music
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs.
“The Littlest Birds,” The Be Good Tanyas, Blue Horse (Nettwerk Records, September, 2001).
I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 143.
Kit Bramblett, the county attorney for Hudspeth County in West Texas, where Mr. Nelson was arrested on a marijuana possession charge last year, has said he will allow Mr. Nelson to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count if he pays a small fine—and performs “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” in court.
“Willie Nelson May Be Able to Sing His Way Out of Pot Bust,” The New York Times, March 29, 2011.
My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV.
Songwriters on Songwriting by Paul Zollo (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003).
Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.
About her husband, Lou Reed, published in the East Hampton Star, October 31, 2013. Full obit here.
I found a new chord the other day. I was like, “Shit, if I had known that years ago…” That’s what’s beautiful about the guitar. You think you know it all, but it keeps opening up new doors. I look at life as six strings and twelve frets. If I can’t figure out everything that’s in there, what chance do I have of figuring out anything else?
Oct. 17, 2002 interview by David Fricke, in The Rolling Stone Interviews, ed. by Jann S. Wenner and Joe Levy (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 440.
If I didn’t think it would work, I would be the first to say, “Forget it.” But we’re fighting people’s misconceptions about what rock & roll is supposed to be. You’re supposed to do it when you’re twenty, twenty-five—as if you’re a tennis player and you have three hip surgeries and you’re done. We play rock & roll because it’s what turned us on. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—the idea of retiring was ludicrous to them. You keep going—and why not?
Oct. 17, 2002 interview by David Fricke, in The Rolling Stone Interviews, ed. by Jann S. Wenner and Joe Levy (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 432.
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1987), 320.
The boys working on the house are named Calvin, Ronnie, and Earl, who’re under a contractor named Jesse Parrish. They sing hymns from ladder tops, and keep buttermilk and Rainbo Pickles in my refrigerator.
Letter to William Maxwell, October 23, 1972, in What There Is to Say We Have Said, ed. by Suzanne Mars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011), 295.
If there were libraries for musical instruments and for furniture, that would be great. Just to have something for a while, and then be able to let it go again.
Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, ed. by Alan Licht (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 315.
The devil doesn’t have any music.
From various interviews, including “I Got a Lot More to Give,” by Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune, August 1, 2004; her answer to those who’ve accused her of playing “the Devil’s music.”
I wear black because I’m comfortable in it. But then in the summertime when it’s hot I’m comfortable in light blue.
Larry King Live, CNN, November 26, 2002.