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Tag: music

The Dancing Bells: quintilla

Published on June 19, 2025

The world seems so out of balance.
Perhaps it’s only me and mine.
Sometimes the music for the dance
makes every step a dotted line
with the next motion left to chance.

The world keeps spinning, just the same.
It doesn’t matter if the tune
is out of rhythm. Who’s to blame
when one foot shifts its weight too soon?
It’s just a dance. It’s just a game.

The world goes on and on in time,
while we are here a while, then gone,
just shadows, fading and sublime,
whether of queens, bishops, or pawns.
We dance on, while the bells still chime.

19 Jun 2025

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Another Marionette: light verse

Published on June 12, 2025

Please tell me: just who pulls your strings?
I’d really like to know.
I see you making pirouettes
and flitting to and fro,
much like a butterfly, who lights
on flowers here and there,
and samples each one with delight
not getting anywhere.

Myself? I am a puppet too,
I dance a merry jig,
although I found out years ago
my role is not that big.
I’m just a nameless extra;
call me Dancer 24.
Someone will play me in a week.
Another’s come before.

What music shall we choose for it,
if we may choose at all?
My preference is for comedy,
or something that they call
an incidental piece of work
best suited for the stage
between epic and throw-away,
mere notes upon a page.

So tell me: when you learned to dance,
who taught you how to fall,
before your clumsy feet learned how
to leap, parade, and crawl?
Whose shadow did you hide beneath
while trying to perform
the act you’ve now perfected,
taking the whole world by storm?

Me? I found books and magazines,
all filled with words and stuff
that in time helped me realize
we’re all just useless fluff
designed to be distractions
from another’s main event:
a small piece of the puzzle.
That’s become quite evident.

But still we must keep dancing,
at the far end of the strings
that out of sight, maintain control
and keep us at our thing:
pretending that we are the show
that people pay to see,
instead of dumb mute puppets
who imagine we are free.

12 Jun 2025

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For Art’s Sake

Published on April 23, 2025

Maybe it’s because I’m a musician, or due to having been read to a lot before I started to read for myself at age 4, or because my family seems to be filled with generations of marvelous storytellers. Maybe it’s because I’ve studied for many years the bardic traditions of the Druids. But if seeing is believing, then hearing is belonging.

For me, audio books are both a natural progression and a journey backwards in time. By this I mean that anything I read, in my head I imagine either reading it aloud or having it read to me. It becomes a conversation. Granted, it would be difficult to have a conversation in real life as long as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. You’d have to stop for meals, a couple of naps, restroom breaks, and the endless stream of diversions that inevitably break up a three-day encounter with another person. Even if you reduced or compared it to that most modern of contrivances, the binge watch, it would take quite a chunk of time – and the rapt attention of both parties – to commit to, engage in, and successfully complete such a talk.

That’s one of the reasons why I’ve started several novels but never finished them. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to talk to me for that long. So, I keep it short – missive like this one, poems, songs. It’s not that I can’t extend an idea or premise out beyond the horizon – and anyone who’s talked to me in person knows I am capable of extemporaneous speech for quite a while. But sometimes, it’s better to take medicine – or poison – in small doses. Think of it as an inoculation against the doldrums.

One of the reasons I don’t play live music much anymore is the absence of a conversation. Again, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the people who come to the places around here that are available for gigs, where like in a casino, the band is an amenity like the all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s a loss-leader, as far as the venue is concerned, because people aren’t really coming in to see the band, but to eat, hang out with their friends, or get drunk. A live band in those kinds of situations needs to be more like a juke box, pumping out familiar sounds at a chat-enabling volume, not placing too many demands on the royal ear, so to speak, and definitely not presenting anything confrontational, controversial, confusing, or confounding. Consider yourself part of the furniture. Or worse, a mere player in a tribute band, actively pretending to be someone you’re not, someone completely different, someone worth listening to.

There are music venues that are not like that, of course. But they are becoming harder and harder to find. Odd, because when you consider the performance rights dues that a venue has to pay to support cover bands, radios, or juke boxes, original music is much cheaper. And since the patrons aren’t coming to see the band anyway, from a purely objective point of view it doesn’t matter what they play. So long as it is comfortable, right?

But art is not supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to show you something, make you feel something. A live music event is an experience: a specific time and space coordination that exists only now and involves absolutely everyone in its presence. Performers, promoters, patrons, bartenders, wait-staff, and even random passersby. It is a feast for the senses. And too many people these days seem to be too satisfied with pre-processed, microwaved, and poorly presented fast food that looks nothing like the pictures on the menu.

So many people are dying to simply talk to another person. Or to be heard. And yet we isolate ourselves more and more, not demanding greater physical or emotional interaction because we’re taught it’s unsafe, unsanitary – or maybe just “insanitary”.

Maybe that’s the problem. The conveniences we have demanded are now mandatory, and the entire might of civilized society is conspiring to keep us from actually touching each other.

So, if you can’t see live music, or a live play or dance recital, or poetry reading, go to the library on the weekend and watch the faces of children during Story Hour. Let their joy seep into your pores a little. Maybe you’ll remember what it’s like to be part of a tale, story, legend, myth, or history. Instead of just watching it go by or swiping left.

