NONALIGNMENT PACT

On March 17, 1999, Jeremy Hart and I were at Rudyard’s in Houston watching the spindly, angular-looking Mark Linkous lead Sparklehorse through another chillingly poignant set. Mark and the band completed a version of “Saturday”
07 Saturday
and an audience member loudly muttered “Fuckin’ beautiful…” in the most gruff rocker growl you can imagine. It didn’t [...]

1984 was the year I made that first fateful turn of the radio dial from KRWG 90.7 FM, the local NPR station in Las Cruces, NM over to B94 FM, the El Paso station that would carry me through my formative transition out of classical. Much of the early stuff I heard is consigned exclusively [...]

I personally don’t have a voice anyone needs or wants to hear. Since early in high school, it’s been painfully obvious that others find my nasally baritone less than appealing as a narrative or melodic force. And while I’m certainly willing to lend my vocal “talents” to a reading of Harriet the Spy or These [...]

…send love songs that speak to absence, yearning, and pain. Some are sad, for certain…
…from the classic moth-to-the-flame scenario…

…to the utterly unrequited…

…to the one that got away…

…to the subtle exploration not of what’s there but rather what isn’t there…

Most Of The Time – Bob Dylan
…and finally to the tragic tale of early love taken away [...]

Most nights, as my wife Heather puts our 10-month-old Althea to bed for the evening, my 6-year-old Maya and I are left to fight for control of the airwaves. It’s usually time to clean the kitchen, a time Maya dreads because she knows I can’t read to her or pretend to be Pocahontas’ enemy for [...]

An addictive personality can play havoc with your ability to enjoy the finer things.
I have been blasting my ears out with music through headphones since I was 12. It certainly can’t have been because the quality of the sound from those experiences, can it? Of course not. I had a collection of GE boomboxes and [...]

What I’ve determined in making posts a little more personal to me is that I begin to think of each one as an attempt to rip open the thin veneer clouding my psyche and allow all to gaze at the wounds. Since this week has been a combination of dazzling euphoria and earth-shattering shame spiral [...]

As an musician, I have been thinking lately about how much I have in common with other artists (a word I find painful to use when describing myself) and the attention they pay to the tools they use. I can’t get into too many specifics about the media those artists (the ones I know who [...]

Part of me wants to be the one who not only has 20,000 songs on mp3 or on CD or in any format and knows where all of it is but also listens to all of it. Or has an active desire to listen to all of it. Part of me really wants to be [...]