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. I opened it and looked inside it, and it was white willow bark, a cage necklace, and a …
Tag: creative writing
how to tune a guitar
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 …
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 …
b-flat
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 …
two winters
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 …
simple lives
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 …
strange and familiar
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 …
truth and lies
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 …
unwanted things
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 …
love and loss
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 …
