songwriting
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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…
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as a writer of one- to two-minute songs, I’m not interested in holding on to something for very long, or walking back into the past too deep. I’m in it for the permission to be transient. it’s like this with singing, too. the whole idea of holding a note is strange to me. singing isn’t…
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my songs have a way of letting me know what’s going on. they accompany me through depression and dependency. they make me feel less alone. they help me feel some light, and even sometimes a little beautiful.
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leaving a lover, leaving a party, anything you leave, saying good-bye any time, has an ending. with a song, it’s hard to know when. because it’s a small invention. with no conclusions. when I write a song, I’m not theorizing anything. nothing comes together at the end, except the end and the beginning. a return to something as it…
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I was four when began to play music. suddenly, I understood silence. silence is the language of the beginning of a song, when I hold an intruding melody to my chest for the first time. it vanishes at the sound of my voice. it’s the language of the question when I search for a musical phrase and I ask…
cookie nieves 