Composing Wild Animus
Rich’s initial idea for the Wild Animus music was that it would employ one voice (his own) and one instrument (acoustic guitar/mandolin). What Blind Willie McTell did on “The Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” influenced him greatly.
“The song was challenging to listen to, but deeply rewarding. Blind Willie took bits and pieces of four or five different songs and stitched them together to tell a story. I loved the complexity, the ways in which the melodic fragments worked to portray specific moments. And I loved the surprises.”
Could a much longer story be constructed in a similar fashion?
“I embraced the idea that a mixture of song-like pieces and free-form pieces would work. There might be scenes where a typical song structure made sense. In Wild Animus, there’s a pursuit, or some continuous action or thought, and it’s accompanied by verses with a repeating melody and consistent meter. But then the action breaks up—it’s stop and go, or interrupted by internal reflections—and the music becomes fragmented. The fragments have accessible meter and melody, but they may not be repeated. Don Van Vliet was an inspiration here—master of the unexpected.”
An Experiment in Storytelling
“I thought it might be possible to use jolting and disconnected passages to convey a sequence of dramatic events. More recently, I heard John Zorn’s Spillane. It’s a soundscape, there’s very little speech, and you wouldn’t call it a story. But he uses loosely-connected bits of music to create a sequence of theatrical moments.”
Rich realized early on that this music wouldn’t be for everyone. But he was convinced that “there will be people like myself who will go for it. The potential to expand the nature of storytelling is really exciting, and I believe others will share that excitement.
“This has always been an experiment, and I want people to approach it that way. If this way of integrating words and music has potential, it will require people to look past its weaknesses and unfamiliarity. Are there moments where the experiment works? Does the story come to life in a way that would be otherwise impossible?”
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“This has always been an
experiment, and I want people
to approach it that way. If this
way of integrating words and
music has potential, it will
require people to look past its weaknesses and unfamiliarity.”
