When I was a kid, nothing was as glamorous to me as a record store. Other 10-year-olds would drag their moms to the video arcade; I would take mine to Bleecker Bob’s in Greenwich Village.It was in those early days when I identified the one thing I was born to do, songwriting. And I discovered …
Tag: music
ritual
Some claim it takes 10 minutes. I don’t really know how other songwriters work. I'm just grateful that I can write one, after another, after another and bring anything to conclusion. I don't think about how long it takes me. It’s the finished-ness of the song that I really cherish. There's a reason why our …
bulletproof
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 …
living room music
There's a tempo they want. A sound quality they want. There are subjects they won't air. The music industry (like any other successful industry) is about formulas and rules. Follow them, and you will succeed in it as a songwriter and, for better or worse, likely remain a part of it for life. Incidentally, the formula looks like this: This Brightness plus that Tempo plus this …
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 …
messengers
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 …
never easy
Today the sun almost shines in the palest sky. I’m trying to get into the day and finish up the second song for a new EP. I have to. It’s a pretty song, but not easy. The song would say, "You’re not easy, too." We’re trying one another’s patience. And I need to be braver than …
warm spot
When I was 18 or 19, I decided I was going to get a gig at a famously dusty and dim, folk music club in New York City. Its purple neon beacon, hanging three feet below the century-old pressed-tin roof, blared two city blocks, a kind of downtown iconography. It was the kind of place where …
threads
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 …
