love and strange horses *

Tony Starling Kidd6 Comments

I am convinced my soul was constructed to belong entirely to a life of making up songs, just as the cowboy’s was to rope calves and the sun was made to lay its palm over the window in my studio this late afternoon.

I spent time this week with two lawyers and someone from A&R. All of them pushing papers with big words and lots of numbers to keep the conversation going.

I have to confess there’s something about being with the fine people who work at these jobs that leaves me feeling alone. I’m the only one of my kind when I’m with them: an outlier, not easy to lasso into their carefully scripted conversations. I stand at the crescent of my hoofs at these meetings, head jerking away from the halter, ears searching for the stablegirl’s caress.

It’s different when I’m among my own kind, musicians and other artists, or when I’m home doing all my comfortable alone things: making up songs, tuning an instrument, reading, or just looking the day away in a pasture empty of everything but wildflowers and witchgrass.

At these times, I feel peaceful and occupied with all the things I know I’m meant to do.

strange horses

* The title of a book by the amazing Nathalie Handal

longing town

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

We want to last, and for things to last … and I don’t know how to do that except through art.

I’m singing in a little town tonight, a whisper on the map.  I’ll drive two hours through the countryside to get to it.

It’s the little towns I like. I can understand these places, settle in and lose myself in any one of them. They make me want something of what’s passed.

Maybe one day I’ll put the town, its lampposts undermined by twilight, half-hidden in my lines, and a song will become my history with the place. And maybe the song will give me the illusion that I never left, and the moment will last forever.

My life has been filled with longings. It’s consoling to be going tonight, on my way to another place I will miss.

longing town

music lesson

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

Playing notes is the basic idea of music, but it’s an impression, and a shallow one. It’s not enough to play the notes.

What I really have to do as a musician is everything that is not in the notation.

The same way I need time with my instruments to interpret notes, I need time with people, to understand and interpret them.

It’s the things I notice when I’m not with my guitar or at the piano that I find so interesting and want to explore later through the soundboard, the strings, bridges, keys and petals.

Playing music is mostly about this: listening to the human heart as it encounters, accepts, and learns to live from whatever rubs up against it.

music lesson

 

she’s a rescue

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

I got myself a new guitar today. Well, not really new: an old Gibson J 45, rich and deep on the low E and A strings, with round shoulders, a wine-red finish and tortoise teardrop pickguard.

She’s a rescue from a city pawn shop. There she stood, so beautifully abandoned, in reverent silence. I imagined her maker reclaimed wood from an old church pew in order to create her.

She came with an exile’s suitcase, and a belly filled with songs.

The music just lives in these old guitars. If you really want to write a song, if you have no ideas and can’t go thinking or don’t want to, go to a pawn shop. Go ask a guitar. Buy one used, because she has music in her.

Think of her as your grandfather’s cane, take her on a walk. She will talk to you. She’ll tell you about places she has known, the wrong turns she’s made and who she’s seen. About the café chairs she’s rested on, and baggage carousels she’s ridden, her wild ways. How one night in a downtown club, she found grace. And why her strings are sad and full of regrets. Could be the one who played her before had no heart.

Tune her up and, warbling out the old, she will begin anew. Tell her to find you a B minor, A major song. Maybe the next day suddenly you’ll have something.

People will turn to see where the beautiful notes came from. They’ll feel transfigured. Those that heard will say the holy spirit spoke to them as from an eternal tree. Anyway, that’s what my new song will say.

abandoned