There’s a wall in my apartment that could use a fresh coat of paint. I didn’t paint the wall today. I didn’t do 50 pushups. Partially, because I can’t. I can do 20. I didn’t do those either. 10 days ago I ordered a gong from Nepal. It arrived, and it’s beautiful. I didn’t get …
subject of a song
noun: a person, place or thing I gave my heart to
the order (in which things are broken)
Words like rescue and tenderness and forever and don't go. The things I experienced, written on my cells as memories and patterns, a record. All of them broken, all of them saved, in one- to two-minute narratives packed tightly into small spaces. It begs the question: Why did I save this? What is the value …
little things
I’ve learned to practice myself in little things. A good night's sleep: 7-8 hoursThe morning walk: 90 minutesA slow drink of room temperature water: 1 hourWarming the voice, stretching the range: 30 minutes (Humming and yawn-sighs, 20 minutes. Tongue twisters, facial exercises and sung scales, 10.)Finger stretches: hold for 30 to 60 seconds and then …
alone
Being a songwriter was never my ambition. It was and remains my way of being alone. It's an essential place if you want to make some meaning. It's where masks come off, truth is unveiled and you encounter the unforeseen. I love how Nick Cave put it : Like Jesus praying alone in the garden, …
beautiful days
Who’s to say the bicycle did not die of heartbreak from not being taken anywhere? Where will I go with my new songs? What is their meaning beyond the consolation they brought to me in writing them? Who are they for anyway? Does it matter if no one else gets to hear them? It does …
missing
We call a T-shirt T-shirt, even when it is used as a rag to wash the car – it is still called T-shirt. Maybe the old Radiohead concert T-shirt. It’s always changing – the shape, the size, the color — but its name and meaning remain. Soap and water pulse against the car, and the shirt lies on its back looking up as if …
the story of rooms
The titles for songs almost always come to me after a long struggle with the lyrics and melody. Not rooms. I recorded a version of it moments before I posted my perfectly imperfect record this summer. It's about the feeling of being held impossibly within grief — a wounded inner house privately lived in. The …
record store
When I was a kid, nothing was as glamorous to me as a record store. Other 10-year-olds would drag their moms to the video arcade; I would take mine to Bleecker Bob’s in Greenwich Village.It was in those early days when I identified the one thing I was born to do, songwriting. And I discovered …
25
This song started as a prayer into my disbelief. It is a contemplation of what I cherished about the beautiful dead girl in the lines. Her death brought me to my knees and asked something of me: to present myself to God and the unknown as pure as I could be. It remains a prayer. …
