Werewolves
I wear a necklace every day that has a wolf on it. People will often ask if it has any special meaning. My response always starts the same way: “Do you want the short answer or the long answer?”
The short answer is that I like wolves and thought the small medal was in-line with typical Brian fare. The long answer comes from Derek Delgaudio’s In & of Itself —it’s on Hulu; you should watch it. In one of the segments of this autobiography-meets-magic-meets-lecture performance, Delgaudio speaks of a “medieval cautionary tale” concerning the “time between dog and wolf.”
Medieval parents supposedly used this tale as a way of corralling their children before darkness descended on the countryside —to be home before it was dark enough that you couldn’t tell the difference between a dog and a wolf, the difference between a friend and a foe.
“I didn’t see this as a dangerous time,” Delgaudio says. Instead, he says that this period offers a unique opportunity for transformation: It is the one fleeting period where a wolf gets to be a dog, and a dog gets to be a wolf.
I reflected a lot on this idea. What does it mean? How can it illustrate the roles we take on in our lives? How can it transform? How do we transform? Though my thinking is always evolving and exploring on such things (I still think about this idea quite a bit), where I settled was to believe this meant that each of us has places in our lives where we can appear to be more than we are. Places where we have the capacity to reach beyond our normal frailty, faults, and weakness and temporarily transform into something empowering. Something dangerous.
Being a parent might be where this idea is most commonly visible. Or maybe it’s when you go to work, or take to a stage, or when you write a book, or teach others? Any space where you reach beyond yourself —those holy spaces where you look back and say, “how did I do that?”
So, this is the long answer about the meaning behind my wolf necklace: It is my constant reminder to seek out the areas of my life where I can be more than I am, to seek out my superpowers, even if they are temporary. Let’s briefly turn to Bob Dylan:
Darkness at the break of noon
shadows even the silver spoon
the handmade blade, the child’s balloon
eclipses both the sun and moon
to understand you know too soon/there is no sense in trying
--“It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” —Bob Dylan
“Try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that…and I did it at one time,” Dylan told Ed Bradley in 2004.
“You don’t think you can do it today?”
“Nuh uh.”
“Does that disappoint you?”
“Well, you can't do something forever. I can do other things now. But I can't do that.”
When I look on my body of work I see many instances that feel as if they were beyond me. I wonder how I came up with this idea, or that idea. One of those instances is my song “Werewolves:”
“Werewolves” was the first song I wrote that worked with loops. Though I (slowly) constructed the loops by layering on my keyboard’s bells and whistles, I really had no idea how it was going to come out, and little idea of what I was doing.
I wanted “Werewolves” to be different, something that didn't sound like everything else I’d written. While the lyrics and delivery sound more Leonard Cohen-esque to me, I think the occasional melodic flair amidst speak-singing is a nod to one of my favorite elements of Nick Cave’s last decade. I knew I was lifting from both of them, so I threw in a quiet nod to Cohen:
I’ll let that lunar sway bathe me in its light
Swiped straight from Cohen’s “Democracy:”
It’s coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway
So much of what I love about (song)writing is how sometimes simplicity wins, but other times coming up with beautiful, elegant ways of saying something makes it explode off the page. Here, it’s using “the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway” as a stand-in for the arrival of a (figurative) high tide. Sometimes “poetic” is irritating. But when it’s not, man, it can make the engine go.
Fitting then that this all happens on a song about a creature built on temporary transformation —a werewolf. That transformation is the central tenant of this song, landing on what is maybe my favorite lyric I have in my songbook:
Throw the dirt and let it scatter to the wind
It’ll sound like rain coming down again
That was always my kind of trick
Offer up something and watch the elements shift
In a song built on transformation, this stanza is everything that wearing my wolf necklace is about. You offer up something, and, suddenly, it’s something else entirely. Maybe that’s a gap between what you intended to do and what you ultimately did, or perhaps it’s who you are and who you were in a particular moment. Or, in the literal sense of the lyrics, you throw dirt (earth) into the air, and it sounds like rain (water) when it falls back to the ground. Offer something and watch it transform. Watch the elements shift.
Maybe it’s the moment when the dirt is highest in the air, or maybe it’s right at the moment it starts to land that the fleeting opportunity for transformation happens, the brief moment when the dirt gets to be water, the dog gets to be the wolf. And maybe the point is simply to experience what it means to transform, even temporarily, for no other reason than its own sake, the chance to feel like the (were)wolf: “God forbid, I’d say, is it such a sin, to stand in the light just to let the light in?”