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 …
Category: writing
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:
one day
one day, you will awake from your covering and that heart of yours will be totally mended, and there will be no more burning within - Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, from Love Song for the Newly Divorced
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 …
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 …
making up
Everything eternal happens in a spare room after 1 a.m. I've come downstairs from the loft after working all night, trying to find a new song. The one from the last few days doesn't seem to be coming to anything. I can't stand it suddenly. So we're not speaking to each other, for now. (Songwriting …
otherly beauty
I have long drawn strength from the reverence with which I approach my art. As a child I was touched by the otherly beauty of liturgical hymn and speech that I heard in the chambers of churches, where everything sounded (and was) important. At five or six I lived for songs my grandmother sang while she prepared the ritual food made …
strange companions
I think it’s not possible to be a songwriter without being a kind of instrument for other people. In a way, when you’re making music you’re a conduit for what’s in the air, not just the culture and times you’re living in, but human spirit. That was my experience early on. As a young boy, I was …
