TURBULENT INDIE NEGRO is a collection of songs old and new and borrowed and indigo performed by Albany, New York, soul-rock singer-songwriter BRYAN THOMAS.
It was first produced in a limited run of CDs available exclusively to the freaks and soldiers participating in “PazFest IV: A New Orleans Tribute to Joni Mitchell”, September 3, 2017; a free download of all six tracks is now available.
All music and stuffs and thangs are by Bryan Thomas, except “Black Crow” and “Sweet Bird” are obviously by Joni Mitchell and “Lemon” is basically by everyone, including you.
The songs were recorded and mixed in a basement in Delmar, New York, July 23-30, 2017. Beats courtesy the Loop Loft. Mastered by Troy Pohl.
This tiny album is not for sale; it is just a means to circulate a soul around.
Thanks to Paz, Les, Troy, the JMDL and especially to Delmar’s prettiest mommy, Cindy.
TRACKLIST
- Black Crow
- Sweet Bird
- Lemon (The Plagiarism Song)
- The Pretty Moms of Delmar
- She Loves Slashes
- What Would Joni Do?
ABOUT THE SHOWS
Follow the link for more information on “PazFest IV: A New Orleans Tribute to Joni Mitchell” at the Civic Theater, and the sneak preview show at the Odgen Museum of Southern Culture.
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It started as an idea for a lyric video. And then it became much, much more.
This is the new animated music video for “This Is Not a Pipe.” And it’s kinda bananas.
It’s dropping partly in anticipation of a certain radio station’s 10th birthday on Friday.
Enjoy.
DOWNLOAD IT
You can download the song at Bandcamp; it’s part of the “Bigger” EP.
BEHIND THE SCENES
CREDITS
“This is Not a Pipe” was not inspired by the painting “The Treachery of Images” by René Magritte. Francais by Maya Elizabeth Thomas. The fourth verse includes a shout out to Jason Martin and Power Animal Systems’ jam “Newsnet.”
“Les enfants qui applaudissent sur l’un ne vont pas au paradis.”
Albany soul rocker Bryan Thomas’ new tiny album “How Bigger Was Born” is now available for FREE download.
TRACKLIST
- I Am Not Your Negro
- This Is Not a Pipe
- Mediocrity
- Enough
- Bigger
BONUS: The quasi-documentary “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” will be available for streaming online for a limited time. This rarely-seen short film, produced in late 2015 by Jennifer & Jean-Luc Studios, LLC, documents the songwriting process for the song “Bigger”.
HOW BIGGER WAS BORN.
Another tiny album by Bryan Thomas and the Buggy Jive.
released May 11, 2017
BT: Vox, Acoustic Guitar, Stranger in the Village
Jennifer: Lead Guitars, Backing Vox, Everybody’s Protest Novel
Cleopatra Jones: Bass, Backing Vox, Many Thousands Gone
DJ Lady Mac: Beats, Samples, Synths, Backing Vox, Notes of a Native Son
All songs © 2017 by BT except “Bigger” © 2015.
Recorded in a warm hole full of light somewhere in Delmar, NY.
Produced by Dewitt Joe Damseph for WT3 Records.
HOW BIGGER WAS BORN. Copyright 2017 Radical Plastical Music and WT3 Records. All rights reserved.
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Shout out to Mr. Chris Wienk and WEXT for having me on for another installment of the Local 518 show.
I had a cold, which made singing a little rough, but to make things even worse, I was stupid enough to try to perform a song that was at the time only 72 hours old. Appropriately named “Mediocrity.”
So: two songs from the new tiny album Song About Books About Writers and a new one from the forthcoming tiny album “How Bigger Was Born.”
That’s right. 5 more new songs.
And a movie to boot.
Coming soon to a Bandcamp page near you.
Without further ado, here are the three mediocre performances.
Simon
Mediocrity
Agency
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A self-imposed songwriting challenge, in two parts.
Part One: Build a song with just vox, bass guitar and samples (beats/horns/strings). No 6-string guitar allowed.
Part Two: Get inside your head. Go deep.
The result?
“I Am Not Your Negro.”
LYRICS
When was the last time that you were the only one in the room who looked like you?
