NAPOLEON WASHINGTON

©2004 Sepia Prod – All rights reserved.

NAPOLEON WASHINGTON

©2004 Sepia Prod – All rights reserved.

Live at Casino Theater 

 

Casino du Locle, Switzerland (2004)

 

Best described as contemporary blues, Napoleon Washington’s music relates to a very personal universe, haunted by spirits and rythmed by sweet or bitter chronicles.

Who Craves to Know

Got Yesterday Behind

A Hundred Days

Nail in my Shoe

Second Best

I Crossed her Way

Sweet Smile of the Crocodile

Dance on my Grave

Single-Side Coin

Green Missing

Guitars, Vocals : Napoleon Washington

Piano, Hammond XB2, B3 and Rhodes: Christophe Studer

Drums and percussion: Marc O. Jeanrenaud

 

#01

Who Craves to Know

This song was the opening of a show we played for a good part behind a cinema screen, with movies synchronised on the music and made only for that occasion. The idea being to provide the audience – who before the curtain opened, awaited just a normal concert – with a door to enter a universe it had taken six months to set up. It was magic. What was to happen that evening? Who craves to know…

#02

Yesterday Behind

The second one in the show we played behind a cinema screen. The purpose was to let people guess, playing with transparencies and shadows, what was to come during the rest of the show. Catch reflexions from the drums and perc, get a glimpse of the massive Hammond B3, the strange silhouette of a grand piano four feet above the stage. And give a french-speaking audience a taste of the song’s lyrics.

#03

A hundred days

At that moment of the show, we had already played two songs behind a cinema screen: it was time to remove it. But that thing took a painfull 40 seconds to go up: too long to happen between songs. We were at a loss for weeks about how to get rid of it. Then we realised the solution was to find a way to dramatize it, to emphasize the manoeuver so we could make it a part of the show. See for yourselves, and share a thought for the brillant synchro of the techs at work.

#04

Nail in my Shoe

Maybe you know that feeling. You’re walking, and there’s something in your shoe… at first, it’s just bugging you. You ignore it and go on, like it’s gonna disappear just because you refuse to think of it. Guess what? After a while – not long, either – you can’t stand another step. Time to fix it, Man. Goes the same sometimes in our sorry lives.

#05

Second Best

It’s more a song about tough luck than about competition. Competition is a bitch. But just don’t ask for the score and many a time, it’s standable. Coming second though is probably the hardest smack-in-the-face you can get in that matter, because there’s just no way to ignore where you stand in the line. There’s a million “I like you very much”, but only one “you’re the second best”.

#06

I Crossed her Way

This one is about what I saw in a Lady’s eyes whom I crossed in the street. She seemed lost, far – very far – from home, and not by choice. Forced immigration, broken life, painfull memories maybe, brutally thrown in the first ugly snow of november in a strange land. All that at the very time I was bitching about another winter to bear… I wrote this song to try to remember I was not the coldest soul that morning.

#07

Sweet Smile of the Crocodile

Now this one’s a song about having a positive vision of things. Picture this: you’re lost in the bayou, and the night is falling… it may be any kind of swamp: from your local muddy waters to the quicksands of your expectations. Remember: see the bright side of things. Odds are it’ll all end up in a smile! Even if it has to be a baregums one from a crocodile.

#08

Dance on my Grave

The three first songs of the show had been played behind a cinema screen. As we were reaching the three last ones, we brought it back. The background you see in the movie has been shot in Paris’ catacombs, and yes, it’s a voodoo song about death. But not in a morbid way, as the dancing lightbulbs appeal to life on top of it, and as the strange beauty of several millions skulls and bones becomes a meaningful encounter with our own lives. Go visit the catacombs next time you’re in Paris.

#09

Single-Side Coin

We’re behind the screen again, and the camera flies around a voodoo guitar as the music goes calling the spirits. It’s a song I wanted to write since my early twenties, when I realised life was just damn unfair to force you to always take the bitter with the sweet. I was screaming for a single-sided coin, one touch of gratuitous good with no bad attached. Never found it, but eventually wrote the song.

#10

Green Missing

This little New-Orleans rumba was the last song of the show. We play behind a cinema screen, as the doors we entered in the opening song were now closing on the universe we took a whole concert to travel through. The songs is about the illusion of the grass being always greener on the other side of the fence…which to me means just that: you’re not at the end of the road, Buddy.