Tuesday, October 12, 2010

ExplainMyHeart, a new song by Saul Williams


Apparently, Saul Williams is releasing a new album in early 2011. I seemed to be one of the three people on the whole internet talking about it. That changed when Mr. Williams made a cryptic post on his facebook page with the phrase "De-code My Heart" along with a link called "Volcanic Sunlight".

For reasons unknown to me, I immediately went to youtube and searched for both phrases, and a video came up with one of the images from the Volcanic Sunlight website. It said the video was uploaded "one hour ago". I pressed play, and a song started playing. It was unmistakably the voice of Saul Williams in the song. When the song finished playing, I noticed there was one play on the video. I was possibly the first person on the entire internet to watch it. Here's the video, which is the still image accompanied by a wonderful new song.


It sounds very different from his older music, but I like it a lot.

The percussion in the song made me immediately remember an old Wired magazine interview from November 2008 (almost two years ago now) which was a year after he released his last album. He mostly reflected on that album, but he also talked about some of the newer material that he was working on.

"The focus of the new album is percussion. For all intents and purposes, it’s a discussion of percusson. If I have to label some of the songs, maybe some are dance punk, dicso-y, or prog-rockish, but I really don’t know how to categorize it. Some of it makes me think of De-Loused in the Comatorium, The Mars Volta’s first album — there’s a lot of live instrumentation with a hip hop filter. I lived for a year in Brazil as a teenager, and percussion was always present in my appreciation for music, but not necessarily in my music. So that’s where my head is at."

I imagine he was talking about the album Volcanic Sunlight.

You can download the song "ExplainMyHeart" for free by clicking here. I recommend it. As I said, it's a wonderful song.

UPDATE #1:
It turns out one of the images was a code that needed to be decoded by some fancy device apparently known as a "smartphone" to give you the url to download the song. I have never owned a cellphone, so that all sounds like another language to me.

I also found out that the song or a previous version of the song was featured in a video from over a year and a half ago that I've never seen called Saul Williams: Writer In Residence on Current TV. It's kind of shocking how something can exist for so long right under our noses without us knowing about it.

Update #2:
Saul Williams retweeted one of my tweets regarding my excitement about his new album. :)

5 comments:

  1. Fuck yes, I had no idea he had anything new coming out until I stumbled onto this blog. I've been a fan of Saul's for a number of years and I saw him live in 2008. He's a truly brilliant, amazing man. I love all his poetry and his music. I'm super hyped for this new album now. "ExplainMyHeart" is a sick song.

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  2. Whoa, I have a reader. :P How on earth did you stumble onto my blog?

    I've been a fan of his for quite a while, but I've never had the pleasure of seeing him live. I have his albums and three of his books though, and I love them.

    I've been waiting for news for a long time about any new music from Saul, especially after reading that Wired interview a couple of years back. I was starting to think he scrapped the album or something. Did you hear that song he released a year or two ago called "The Government"? I wasn't really into that one.

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  3. I found it while looking for info on new Saul stuff actually. It just happened that I was in the right place at the right time. I had no idea there was a new song coming out and lo and behold one had come out that day.

    I wasn't really into "The Government" either, but I doubt it will be on the album since it's been so long since it came out. I wouldn't be surprised if he actually has scrapped an album along the way while making this one, considering how long it's taken and that song coming out then everything going dark again for a while.

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  4. The heart is a myogenic muscular organ found in all animals with a circulatory system (including all vertebrates), that is responsible for pumping blood throughout the blood vessels by repeated, rhythmic contractions. The term cardiac (as in cardiology) means "related to the heart" and comes from the Greek καρδιά, kardia, for "heart".

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  5. Haha, nice explanation Na. I'm looking forward to it too!

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