Tag: God

messengers

Tony Starling Kidd9 Comments

Driving home from a show late at night with the windows down offers its own music if I’m paying attention:

A frozen lake breaking apart in the middle of winter …

The angular song of an unseen screech-owl …

Half-crying stars out on the interstate, semis blowing their horns below …

The sound of the highway brushing against the car window, with daylight
still miles away.

A train blazing the tightrope strung across the interstate doesn’t sing her song so much as murmur it beneath her steely breath in a whisper bordering on an ambient hum. Her words, those sparks flying off into the still dark fields, remind me that I’m held aloft on a tightrope myself, and the rest of my life is far below me. For this moment I know where I’m going, just like that train, but who knows about tomorrow?

The owl, the stars, the train: Life is filled with sweet message bearers, bringing and imparting grace. You have only to wait, they will find you. And when they do, you will keep searching for them everywhere, for years,  while right beside you, the tracks they are leaving resemble notes of a mysterious song.

messengers

threads

Tony Starling Kidd4 Comments

My latest song was inspired by a lovers’ spat I witnessed outside the movie theater here in town. It’s about a terrible, terrible betrayal, and the possibility of moving from the brokenness to happiness, if only for a few moments.

When you’re a songwriter living in a small town you hear more things, about all sorts of people —

Those two parting angrily on the street, leaving their love affair hanging by a thread …

The grammar school teacher who retires after 36 years … the heartworn glow of the movie marquee that says, “Thanks Mrs. R for everything” …

Old timers settling world affairs at the donut shop, their opinions steeled with stubbornness and age …

Young girls, beautiful as warm countries, cheering on the school basketball team on a Friday night, living life as it is, thread by thread.

So many of the songs I make up are tapestries of other people’s threads. Nothing but the musical strand that binds them is my own.

Sometimes I think I need a large city. But you see so little of the world there: we slip easily into our private lives, drift into minorities. In the little towns there just aren’t enough folks for that.

In the city, I would only have read about things in the paper. I wouldn’t have picked up all the threads.

threads

shadows and light

Tony Starling KiddLeave a comment

If I’m in a town and there’s somebody I like who has passed away, I’ll visit their grave. Sometimes I photograph it, sometimes I lie beside them and think about their work, their special loneliness now, or bring flowers.

It’s nice to visit where people are or you believe them to be. Just because they have died, doesn’t bring the relationships to an end. I’m happy to surround myself with their ghosts.

My muses are all ghosts. To love them is easy; they’re final, perfect. It’s when I learned to make up songs that I began always to live among them.

When I’m making up a song I imagine them listening with eyes down and smiling sweetly, looking at me lovingly with their abstract sorrow, as if ready to speak kindly, though they never speak.

I look for evidence of their presence in every line I compose. I’ll sit at my writing table, under a tree or in a café, and wait for a sign. It comes in different ways: a shape moving near me like a question, a tone I can hear, but never trace, in my voice.

Sometimes it’s a vague presence that moves up ghost-like from a well of silence on a small stage somewhere and into the heart of the listener — reminding me there is another world, and it is in this one, one sustaining the other.

shadowslight

 

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.