MP3 Peter Britton - The Galveston Sand
Offbeat and edgy western swing with teeth
13 MP3 Songs
COUNTRY: Western Swing, BLUES: Texas Style
Details:
Peter Britton has been a longtome journalist. Energy was his beat. As that business changed for the worse, he needed something fresh, worthwhile and lasting. Writing music with nervy, articulate, edgy and quirky lyrics seemed worth a try. He would use danceable music that could say things in a new way, with words the main power.
He''d call it Quirky Western Swing with Teeth.
This music would address more than fickle relationships. Maybe an offbeat news item, a skewed observation, a fleeting funky thought. The source for this would come from his life since two Army years in Georgia.
In the 1970s business had taken him to the Offshore Technology Conference at the Astrodome in Houston. It was a story on climate change for Exxon. The intensity and excess of that huge indsutrial show---oil from the oceans was the subject---called for a respite.
The beach at Galveston beckoned. And there, on its eastern-most stretch, where sand meets the Houston Ship Channel and its incredible maritime traffic, the music bug bit as he watched a pickup truck, caught by tide and sand, slowly sink from sight. He pondered and photographed and marveled.
This spit of land held a rich cache of images---the sinking pickup, the milling cars, the cement-hard sand, the people playful under a vast blue sky, the breakwater with fishermen and crashing waves of brown Gulf water, the college crowds, the gulls and shrimpboats and stranded jelly fish and channel boats and hum of life---that would coalesce into a story song, herein told.
Galveston''s eastern end would become, in fact, a symbol of consilience, a blending of nature and industry, of mankind and life.
Back then the words came easily, the music hard. So he turned to a young New York cab drier/musician, one Lisa Ferris, then playing at Joe''s Bar on East 6th Street in Manhattan. She would write the tune to his lyrics.
One night during a break she played it for him in the men''s room as the chaotic bar scene raged beyond the door. That was it. He had taken a strange subject, complicated it well past the usual, made it into a powerful, thought-provoking piece that captured time, place and event.
This was what music was for, he thought, conveying truth and interpreting the problems and circumstances of life.
Could there be anything more beautiful or more impoprtant?
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