My mother-in-law Valerie has some ideas for her end-of-life celebration and I’m fully on board. She wants me to play Bob Dylan’s She Belongs To Me, the hymn Abide With Me, and Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game. Adelle asked me to play Circle Game for this week’s MMM. Realizing it was a great way to practice and formulate my vision for the tune, I hopped to it.
Rather than look for the ‘tabs’ on-line and muddle through someone’s interpretation of Joni’s inscrutable chords and “alien tunings” (that’s what David Crosby called them) , I decided to adapt it to my oldest, broadest 4-string tuning, DAAD. Because my 4-string is half a 12-string, I thought the nostalgic rattle of the octave strings would please Valerie. She loved music, went to Woodstock, and had a sweet spot for the Incredible String Band. DAAD is a great earthy drone tuning and feels especially natural. I think she’ll dig it.
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>listen to the pod commercial free!<
I’ve been playing Circle Game since that recording and it’s still evolving. In the show I say I might switch back to a standard 6-string and regular chords. But I realized I could also play She Belongs To Me -and- Abide With Me in the DAAD configuration. The songs can flow in and out of each other. That’s where I’m at now. While Adelle is carefully preparing her speech, I’m trancing through chord variations and basking in the poetry of these songs. The service is in 4 days. See ya there Val!
-my version of Circle Game (separate from the show) is below the paywall-
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