As unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, it’s the Pop Empire newsletter!!

This mailing list has been collected (very slowly) over the fifteen years that this musical project has existed, though I don’t believe we have ever sent out a direct communication through this channel.

Going forward, we intend this to be a primary platform through which we share updates about new recordings, shows, merch, and other creative work, along with behind-the-scenes material, unofficial (secret) releases, reflections on the creative process, and explorations of the backstories and inspirations for certain songs and works.

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Last Lights Off the Black West

The last several years of our musical work has culminated in an album that I have titled Last Lights Off the Black West. This title is taken from the lines of a sonnet written in 1877 by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This poem has long held a special place for me — I first memorized it when I was eighteen or nineteen — but only a couple years ago I realized I could set it to music by repurposing the tune of “Sittin’ On Top Of the World” aka “Some Summer Day”. That’s when I began developing it as a song, along with the rest of the little clan of songs that would become the material of this new album.

And though the last lights off the black West went,
  Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings

https://poets.org/poem/gods-grandeur https://poets.org/poet/gerard-manley-hopkins https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins

Although he is now regarded as one of the best English poets of the Victorian era, his poetry was not published until many years after his death, and he nearly gave up writing poems entirely when he joined the Jesuit order. He burned all his old poetry and vowed not to write again unless directed to do so by his superiors.

He did take up writing again, however, with the approval of his spiritual director. The occasion that spurred or at least solidified his return to verse was a great civilian tragedy, the sinking of the passenger ship SS Deutschland, carrying emigrants bound for New York.

His immediate and extended family on both sides was full of literary and visually artistic minds. Gerard inherited these inclination along with the devout religiosity and reverence for Nature that were also characteristic of his family. In particular, many of the female members of his family were well educated and artistically accomplished. Beyond this intellectual stimulation, it seems his family was, all in all, quite affectionate. However, his conversion to Roman Catholicism caused a significant estrangement betweeen him and his Anglican family, the pain of which seems to have been felt acutely on both sides.

Hopkins died in 1889, one hundred years before I was born.

Hopkins, in his internal life, struggled extensively with the demon of acedia.

Hopkins coined the term “sprung rhythm” and is considered the originator of that metrical style in modern English verse, although I believe that in fact he was correct to say that this is the natural prosody of native English speakers, and that he merely identified and named it. Sprung rhythm was not in general use in formal verse in the Victorian era, but it had never disappeared from popular song and nursery rhymes, and it would make a brilliant return to the arena of “serious” poetry in the works of Modernist poets such as Dylan Thomas, writing several decades after Hopkins’ death but only a short while after the publication of his works.

Digging into the nitty gritty, “God’s Grandeur,” written just a year or so after Hopkins’s return to poetry, is scanned by the author as a specimen of counterpointed common verse. Sprung rhythm arises naturally where common verse (i.e. lines made up of repeated feet with a regular stress pattern and number of syllables, also called “running rhythm” by Hopkins) is reversed or counterpointed. Counterpoint, in Hopkins’s usage here, is the superposition of a new lyrical rhythm on top of an already established rhythm. He employed this term in analogy with musical counterpoint, which is the superposition of a new melody on top of an established one. In modern parlance, it would seem to make more sense to call this syncopation or polyrhythm, which are hallmarks of music influenced by traditional African styles, as these terms pretty well fit the meaning of Hopkins’s reversed and counterpointed verse without resort to any mediating analogy. Yet these terms were not widespread in the theoretical analysis or even in the practice of European music in Hopkins’s day.

Hopkins’s style has been very influential on me, not just sprung rhythm, but other lyrical eccentricities too — grammatical practices, such as rambling adjectival phrases that swallow whole clauses. A good example of this is found in “The Windhover” (emphasis mine):

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding…

Lines from Pop Empire songs such as “Nightwalking” and “Riding the Crest” take inspiration from this.

In the high sodium-vapor-yellow
lonesome air, the silent twilight’s fall silhoueettes a figure…

Riding on that crest of silver starlight Dazzled dim, dark water by the shore…

The first of these excerpts, from our song “Nightwalking”, also borrows from Joseph Campbell’s “Gartan Mother’s Lullaby” (1904), and the latter, from our song “Riding the Crest”, makes clear allusion to Yeats’s “Aedh Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven” (1899).

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