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: relationships
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 …
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 …
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 …
alibi
I have wanted to write about the people who owned our old farmhouse before, but I couldn’t realize the song, which more and more seemed to want to talk about some essence of their moving on, not their past. Reaching into the past, I am able to salvage: The dim farmhouse, morning radio on … Black-blue meadow …
