Last Thursday (in Fragments) - "Limitation"

"To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking..."

Tape Extracts:

Garrett Tiedemann: So what did you find? 

Don Chambers: Well, that I was really hungry, I was really hungry for getting back into song writing, but that's that's not really finding anything.

When I was a kid, there was nothing more satisfying than cutting the grass. Because you've got that immediate change of landscape and I like the immediacy of the songwriting process at the beginning stages when you're just making things up and having an immediacy in my songwriting I think the Last Thursday did give me more willingness to push myself further in taking chances with songwriting because one of the other keys to the Last Thursday was its limitation. 

It's a great idea to give yourself a list of things that you can't do or some kind of limitations. So, you get things done, basically. I don't work well if I have too many choices. And the Last Thursday, because of the time limitation and I tried to do as much as I possibly could with the palette I had made for myself. And so moving back in the songwriting, I think it's given me the willingness to just push, push out further.

Johnny Cash with Woody Guthrie and with Dylan's 60s stuff. My first band before Vaudeville was called Cursing Alice. And we used to cover a lot of that and we were purposely acoustic because I was afraid if I picked up a electric guitar and got a couple of pedals that I wouldn't learn how to write a song. 

So we kept it really simple at the beginning. 

The themes, the general approach to the whole thing, it's a very visual show and the thing that I'm working on next is going to definitely pull in a lot of those themes and a lot of the visuals and turn it into something else. It was too fruitful here to to just leave it behind. But, I want to leave it behind as the thing that it was. I don't want to try and ever repeat that, at that place, with that set up because it was special in that way. Small theater, intimate, pretty much I had a mailing list. So the crowd was, a lot of the same people came every month and were along for this ride you know and we'll see what's going to happen next, what's going to be in the Christmas stocking. 

I don't want to try and repeat anything like that, but it is folding into the next thing. I just, I'm just honestly I'm not sure I want to go there yet with talking about it.

Putting words to it, then it becomes somehow committed in your head to this is the way it is supposed to be even though you might have only said it to one or two people, but I think your brain starts to think oh, it's going in this direction. Right now, I'm pretty sure I see which direction the things going in, but it's gonna. I want to let it gestate for a while.