I recently made some updates to the Dabang Band subsite, mainly just fixing broken photo galleries but also adding song lyrics from the old archived site so they’re better formatted and more easily reachable. While I was doing that, I ran across lyrics for a few songs that never got recorded. One of them wasn’t mine, so I don’t know how the melody went–I’m pretty sure I never even heard the song, and I’m not sure how it ended up on the website.

However, I also found the remnants of several of my own long-ago attempts at songwriting. It was a tough, frustrating struggle for me: I knew how to write fugues and avant-garde music, I could invent new jazz melodies on established chord changes–though I learned that things like diminished chords were not in the cards for us, which meant all that lovely jazz harmony I’d studied was useless. A rock song? That was an alien structure to me, and I struggled to get a handle on it. Several of my attempts turned out pretty rotten, but since our lead singer asked me to try write something for the band, I went ahead and kept trying. The problem was that I gravitated to formal structures that were more familiar to me… and completely unfamiliar to the rest of the band, which is part of the reason that only two of my songs ever got into rotation at all. (“The Jeonju Zoo,” and “The Deep End.”) Others–including an odd rock-waltz, and a sort of upbeat country-ish folk song called Spiritwood that I think would have been just lovely, didn’t get past a single run-through.

One of the oddest tunes I wrote, though, was called Bodhi-Dharma’s Work Song. It was basically a chain gang/work song, like “Berta Berta,” which many people probably first saw as part of “The Piano Lesson,” though I’ve always been partial to the version on Branford Marsalis’ blues-focused album, “I Heard You Twice the First Time”:

Some deep, deep grinding music. That track still blows me away, in part because of its incredible physicality, but also because it just begs to loop and loop and loop. I’m fascinated by musical structures like that, the kind that loop and beg to be looped endlessly. I wondered whether it might be possible to do something that was a little more like churchy music, but using a structure like this, and very simple harmony.

What I came up with was “Bodhi-Dharma’s Work Song.” The lyrics went like this, with the x2 signifying a repeat of the couplet:

I’m a-walkin’ down this road,
Where it goes nobody knows. x2
I’m a-walkin’ to the East,
Always famine, never feast. x2

I’m a-preachin’ the Lord of Light,
Try to end the endless night… x2
Buddha, you are everywhere,
Come and help me from this snare. x2

Bridge:
Oh Lord, take me home…
Oh Lord, take me home…
Oh Lord, gone so far, so far…
Oh Lord, take me home…

I’m a-walkin’ down this road,
Where it goes nobody knows. x2
I’m a-walkin’ to the East,
Always famine, never feast. x2

Then the holy one he sighs,
sits up, opens up his eyes. x2
Takes us all inside one hand,
hauls us up to the pure land. x2

I’m a-walkin’ down this road,
Where it goes nobody knows. x2
I’m a-walkin’ to the East,
Always famine, never feast. x2

Here’s some sheet music, with a few fixes for things that just didn’t sound write in my original notations, and some other changes to clarify things. If you can read music, you’ll notice there is no verse/chorus structure: it’s couplets, each sung twice, in roughly the same rhyme and meter–and on a single melody line that shifts slightly for the second pair of couplets:

And here’s a PDF, for those who don’t have the eyes of a twenty-year-old.

The second voice line was just a suggested harmony. It wouldn’t be present all the time, probably just in the second and last verse, though it would be up to the singers, who could also improvise other harmonies and counterpoints as the song developed. By which I mean, it’s the kind of song you sing a bunch of times, till it becomes part of you, before you ever think of recording it with your band.

Originally, I’d envisioned it as having a flute solo in the middle, with drums and bass, and minimal guitar–backing it. However, I eventually started to think maybe it’d be better just as some kind of a cappella song with only a bass like, and maybe a shekere (I had–and might still have–one back in Canada), a large Korean hand-cymbal, and maybe a Tibetan meditation bowl that could start to ring out somewhere in the middle of the song. (I picked one up in India, and still have it.)

Well, maybe I’ll manage to record a version of it someday, just with voices and an upright bass, if I can get my hands on one. I prefer not to just overdub my own voice multiple times, though: that never sounds really right for this kind of thing. You need the density and richness that multiple different voices singing together creates. And I feel like it needs to be people who’ve sung the song together a bunch of times. Ah well… someday. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

Oh, one more thing: while I had seen the film “Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?” prior to leaving Canada for Korea–it played on Showcase late one night–I think it was probably Kevin Kim who got me back to thinking about Dharma Daesa (as he is called in Korea), and almost certainly this image of Kevin’s helped inspire the song:

I used to have the T-shirt featuring this line drawing, but the shirt, like so many things from that time, is long gone. I’m sure Bodhi-Dharma would smile and point out that it’s better not to be attached to such things, as attachment leads to suffering. Still, I can’t help but be happy that the blog post isn’t long gone, and that the song is still around, if even in this ephemeral form.