The titles for songs almost always come to me after a long struggle with the lyrics and melody. Not rooms. I recorded a version of it moments before I posted my perfectly imperfect record this summer. It's about the feeling of being held impossibly within grief — a wounded inner house privately lived in. The …
Tag: song
record store
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 …
25
This song started as a prayer into my disbelief. It is a contemplation of what I cherished about the beautiful dead girl in the lines. Her death brought me to my knees and asked something of me: to present myself to God and the unknown as pure as I could be. It remains a prayer. …
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 …
shadows and light
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 …
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 …
