This twisted* song was written during the years I spent living in Arusha Tanzania, during the first decade of this century. It's a fairly long and complicated story that I've always found kind of difficult to deliver to an audience, and today I took a new approach in this rendering, and mostly delivered it as a spoken word piece over the chord progression. I only actually sing the last stanza. I think this idea works well, and makes the story much easier to follow. (I think the idea probably came to me from hearing how Leonard Cohen very effectively talks his way through some of the songs on his last records.) I had tried to record this back in mid-October, but my clawhammer was not nearly recovered enough at that time, following my stroke in May that hampered the use of my right hand and arm. At that time, I couldn't come close to playing it clawhammer all the way through - and, happily, now I can! But playing a song this long using clawhammer style is still painful to my shoulder, wrist and hand, with the pain increasing the longer I play, so that I'm never sure I will make it all the way to the end. Luckily, I was able to get this down in one take - I'm not sure I could have gotten through a compete second take.
My clawhammer playing here is much more laid back and uncomplicated than it used to be in this song. While that's partly due to necessity, in that I really can't do much more than this at my current state of recovery, I also think that this laid back playing suits the spoken delivery well. I'm trying to take advantage of what I can do these days to come up with good arrangements for my songs, rather than trying to reproduce what I was doing before my stroke (and getting frustrated when I can't do it).
Hopefully, this first year of a new decade will give me back all my banjo chops I had before - but even if it doesn't, I won't let that stop me from coming up with good arrangements using the tools in my banjo playing toolkit that I currently have at my disposal. Sometimes, as the saying goes, "less is more".
This was recorded on 1 January 2020, on an old Whyte Laydie banjo, tuned (open) at eDGBD, but with a capo at the 2nd fret, giving an effective tuning of eEAC#E.
* "twisted" both in the twists and turns the story takes, and also in the unsavoury nature of most of the characters in the story.
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