Category: relationship

bulletproof

Tony Starling Kidd8 Comments

When I go on tour, I meet a lot of interesting people. After a show near Woodstock this week, a sweet man calling himself Star Blanket handed me a mysterious bag whose contents, he said, would make me … bulletproof.bulletproof

I opened it and looked inside it, and it was white willow bark, a cage necklace, and a dark blue, patterned linen handkerchief containing a pinch of black pepper.

It made me realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

Bulletproof … sometimes I wish I could be. Being a singer-songwriter leaves you wide open. Not bulletproof at all, in fact.

I’m amazed how critics in particular affect me. The good reviews make me feel heard, understood, even loved. The bad ones make me feel sad, misunderstood and rejected.

(I suppose a bad one is better than being ignored, right?)

Everyone says you have to have pretty thick skin to stand doing the work I do, but artists don’t have a thick skin. What good is an artist who’s bulletproof?

 

that’s beautiful

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

My friend Ryan stopped by this afternoon. I played him a song I started recording last week. (I’ve got an acoustic guitar, a lead vocal, and a temporary background part on it so far.)

“That’s beautiful,” he said.

I never know what to say after someone says, that’s beautiful, except to agree with them. For me, beauty is an end of conversation.

The beginning is different: This is when you have to be suspicious of your best lines, yourthatsbeautiful best melodies. Then your song has a chance of being beautiful and alive against them.

The beginning produces all the discoveries. That’s when you start to say the things you didn’t know you knew or could say.

Even your deepest, most serious problems very few people are going to be interested in unless you yourself, in the act of making up the song, make some discoveries about them. Then your song has a chance of delighting someone and locating something true which the listener couldn’t locate by themselves. You can share a life then.

When all the pieces fit this way, when the song comes out beautiful in the end, that’s how you know you had a good beginning.

 

 

beach place

Tony Starling Kidd9 Comments

There’s a place on the coast that I go to now and then for stretches of isolated songwriting. It’s a place where I can gaze out at sea for hours and listen to the waves bring the eternal note of heartache in.

A new set of songs I’m writing is evolving as an intricate, relationship breakup album. It will sound like the heart shutting, and possibly mending.

Many songs about heartache and isolation exist in the world. (Music is somehow the perfect medium to express these things.) Why chart the demise of a relationship over another 7 to 10 songs? I suppose I want the songs to be the only heartbreak the listener will want to experience more than once.

The place where I’m hiding out reminds me a little of my grandmother’s house. Her home was two rooms. She had a bed, a dresser, a couch, a stove and a refrigerator. I loved staying with her. My parents sent me on the train the 80 miles to live there every summer. I slept on the floor, got up at daylight to feed the cats, make prayers, water the garden, snap string beans which would be perfectly cooked and tossed in a lemony dressing with toasted almonds for lunch, and now and then help her spoon quince sweet preserves into jars. Then we walked to the beach.

When I think of the peace, the love, and how simple things were then, I know … this is where I got the quiet place in my songs and in my heart.

beachday

love songs

Tony Starling Kidd4 Comments

If your heart is broken, a song is a good place to grieve. If you want someone to fall in love with you, a song can be the place to take them in.

I believe that all songs – the happy ones, the sad ones, the lullabies, the protest tunes, each social commentary and every funeral dirge – all of them are love songs, just as every poem is a love poem, simply by virtue of being written.

Because making up a song, about anything, is a positive, loving act.

Songwriting works to take energy away from the spiral you get into as a fully living person who has formed a feeling about something following an emotion, and puts it into the construction of something of meaning.

I build my songs from every person I’ve ever loved (and every relationship I have mourned). Songwriting helps me to live through my moments with them, and then it helps me remember, if I want to.

Somedays, I really, really want to, because the times and places we were together, the things we meant and said to one another … they aren’t just moments I can leave behind me.

Making up a song about those moments allows me to bring people back after they’re gone. They come around again, just in another form.

Even after a thousand years from now, when I’m just a singing hologram, they will always come around again.

love songs