Songs of Experience (album)

Composition

As he had on his 1968 debut album Song of Innocence, Axelrod composed musical interpretations of the works of English poet William Blake on Songs of Experience. He used eight poems from Blake's Songs of Experience (1794). The album's gatefold featured Blake's poems reprinted for each song and liner notes that stated, "an anthology of awareness after birth ... based on the 18th century poems of William Blake." Blake's poems began with the premise of birth and innocence, and explored themes of life experience, rite of passage, and changes of perspective in life.

A jazz fusion album, Songs of Experience was partly inspired by Gunther Schuller's Third Stream concept, which fused American jazz with European classical music. Axelrod supported his Baroque orchestrations on the album with rhythms and melodies from rock, R&B, and pop music. The album's suite is more orchestral and less rock-oriented than Song of Innocence. Its symphony is embellished with percussive sounds, British and Irish folk song elements, and stylistic innovations from contemporary arranger Gerald Wilson.

With Songs of Experience, Axelrod explored darker sounds, as the poems he had chosen dealt with the darker side of humanity. For "The Human Abstract", he used ascending piano, bass, and percussion instruments to evoke the ghost described in Blake's poem. It is a bass-driven, funky song that juxtaposes augmented sevenths strummed on an electric guitar against an acoustic piano and muted horns. According to music critic Thom Jurek, "The Divine Image" and "A Little Girl Lost" elicit feelings of majesty and "pastoral sadness", respectively. "London" was recorded by Axelrod as a tone poem to reflect Blake's opening stanza about the spiritual climate of London at the onset of the Industrial Revolution: "I wander thro' each charted'd street / Near where the chart'd Thames does flow / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe."

Reception and legacy

Songs of Experience was released in October 1969 by Capitol Records on stereo LP. In a retrospective review, AllMusic's Thom Jurek gave the album four-and-a-half out of five stars and said that Axelrod "succeeded in spades" in his search for a sound that "best exemplified not only his feelings but also the heady text he sought to sonically illustrate." Jurek felt that his compositions were diverse, lush, and able to resemble literature by "using as much space as they do sound for dramatic and dynamic effect", and that Axelrod created original palettes for rock instrumentation through his complex use of the horn section's "various colors". Lynell George of the Los Angeles Times called it a "prescient, genre-defying" solo project, and NME viewed it as a "landmark" album. Mojo cited the album, along with Song of Innocence, as Axelrod's artistic peak and particularly praised "The Human Abstract" as "beautiful and blank", evoking "the view from Arthur Lee's castle of an endless pale blue sky and the vast deathly city beneath it." Songs of Experience was reissued on CD in 2000 by EMI.

Songs from the album have been sampled frequently by hip hop producers and artists, including Black Moon, who sampled "A Divine Image", and DJ Shadow, who sampled the luminous piano line from "The Human Abstract" on his 1996 song "Midnight in a Perfect World". English hip hop producer Metabeats called Songs of Experience one of his favorite sources for sampling music and said of the album in an interview for Hip Hop Connection: "You could sample everything on this record, and I think everyone already has. Axelrod is pretty much a sound library in himself – the quality is amazing." American musician John McEntire ranked it third on his list of top-five albums and called it "early crate-digger stuff. Great, funky rhythm-section playing, crazy, overblown string arrangements." In a 2000 interview for The Wire, rapper and producer Mike Ladd spoke of the album recording "London", deeming it "crazy stuff" that deviated from the one-dimensional rhythm loops of contemporary hip hop production. He went on the say, "this is definitely the kind of stuff I'm planning to do for the next album, incorporate more fusion elements and stuff like that. This is a really good production. I like it because it's little parts with gaps, which I don't normally have. Somebody told me I should listen to [Axelrod]. This is one I'm definitely going to buy I'd like to do more stuff with complicated melodies, everybody playing together, drum breaks, things like that."

Track listing

All songs were composed, arranged, and produced by David Axelrod.

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.