Concert Preview: Daryl Fleming reaches back to beginnings of modernism on 'Fables'
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Daryl Fleming is the kind of singer-songwriter who might begin a sentence with "Back in the day, during the enlightenment era" or explain that one way "Fable of the Bees," his latest effort, differs from 2002's "Better The Parcel Than The Post" is that he "went beyond the Federalist era this time."
Where: Club Cafe, South Side.
When: 10:30 p.m. Friday.
Tickets: $7; 412-431-4950.'Daryl Fleming and the Public Domain'
Where: Club Cafe, South Side.
When: 10:30 p.m. Friday.
Tickets: $7; 412-431-4950.
One highlight, a haunting recorder-fueled folk ballad, "Lex Taliones," consists primarily of quotes from Andrew Jackson, things like "Soon, the whole freed nation will be covered in blood" and "Never again would their midnight flambeau illuminate the castle house." Another, the heartbreaking "Johnny Has Gone for A Soldier," is a folk song he stumbled across in a book called "America During the Revolutionary War," while "The Prophet Matthias," an enigmatic gem that could pass for an outtake from Dylan's "New Morning," was inspired by the story of a self-styled prophet from the 1830s. But the centerpiece is clearly "Marrow From The Fable of the Bees," a 7-minute epic built on 56 lines Fleming took from a nearly 500-line poem written in the early 18th century and a scrap of a melody borrowed from "The Butcher Boy," a track on Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music."
"What I do," Fleming explains, "is when I read something, I read non-fiction, and when I do, I've got so many things going on in my life that if I'm gonna read a book, I'm gonna have to convert it into a song, too, just to maximize my time. So I did that with Andrew Jackson. I used his own words. And it's easy to see how, in hindsight, he kind of looks like he's hanging himself. He sounds terrible. Did I make him look bad? I was thinking about him burning down creeks, setting people on fire and stuff. But I thought, you know, I don't have to editorialize about Andrew Jackson. Just use his own words and people can see for themselves."
Regardless of the carbon dating on the source material, there is a very real extent to which the songs here are part of a song cycle based in part on what Bernard De Mandeville was getting at 300 years ago in "Fable of the Bees."
"When I read 'Fable of the Bees' and other literature it pointed me towards, my God, it was a revelation," Flemings says. "I didn't realize the totally formative and positive impact commerce had in terms of raising the standard of living for people, the education it afforded, the liberalism it brought about in terms of the tolerance of other peoples, due to exposure through trade, and also, feminism, with women emerging in the work force. Ninety-five percent of the critique in popular culture of commercialism almost seems disingenuous or perhaps hypocritical now that I've looked at it from this other perspective. You wouldn't be critiquing commercialism if it wasn't for commercialism, which gave rise to the university system, which gave you your education at a pretty cheap rate."
Not that Fleming means to come across all "Up With Corporations" here.
"I'm just trying to be a little more honest," Fleming says, "The title song says 'Private vices, public benefits.' That was the whole argument this guy De Mandeville made about indulgences and luxuries, that people consuming luxuries has public benefits. One of the lyrics is 'Does luxury weaken the bones of good men or motivate them to get up again?' Are we softening from our consumption? If you look where there are indigenous cultures still, they're not highly productive people. They don't have a very high standard of living and it's a bit barbaric. They probably treat their women in a way that doesn't accord them any rights. So I'm trying to get a more balanced view on the modern versus the romantic."
As to what, exactly, that more balanced view might be, Fleming says, "On the one hand, you would have Rousseau, who feels modern society has created artificial needs and desires to which men have become enslaved. On the other hand, you have someone like Hume who makes a case for the civilizing influence of commerce. Those would be the two opposing points of view. But basically, the modern era, from 1750 on, it does give us those things that Hume was talking about, the education, the tolerance, the standard of living, but it also does the things Rousseau is talking about, so it's raising us up and kind of rotting out our souls simultaneously."
As much as Fleming clearly loves to talk about this kind of stuff, he's worried that the academic nature of his lyrical pursuits might be distracting from the music.
"I don't want it to seem like a thesis," he says, in the midst of a long dissertation. "I want to present it as music."
But he's done that too.
For all the books that went into the writing of this album, what you're bound to notice first is just how great the music feels, like "Basement Tapes" or "Beggars Banquet" only way more Fleming-esque, arriving at a gritty yet sophisticated blend of classic chamber pop and rustic folk, as fleshed out in style by the Public Domain and Fleming's co-producer John Purse using everything from pedal steel and dobro to recorder, trumpet, flugelhorn and even glockenspiel. And when the lyrics do set in, that may be right around the time it goes from feeling like a timeless record to becoming one.
First Published November 30, 2006 12:00 am
