There’s just so much heartache, the kind that gets you with its earnestness, that makes you overlook clunker lines because you’re like, “yeah man, yeah, it’s gonna be okay, you play that piano for REAL.”
I can remember you on stage and I can remember singing along and I can remember feeling good about just thinking that you all fucking rocked. Such a bonus, going for the headliner and being rocked by the opener. This happens in Portland, this thing where the band no one knows shows up at the Doug Fir, knows their shit, and just wins over the entire room.
We tripped over ourselves to wonder if you could really be that old. We said, yeah, yeah, it totally makes sense that your music be paired up with theirs. We watched your bassist fuckin rule that 70’s weirdoslap bassline and make it her own.
We ponied up, we did.
I still don’t understand how I can like one ambient artist and not the next. I am not sure if perhaps Eno broke me into thinking that Eno-type stuff is great and new agey somehow is something different or what. But I do love the fact that when this kind of music vibrates the right way, I feel lighter, more connected. I remember as a child when the musician visiting our classroom told us to draw what we hear. I was always so frustrated that my drawing skills didn’t match my the way that I hear; I’m obsessed with the idea of creating a machine that shows us, on a screen, what we are hearing when we hear music or what we are seeing when we see memories. I like that this poem was not really a poem, until I said it was not and then rewrote the middle and now it feels more like one. I like writing in a space when that debate can still be relevant. I like when art pisses people off because they think it isn’t art. I don’t like that art can be the kind of thing that divides us into trained and not trained. Tonight a poet told a story about how one poet finally understood another poet’s work in a way that was like finally understanding Coltrane: the poet listened to Coltrane, pissed off, again and again and again, for an entire year. And then one day, the poet understood. One day he got Coltrane.
I love how you can never un-get Coltrane.
