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 …
Tag: love
love and strange horses *
I am convinced my soul was constructed to belong entirely to a life of making up songs, just as the cowboy's was to rope calves and the sun was made to lay its palm over the window in my studio this late afternoon. I spent time this week with two lawyers and someone from A&R. …
go
Love goes on / It's the lovers who go words and music by Tony Starling Kidd © Buffalo Spoon Records
the last holdout
You left to run horses / We both had reasons to run / I hear only hooves now / No rider comes / Oh, runaway heart / Again, I've lost you / There you are, gone, the last holdout / And I'm holding on to things gone missing / Lover, you left so much words and music …
finder’s reward
When I'm making up a song, I keep an ear to the ground for what people cast off. An overheard remark in a train station, the half-sentences of friends workshopping love’s particulars in the local coffee shop: They’re the finder’s reward. I listen in like an ecclesiastic to the human heart as it bares its splendor and its brokenness. I listen, and write. And as I write, I …
all the horses
I wanted all the horses / Somehow let you go words and music by Tony Starling Kidd © Buffalo Spoon Records
opening sounds
What something sounds like can’t change what it is: The sound of a drawer opening … The north wind on the telephone lines … A motorbike along the lane … Lilacs crashing through old barn walls … The key turning in the door to an empty house … Footsteps retreating. Yet sound opens sound. It …