Hey, friend. It’s been a couple of days since I sat down to write, thought of you a few times and figured maybe it was time I dropped you a note. After a bit of warmer weather the temperature’s dropped again, and now the wind’s picked up. It’s positively winter out there. A good night to celebrate the fact that I’m inside. I don’t say much to people but there’ve been times when I didn’t know where I was going to spend the night, and it was dropping colder than this. So I hoist a warm drink and say thanks. I’m sometimes considered a bit strange when I’m thankful for stuff like that, especially when I say it out loud. Surrounded as I have often been by part-time artists with good day jobs, I can be the odd man out. I’ve had a very different experience from some of my fellow artists. Certainly not better, that experience, or more noble. No way. But when I sing about someone on hard times I guess it comes out a little different.
You’ve taken me to task more than once for not telling people more about my own experience and how it informs what I do. I know you’re right. I suppose part of me wants the music to stand on its own merits. And I fancy that at its best it does. But in the end I think I have to agree with you, I can see times when where the music comes from can be just as important as what it’s trying to say. I don’t think it’s always like that, but it can be.
I do know that when I explain to people the circumstances that caused me to write “Poor Man’s Wine” the song is a stronger experience for people. Do you remember that song? I wrote it years ago, funny that it still stands up after all these years. Remind me to play it for you sometime. And I suppose if I’ve gone though an evening of music with people they’ve probably got enough of a sense of where I’ve been that something like “These Are the Times” lands just a little bit truer for them. So I suppose you’re right.
I remember you were quite surprised when I told you my folks came from a shipbuilding town in the north of England. You wondered why, when I’d just sung a whole bunch of sea songs for a Canadian audience, why I hadn’t told anyone that I was singing about my family history. I still don’t really know the answer to that. I guess partly because I came to the songs separate from my family experience, remember we didn’t make music in my family. But maybe also because I was still busy being the child of immigrants. Trying to blend in. (I know, it’s hard to imagine me blending in anywhere, fair enough, but I can try.) Things have different meanings to folks from here, I’m still tripping over them even after all these years. People around here think of fishing as something done with a rod in gentle pools and streams. To me it means what we did when we went out with grandad–lay out some lines when the tide’s out and come back once the tide’s come and gone again to see what you’ve caught. Long-lining. But they don’t write songs about that, least not that I’ve run across.
I figure it’s something like how I’ve done so many performances on the bass that now there are some people who know I’m a musician but who don’t know that I play guitar. In that same way apparently there are some people who don’t know that I sing. (I know, there are some people who’ve heard me sing that still aren’t sure, let’s leave that thought alone.) If I’m playing bass with someone I figure if people don’t know that I play guitar that’s okay, as long as they know that musician sounds really good tonight, at most maybe noticing that the bass player knows how to support someone. They don’t need to know that I can follow the singer’s phrasing because I sing too, or that I know how that guitar part will go because I know how a guitar player’s right hand works. At least I don’t think they need to know.
But you’re right, when I’m singing I don’t say much about my own experience. And maybe I should. I’ll take that thought into the next few performances and see what it makes. But for now I should go and deal with a few chores. Thanks for the excuse to sit for a while. Write when you get a chance. In the meantime I hope this finds you well.