Death, hoping to retire, foists his crown upon an unsuspecting, unconvinced stranger. It’s a phrase I heard, or perhaps misheard, somewhere ages ago and it’s been hanging around in my notebooks, beckoning me uncertainly ever since. Things come from everywhere: you maybe don’t even know what they mean, and they might mean something entirely different later. You just jot them down and hang on to them until it’s time.

I know that my collaborator David Nagler’s initial inspiration for this was Gary McFarland’s “Wine and Bread”, a song I adore from McFarland’s wonderful 1965 album The In Sound, with a sensational jazz-protest lyric, quite inspirational on this album generally. I’ve been trying to get the English UK to cover it at a Cabinet but we’re never quite got round to it. We will. I often send David stuff I like for inspiration, as he does for me too, though he might travel in quite parallel dimensions. Here, he took the lyric to Cuba: mambo and cha cha, Arsenio Rodriguez, he tells me. I encouraged him to go further out there on the piano on this one because I wanted it to sound freer. There is a very nice conversation, a scuffle in fact, between his piano and Domenica Fossati’s flute. Plus it’s the first time David got to play the tres that he bought from Nelson Gonzalez, the great tresero who played with Eddie Palmieri and others.

This song was a lot of fun to play on the last solo tour, and somehow managed to include The Champs’ song “Tequila", though I preferred the audience to sing “Grim Reaper” for obvious reasons - I suppose they could also have sung “Antifa” or “Saliba”, depending on what channels you watch and whom you support. It takes a little while to work these songs out for solo acoustic performance, as you can imagine - and the Secret Series version of this album was the trickiest one yet - and it’s really very satisfying when they turn into something very playable. It’s not always the case! But this one did. Also, there’s a little call and response in this chorus - not very much of it - but as anyone who has ever been to my shows knows: audience participation is very rare. But, finally, FINALLY, I can sing “hanging up the sickle” and…. you can sing it right back to me.

Photo by Ilya Mirman

Design by Morgan Narkiewicz