February ’07 - One song I listened to about ten times in a row recently was 'HOUSE OF CHANGING FACES', by David Blue. I thought only Townes Van Zandt wrote songs from such desperate places (like Sanitarium Blues, which makes me picture Townes buckled to a bed but still groping for a pencil, then scrawling lyrics on his green hospital gown, saving up the very last of his brain cells for a song). There is not a single wasted word in David Blue's song - “It wasn’t easy when I think about it, living in the house of changing faces. I still have the tracks to remind me what life was like high and wasted, when I wanted to die” - and his guitar, heavy, harsh and twanging, says even more, maybe all the truly awful but undramatic details which just can’t be conveyed by words. His vocals are double-tracked, which I think is often a mistake for really personal songs…but in this case, maybe he needed the moral support of another voice (and it could only be his own).
