a drum kit. So for example any beats should sound like they were made by the ship itself, the mechanized environment.

We used public-domain recordings by NASA Voyager as a ‘bed’ to many tracks, so you feel like you’re onboard. Yes, I know, there’s no sound in space. The best way I can explain it is that as it hurtled past the planets, Voyager recorded space frequencies, the solar winds, that could be translated into audio.

Interestingly, different planets have different audio character. Mars sounds more sinister than Earth.

Then the big ‘now what?’ moment - how in the hell to strip away all those studio layers to play the songs live as solo acoustic, something I had little experience with. That’s been a learning curve, and still is.

The songs written since have been more ‘meanwhile back on Earth’, more grounded in love and solidarity in changing times. The underlying climate theme is hand-in-hand with creeping fascism:

Come and take me out of here

Come and take me slow

We’ll take our time as voices near the window

Cranes collapse and faults collide

Small boats are not safe

We’ll take the road at mud tide as you say

Lovers separated by war in Bosnia, as the waters rise:

Great green river cuts through the town

On its way forward

The past rushed over, submerged

You know I can’t quite find you

My breath is still inside you

A kind of storm

My newest song takes a more warrior stance:

Bring on another time another day

It may not soothe me

Open up my eyes to find a way

It don’t confuse me

Going in with eyes wide open

Gonna blow this thing wide open

My solo ‘career’ (cough) is now in roughly year ten, still gets me out of bed in the morning. Making any art is part being in the present and part creating the future. Standing up for the kind of world I want.

Yeah, I do use the word imagine a lot.

As bell hooks said, “What we cannot imagine cannot come into being”.