6:30pm, Thursday, December 9th, 2010
at Readings bookstore, 112 Acland St, St Kilda

The launch will include a live performance of Ghost Town Bridge songs and poems.

An excerpt from James' performance video,
Ghost Town Bridge, live at fortyfive downstairs

Songs for a Season at Ghost Town Bridge is a combined CD and book of songs and prose poems. The songs and poems in the book are also presented as a CD album of sung and spoken word performances. All the tracks are one-take recordings of James singing / reciting and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar or mandolin.

Through a mix of anecdotal magic realism, love stories, chance meetings and lives travelling off the rails, James has created a meditation that is at once humorous, ironic and serious and which offers a sophisticated, contemporary vision of the wide streets and corrugated iron of rural Australia.

We meet the travelling showman, Crow Step Billy, eternally searching for his lost love Jenny, and whose horse can sing harmony and play the violin (Jenny's Gone for Rock 'n' Roll); That Kid Who Loves Birds, a well meaning Zen outlaw whose lost years in the methamphetamine trade have left him with a sorrowful, yet strangely hopeful, tale to tell (A Brand New pair of Riding Boots); and Fox Eye, one time trader in re-birthed cars, now hermit philosopher and dangerous stranger on the road (A Bad Night on TV). We also meet the eternally soothsaying Ghost Horse and the pilgrim James Griffin, who travels the road to Ghost Town Bridge with his talking dog, Cleopatra.

Do we ever find out who blew up the wheat silo and the railway signal box? Maybe not. But let's give the last word, this intimation of mortality, to that other, at this time, anonymous, ghost town philosopher, who writes, from his temporary home in the Ghost Town Bridge Hotel:

Drifting in the dust storm
In one more rusting car
Rattling around in the boot back there
Is a two thousand dollar guitar
But I don't care about the burning air
& about the shape of me
I look in the mirror at someone there
& no lifetime guarantee
& I don't care about the wear & the tear
& the singing in harmony
A song is just one man breathing
One man breathing like me

The CD/Book is available from State Library of Victoria stores & Readings St Kilda, Carlton & online: