Song Breakdown
On 6 September 2006, the track listing for the album was released on Pete Townshend's personal website. On 27 September 2006, a press release was issued which featured track-by-track commentary by Townshend. All songs written by Pete Townshend except as noted.
- "Fragments" (Townshend/Lawrence Ball)
This song is based on one of the very first experiments by Lawrence Ball, a composer I commissioned to create a system, and software, that would recreate the 'Method' music (music accurately reflecting an individual via a website) described in my three interlocked rock-opera projects:
Lifehouse (The Who 1972);
Psychoderelict (Pete Townshend solo 1993);
The Boy Who Heard Music (Weblog Novella 2005–2006). In
The Boy Who Heard Music, a group of three young people form a band—The Glass Household—and their first big hit is this song.
- "A Man in a Purple Dress"
After watching Mel Gibson's harrowing 2004 film
The Passion of the Christ I immediately wrote three songs. This was one of them. It is not so much a rail against the principles of justice through the ages, but a challenge to the vanity of the men who need to put on some kind of ridiculous outfit in order to pass sentence on one of their peers. It is the idea that men need dress up in order to represent God that appalls me. If I wanted to be as insane as to attempt to represent God I’d just go ahead and do it, I wouldn't dress up like a drag-queen.
Another song performed throughout the 2006 US tour, Townshend and Daltrey also appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman on 14 September 2006, to perform the song, reduced by two verses.
Who songs have been used recently for TV shows. I thought a lot about why there are people who feel that isn’t a cool thing to do. Mike Post is a man who has written a number of TV themes that I feel have created a kind of regular sparkle in my life – they have reminded me that life comes one day at a time, and that it is truly the little things in life (like Soap Operas on TV) that help ease the big troubles. The larger theme in the background of this song is the statement that we are no longer strong enough or young enough to love. In a very real way, movies, novels and TV series do help us to express selfless emotions as we once did when we were in love. Men cry quietly watching TV and movies, women maybe a little more openly, but when we do that we are reconnecting with our innocent and free-flowing feelings. If only we could still do that with the principal lover in our lives.
In my novella
The Boy Who Heard Music the narrator is Ray High, a rock star whose drug-abuse has led him to a sanatorium. While there he learns to meditate and begins to sense that someone is interfering with his quietude up in the place where he allows his mind to go. It seems almost as though they are using a Ham Radio, an old fashioned long-wave radio that was the specialist precursor to the modern internet Chat-Room. He may sense another presence, but this song reinforces how lonely it is to be
spiritual. If the intention of the spiritual aspirant is to 'become one with the infinite', and yet life is almost the universally finite antidote to the infinite, isn't he likely to get very lonely?
Debuted live by Townshend at a solo gig for the Poetry Olympics at the Royal Albert Hall on 25 September 2005. The song was later released as a download on Townshend's website, but fans were put off by Townshend's vocals, reminiscent of Tom Waits, and Daltrey reportedly passed over singing the song for the album.
A love song. We sometimes fall in love when we do not want to, and when we do not expect to. Suddenly. Foolishly. This song is about the man holding a child in the Beslan massacre who described the female terrorist who blew herself up, killing the child he held, as 'having the most penetrating and beautiful eyes'.
Daltrey talked about this song in an interview in early 2006, saying it was written about Stockholm syndrome and quoting it as one of his favourite tracks on the album. The song was performed infrequently on the 2006 US tour.
This is one of the three songs I wrote after watching
The Passion of the Christ. This one is about the fact that Judas may not have been acting to betray Christ at all, but precisely following his instructions. He waits two thousand years for us to consider this a possibility. We wait two thousand years for the New Christ. We need a lot of patience.
Townshend debuted this song on the In the Attic programme in 2005.
- "God Speaks of Marty Robbins"
Very simple song. God is asleep, before Creation – before the Big Bang – and gets the whim to wake, and decides it could be worth going through it all in order to be able to hear some music, and most of all, one of his best creations, Marty Robbins.
Townshend had recorded an instrumental demo simply titled "Marty Robbins" in June 1984, which was released on his 2001 Scoop 3 album. He later debuted the song at an Internet-only streaming concert titled the Basement Jam on 4 December 2005.
- "It's Not Enough" (Townshend/Rachel Fuller)
Watching Mepris, the '60s film by Jean Luc Godard starring Brigitte Bardot, I found myself wondering why it is that we choose people to partner who we feel aren't quite right. Bardot asks her lover, 'Do you adore my legs?' He nods. 'My breasts?' He nods. 'My arms?' He nods. She goes over her entire body. He nods every time. When she's finished she gets up and tells him, 'It's not enough.'
"It's Not Enough" started off as a Rachel Fuller track, but Townshend liked the music and asked her if he could use it for the new album. The song was released as an Internet download single in October 2006, where it reached #37 in the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks.
I wrote this a few minutes before appearing on my partner Rachel Fuller's In the Attic Live webcast show from my studio in London. I had nothing new to play, and decide to write a song. This just came out. It is for her, and for Roger, for believing in me, and standing by me when I have been completely out of order. It could be for many of my family, friends and fans who have done the same. I have often been a very tricky man to live with.