23 APR 2025

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A Song to Sing

Published on April 20, 2025

One of the things that I fear people asking, that I imagine to be the greatest torture in the world to which I can attest with personal experience in the matter, is “What kind of music do you play?”

Ok, so maybe that’s a first world problem. Could be that most people even in the most obscure, bizarre and strangely unusual circumstances would not find themselves needing to consider it. And I’m ok with that if you are. I mean, what I’m not able to communicate will be more than offset by what you’re not able to understand, right? And visa versa.

It wouldn’t be so bad if there really were specific types or genres of music that folks use to clearly define the sounds they hear, imagine they’re hearing, or wish they could hear, when their lives, like a Broadway or Hollywood musical, need some music or a song to get through a particularly thorny plot point or epiphany. But the truth is, those common shared definitions don’t exist. Ask any two people on the street to define jazz. Or punk. Or country. Or classical. Now ask any two musicians. Of the four answers you have, do any agree with your own descriptions?

When I was at Berklee, one of my professors told us that when Duke Ellington was asked that question, he replied, “Why, beautiful music, of course.” I’ve used that answer since myself, but I always feel both a little guilty – and also a bit skeptical. After all, beauty is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder. There are more ways to divide the spectrum of beauty than almost any other abstract notion in human history. As my dad used to say about working at the Detroit Department of Sanitation, “It may be shit to you, but it’s our bread and butter.”

The beauty you see, absorb, and reflect in the world, and the music you hear, internalize, and echo back to the cosmos, are in that respect very much the same. In many ways, you find the beauty or song you need at the precise moment you need it. That’s why it makes such an indelible impression. Just like you are not the same person from one set of space-time coordinates to the next, but are constantly if unconsciously evolving into something never before quite finished, you’re never really done with beauty and music because once they’ve touched you, they’re never really quite done with you either.

That’s what makes the question so difficult to answer. Not just because the answer changes, but because it doesn’t. It’s the etudes you first learned to play before you knew the names of the strings on your violin. It’s the first piece you practiced for hours preparing for that piano recital. The song you wrote after coming home from your grandfather’s funeral. The tune on the radio when you stormed out of the house and broke up with your first girlfriend. The last of music you hear before you die, when you don’t know you’ll never hear anything else.

In a brief bio of Sandy Denny, I read, “The mark of a great singer is that he or she always tells a personal truth regardless of the given material.”

So you sing your song or somebody else’s, regardless of who actually wrote it. And that’s the kind of music you play. Because nobody else can.

People will keep asking, because they don’t recognize their own life’s soundtrack. And your answer will never be their moon or its light, or even a reflection in a dewdrop of water. But it may be useful as a finger pointing the way.

20 Apr 2025

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Too Fast, Too Young

Published on April 19, 2025

When people talk about all the celebrity deaths at age 28, it’s always to ask, “Why did they die so young?”. But as these folks occur among your own peer group, your perspective changes.

In my own case, I find myself asking, whenever reflecting back on it, “What did I do to live so much longer?”

What would [great deceased artist] sound or look like or talk about if they were still alive today? Imagine what you could do at 28 and pretend you could still do it the same way today. What would THAT look like? Wouldn’t you start to figure at that point that you’d given a lot already, and didn’t feel it absolutely necessary to pull it out of mothballs and get a few dollars for it?

You say, well, there’s all kinds of folks out there who are your age and older who still seem to be living an authentic experience and sharing it in some way with millions of other people. Lots of artists who influenced you growing up that are still around and making it happen.

And I say, well, they all lived past 28 too. Everybody’s got to live their own life or someone else’s. And everyone one of them is different. Except for one thing: we all survived our Saturn return. And we survived by changing something in ourselves. Not the same thing, of course, but something.

If we can get past that, then we can think on what I actually wanted to talk about.

When I ask the question, “What did I do to live so much longer?”, what I really mean is something completely different. What I should have said, and what I was really thinking at the time, was “How did I actually live longer?”

Did I just give up sooner? Did I not have the inner drive to make a bigger or better impression? Was it just never in the cards? Or was I really just afraid: scared of producing the frequencies that would destroy the record player? Does any of that really matter? Then, or Now?

The answer is, “I don’t know.“

The path is where you have your feet. You don’t have a map, because you are the territory. All you do is keep moving forward. Many years ago I wrote the line, “The path I’m on doesn’t have a name. It’s not done yet.”

I haven’t wasted 38 years since just worrying about that. There are too many much more important minutes to consider and live in right here and now.

You can’t worry about how you’ll get through the next five minutes. You already have.

And here we are. Still standing. Still here. With most of ourselves left.

What now?

20 Apr 2025

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The Undertone: terza rima

Published on June 2, 2017

Underneath the skin, a single notion
supports how life unfolds from start to end.
Beneath the bustle of the world’s commotion,

it floats in just a whisper on the wind.
In quiet moments, it can be detected,
first here, then there, and then it’s gone again.

This song speaks to the lonely and infected,
the disenfranchised and the left behind.
To listen is feel far less neglected,

to find relief to ease a troubled mind;
and in the falling darkness, light a candle
that saves the world from stumbling on, blind.

If you sit still and listen, you will hear
a music that transcends both hate and fear.

02 JUN 2017

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