Sometimes the things we present here come together quickly. For example, the LYL Band pieces are often first takes where the musicians are reacting to the words spontaneously the best we can. Other pieces ask to spend a little time underground to think like seeds think.
Today’s piece is one of those later ones. Nearly two months ago Grant Hart, a founding member of Hüsker Dü, a Minnesota indie rock group that achieved some fame before breaking up in the late 1980s, died. After Hüsker Dü broke up, Hart continued working in music and visual art, some of it quite striking, none of it as well-known as it should have been. We are used to stories of a young person whose indie band is on the rise, there is less notice for those artists whose work continues past middle-age. After all, even when there are new levels to the work, there may be no apparent market. While thinking of him, I noticed, strangely, for the first time, that Grant’s name was, in effect, a two-word prayer.
Around the same time, I was talking with Dave Moore (who you’ve heard here, vocally, keyboardely, and composerly) about his household’s garden bounty coming to an end.
These two thoughts combined into the words for today’s piece back in September. And early last month I wrote the music—so this piece has existed, on paper, for a month. I performed it on acoustic guitar for a handful of people in a living room in October. It seemed to work. So why haven’t you heard it yet?
I really wanted to get the performance right. And this month I attempted that, getting as close as this recording. I wanted it to be good, but I didn’t want it to be polished either.
The LYL Band began roughly the same time as Hüsker Dü. We even shared a producer of our first recordings back in the day (Colin Mansfield). But we were much different. We were a band of poets and artists, closer to the Fugs or Billy Bragg than the Who or the Jam. And I was then, as now, not a consistent and confident performer and a problematic singer. That was my problem as a band-member back then. As passionate as I could be in my writing, I couldn’t find the heart to focus that passion on stage, to the detriment of the band.
So, it didn’t take just the two months the song was in process, it took some decades to get close to what this song requires. When you listen to “Garden Elegy (for Grant Hart)” you’ll hear me going for it as best I can, trying to focus passion. About halfway through you’ll hear the body of the guitar slam into the amplifier.
And that’s my prayer for artists today, perhaps your prayer too: that we may be granted heart.