The first song from
Wire & Glass, a 'Mini-Opera', ten songs that comprise the principal music composed so far for the novella
The Boy Who Heard Music. A young man (the young Ray High) is driving a large camper bus with extreme air-con around an Estuary close to a large Power Station. He can see that the sea is swarming with a plague of jellyfish encouraged by the over-heated sea water (this is based on something that happened around 1971 in the Blackwater Estuary in Essex). He stops and looks at the water, throws a stick for his dog, who he has to rescue. In the sky he sees the future – nothing ecological or apocalyptic, more a vision of a society strangled by wire and communications.
Reportedly, this track, the following track ("Pick Up the Peace"), and an unreleased track titled "Ambition" (see below) were written in 1971. The character of Ray High also appeared as the protagonist of Townshend's solo album Psychoderelict.
Ray High, now an old '60s rocker, is meditating in what looks like a cell in a secure hospital. He sees three teenagers from his neighbourhood getting together as kids do, playing, flirting, talking, and forming a band. Then he has an intuition that they are going to become stars. They are Gabriel, Josh and Leila. (They call their band The Glass Household). In striking contrast he sees scenes from his own childhood in the same neighbourhood, bombed buildings and old soldiers.
The three kids are from very different families. Gabriel is from a show biz family of lapsed Christians. Josh is from a fairly devout Jewish family (they observe Sabbath) who have suffered a tragedy, the loss of their father in an incident in Israel. Leila, from a Muslim family who have also suffered a loss: that of her beautiful and charismatic mother who died when she was very young. They each share fantasies, and afflictions, gifts and ideas, and become deeply committed friends. Like urchin-angels they share their secrets: Gabriel hears music; Josh voices; Leila can fly.
Josh's widowed mother vests all her hopes in her brother Hymie becoming a great man. He falls in love with Trilby, Gabriel's goofy blonde Aunt. Trilby is the one who has nurtured Gabriel's great musical talent, unnoticed by his preoccupied mother. The kids decide to put on a musical play at Leila's father's studio featuring this song, and it finally breaks Josh's mother's resistance to the love match. The song is sung by Gabriel. The play is a naïve children's effort, but with a grand proscenium stage (like a large Victorian puppet theatre) a stairway and a cherub and angel filled backdrop.
At some point in their rehearsals for the play, the three teenagers unearth documents that turn out to have belonged to Ray High, Leila's father’s old studio partner. The documents refer to a crazy scheme to use the global wire network Ray saw as a young man to spread unifying music to everyone. (This matches my own vision for the Lifehouse Method, a computer-driven website through which people can commission their unique musical portrait.) They pore over the plans and realize that his scheme might be something they can make happen.
Townshend performed this song solo at Joe's Pub on 14 September 2006. The Who had also performed it live in full in Berlin on 12 July 2006.
- "Fragments of Fragments" (Townshend/Ball)
A stripped version of FRAGMENTS to show off the Method music.
In a series of intense discussions the three metamorphose from kids to adults and expert media and internet manipulators and we see them performing a hit on TV, radio and stage. The hit referred to in the lyric is FRAGMENTS.
Another song that was "extended" for a special edition of the album, with an additional verse not heard on the mini-opera version.
- "They Made My Dream Come True"*
Still in his cell, Ray High can observe the kids' rise to fame while meditating. He foresees a tragedy, someone at the band’s biggest ever, and last, concert will die. He rues the fact that the rock industry seems unable to change. What is never clear is whether the concert he foresees ever takes place in reality, or actually remains a dream forever.
The three pursue their own dream: to perform an extraordinary elaboration of their children's play in Central Park in New York that is webcast to the entire world for charity, and during which they demonstrate Ray's idea to 'turn everyone into music'. Where there was once a small puppet theatre stage, there is now a massive one; where there was once a small stairway to the back of the stage, there is now a stairway hoisted by blimps that seems to reach into the heavens. The band play, it becomes clear that there are terrorists on the streets trying to distract from the celebration, but the show goes on. At the top of the stairway appear gathered a series of legendary singers from popular music, all dead. A shot rings out and the tragedy is established. Josh, a paranoid schizophrenic, has stopped taking his medication and grabbed a pistol from someone and shot Gabriel. We cannot help our own. He ascends the stairway to join the dead. Even now, it is not clear whether this particular series of events actually takes place. It will be noted that one of the listed names of deceased singing geniuses (Doris Day) is still alive. In show-biz heaven, behind the ‘Mirror Door’ no one ever really dies (it is rather like an after-show pub gathering). FRAGMENTS, the kid's biggest hit, becomes a moment to look back and celebrate life, death, breath, creation, science, physics, maths, literature and growth.
This song was released to the radio stations ahead of the mini-opera in June 2006, and was remixed for the Wire & Glass release later in July.
Years later Josh and Leila – now old – take tea together. Coincidentally Josh's protective sanatorium cell is next to Ray's and they have just – together – revived once again the children’s play, this time with the inmates of the sanatorium. They reflect on their career and lives together. The inference here is that perhaps, just maybe, Ray (the narrator) has confused the play he just saw in the Sanatorium with the one they all hoped to see happen one day in New York, in the sky, and up into the universe.
An asterisk (*) denotes songs included on the Wire & Glass EP.
There are two special edition versions: one contains a bonus DVD with 5 live songs: "Mike Post Theme", "Baba O'Riley", "Who Are You", "Behind Blue Eyes", and "Won't Get Fooled Again". The second version contains a Live CD from Lyon 2006: "The Seeker", "Who Are You", "Mike Post Theme", "Relay", "Greyhound Girl", "Naked Eye", and "Won't Get Fooled Again".