On November 30, 2024 I created a concert called “Songs of Grief & Gratitude” at Besemer Concert Hall in Nevada City, CA. The two-hour event was comprised of about 65% original music created in response to my brother Todd’s suicide in 2011. Most of the music had never been performed, though much had been recorded and released under various projects such as Dogon (Miguel Noya/Paul Godwin) and Eternal Return (Noya, Godwin, Robert Jürjendal, Colin Edwin, Miguel Toro). This event included local Nevada County musicians Velvy Appleton, Kimberly Bass, Paul Zieff, Bea Sak and Annette Dunklin who appear on this song.
In 2017 while on artist residency at Obras, Portugal, Miguel and I began working on material based in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa. Later that year we released “I Am the Size of What I See” an EP on Bandcamp under the moniker “Godwin & Noya.” In 2018, at OBRAS once again, with Ameera Godwin, we created “So Dou Tomanho Do Que Vejo” in Evora, Portugal. A short performance of projections, dance and music on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Portugal’s contribution to World War I in a public forum off the main square. The event was produced by Obras and the City of Evora. The project is now collected under the title “Heteronimos.”
The lyric for Child of the Incoming Fog is from The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa’s heterononymous, posthumous masterpiece which continues to delight and inspire me lyrically. There were three versions of this song we created, this is the “goldilocks” version, with a piano figure from Miguel that alternates 3 bars of 6/8 with one bar of 7/8 - a signature of 25/8. I guess. He composed it without ever having played it and I learned to play it so I could sing it for this concert. While artist-in-residence at Centrum, Port Townsend, Ameera Godwin created an extraordinary “visual reverie” of the piece which can be found here on her Vimeo channel.
The lyric by Pessoa:
“no tales were told, that others might have told before…
“no firm information, about the person who left earlier…
“in the hopes of embarking, on some illusory boat…
“child of the incoming fog, of future indecision…
“I came down from the unknown mountain, to the equally unknown forest
“and my steps in the slow evening, were just tracks left in the clearing
“everyone I loved, abandoned me to the shadows
“no one knew the time of the last boat
“in the post there was no sign of the letter, no one would write.
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