Sidewalk Daisy

You can expect more posts like this now that school's started. Here's a treated photo that I took out at the Albany Bulb. Below is a sample of today's chunk of the novel. Copyright 2009, Sean Craven. As if I should have to say so...

“Hey,” I said, “does the album have a name yet?”

“It’s called Sidewalk Daisy,” Lulu said.

“No it isn’t,” Willy said. “The lead guitarist for an album called Sidewalk Daisy is a twelve-year old girl named Kimberly with a little heart over the i.”

“You get to pick names when you start writing songs,” Lulu said. “So until then you are allowed to shut the fuck up and that is the law.”

To go from hearing Lulu and Willy singing along to an electric guitar to the insane lushness of Sidewalk Daisy was amazing.

Willy’s bluesy guitar could have been recorded any time in the last forty years, but underneath it Lulu’s electronics were like nothing I’ve ever heard — lush, sweet, so complex you couldn’t take them all in. As I listened hard and tried to figure them out, the hairs on my arms rose and my skin prickled. I went back to being lost in the fog, the sound I had followed. I heard the same sound in her music.

The vocals were where Lulu’s background came through. There are places back East where they sing British folk songs in more archaic forms than they do anywhere in England and it’s my guess that Lulu came from one of those places.

At the same time the rhythms and guitar melodies were African, brought over as work chants by the slaves. That was Willy’s contribution. He and Lulu had taken the blues and country ballads and fused them together all over again. It was the birth of rock coming out of a little black laptop.