Did you not see color?
Were you looking for another?
Were you feeling kinda desperate?
Were you looking for the exit?
A victim of your circumstance?
Were you angry?
Were you anxious?
Were you scared?
Or: did you dance?
Let me see you dance.
Did you question their intensions?
Were you on some kind of mission
to make them understand your condition
and the fact of your existence?
Did you take the time to listen?
Or: was it beautiful?
Did you stay until the end?
Did you want to tell your friends?
Did you feel a sense of pride
just for being in the room and alive?
Well: I am not your negro.
If you were the only one who looked like you, who lived like you, who loved like you…
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Thanks to the Altamont Free Library (and especially Joe!) for inspiring an evening of slave songs and hip-hop and Broadway and rock and roll with the kickoff SongTeller Sessions show. Really fun, thanks to everyone who came out. And Joe: the questions are great, they really forced me to get inside my own head – and some of my fellow songwriting friends, too (I’m looking at you, Victor Johnson!)
My answers are below. But first, here’s the answer to question #6: a one-time performance of “Wait For It,” from a little play you probably never heard of called “Hamilton.”
1. What is a song your parents loved?
“Mary Don’t You Weep” (Traditional/Aretha Franklin)
2. What was the first album you bought with your own money?
Mashup: “You Shook Me All Night Long” (AC/DC Back in Black) and “You Can’t Win” (The Wiz)
3. What was the first song you learned to play?
“Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho” (Traditional)
4. What’s the first bad song you wrote?
“Spirits” (Basically a ripoff of “Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho”.)
5. What’s the first good song you wrote?
“Six” (It’s not necessarily good, but fun, and more importantly, it’s the first song of mine I saw someone else cover.)
6. If you could have written any song, what would it be?
“Wait for It” (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton)… But also: “Ballad of Dorthy Parker” (Prince) and “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” (Joni Mitchell).
7. What song do you love that other people seem to dislike?
“Ultralight Beam” (Kanye West)
8. What’s a traditional/folk/children’s/church song that you like?
“Starfish and Coffee” (Prince)
9. What’s a song that reminds you of home?
“Golden Years” (David Bowie) Me and my brothers fighting over a greatest hits cassette back in the day.
10. What song of yours would you like to be remembered by?
“Rise”
And I opened/warmed-up the set with “Agency,” a song about writing and editing and Toni Morrison and Harper Lee that’s on the new mini album, which you can download for free.
Cheers, and thanks again.
(And yes, Prince really was on the Muppet Show. And it was amazing.)
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This is a hardbound book of blank pages I received in third grade for winning a creative writing contest.
My plan was to keep it blank until I was ready to fill it with my Great American Novel.
It’s still empty.
But now, at the very, least it’s the cover of a new, tiny album of four songs about books about writers called “Songs about Books about Writers”.
That’s right: just dropping a new rekkid outta the blue. Free download. No big deal.
Enjoy. Happy New Year.
SONGS ABOUT BOOKS ABOUT WRITERS
A tiny album by Bryan Thomas and the Buggy Jive.
“Simon” borrows from Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the New Testament, the wisdom of Simon Weisenthal and a beat by Simon Phillips (courtesy The Loop Loft).
“Writer” was inspired by my own failures, Robert Frost, and the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway. With Ava Gardner as Cynthia Green and Benny Carter as the African with no piety from the film of the same name. Beats courtesy The Loop Loft.
“Orlando” was inspired by Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Beats sampled from Questlove’s “Ludwiggy.” (More info here.)
“Agency” was inspired by Toni Morrison and Harper Lee. Beats courtesy The Loop Loft.
released: January 1, 2017
The Buggy Jive is:
BT: Vox, Acoustic Guitar, Rising Action
Jennifer: Lead Guitars, Backing Vox, Climax
Cleopatra Jones: Bass, Backing Vox, Falling Action
DJ Lady Mac: Beats, Samples, Synths, Backing Vox, Denouement
All songs by BT.
Special guest appearances by Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison and Harper Lee.
Recorded in a warm hole full of light somewhere in Delmar, NY.
Produced by Dewitt Joe Damseph for WT3 Records.
