Words like rescue and tenderness and forever and don't go. The things I experienced, written on my cells as memories and patterns, a record. All of them broken, all of them saved, in one- to two-minute narratives packed tightly into small spaces. It begs the question: Why did I save this? What is the value …
Category: God
little things
I’ve learned to practice myself in little things. A good night's sleep: 7-8 hoursThe morning walk: 90 minutesA slow drink of room temperature water: 1 hourWarming the voice, stretching the range: 30 minutes (Humming and yawn-sighs, 20 minutes. Tongue twisters, facial exercises and sung scales, 10.)Finger stretches: hold for 30 to 60 seconds and then …
alone
Being a songwriter was never my ambition. It was and remains my way of being alone. It's an essential place if you want to make some meaning. It's where masks come off, truth is unveiled and you encounter the unforeseen. I love how Nick Cave put it : Like Jesus praying alone in the garden, …
beautiful days
Who’s to say the bicycle did not die of heartbreak from not being taken anywhere? Where will I go with my new songs? What is their meaning beyond the consolation they brought to me in writing them? Who are they for anyway? Does it matter if no one else gets to hear them? It does …
missing
We call a T-shirt T-shirt, even when it is used as a rag to wash the car – it is still called T-shirt. Maybe the old Radiohead concert T-shirt. It’s always changing – the shape, the size, the color — but its name and meaning remain. Soap and water pulse against the car, and the shirt lies on its back looking up as if …
light in odd places
I don't know how to understand the experience of losing someone you love. That which remains rises in time from the dark, spilling light in odd places. Another Sunday always comes. This is Sunday, wounded, from courts:
love, God + death
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed / You will never be lovelier than you are now / We will never be here again. ― Homer, The Iliad (Yes, the story with the big horse.) I knew at a young age that if I was going to be a writer, it had to be songs. My house …
rooms
All of my songs are little rooms. One- to two-minute spaces made of memory and life. My job as a songwriter is to build them nice enough the spirit of music will come and live in them. The new record of demos and first-takes is called courts. This is rooms:
three things
Three things cannot hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth. ― Gautama Buddha
musical chairs
Last night I sat on a little red chair and sang for around 30 people. Some were sitting real close … their closeness was almost air to me. I was singing some new songs, really new and raw, so I wanted as much closeness as I could have. But probably only two or three in the audience were really that close …
