Skywriting with Glitter by Ellyn Maybe and Robbie Fitzsimmons
Ellyn & Robbie, 2016
Tailfins humming down Rte. 66, radio Imagism blaring from chromed speakers: “All was the lips of time / Meeting the glass of what is champagne / And what is painless…”
“Whaaat???” (bite of warm corn dog) “Play that again.”
Skywriting with Glitter is an album that bewilders and amuses as it unfolds, original, aboriginal, tonal, odd, and infiltrating. It is an agile concoction of poetry and musical theatre by Ellyn Maybe and Robbie Fitzsimmons.
Ellyn Maybe is a prominent west coast poet and spoken word artist with an international following. She’s performed solo, toured with The Carma Bums, played the Glastonbury, SxSW, and Lollapalooza festivals and is championed by Henry Rollins, Greil Marcus, and Jackson Browne, at whose studio Skywriting with Glitter was recorded. She opened the MTV Spoken Wurd Tour in Los Angeles. Her books of poetry include The Cowardice of Amnesia (published by Henry Rollins, edited by Exene Cervenka, cover by Viggo Mortensen). Her previous album with The Ellyn Maybe Band is Rodeo for the Sheepish. She was on the 1998 and 1999 Venice Beach slam teams. She’s one of those genre-bending poets riding the ridge of music, spoken word, and interspecies communication.
Robbie Fitzsimmons, a member of The Ellyn Maybe Band, is a musician and songwriter who has collaborated with Paul Simon and Lana Del Rey. His music, sound design, and voicing create an ameobic aura around the seven Maybe poems on SWG.
Skywriting starts off with “Myth,” mischievously namechecking poetic muses from Phil Ochs to Lord Buckley, Michelangelo, The Fugs, Chagall, Ginsberg, and Whitman, delivered in Maybe’s familiar lilting sigh, a chameleonic recitative: “I tried to visit you like Frank O’Hara’s sun. You drew the blinds.”
Her narrative is a contortion of imagery—“My endorphins singing to the dolphins that have lifted their tails to greet me in an opera of water”—that navigates absurdity and lyricism with barefaced aplomb.
“Anybody,” “Onset,” and “The Life of a Raindrop” are actually songs, with rhyme and all that, written and sung by Fitzsimmons. Their chemistry is symbiotic. They create a theatrical platform for linguistics to oxidize and leak through. SWG flits like a paper boat on urban effluence.
“Kingdoms in the City Lost to Time” is the track that gives the album its title. It has a regal scope, suggesting regret and longing in a generational quest:
We sang into the lightning like thunder. / We sang into the rain like tears. / We sang into the dreams asunder. / We sang into the creature’s ears. / We looked at our feet. / Another day danced into the mountain. / … We are jewels and bright gems. / We were given everything and more. / We were skywriting with glitter in our teeth. / We were singing the history books on our mouth.
Ellyn Maybe’s work is always fascinating and elusive; she’s an imp on a freeway of fast traffic. She’s been dubbed as a beat and a punk, but she’s a true contemporary and has been for decades. Skywriting with Glitter is invigorating and endearing to hear, especially in that phantom Impala, cruising a superhighway on the way to Armageddon.
Ellen Sander, a lapsed rock journalist and computer tech adept, was the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, in 2013 and 2014. Her latest chapbook is Hawthorne, a House in Bolinas (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She hosts Poetry Woodshed Radio on Belfast’s local radio station, WBFY, Tuesdays from 7-8 p.m. (ET), which also streams live on http://www.