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. …
ritual
Some claim it takes 10 minutes. I don’t really know how other songwriters work. I'm just grateful that I can write one, after another, after another and bring anything to conclusion. I don't think about how long it takes me. It’s the finished-ness of the song that I really cherish. There's a reason why our …
last holdout
the window now, framing the steady gaze, the fenced-in beauty of horses. from Buckskin, Indiana, a poem by Roger Pfingston Here is an old song called Last Holdout:
light in odd places
I don't know how to understand the experience of losing someone you love. That which remains rises in time from the dark, spilling light in odd places. Another Sunday always comes. This is Sunday, wounded, from courts:
love, God + death
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed / You will never be lovelier than you are now / We will never be here again. ― Homer, The Iliad (Yes, the story with the big horse.) I knew at a young age that if I was going to be a writer, it had to be songs. My house …
don’t tell me
don't tell me / I have lived without names before
in another California
the words: California, your heart is beating you / you had me in a rented room / can't speak of the redwoods, you're cruel / with a gift for burning what you love the song: the story: We were staying in California. Lies spread like wildfire. End of story. I just didn't know it. …
rooms
All of my songs are little rooms. One- to two-minute spaces made of memory and life. My job as a songwriter is to build them nice enough the spirit of music will come and live in them. The new record of demos and first-takes is called courts. This is rooms:
house guests
My rooms are filled with instruments. Dreadnoughts. Concert guitars. My beloved '67 Harmony Bobkat. But no one owns a guitar, a piano, a mandolin. The drum. They're just house guests. Guests who will survive us and pass to other hands, the way they passed to mine. You can hear some of them way over here. …
