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. …
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
