Encounter with 3 foxes inspires songwriter
Wildlife encounter inspires San Anselmo songwriter Kyle Alden
Singer-songwriter Kyle Alden’s wife was teaching a
Zoom class with her elementary school students one recent morning when she glanced out the window at the surprising sight of a wild fox cavorting in their San Anselmo backyard. She was amazed when a second fox showed up. And when a third suddenly appeared, it was so incredible that she turned the camera around so her class could see what she was seeing and share in her excitement.
“She was just thrilled,” Alden says. “And the kids were blown away.”
That delightful moment became the inspiration for the title track of his new album, “Triple Fox,” a collection of 11 often poetic, sometimes topical and, at times, funny rock, pop and Americana tunes recorded in his basement studio during the enforced isolation of the pandemic.
A line from the song: “The triple fox on the equinox breached the garden gate/Wiggled his toes in the spinach rows and danced till half past eight.”
“People were literally staying home, which means they weren’t driving their cars, they weren’t flying in planes. The whole planet became quieter. And that was an invitation for the animals to recognize this quietness that probably existed for millions of years before we came on the scene.”
— Kyle Alden
A positive
To Alden, the episode with the foxes is emblematic of one of the few positive ramifications of a plague that’s been tragic for humans while at the same time freeing for animals and refreshing for the natural world.
“If you think back to when
the stay-at-home orders were first issued back in March and April, there was a lot of uncertainty about how bad this was going to be,” he says. “People were literally staying home, which means they weren’t driving their cars, they weren’t flying in planes. The whole planet became quieter. And that was an invitation for the animals to recognize this quietness that probably existed for millions of years before we came on the scene and feel safe to venture out.”
The track on the album that’s getting the most attention, especially on college radio, is a comic folk-rocker called “Flow.” With its line
“the phone call was perfect,” it automatically brings to mind the absurdity of the now infamous
“perfect” phone call by our twice-impeached former president without actually being about him.
“I wanted to build on the idea of why someone would use the phrase ‘the phone call was perfect,’ so I began riffing on that,” he says. “My songwriter self began ruminating on what qualities could possibly make a phone call perfect, a masterpiece even.”
Need to connect
On a deeper level, the song also works, in his words, as
“an homage to our need for communication.”
“We’re all in our little world, particularly during COVID,” he says. “So, if you take it on the level of communicating among human beings, a perfect phone call is actually something we all desire and need.”
The most overtly political song on the album, “Rules,” deals with inequality and privilege at a time when the pandemic puts the disparities between rich and poor, between the haves and have-nots, in stark relief. It was also inspired by a politician, this time by one he voted for and supports, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was scandalized for violating his own pandemic guidelines at a dinner with a large group at the French Laundry in Yountville.
“It looked so bad, but he was caught in a very human, unfortunate situation,” Alden says. “I just went, ‘Wow, the rules
don’t apply to him.’ But it resonates more than just with him. It’s a terribly important social issue as well as an existential one about who we are as Americans.”
Best known as an Irishinfluenced folk musician, Alden has been acclaimed for setting poems by W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden and others to music on previous albums, including last year’s “Fables” and 2011’s “Songs from Yeats’ BeeLoud Glade.”
“Triple Fox” is a creative departure from those projects. It builds on “Down in the West Vol. 1” in 2013 and “Down in the West
Vol. 2” in 2017, albums of original music that led me to dub him “Marin’s musical poet laureate.”
“The new album reflects an inward-looking process — getting in touch with the craft of songwriting and working in the studio, trying out different ideas,” says Alden, acknowledging the debt he owes to the poets he honored on his earlier albums. “But, on this record I’ve made the conscious decision to work on my own language and lyrics.”
Alden handles lead vocals in his folksy baritone and plays guitars and most of the other instruments on the record. He’s joined on some tracks by the versatile Marin drummer Rob Hooper, former Frank Zappa bassist Scott Thunes and Eamon Flynn, once a member of Ireland’s the Commitments, on piano, organ and backing vocals. The charming cover drawing is by Lagunitas artist Jeffrey Beauchamp.
At 63, Alden is a prolific songwriter who’s been able to balance dual careers as a practicing architect and as a working musician, not an easy feat, especially now, when being a musician means not being able to play in front of a crowd.
“I serve two muses,” he says. “It’s devastating sometimes but fulfilling.”
