Tag Archives: music

Listen to the Music

I wonder how much of our time we spend actually listening to music?

I don’t mean seeing a band in a bar (where there’s all kinds of distractions you’re probably focused on), or listening at work or while driving, or kicking up the surround sound when a Dolby sound movie comes on the TV. I mean, sitting still, without trying to accomplish or be 17 other things, without conversation, without dishes to wash. Seems to me that if you consider yourself a music lover, or more to the point call yourself a musician, and don’t spend at least some dedicated portion every day to just listening to music, then it probably takes you longer and longer to get “into it” each time you put it on or play it.

By denigrating music as a soundtrack to more important things, we lose the beauty and magic of music as it truly is — an art for art’s sake, with no tangible benefit other than perhaps temporary change of mood.

Makes music seem more worth doing, because it NEEDS to be done. It is not a sideline, an afterthought or a minor player.

Music is the fabric that defines a culture, makes it technology and achievements worth celebrating, learning, remembering and passing on. Without it, we are left with only philosophies of how to do, and none to tell us why.

14 AUG 2013

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Fundraiser for my new album project

If you’re a regular visitor to or reader of this blog, please consider making a small contribution to the fundraising effort for recording and releasing my first official album (CD) of original music, Songs from the Undertown. Thanks.

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Some music must be free

All music cannot be contained
in simple structures, common forms,
by formulaic skeletons
that would restrict the way it’s made;
it reaches out beyond those lines,
a crayon in untutored hands
that blurs the edges in between
the guidelines of a thing.

Some music, yes, belongs inside
of metered time and measured space
to ground us in the here and now,
to mold from chaos grand designs;
without such structure, we might fail
to understand in order’s calm
the limits of what is right here,
constructed on our yesterdays.

But other songs burst free those chains;
they must, else we could scarcely breathe,
and would attempt constant escape
from ordinary life, or worse,
might find a way to shade in grays
without a trace of brighter hues,
and silent, shuffle off to death
without a word but still in step.

24 APR 2013

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Festival Day

Downtown along the river bank
the party has begun;
from miles away the slow parade
of cars and people come

for fried dough or some boudin balls,
for gator on a stick,
for cheap and warm domestic beer
and wristbands that won’t stick.

Across the social register
today the lines are blurred.
The crowd is mixed in all the ways
that make judgments absurd:

the color bar, the young and old,
the college and the town,
those with, and more of those without
than most days can be found

here on the pleasant, verdant shore
against the brick-lined street.
Hello there, great to see you here!
No saccharine tastes so sweet.

For special patrons, private tents
keep out some of the heat;
the rest of us spend hours walking
up and down the street.

The music seems an afterthought,
almost just ambiance;
an ever-changing set of songs
accompanying the dance.

13 APR 2013

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Your backstage ghost

For forty years, I’ve sung and played;
each bar, garage or concert stage
has its own ghosts, its private songs.
They do not share them all.

Some of these venues are long gone,
while others stand with different names;
those that remain all show their age.
We all get older, year by year.

The players, too, have come and gone
to better gigs or greener lawns;
sometimes, I hear of their success
and wonder if they think of me.

In forty years, I’ve found that songs
evolve or die. To stay the same
means fade away, and is not love;
I’m missing Buddy Holly now,

and many more I’ve never met
except perchance as lingering shades
who hang backstage, behind the lights
and sometimes, hum along.

05 APR 2013

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The blues spoken here

In the Marines, they quip there is no color:
just light, dark and medium green.
So it is with the blues, if you look closely enough;
beyond the initial reaction,
the worry over the metal detectors at the door,
run-down houses down the block,
a sign that hangs precariously by one rusty screw
and a hastily tacked up hand-printed waybill
proudly announcing a cover charge
changed at least three times
if you can trust the scratch outs,
there is a calm in this place.

To speak of blues lovers
as separate but equal,
colorblind,
open-minded or tolerant
is to cheapen the blues,
to somehow try to prove, in vain,
that misery and suffering
are not quite universal,
less than absolute,
meted out in small degrees
according to one’s lights.

Not so, not so:
the blues succeeds
where other kinds of music fail,
across wide oceans of despair
to reach into the blood and bone
which are, when life is measured out,
bleached white the same
and turned to dust.

2 APR 2013

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A simple turn of phrase

While would-be existentialists
consume their lives with endless lists
of what-might-just-as-well-have-beens
from birth through death and in between,

I will continue, more or less,
in both malaise and happiness
to seek, to find, to stand amazed
when hearing what songs still are made

by those who choose to find the notes
between the strings, beyond the throat
in that strange music where each sound
reverberates and shakes the ground,
and with a simple turn of phrase
exists beyond all saccharine praise.

01 APR 2013

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