I Can't Help It...

[By chance, I ran across the liner notes that Ichabod Rain put together for one the hard copies he made of a collection he entitled, "I Can't Help It" with the remark that it was of his "sad song". Just what he meant by that, I haven't yet determined -- but I am convinced that it is a play on words of some sort.

With this in hand, I will post over the next days, the texts and, hopefully, further comments that Ichabod may have made about these compositions -- one never knows what one might uncover in the 2nd and 3rd level footnotes to the Absolute Truth, 21st Edition]

What A Monkey Can Do -- an old friend told me about being attacked by some skinhead nazis and this song was the result. It's really not about fascists -- it's an examination of the theme that there is no way to find a limit on the goodness or wickedness us little monkeys can demonstrate.

I Can't Help It -- a pretty little thing I put together one afternoon which starts with a complaint that I had lost my "genuine triangular tortoise shell flat pick" and glides over to deep philosophical speculation, if you know where to look.

Crazy Lover -- a take off on an old traditional guitar piece, "Buckdancer's Choice" to which I found a few words somewhere...

The Earth -- Sunflower Woman hates this song because she sees it as a rip off on Woody Guthrie's "This Land is your Land" -- which it isn't. True, the concept owes a lot to "This land", but the melody has no relation and the structure of the chorus as well as the development of the first two verses is a lot different.

Freight Train -- my modest interpretation of Elizabeth Cotton's classic

Rambler Gambler -- my interpretation of a classic folk song

The Water is Wide -- my interpretation of John Jacob Niles' arrangement of a lovely, classic folk song. The D-tuning arrangement is something I picked up somewhere at least 30 years ago.

Deep Water -- if I was to choose, I'd say that this is best thing I've ever done, "...perhaps you are afraid to go, but still you cannot stay -- love is the journey we must all go on someday and it's deep, incredibly, perhaps infinitely deep."