In fact, he designed the house that he and his wife live in now, feeling grateful to have such comfortable surroundings during these long months of being homebound. It was built in 2017 on the same lot as their old house, which had to be torn down and hauled away to make room for the new one. That experience became the fodder for a poignant ballad on the new album, “Gone for Good,” that speaks to the memories the old place held between its walls that remain in the minds of the ones who used to live there.
The song’s chorus:
“Memories still linger on/ Friends and family have moved and gone/Like maple trees the stories grow/ the more we tell them the more we know.”
• INFORMATION » CDs, at $20, available through PayPal at py.pl/2LGxL7. Venmo is venmo.com/KyleAlden-5. Send name and mailing address to beeloudmusic@gmail.com.
For more information, go to kylealden.com.
It’s often the case that movies based on true stories offer a glimpse of the real-life characters at the end. In “The Mauritanian,” the story of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s 14 years behind bars, that real-life footage is the most engaging part of the film.
That’s not entirely the fault of the filmmakers, who do an earnest and thoughtful if less than totally absorbing job of telling Slahi’s story based on the best-selling memoir he wrote in prison, “Guantanamo Diary.”
It’s just that nothing can beat this intimate view of the real man, smiling and singing joyfully to Bob Dylan, no less.
One wonders how he even managed to stay sane, let alone joyful, after 14 years at Guantanamo without being formally charged or tried.
And in conditions that included a brutal stretch of torture: severe cold, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, a mock drowning, waterboarding, and threats to imprison his own mother at Guantanamo.
Luckily, “The Mauritanian,” directed by Kevin Macdonald, gets one thing very right: Tahar Rahim’s masterful central performance. The French actor achieves something his big-name costars — Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — do not, presenting a multi-layered, subtly shaded and deeply moving portrayal that proves hard to forget.
Rahim deserves the awards buzz he’s getting; he also deserves more big roles, and soon.
Macdonald is known for documentaries (the Oscarwinning “One Day in September”) as well as features (“The Last King of Scotland”), and “The Mauritanian” has a quasi-documentary feel at times. Partly that’s because there’s a lot of dry information to get across here, namely the ins and outs of Slahi’s legal case.
The film tries to achieve this by juxtaposing the stories of defense lawyer Nancy Hollander (Foster), who works to gain Slahi’s release based on lack of evidence, and U.S. military prosecutor Stuart Couch (Cumberbatch.)
Both Foster, in her brittle, crusty portrayal of Hollander, and Cumberbatch, sporting a southern drawl as a devoted military man with a conscience, are welcome presences in any movie.
But the script here really doesn’t give them a lot to work with — we learn almost nothing about them as people outside the case. With actors of this caliber, that’s a shame.
Rahim, though, has plenty of room to shine. The actor finds a way to infuse almost every scene with humor and humanity. We first meet Slahi at a wedding celebration in Mauritania, two months after 9/11.
The police show up to question him about ties to al-Qaida. “The Americans are going crazy,” they say. He assures his mother he’ll be back soon — and asks her to save him some food. It’s clear she fears she may never see him again (in fact, she didn’t.)
Four years later in Albuquerque, lawyer Hollander is approached to use her security clearance to help find Slahi, on behalf of his desperate family. She has no idea of his innocence or guilt, but asks: “Since when did we start locking people up without a trial in this country?” She enlists a junior colleague, Teri Duncan, to help (Woodley, underused.)
Meanwhile we meet Couch (Cumberbatch, also a producer here), who’s tapped by superiors to lead the prosecution. They know he has skin in the game: his good buddy was a pilot on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. He asks: “When do we start?” It’s made clear that the goal is the death penalty.
The film tracks these two as they pursue their cases, each stymied by government restrictions on information. Hollander receives cartons of fully redacted documents; Couch seeks crucial details about interrogations. For each, the ultimate discovery of the torture Slahi went through will change the dynamics of the case.
But the most accessible scenes feature Slahi himself, whether they involve the dreaded interrogations or the prisoner’s basic efforts at making a friend at Guantanamo, a French detainee he speaks to through a green mesh fence, and who dubs him “The Mauritanian.”
The film has the rhythm of a legal thriller heading toward a dramatic courtroom trial. The true climax is hardly that climactic: Slahi testifies by video at his habeas corpus hearing. He learns by mail that he’s won.
He whoops with joy.
He’s going home.
And then, the closing credits tell us, he remains imprisoned at Guantanamo for seven more years.