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about

"Orlando" was inspired by the novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Beats sampled from Questlove's "Ludwiggy." Special appearance by Virginia Woolf as herself.

lyrics

VIRGINIA: "Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind."

Orlando is tired
300 years of living life forward
She wanna get back.
She's lost all desire
Humanity can be such a horror
Wanna get back.

She is my allusion.
Wrapped in my conceit.
Novel or novella?
It don't matter I'm just happy to be writing again.

My Orlando is livid
So my Orlando will fix this.
She gonna get back.
Joni got us back to the garden but
My Orlando say that ain't far enough
She wanna turn back the clock so she can stop the original carbon

From my imagination
To this appropriation
Literary reparations
I'm just happy to be writing again.

So just to refresh
You return to the text
And Virginia jokingly say: "There can be no doubt of his sex."
Ha ha ha.
But - no joke - so much to doubt in all of the rest.
Page One:
Young Orlando swings his sword again and again and again
At the severed head of a dead African
That daddy put to death for defending his land.
Daddy brought the head back from deepest Africa
To hang on the wall with the other prize animals.

And this is not the story that I wanted to be writing.

Orlando had a great variety of selves to call upon
Far more than Virginia could accommodate.
Whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand selves.
A biography need only account for six or seven or eight.

So who is Orlando?

Is Orlando: the boy who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet;
the boy who handed the Queen the bowl of rose water;
is he the Courtier; the Ambassador; the Soldier.
or the young man who fell in love with Sasha;
Or is he the boy who cut the nigger’s head down and strung it up again?
Is he the boy who cut the nigger’s head down and strung it up again?
Far too many selves for Virginia to accommodate.
But a boy swinging at a severed nigger head is the one she went with right out the gate.

My time travel hero to end our sufferin'
Could have been Benjamin Button
My time travel hero to save the childrens
Could have been Billy Pilgrim
My time travel hero to turn back the clock
It could have been Marty and Doc
But it had to be Orlando.
But it had to be Orlando.
But it had to be Orlando.
But it had to be Orlando.

VIRGINIA: "Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy."

credits

from Songs About Books About Writers, released January 1, 2017
The Buggy Jive is:
BT: Vox, Acoustic Guitar, Rising Action
Jennifer: Lead Guitars, Backing Vox, Climax
Cleopatra Jones: Bass, Backing Vox, Falling Action
DJ Lady Mac: Beats, Samples, Synths, Backing Vox, Denouement

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Bryan Thomas Albany

Nippertown’s Greg Haymes says Albany soul rocker BRYAN THOMAS's "writes smart, and he writes from the heart, balancing intellect, passion and politics.”

The Times Union named him“Best Male Singer-Songwriter” shortly after he released his acoustic hip-hop debut Radio Plastic Jennifer in 1999. The follow-up soul rock epic Ones and Zeros was Metroland Magazine’s “Album of the Year” in 2002.
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