Mike Vocals, guitar and production
Tom Bass
Norb Jost Harmonica
Lou Jost Backing vocal
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Category: Twisted Love Songs
Wish I knew you in a different lifetime—different from this one.
Wish I’d met you on another planet—closer to the sun.
The heat would rise from our bodies—and melt into the air.
Ecological convergence—a bi-symmetrical pair.
Wish I knew you in a different way
Than gender and despair.
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Bandit
Marietta Marcolini
My grandmother, Marietta Marcolini, was born in rural northern Italy and came to New York as a very young, naïve woman. She came for an arranged marriage to a much older man, who soon died and left her a single mother. Thus began her descent into America—a place where she never felt welcome or at home. I think the greatest sadness of her life was that she was never financially able to return to Italy for a visit—as she said it—“To see my mama, again.”
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Courtly Love
[The Karma Refugees, 2017, Walter Benjamin, William Blake, John Keats, James Ensor, Courtly Love, Intellectual and physical ruin] When Tom Daddesio and I started our exploration of reggae music and cultural theory, we had no idea we would someday play the music. We approached it as scholars and collectors of obscure Jamaican records. Sometime around […]
Mike Opitz: lead vocal, guitar, digitally assisted production and final mix Caitlin Brutger: keyboard, harmony vocals, production and mixing Brian Heilman: guitar, harmony vocals, production, mixing and final mastering Tom Daddesio: bass *** The strange events of last fall’ s election season mixed with the falling leaves and seemed to conjure up nostalgic feelings in […]
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The Muse 2015
I learned about Suzanne Valadon from my wife, Maureen. At first, I was taken by Valadon’s evolution from an artist’s model into an artist. Her story evokes thoughts about gender, class, sexuality, celebrity and the economics of art. It made me think of how our culture deploys and exploits images of women. I wrote “The […]
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Activist
Activist A few years ago, one of my students–I think the class was Environmental Literature.–had been reading a labor newspaper before class and gave it to me. It had an article about how often women organized and supported labor movements but that the men took the credit and also took the labor of women for […]
The Dub
It’s interesting to think about the relationship of a song to its dub. I discovered this relationship through listening to Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey and Garvey’s Ghost and Lee “Scratch” Perry’s dubs of many classic reggae songs. Because I was a member of reggae’s white, middle-class audience, I was immediately drawn to the spiritual and political songs and sought them out.
Notes on the writing of “Streets (One Way)” Dreams and Visions, song 1 One of the aims of this site is to produce songs that are linked to theory that can provide insights into the glut of junk the contemporary consumer world has made for us, and of us. In that sense, the work of […]
My Grandmother and the “Bandit”: Two Songs About Marietta Marcolini My grandmother, Marietta Marcolini, was born in rural northern Italy and came to New York as a very young, naïve woman. She came for an arranged marriage to a much older man, who soon died and left her a single mother. Thus began her descent […]
Mike Opitz Song Writing and Theory Project 