Tag Archives: music

My Obsession, Tab Benoit

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Tab Benoit, a bluesy southern soulful gritty singer is probably my favorite artist of the last decade.  I can’t get enough of that voice.  I saw him in Chicago and it was incredible.  There’s a bit of talking here at first but sit thru it, I promise it’s worth it!

 

“Extreme Ways” Moby

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Now I’ve never been a fan of Moby this song is brilliant.  Genius.  And it also happens to be the theme song to the Bourne movies I’m obsessed with.  Enjoy

lyrics:

Extreme ways are back again

extreme places I didn’t know

I broke everything new again

everything that I’d owned

I threw it out the window, came along

extreme ways I know move apart

The colors of my sea, perfect color me

extreme ways that help me out late at night

extreme places I had gone

but never seen any light

dirty basements, dirty noise

dirty places coming through

extreme worlds alone

did you ever like it then?

I would stand in line for this

there’s always room in life for this

oh baby

then it fell apart, it fell apart

oh baby, oh baby then it fell apart, it fell apart

like it always does, always does

extreme songs that told me

they helped me down every night

I didn’t have much to say

I didn’t get above the light

I closed my eyes and closed myself

and closed my world and never opened

up to anything

that could get me at all

I had to close down everything

I had to close down my mind

too many things to cover me

too much can make me blind

I’ve seen so much in so many places

so many heartaches, so many faces

so many dirty things

you couldn’t even believe

I would stand in line for this

It’s always good in life for this

oh baby, oh baby

Then it fell apart, it fell apart

oh baby oh baby

then it fell apart, it fell apart

like it always does, always does

 

Leave, first poem in awhile

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Come share and read your poetry Open Link Night over at dVerse!

 

There’s a square patch of sun on the wall

another cigarette stubbed out

I can’t play Adele anymore

and Ali Farka won’t distract

it’s quiet in these rooms

 

smoke curls around the plant

from the candles I’ve just blown out

I don’t recall it all being so still

I don’t remember how you worded it–how

you’d found someone else

but all that you said, how it all fell outa your mouth,

and I take to and bite the wind

in this winter that eclipsed from that spring

I stare out into the sun

the window sweating

and the voices, the words, the songs, the rhythm of

everything about you

has stilled

and I press play to another acoustic guitar

strumming, plucking gently down the line

hoping again that this is a sign

that this is how it feels

when you start to recover

The Humming

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come join in the fun at dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night!

there is a humming

I hear

like an African choir

like the early delta blues

I heard it before

in the mirage of July

when I was eleven without permission

discovering the earth

in my PF Flyers

and rusty schwinn, speakers

from my portable radio wrapped

around the handle bars,

American Pie static in the air,

finding the swimhole no one

had discovered I thought

the humming then–a promise

of my future

of adventure

of a brave life

in love with the world

in my teeth

it drones to me at night now

when I can’t sleep

anxious beneath the stars

my smoke breathing

into the black

wake up! wake up!

sing, girl, sing

I’m Singing

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So I’m singing down at Open Mic night at the Deep Water with an old acquaintance/musician.  Here’s the song we’re doing (yes I used to be in a band).  I’m not gonna lie, I’m a pretty damn good singer.  It was the only reason boys had crushes on me in high school I swear.  I’m a cross between Jewel and Amy Whinehouse:

A Kind of Daydream (a Billie Holiday essay)

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A Kind of Daydream

Lady Day’s voice dips and drones and flattens the back of my throat as we open the summer together.  I’ve waited a whole year for this.  My car coasts so easily on the black road that climbs up and swoops down green hills, as if I’m not even driving but simply along for the ride.  The heat comes in from all directions; it radiates through the glass and wilts the lilacs on the dashboard; it blows in the front windows and weaves out the back.  I’m sweating but I welcome it as much as I welcome this annual tradition.  Somewhere deep within the miles of trees, our cabins await us (along with about two dozen other family members) on clean, clear lakes just beyond Delta in BayfieldCounty.

White clouds and treetops scroll across the silver hood and up the window.  Shadows dance across my arm as I steer the wheel.  Through muffled static, the notes from the piano lightly dance up and down scales, and the trumpet sounds miles away –backdrop rhythm.  The bass clarinet’s riff sways and blunts my spine, taps my sandal on the pedal.

    …like a summer with a thousand Julys…you intoxicate my soul with your eyes…

Her voice is the long, velvety cord that laces all the different sounds together in a lovely, melancholy song.  I reach to turn her up.

