Dec 25, 2019
Our final discussion around The Black Rider continues from last week, as Martin and Sam get Burroughs quotes wrong (“Do what you will, that is the whole of the law” obviously being an Alistair Crowley quote, you idiot Sam, how did you miss that?!?), talk about the problematic autobiographical elements of the story,...
Dec 18, 2019
Sam and Martin dig into the four tracks that only appear in The Black Rider play, trying to decide why they weren’t featured on the Waits album. With some mixed feelings about the quality of the songs overall, and a little discussion about the language used by Waits and Burroughs (both in English and German), we start...
Dec 11, 2019
A third week with David & Callum brings Sam & Martin to the end of The Black Rider album, although we reach back to much earlier in the play. Ideas of carnival celebrations in a British context are compared to the American funfair/freakshow image, and we take a bit of time to think about the ideology of the play and...
Dec 4, 2019
Moving into a coda of sorts (both in the album and the play) Callum, David, Sam & Martin discuss the way Waits winds down The Black Rider with this final “proper” song. With some full-blooded disagreement over comparison between the theatre and album versions, Song by Song edges towards the conclusion of this...
Nov 27, 2019
Theatre-maker David Shopland joins his collaborator and returning guest Callum Hughes (plus the usual goofs Martin & Sam) to listen to this climactic track from The Black Rider. We discuss fusion of Waits’s traditional mode of writing with the theatrical context, the nature of his writing throughout the album, as well...