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 …
Category: poetry
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 …
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 …
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:
