Huckleberry Man – Song and a Chat

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Episode #67: Huckleberry Man (Song starts at 7.54)

Hi there & welcome! This week’s episode features a song that came out of thin air – a collaboration between myself and my friend Jo Kinniburgh. The evening it happened, we didn’t set out to write a song – it was completely unexpected.

It was at the time I composed my very mellow 1st solo piano ‘River Music’ album. There were 3 of us living in the house at the time, reading Tolkien by candle light, going fly fishing… Sounds pretty tranquil doesn’t it? It was.

But, In contrast to all this, ‘Huckleberry’ came through like a shot in the arm – a song with a sense of humour and message too, I think.

Jo started the guitar riff and I piped up with ‘Pascoe speak’ -half ‘gobbledegook’- sung ‘lyrics’. Huckleberry and the other character, Miss Merry Meadow arrived from the ether, as did Jo’s chord changes. I edited the lyrics and it all came together in no time at all. Great fun.

Over this past 15 months or so, as I’ve archived and examined my creative work (music and art), the elements of humour keep arising. I would venture to say this humour helps to keep energy flowing, keeps you on the breath, ready to receive whatever comes through from the muse – or whatever you’d like to label this ‘ thing’

To me, it’s more than a thing. ‘It’ feels like an ever changing …entity …is the wrong word …force ? Wrong, again. Ahh my coarse brush of my language fails me. I’m comfortable with that. It’s a mystery. Perhaps we can agree to that ?

The lyrics came from somewhere ‘deeper’. As usual, I did weave universal themes into what (on the surface) was a light hearted song. There’s s little bit of me in Huckleberry. And perhaps there’s some of of Huckleberry Finn here as well. Maybe that’s an example of the power and the uniting force of the arts. Here I am, living in the South Pacific , channeling something written by a novelist from the northern hemisphere, in another century.. ..And there’s a little bit of someone else I know in Miss Merry Meadow.

But there’s more … Huckleberry represents male energy in general and Miss Merry, the female energy. So this song is about that dance.

In this episode , I imagine Beethoven composing in a castle, talk about my imaginary dog…yep, we get all over the place, again. The sense of play as I speak helps me to uncover and explain some of the processes I go through to come up with these songs..

So thanks, Jo. I loved writing this with you. And thanks to you, I’m presenting another ( hopefully ) entertaining and informative episode – that’s the aim.

Enjoy that sense of fun and the ‘up’ country type of song as well… Yeeharrr……

Lyrics here : www.petepascoe.wordpress.com ( plus a stack of art and more music).