Shelley Hirsch - Maroney: Music for Words, Perhaps (2010)

This is an album of songs I've written over the years, starting with "I'm Yours" in 1979, "A Thought Revolved" in 1982, and "Music for Words, Perhaps" in 1999. I've written others, but these I like especially. "I'm Yours" and "A Thought Revolved" I wrote for Iota Jot Yod, a band I was in from 1980-84 with Shelley Hirsch, Herb Robertson, David Simons and a series of bassists, including Skip Laplante, Ed Schuller, and Arthur Kell. Tim Berne joined us a few times I think. "I'm Yours" was the first song I ever wrote. It was full of angst until Shelley got ahold of it. Wallace Stevens' poem "A Thought Revolved" moved me because of the line, "The poet... denies that abstraction is a vice." In 1997, when my father died, my wife Erin and I went to Ireland, where her father and my father's ancestors were from. To prepare, I read Irish history and literature. Yeats especially I admired. That was the germ of "Music for Words, Perhaps," a 10-song cycle of his poems. As the old pensioner laments, "I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me."