Tag: creative writing

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?

 

how to tune a guitar

Tony Starling Kidd8 Comments

You go for a drive with the top down and let the guitar sit in the passenger seat.

Make the first left, that way your destination is farther and the road to it prettier, the blossoms absurdly violet. Lose your location.

Fiddle with the radio dial. Brush past the popular music stations to the one of choice. Pause there just to adore someone’s croon.

“She was 21 when I left Galveston …” Begin thinking softly to yourself about the sadness heard deep inside the radio.

Now pick up the guitar and press your side close to hers. Begin tuning. The notes the open strings make, from the thickest to thinnest, are as follows:

E – the lowest string. The hollow Echo of a voice which speaks in an empty room.

A – she whispers sea “Anemones,” but my heart does not look up.

D – the 4th string. Dragonfly and water lily.

G – Sound becomes flesh for God to enter.

B – the Buzz and babble of billions of white bees in succulent afternoon.

E – the highest string, Exhaling verses blown back in air.

Gathering your fingers around her, reach inside her wires and steal away her heart. At last, you are playing.

tuneaguitar

masterpiece

Tony Starling Kidd4 Comments

masterpiece

The thing I most dreaded when I began making up songs as a teenager was being struck down by an F-150 before the world could hear my masterpiece.

Not so much anymore.

These days I don’t sit and wonder if my next song will be liked by hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t care whether the world will consider it a major work. I make up songs for one reason: to get free.

Songwriting makes my feelings manageable. Some people fight or pray their way out of really painful situations; I just have to tell you how bad it felt. The grief is released, mastered in a sense, through the work. I am able to move forward from it — you never move on from grief, you only move forward — after that transcendent moment when suddenly it’s art.  To be able to do that makes the song, for me, a masterpiece.

It has a little something to do with craft, skill and workmanship. It has nothing to do with being popular. (If the goal is to be popular, then it’s all about the judgment of the world.)

It has everything to do with carving the battle scars deep into the work itself.

As long as I’m satisfied that the song I’m writing has that character, I know that even if, in the grand scheme of things, it’s the perfect emblem of unimportance, even if it’s mortal and has provided but a moment or two of consolation or healing, it will still be a masterpiece of sorts. It will be, if only for a little while, my masterpiece.

b-flat

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

Science fact: the universe is humming. A black hole in the Perseus cluster approximately 250 million light years away is emitting a note: B-flat.

Actually, its entire tune is the note B-flat, but 57 octaves lower than middle-C, or one million, billion lower than what the human ear can hear.

Science has a name for the humming: “obsessive musical thought.” But science doesn’t know exactly what causes it or what to do about it.

I am not enough of a scientist to be able to work out the cosmic correspondences, but this makes me wonder:

Is it a normal obsession for bodies in Heaven to groove to their own personal soundtrack? Is the universe having musical thoughts?

What could Perseus be singing about? I imagine a star being torn to shreds by the massive black hole in the heart of this distant galaxy, and a loving record of its death.

Perseus is not the universe’s sole galactic vocalist. M87, a galaxy that holds one of the universe’s most massive black holes, is also known to croon.

Other interstellar objects and events produce sound waves as well. In fact, the echoes of the big bang have been humming since shortly after the universe’s birth. Closer to home, the sun has been chanting for billions of years.

Could the universe actually be communicating with us through song? Does it have wisdom and an emotional force beyond what we can bring out of it? Who’s to say.

Though no living thing on Earth can hear the music, the cosmos continues its endless repetitious chanting, like a secret blessing that preceded everything.

equuleusconstellation

Equuleus constellation lies in the northern sky. Its name means “little horse” or “foal” in Latin.

two winters

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

part of me is here, part of me is missing / since the last time I saw you / you went, I stayed / like the frame of a stolen painting left behind / two winters, a fractured truth ago / but I can’t stay here any longer, the place knows too much / two winters, a fractured truth ago

words and music by Tony Starling Kidd

© Buffalo Spoon Records

simple lives

Tony Starling KiddLeave a comment

I give my songs such simple lives, they give me such beautiful tragedies. They seem to have a way of letting me know what’s going on.

Each helps me tell the truth as I see and hear it at that moment.

Two Winters is the oldest song on my little record. It’s about a heart encountering, accepting, and learning to live from its brokenness.

Please listen, share, buy.

words and music by Tony Starling Kidd

© Buffalo Spoon Records

strange and familiar

Tony Starling Kidd2 Comments

There’s something deeply satisfying about writing songs without being hemmed in by expectations of a specific linear form or any particular idiom of music.

Yet it isn’t as simple as “out with the old, in with the new.” Here lies the beauty, complexity and excitement of songwriting:

Making up something that bears identifiable traces of its roots yet stays unmistakably my own … writing a song that puts me deep enough in the woods, and at the same time a clearing in the forest where people recognize me.

Most people bridle at unfamiliar things. The new blasphemes, it always does. The art is in straddling the two worlds, new and old, and this takes some precarious grace.

The moment of truth is when an unplucked string is finally strummed, it calls, and a strange and familiar heart answers.

stable

 

truth and lies

Tony Starling Kidd3 Comments

There’s a misguided belief that just because you play an acoustic guitar and sing in a near-whisper close to the microphone, it makes you more honest than singer-songwriters who attempt to create an experience of truth in some other way.

Here’s the truth: Some songs are meant to calm you down. Some are meant to stir you up.

Some are transcendental, and some are just really dumb.

The religious hymn, praise to the king … songs filled with the sorrows of a dissolving marriage, or an inventory of lovers … they all have a place.

The dark, brave, thoughtful and serenely startling songs … tracks we can dance to, anthems we revolt to, beats we bounce to and sounds we make love to … they all have a place.

We may crawl out of a song feeling more in love, or younger, or angrier, or wiser, clutching a secret message of small meaning or nothing, nothing. We might seem lost. We might seem happy. There are a hundred different states of human yearning, and people need to feel them all.

What matters is that when a songwriter comes along with a pure heart and something to say, we listen.

truthlies

unwanted things

Tony Starling Kidd9 Comments

There is no burden like unwanted things. Which is sad because, against all real evidence, things have feelings too. They don’t love in the human way, still:

That blue thrift shop sweater out at the elbows has a story. I try to imagine the places it has been, and who wore it before it was mine.

Those rundown cowboy boots slouched in the closet talk in accents from the Old West. I stare at them appreciating all the wrong roads they may have taken. Usually, I find a song in them.

Pale-portrait faces stored in the attic gaze sadly at each other, old, tattered books think softly to themselves in between readings, and under its yellow blanket, the whittled-down pencil dreams of writing again.

Not one of these things transcends its thingness; the artist who connects with them becomes all these things.

They become a part of my inheritance as a songwriter. Forsaken, they now take me in their arms.

winterhorsefield

love and loss

Tony Starling Kidd9 Comments

I never know when or how a song is going to end. It’s something that eludes formula and analysis.

I do know that a song has a way of bending: The end of the beginning bends to the beginning of the end.

I can’t tell you how many times I have sung loss, and how often it was love that was hiding unconsciously in my heart … how many times I thought I was at the end, only to find another beginning.

loveandloss