"At Burger King" by Joseph Dillon Ford (music) and Henry Stevens (lyrics)
The Three Poems by Henry Stevens were composed in the same order as they appear in the final score during a period beginning in late June 2008 and lasting until 20 August of the same year. Ford intended them as a gift for the poet, whom he had befriended through correspondence on a Unitarian-Universalist mailing list about Buddhism. Stevens had previously commissioned Ford to compose the score for his poetry DVD titled Victory (2005), and thereafter continued to show his support of new art music as a member of the Delian Society's Order of the Cynthian Palm.
Although the style of the three songs is a direct response to the three Stevens poems, the poems, in turn, were chosen because of their relevance to Ford's own life circumstances. "At Burger King" sets the overall tone, emphasizing, as the original poem does, the psychological distance and division that exist between sectarian believers and those who do not hold their ideologically separatist views. The faithful and those who exist outside of their bubble of religiosity have in common only their coincidental presence at a well-known fast-food establishment. The highly ambiguous, chromatically charged harmonic language, with its strange, quasi-mystical augmented sonorities and rapturous figuration, conveys a sense of otherworldly detachment. Tonal stability is only intermittently evident, and the song ends without any firm cadential closure.
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