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safe forever
When someone is missing, their possessions start to take on meaning. And so where I run into these things, I begin to make up songs – I can feel your empty clothes, but I can’t feel you … Your spoon,...
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audible
Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like “Strawberry” is a very musical sounding word to me. Dandelion is another. I like Honeysuckle and Hurricane, too. And Hallelujah. Standing on the edge of...
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oh, very young
When you’re very young: You wonder, “What exciting thing is going to happen today?” You experiment. You LOOK. You imagine. You learn. You play. You share. You make friends. You’re curious. You’re...
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precious
A mini tour brings me and my guitar to a few different towns this weekend. All my life, I’ve had the privilege, the obligation too, I believe, to sing these beautiful solace-making things for people. I...
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steps
I am only my steps. A hundred steps ahead of me, both my compass and my chasm, I find: Homer the souls of waves in his embrace King David the sweet psalmist … “Into your hands I give my spirit” Manos...
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music lesson
Playing notes is the basic idea of music, but it’s an impression, and a shallow one. It’s not enough to play the notes. What I really have to do as a musician is everything that is not in the notation....
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otherly beauty
On the final stop of the weekend tour, I played in the atrium of an early church. People sat in concentric circles, light joined the sound … it was grace. I have long drawn strength from the reverence...
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unrepeatable beautiful
This morning, I sit in my little studio and write with a view of the birch-lined road and the light let loose in the garden. I’ll work until 11:30 or 12, then we’ll take the children to the library for...
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between life and art
One of the remarkable things about being a musician is that there are no rules. There’s no right way or wrong way to be one. You can experiment with every aspect of making up a song, and there’s no one...
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G
I go into the studio in Tribeca today with my friend P, an engineer with great skills on the board. It’s so nice working with him. We’ll keep sequencing and stroking and finessing this thing I’ve...
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all things invisible
For the next two days I’m living in a sunny, spare room over a bookshop, in a one-pump, two-church town by the sea. It’s a kind of self-imposed exile; I have to finish this song I’m making up for N. I...
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love + strange horses
I’m convinced my soul was constructed to belong entirely to a life of making songs, just as the cowboy’s was to rope calves and the sun was made to lay its palm over the window in my studio this late...
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shadows + light
My muses are ghosts. To love them is easy; they’re final, perfect. It’s when I learned to make up songs that I began always to live among them. If I’m in a town and there’s somebody I like who has...
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park bench
Near the cemetery you always find stone cutters and gardeners. Near the courthouse, lawyers’ offices and newsstands. In November, the silence of a park bench at three o’clock: The songwriter. Noticing...
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winter mix tape
I’ve been on the couch listening to music all afternoon, watching the winter light fade over the trees outside. Peppermint tea. Leftover Christmas cookies. Leafing through books I might read. Watching...
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outer banks
It was good to be back on the Outer Banks. Life seems to wash itself there. It comes clean with waves rolling in, little snowplows. I had missed the beach and salt grass, like a starling that stayed...
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a love song
I turn the dial on my car radio searching for the latest love song. Listening to it now, I can’t help but feel it casts a benevolent spell. N’s voice moves lighter than air, like a hummingbird...
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music + danger
My mother went to school in the little church of her bleached village high up in the mountains of northern Greece. There she learned to read and write, say her verses, and sing the spirituals. She...
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the threads
H’s bittersweet, new album is filled with pretty, meandering tracks. I have contributed one. For all the loneliness found on her record, she has drawn quite a crowd into her corner. It’s not a...
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signals
This is a view from our house, our little hideaway farm. My refuge from the road. All the songs I have written the past two years loosely revolve around this place that we call home. I kind of grow...
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