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 …
Tag: song
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 …
strange and familiar
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 …
truth and lies
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 …
unwanted things
There is no burden like unwanted things. Which is sad because, against all real evidence, things have feelings too. They don’t love in the human way, still: That blue thrift shop sweater out at the elbows has a story. I try to imagine the places it has been, and who wore it before it was mine. Those rundown cowboy boots slouched in the closet talk in …
longing town
We want to last, and for things to last ... and I don’t know how to do that except through art. I’m singing in a little town tonight, a whisper on the map. I’ll drive two hours through the countryside to get to it. It’s the little towns I like. I can understand these places, settle …
go
Love goes on / It's the lovers who go words and music by Tony Starling Kidd © Buffalo Spoon Records
approximately forever
An approximately three-minute song is as fleeting as a galloping horse against infinite time. But it can capture forever a moment that’s gone forever.