CountyE slopes intoCountyH and disappears behind a wall of oaks around a bend.  This is where the road begins to wind and zigzag throughout the countryside, taking its sweet time to reach Delta.  A series of sharp angles skims us past Benson’s Horse Ranch, where horses graze fearlessly close to the fence, barely looking up at the flash of chrome and blaring trumpets.  Another turn and we ease parallel with a grove of maples and pines behind the familiar old fence that is becoming less and less visible in the overgrowth of bramble and daisies.  I wonder if it all looked the same sixty years ago.  I wonder if someone drove through here in a shiny black 1940s Coupe –my dream car –listening to Billie Holiday crooning out of the radio.  I imagine the reflection of leaves rolling over its rounded surfaces, the quiet whir of the white-walled tires, my fingers curled around the slender wheel.

…all of me…

            Everything is alive and bursting green.  I drive well below the speed limit; I am in no rush to get there.  I have carried the same thought every year since childhood –the faster we get there, the faster the long-awaited week of camping will be over.  But now that I’m older, the drive has become one of my favorite parts.

Pavement gives way to fine rocks and ruts, and we are swallowed up by the national forest, hidden from the sun beneath the canopy.  I look in the rearview mirror and see my toddler sound asleep.  Her plump cheeks are pink from the sun, and the gentle breeze that floats through the open windows cools her skin.  Strands of golden hair wisp this way and that around her face, which has lolled to the side of her car seat.  Life is good.  If I could choose my heaven, it would be this drive, unending through this country on a bright summer day, just Emma and me.

…I see your face in every flower…

We reach the sun-bleached “Fresh Farm Eggs 4 Sale” sign, and I know we are almost there.  The car rambles across the rickety bridge over a shallow creek and into cylindrical beams of sunlight pouring through the leafy ceiling.  Burning campfires waft in through the windows, and there is a blinding flicker through the leaves –sun on the open water.  The road again bridges a small river and then skirts the very edge ofDeltaLake.  I gently brake and look around: everything is just as I remember it.  The few cabins here have been dusted out and families are unpacking coolers or resting in their lawn chairs.  Pink flamingos and windmills line their private lanes and encircle their summer homes.  We nod and smile at each other as I roll by.  On the other side of us, the lake gradually opens wide to the sky.  Just a few yards out, a boat sits still on the glaring ripples with two men, black against the sun, puffy in their fishing vests.  It’s time to turn off my music.

We drive on, and the music comes from outside now.  There are birds singing high above us somewhere, and gravel spits from beneath the dusty tires.  I hear the echoes of branches breaking and laughter from hidden campsites.  I suddenly remember the frogs and become more cautious of the little bodies that love to hurl themselves across the road.  The water ends and we are bordered by Birch trees that hide yet another campsite–Scenic Drive Resort.  I take us further in, left up the hill, where the pines grow thickly.  The welcoming sign to Flying Eagle Resort comes into view.  I’m almost reluctant to turn, but I take us down the bumpy drive that will wind its way around the wooded resort and bring us to our cabin.

“‘…It’s just the thought of you…the very thought of you, my love…’” –I look back to see her cheeks jiggling with the bumps.  She stirs.

“Emma, we’re here!”

After the Storm

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I discovered this amazing song on Pandora–”After the Storm” by Mumford and Sons.  Here’s some of the lyrics before you get to the song/video:

“and after the storm…I run and run as the rains come and I look up

I look up

on my knees and out of luck

I look up

and night has always pushed up day

you must know life to see decay but I won’t rot

I won’t rot

not in this mind and not in this heart

I won’t rot

and I took you by the hand

and we stood tall

and remembered our own land, what we live for

but there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears

and love will not break your heart

and dismiss your fears

get over your hell and see

what you find there with grace

in your heart

and flowers in your hair….”

Thoughts on what I’m doing here…

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…when the hand races across the page, you don’t know what, and then there it is.  That’s what it’s about.

Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Essays, Scattered Prose, and the Literary Lyrical–no rules.  No stuffy attitudes.  No fluffy prose.  No lies and no puffy truths.  Just simple writing–uncensored, detailed…a documented love affair, if you will, with the issues and moments at hand.  Scattered, random wit and a touch of the heart if I can’t help myself.  I write.  It is all I do.  I hardly know what the hell I’m thinking or feeling until I see it in font.  And music–music and the words from the greats of an older time that I wish to have been a part of.

Excerpts…

  • Howl…there are no poets here gathering in the streets, humming Zen.  Small towns don’t do that./We hide our bodies in fictions and hide our minds in music and fixes/we either dream endlessly and deny reality or squeeze out reality’s final breath in a desperate attmept for   its       devotion…
  • …if you are with your estee lauder, on the cul-de-sac listening to your beeper/when you wanted earlier to hide beneath the subway and collect change beneath skirts so you could fly fly/…the gentlemen watch with their scotch and the new age changes art into new forms, traveling in to seek an out but there is no out,/to any of it/ a march presumes but there is only space and the of-the-moment deals and eclipses of the heart that you will save…
  • I’m a five-year-old in heels, smashing my makeup on the ground, crying into the locked yellow door (of “the bin”).  (PTSD creative writing “Panic of Peace”)
  • …and my memoir has no page numbers…