SONGS ABOUT BOOKS ABOUT WRITERS. Copyright 2017 Radical Plastical Music and WT3 Records. All rights reserved.
tags: alternative black rock solo acoustic solo male artist soul rock Albany
license: all rights reserved
LYRICS
1. Simon
03:27
Simon says: “Pig head on a stick.
Maybe it’s only you and me.”
And a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations
Moves toward the open sea.
I’ve read the book so many times.
Simon always dies.
Simon says: “I shall not disown him.”
Jesus says: “Yeah, right.
Before the cock commence to crowin’
You will say – ‘I do not know him’ – thrice.”
I’ve read the book so many times.
Simon always denies.
Jesus says: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not overcome it. And I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.”
“But do you love me more than you love these?”
Simon says: “The history of man
Is the history of crime
And history repeats.”
He’s seen it go down so many times
Simon is never surprised
2. Writer
03:04
CYNTHIA GREEN: (Sighs.) Hasn’t that African got any piety at all?
I’m writing another book about a writer.
I barely started it.
It’s in my head.
It’s always changing.
Cut and paste.
Undo.
Redo.
Undo.
Yet another book about a writer.
There are too many.
The devil said so.
Her name is Brooke.
She wrote a book.
About a stripper.
Who was writer.
It’s the same thing.
If you’re doing it right.
It’s the same thing.
If you’re doing it right.
Should I let my writer save the world?
Should I let him get the girl then write it all down?
Quill and ink or vintage Smith Corona – whatever’s cooler.
He gets it all down.
Better than I could.
Time for breaking bread loaf with the writers.
Real writers.
As suggested.
By the powers that be.
This is my sigh.
Ages hence.
I retreated.
I wasn’t ready.
I hadn’t lived yet.
I’m still waiting.
But in the meantime (These are the snows)
But in the meantime (of Kilimanjaro)…
I’ve written another song about a book about a writer.
3. Orlando
06:38
VIRGINIA: “Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.”
Orlando is tired
300 years of living life forward
She wanna get back.
She’s lost all desire
Humanity can be such a horror
Wanna get back.
She is my allusion.
Wrapped in my conceit.
Novel or novella?
It don’t matter I’m just happy to be writing again.
My Orlando is livid
So my Orlando will fix this.
She gonna get back.
Joni got us back to the garden but
My Orlando say that ain’t far enough
She wanna turn back the clock so she can stop the original carbon
From my imagination
To this appropriation
Literary reparations
I’m just happy to be writing again.
So just to refresh
You return to the text
And Virginia jokingly say: “There can be no doubt of his sex.”
Ha ha ha.
But – no joke – so much to doubt in all of the rest.
Page One:
Young Orlando swings his sword again and again and again
At the severed head of a dead African
That daddy put to death for defending his land.
Daddy brought the head back from deepest Africa
To hang on the wall with the other prize animals.
And this is not the story that I wanted to be writing.
Orlando had a great variety of selves to call upon
Far more than Virginia could accommodate.
Whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand selves.
A biography need only account for six or seven or eight.
So who is Orlando?
Is Orlando: the boy who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet;
the boy who handed the Queen the bowl of rose water;
is he the Courtier; the Ambassador; the Soldier.
or the young man who fell in love with Sasha;
Or is he the boy who cut the nigger’s head down and strung it up again?
Is he the boy who cut the nigger’s head down and strung it up again?
Far too many selves for Virginia to accommodate.
But a boy swinging at a severed nigger head is the one she went with right out the gate.
My time travel hero to end our sufferin’
Could have been Benjamin Button
My time travel hero to save the childrens
Could have been Billy Pilgrim
My time travel hero to turn back the clock
It could have been Marty and Doc
But it had to be Orlando.
But it had to be Orlando.
But it had to be Orlando.
But it had to be Orlando.
VIRGINIA: “Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy.”
4. Agency
05:04
1.
Toni reads the New York Times with a
pencil in hand and a poet’s eye
She picks through the language upon the pages
Patiently.
She kills some words quickly; some, she lets suffer.
She be laughing as she slashes through others
But the laughter is not fun.
It is agency.
2.
She be laughing on the regular
At them that try to edit her.
