water + bread

Tony Starling KiddLeave a comment

Live performance is writing in pencil on a small postcard. It’s transient and something that the audience may not remember exactly but may talk about for some time to come.

It comes with surprises and no guarantees. It’s an entirely different way of being in the world.

The worst seat in the house belongs to the singer: on stage, I am as a mockingbird alone upon the house top. I feel the pain in my fingers, the rawness of making sound.

At the same time, it’s the best seat in the house: what I experience is something so unbelievably pure, which is before the sound actually happens. I hover like prayer.

There’s an aspect you don’t really get to command as a singer on stage: some sort of luck, a kind of spirit that informs the concert and brings something in you brilliantly to life. It’s hard to place my finger on it. I don’t really want to. But there is that mysterious thing that makes for a memorable evening.

I hope the room is full tonight. I pray somehow I will be lucky, have the grace to have that kind of night. I will be listening for particular voices among the concert to tell me I just did something memorable and good.

I want to be water and bread for everybody.

waterbread

making up

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

Everything eternal happens in a spare room after 1 a.m.

I’ve come downstairs from the loft after working all night, trying to find a new song. The one from the last few days doesn’t seem to be coming to anything. I can’t stand it suddenly. So we’re not speaking to each other, for now. (Songwriting is, mostly, a struggle against silence.)

So this one gets the drawer, for now.

Oh, yes, the drawer: I keep a musical rummage treasure drawer of everything queer, strange thing I play, sing and record. Nothing made up is cast off or thrown away.

A lyrical fragment can lurk around in the little studio up the stairs for years. Or be standing beneath the aged chestnut tree just outside. Somewhere, somehow a bit of a song will reveal itself at some point.

Okay, back to work. Back to the gems waiting to be uncovered, tinkered with and made into meaning through their arrangement.

You see, I know how to fight with a song … and how to make up.

making up

 

otherly beauty

Tony Starling KiddLeave a comment

I have long drawn strength from the reverence with which I approach my art. As a child I was touched by the otherly beauty of liturgical hymn and speech that I heard in the chambers of churches, where everything sounded (and was) important.

At five or six I lived for songs my grandmother sang while she prepared the ritual food made of wheat and sugar, symbolic of death and resurrection. Even now I hear her chant her vesper-hymn, for loved ones who have fallen asleep, I mark her holy smile. I see:

A crowd lit with candles …

The priest’s hand over the merciful little garden of the dead …

My grandmother turning and walking away, and disappearing into her strange distances.

It seems prayer is my natural language. I enter the songwriting process, go into every gig with a prayer on my lips. I need to. I need to lean on something greater than myself, to be open just wide enough to let a condition of grace in. I have always seen the enormous light in it, and that’s what I try to get to as an artist.

It’s sweetness for me. It’s delicious.

otherly

 

 

strange companions

Tony Starling Kidd6 Comments

I think it’s not possible to be a songwriter without being a kind of instrument for other people.

In a way, when you’re making music you’re a conduit for what’s in the air, not just the culture and times you’re living in, but human spirit.

That was my experience early on.  As a  young boy, I was never invited to anyone’s party. I felt invisible. My social interactions were forced, unnatural performances. Strumming the guitar alone in my room was the most natural thing in the world to me.

In my teens I discovered the music I had been waiting my whole young life to hear. The singers I let in were not just my teachers, but confidantes I felt I would be able to talk to – after all, they were talking to me. My early songwriting was an attempt at dialog, a response to them.

I felt that the voices in the songs were my companions. I let them into my bedroom (and eventually my dorm room, and later my car) when no one else was around. I let them into my ears when I wasn’t listening to anybody else in the world.

It’s unusual, isn’t it, how we become so vulnerable with complete strangers. It’s natural to be reluctant to drop our emotional defenses for just anyone. Even with family and close friends, there are some things we just don’t share. But our favorite musicians, we let in. I really didn’t understand why until I began recording and performing my own songs.

Gradually, it became so clear: We trust the singers we love — to cheer us up, take us down, inspire and console us. The reason why we trust them is because they are vulnerable.

I am as easily torn and not easily mended as anybody else. By sharing my humanness through songs, I make myself vulnerable to the listener. The music reveals a type of strength, I think, which makes the listener feel I’m pretty good company to have around. I make her feel … safe.

Today when I write and sing something that’s really worth remembering and responding to, I’m remembering them, my strange companions. I’m releasing into the world again their quiet yet forceful musical spirits.

The kind of response I’m really after is for one of them, somehow, to drop me a line just to say, “Good song, Tony.” That’s what I really want. That, and to make you, the listener, feel it’s okay.

strange companions

 

words + music

Tony Starling Kidd4 Comments

People always ask, “What comes first, the lyrics or the melody?” Hoboy. What a tangle at the bend in the river.

I don’t know why they’re so fascinated with the answer to this question. There is no definitive answer. Songwriters write in different ways.

Some write a full lyric first, and then put it to music. Others write a full track of music with melody but no lyrics.

You can make up words to a song based on a song title. Or based on a story concept. Or a beat, or drum loop.

Sometimes the instrument helps you find the song. I seldom find just melodies on the guitar that come out fully fleshed, and add the words later. If I start on the piano, it often happens that the melody will come first. So the instrument has something to do with the order of inspiration. Sometimes.

And sometimes the smell of gasoline, or the color of a dress … or the fragment of a conversation has everything to do with where the song begins. The melody lies there, clothes half-on. I envy her in her room, call to her in a lit whisper …

… and it ends with the mysterious, beautiful lines, somehow captured in the brittle shell of the tune.

I have written words and music just this way.

wordsmusic

easy

Tony Starling KiddLeave a comment

It’s a beautiful song, this new one in the making … but not easy. The song would say, You’re not easy, too. We’re trying one another’s patience.

And so it goes with each song I make up. I have to depend on patience and persistence, and wisdom and courage, and boldness — more of each than I have — to make something that’s going to touch someone else. This is always the challenge, and it’s never easy.

But the part of songwriting that takes bravery is not that. No, it’s committing to whatever it is I make.

The only way to move past the fear of commitment is to go all in, with an open heart. There’s no other way with art. You’re never certain, and you can’t hesitate to put your art into the world because you’re just not sure.

I’m feeling brave today. And patience, it seems, isn’t different from bravery, it just takes longer.

easy

 

 

no rewind, no repeats

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

Tuesday night I unpacked all my heart before a roomful of strangers, closed it up after an hour or so, then carried it offstage.

And it was over, like a beautiful dream. No rewind, no repeats.

There is a remarkable thing about performing live, and it isn’t about getting everything right, which is so, so rare.

It’s about making a connection with people and sharing something that changes the way they feel.

Isn’t that what we live for?

norewinds