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. …
Category: poetry
why don’t you
Where did her letters go, notes from far-away places written with care about her work and little everyday things. How light the paper was on which this all was drawn. How eager I was to know what might be, and what might have been, and what is, and it was all beautiful to read. And …
jane
Jane Street’s complement of Belgian block pavement begins at Hudson Street and runs three blocks to the end of the street at West Street. This is Jane on Jane Street:
courts
you are the sprinklers on This is courts:
i release you
I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hate twin, but now, I don't know you as myself. ― Joy Harjo
musical chairs
Last night I sat on a little red chair and sang for around 30 people. Some were sitting real close … their closeness was almost air to me. I was singing some new songs, really new and raw, so I wanted as much closeness as I could have. But probably only two or three in the audience were really that close …
far away
Winter arrives early and takes its place at the window. The sky this afternoon has filled the air with snowflakes. There’s just a little light now in my upstairs studio, pale and lonesome as faraway music. I’m dying to take a break from the songs I’ve been writing, but seem to be unable to. I’m afraid to fall out of the groove. …
gold dust
Everybody in the crowd last night was beautiful and young and covered with a kind of gold dust. My guitar was a bit out of tune, but I’m glad that wasn’t fixed. A twist of the knob and, you know, the dissonance would have gone away. But I left it alone. I left things on …
kindness
Last night they wanted me to sing the way someone in love would, how someone wanting love would, how someone feeling alone might. They wanted to hear me tell about hope after hurt, forgiveness, healing after disaster, summery longing, and life after betrayal and breakup (which sadly, I know a lot about). Singing for people has …
water + bread
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 …