All of their so-called improvements just be
Deleterious.
They change her titles, even changed her name
They make it worse; she takes the blame.
So her laughter is not silly.
It is serious.
3.
She finds yet another editor’s crime.
So Toni begins to fantasize
About the reprimand.
She say: “Y’all got some nerve to capitalize
The final word in Paradise
What part of my Nobel Prize
do you not understand?”
But Toni’s too cool to say it.
But don’t confuse cool with complacency.
Listen for her laughter.
It is agency.
4.
Harper had an editor, too.
Wanted to edit her Daddy.
Wanted to edit the messenger too.
Wanted to end it happy.
Editor be like: “This is not fully conceived.
Don’t make him who he was
Make him who we need him to be.”
Harper say: “He was both of these men at once.”
5.
Thus the Lord said unto Harper Lee
“Go, set a watchman to declare what he see.
Go, set a trap for 2015.”
Harper laughs and waits so patiently
Because laughter is an agency.
BRYAN: “I have an idea for a music video. Can you pretend to be annoyed at me while I’m singing?”
CINDY: “Pretend?”
“Beautiful” is a new music video. Shot quickly. Guerilla-style. In a backyard. On a fall day. In panoramic 360°. Live in one take. And she ain’t havin’ it.
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Early morning Veterans Day show, live at the Empire State Plaza, to an audience of none.
Metaphors.
And previously: Capturing souls and selling them back in Central Park on a hot day in July 2012.
From the Smash to Pieces EP.
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Such a great night of music in a gorgeous room. Thanks to the fine folks at Cohoes Music Hall for having me and to Greg Haymes for the kind words.
Here’s the full video of my set, courtesy Chris Coccaro, who livestreamed it from the balcony to the Joni fam.
02:43 – Introduction by Owen Smith
04:30 – It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bob Dylan)
08:55 – Nola
14:49 – Rise
22:28 – Sam
30:47 – The Jungle Line (Joni Mitchell)
37:38 – When
Thanks again to everyone who came out.
THE REVIEW
Bryan Thomas opened the show with a 40-minute solo set that fused the personal and the political, the local and the global, the historical and the contemporary. Bookended by a tender, intimate rendition of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and a raw, radical reworking of Joni Mitchell’s “The Jungle Line,” his set centered around a pair of uncompromising originals — “Rise” and “Sam” — that faced the issue of racial division head-on, proving that he’s the Capital Region’s best singer-songwriter. And he just keeps getting better.
FANTASTIC NEGRITO with special guest Bryan Thomas
Thursday, Oct. 13. 8 p.m.
Cohoes Music Hall, 58 Remsen St, Cohoes, NY
This should be fun.
ABOUT FANTASTIC NEGRITO
Upon winning NPR’s inaugural Tiny Desk Concert Contest, Fantastic Negrito (Xavier Dphrepaulezz) Quickly won over critics with 2015’s self-titled EP. Consequence of Sound wrote of the record “Dphrepaulezz sings like a man compelled by a spiritual force…[his] voice is impassioned, somewhere between a croon and a scream,” and the Washington Post praised the EP’s “raw vocals and self-assessing lyrics.” The San Francisco Chronicle noted that “almost overnight, the singer-songwriter became an international sensation.”
Dphrepaulezz hailed from an orthodox Muslim household as a child. After relocating from rural Massachusetts to Oakland as a teenager in the 1980s, he quickly moved from strict religion to the music of Funkadelic; by the age of 20 he taught himself to play just about every instrument he came across, and in the `90s, he signed a multi-million dollar deal with Interscope Records performing under his first name Xavier. Dphrepaulezz’s life changed drastically when he was involved in a near death car accident resulting in a three-week coma, followed by intensive physical rehabilitation with his guitar playing hand permanently incapacitated. After a five-year hiatus, Dphrepaulezz created Fantastic Negrito. Inspired by all American music, most especially Delta bluesmen such as R.L Burnside and Skip James, he sought to modernize his compositions by sampling and looping his own live recordings.
ABOUT BRYAN THOMAS
Bryan Thomas is a mediocre negrito.
He makes music in his basement.
Sometimes they let him out.
Thursday, Oct. 13 is one of those times.
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