just off the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel into lower Manhattan, in the Red Hook neighborhood, there’s a budget motel, the Brooklyn Motor Inn.
a couple of people that I know who have stayed there (no, nothing like that) said the whole place smelled like smoke. beer bottle caps in the drawer. smallest fridge, ever. but overall not terrible, and there’s free parking.
plus Red Hook has a laid-back seaside village vibe, so cool and set apart from other parts of town.
I have my own special connection to this place (no, nothing like that). it’s more than a convenience of the American road trip. it exists to make me think of loneliness.
and just like me, this odd, out-of-the-way roadside stop hides in plain sight. noticing, taking everything in.
to make songs is to do that, to attach to something. you attach meaning to sound, and sound to feelings, you set aside time to make something that turns you on (and hopefully someone else, too). for me it’s an attachment to a kind of sadness that underlies things, like the funky motel on Hamilton Ave.
but making songs also means to be apart. you’re in a motel on the edge of town. you’re isolated and apart from everything, and it’s there that you can remember someone you might have not thought about in a long time, and how you felt then.
creation is a trip. I think that each poem we dare to write, each line we compose, each melody we dream up—these all began as invitations to take a little inward journey to some far-off private motor inn, switch the light on, sit at the desk, and make something.
it’s twilight, and the notes in my head seem to float in the air like motel room coat hangers.
cookie nieves 
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