life
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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.…
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when I made this song I was thinking about West 4th Street Courts aka The Cage in Greenwich Village. but it could be about anyplace in the city where sirens wail while streetball is played and two ropes swing on beat. you gave that person your heart and soul. you might have lost them, but…
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playing notes is the basic idea of music. but it’s an impression, and just a shallow one. it’s not enough to play the notes. what I really have to do as a musician is everything that is not in the notation (which by the way I can’t read anyway). the same way I need time…
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you know that group of friends in high school that shared a lunch table and spent practically every Friday night together? you know, the cool kids, the populars, the jocks, the brains, the floaters (who got in with everyone), the good-ats? I wasn’t one of them. I was the one all those kids labeled a…
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I love: the city. my guitars. my room. poetry. the church bells at Concord Baptist Church of Christ on Marcy Ave. street art, movement art, lo-budget indie films, dogs and cats, hoops, my friends, the sky, the ocean, my bike, skateboarding, a blossoming almond tree, almendrados (Spanish almond cookies), soccer, adidas, music, healers and dealers…
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I don’t like it when people try to figure me out. I like it even less when they think they already have. there’s a misguided belief that just because you’re a sad-looking punk who plays an acoustic guitar, it means you are sad or it makes you more honest than musicians who attempt to create an experience of truth in some other way.…
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today I am coping with the loss of a friend who was in recovery. he was 26. this isn’t the first time someone in group didn’t make it. when it happened before, a counselor came and told us a bunch of things I wrote down in my notebook and recite each day. she said we…
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I’m riding the Q train, crossing the bridge. I’m leaving Manhattan, on my way back to Brooklyn to play a set for the recovery group. but the train stops because something’s on the tracks ahead. from my place on the bridge, I can see people in their apartment windows. their lives are on display as…
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when someone is missing, their possessions take on a new meaning. so where I run into these things, I begin to make songs – I can feel your empty t-shirt, but I can’t feel you I know your spoon as well as I know your mouth you have the look of the bed you rose…
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today it’s a girl on the train in a red KITH oversized hoodie and black old school Vans tapping her foot to whatever beat, looking like she’s worked all day, dreams of pressure-flips and stair jams, and the snow’s about to fall. Brooklyn Banks is a dark, secret place under the Manhattan end of the…
cookie nieves 