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.
