songwriting
-
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…
-
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…
-
don’t tell me
-
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…
-
Nasser Candy is a bodega on Church Avenue in Brooklyn. everyone there speaks corner store English. it’s just a chill place. I have been there, like, a hundred times. one day it hit different. or maybe it was exactly the same, but I was different. I’m not sure what happened. but I was going to make…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
I never know exactly what poets and lyricists mean when they refer to an angel. often they’re writing about someone they’re just really into, and sometimes an angel in Heaven’s Holy Host. sometimes we call someone an angel to affirm the light in that person. I like this designation: that somebody not apart from life on this earth can bring you a light, sweep air…
cookie nieves 