life
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when I was a little kid, I wrote a letter to my favorite TV show, Scooby Doo. I told them they should do an episode where the monster turns out to be real. I’m grown up now (pretty much), and I still know that monsters are real. and that when you’re fighting one, it’s really…
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as a songwriter and performer, the work of opening the heart can be a lot.it can seem like you’re going around feeling everything — and that can be overwhelming. the audiences I seem to connect with the most are the ones that are feeling some of the same things I am. sometimes I play for…
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you can take a walk through East New York, or Navy Hill, or Greenwood Heights, and one person will think these are really frightening, dangerous places and rush right out of there. and someone else will take their time and explore the history of those neighborhoods, sample the unusual foods and sounds on the streets,…
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leave a bike outside long enough in New York City, and it will probably be stripped of its parts, left for dead. was the bicycle’s actual cause of death heartbreak from not being ridden around? because only moving does it have a soul. most of the songs I write tell and retell a story of…
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when I started out, I decided I was going to get a gig at a famous club in New York City. its purple neon beacon, hanging three feet below the century-old pressed-tin roof, blared two city blocks, a kind of downtown iconography. this was the kind of place where you could just feel the years,…
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I bought a new guitar today. well, not really new: an old Gibson J-45, rich and deep on the low E and A strings, with round shoulders, a wine-red finish and tortoise teardrop pick guard. she was standing in a city pawn shop, beautifully abandoned. she came with an exile’s suitcase and a belly filled…
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this bird comes every day and stops at the branch to sing for an hour or two, as if it were absentminded, trying to remember the melody from the day before. that’s all the bird does. nothing makes it happier. it wants me to listen to it sing as it leans over to my window. its honey voice’s precision, filtered through…
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at ps 20 I learned math and english, science and history, but not other things, like how to daydream by the open window. or how to make a song that leaves bare all things invisible. or why, when a new melody arrives, my human body feels almost too small to contain it. or why all my…
cookie nieves 