Listen to The Rheingold Trauma

Songs with a Message

Jump (from a broken country, without a parachute)
A song which is the musical equivalent of brutalist architecture. It has an industrial flavour and is something of a departure for me. I wrote it around 2017 while watching my country tear itself apart.

We used to live in another time,
A time of rhyme and reason.
But Captain Sensible has walked the plank
And the clowns have put the squeeze on.

Into the fire, into the fire
Into the fire, with unbridled desire.

You ask me how it came to this
This cold, unforgiving place.
We've taught ourselves to sacrifice
The common good for our selfish space.

Jump... jump... just believe that you can fly.
Jump... jump... worst case, you'll just die.

Forged in our own factories
Are the tools that will destroy us
We're eaten from the inside out
By our own deluded paranoias.

Into the fire, into the fire
Onto the pyre, we can't climb any higher.

Now the universal energy
Has traversed from plus to minus
And we've lost all sense of synergy
That we once hoped would define us.

Jump... jump... you don't know how far you'll fall.
Jump... jump... if you die you'll take us all.

Jump... jump... jump... jump...
Take a flying leap...

© Alan Wrigley Apr 2019

Rhythm of the Spheres
A song about our wanton disregard for the planet. At the end of the piece there is a quote from Aaron Copland's ballet score Appalachian Spring.

Gaia shields our world from harm
And offers her protection.
A contract underwritten by the primal laws of nature
Binds us to the universe,
To the rhythm of the spheres.

Gaia held the keys to life;
We stole them long ago,
Tore up the contract and usurped the kingdom,
But we could not hold the power.

Pandora's Box should never have been opened.

© Alan Wrigley May 2019

The Silent Scream
My first vegan song, with a little video to accompany it. Please click on the image to watch it on YouTube.

© Alan Wrigley Jan 2020

Crying in the Wilderness
Unlike much of the music I've recorded in the last 4 years this hasn't been simmering for a long time in my head, but is brand new. It marks my transition from cheerfulness to gloominess over the course of the first pandemic year. I was part-way through recording it when my friend Irene Murphy died. It seemed particularly poignant given the subject matter of the song. Recalling that the slow movement of Bruckner's 7th Symphony was influenced by the death of his hero Richard Wagner, I added a new ending to the song based on the line "All the good people are taken too soon" to form a mini-requiem for Irene.

The saxophone solo in the middle is my 21st century take on the solo trumpet in Vaughan Williams' 3rd Symphony, complete with the discordant half-notes that he heard from an army trumpeter while practising. The symphony is effectively a requiem for the First World War, but whereas Vaughan Williams' trumpet echoes through the last resting place and suggests closure, my saxophone is crying in the wilderness and evokes disillusion with no resolution.

We should have learned from history that we can't defy the tide
For all our protestations we cling onto our pride with a bloody-minded stubbornness inside.

The world will always whirl around
The past is lost but never found
And we will always end up in the ground.

We worship fake celebrity and live on the promise of a perk.
But all those human gods of yours don't work, they just steal your soul and smirk.

Crying in the wilderness
We're taught so much but we can't progress
And we are only so much emptiness.

All the good people are taken too soon.

Lockdown
A song in my Brutalist style written during the first Covid19 lockdown in April 2020.

Lockdown... viral entropy
In splendid isolation, devoid of repartee.

Lockdown... with viral overload
Waiting at safe distances for the breaking of the code.

Lockdown... in the viral hinterland
Nature tries to feed us but we always bite the hand.

Lockdown... from a viral catapault
In case you hadn't realised it's mostly our own fault.

Lockdown... viral world reshape
We need some green, or Steve McQueen to lead us to the Great Escape.

Lockdown... needs a vital panacea
But I bet there'll be no lessons learned - there'll be no changes here.
There'll be... no future here....

Hello....
Does anyone have the key....?
Can you turn the light back on please....?
I think my unicorn has died....