More on: music

I don’t think God wastes anything, our victories or our failures.

For the calligrapher, words are always flesh. 

The spaded earth spurts in fury: 
a geyser of yellow jackets torque  

from their lair.

I found an unexpected resonance in D’Angelo’s low-fi, melancholy mood, articulated in the album Voodoo, which has mystified me for years. 

If I’m to be serious about my music, or any art, I shouldn’t put it toward anything as problematic as God, but toward ambition, achievement: the only reliable gods.

The kettle begins to sing
the one note of its one song.
The day becomes itself beyond
the glass of the kitchen window.

We’re the seeds our mothers have been planting. If
X marks the spot, let’s dig up the whole alphabet.

There was a kind of availability I had to learn in order to create a song like that. A capacity for a kind of ecstatic contact.

I’m a little jealous of my thirty-year-old self. I miss how cute she thought she was. Her goal was to play as much as possible, for whomever, whenever, mostly solo because it was cheaper.

In the Avett Brothers, we share in life’s ups and downs even without blood kinship, and by offering one another redemption born of the generosity of forgiveness, the gift of collaboration, and the freedom to pursue our ideas, our musical family blossoms with creativity.