INSTRUCTIONS FOR WRITING SONGS THAT SAVE THE WORLD
FROM THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. TRYSTAN
Sit up from your bed each morning and press your left palm firmly to your ribcage. Count back from your lucky number and rise out from your spine as it grows into a fist. Take a walk around the same block twice and say "Good morning" to your neighbors. (Even if you send them turning on their sprinklers and sprinting back inside terrified.) Return to your kitchen table and replace yesterday’s carnations with souvenir straws from places you've never been. Take another bite from your apple as you recite the obituaries in the paper to your goldfish. Write down five things you did yesterday that you’ll never do again. Tap your foot against the floor as if it’s the world’s one and only rhythm. Send off your memory to somewhere tropical and dust off your 400 watt crystal ball. Read the opening to Mrs. Dalloway in your spinning chair till gravity breeds a giant in you. Stand at your window to imagine the sounds of trains and hunger and disappearing oceans. Whistle "Amazing Grace" in a paraplegic’s praise of undiscovered planets. Switch to the classical FM station and summon up landscapes from the dead. Dance improbably to Mahler’s 5th and stop to watch the ceiling swell. Say: "This life is just a replay of all the things you forgot the first time." Then make a song that defies continents; that drives dormant souls out of silence; that redeems love to the disappointed; that swings open every front door to a prehistoric chorus measured by panasonic waves of souls unanimous. And when you play it for your mother over the phone, don't poison it telling her it’s "all in progress." Color over the words that crave flesh and history--and never deem the lesson done.
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The ambiguous lovechild of Jean Cocteau & Dolly Parton. Former music composition student at Columbia with ambition up the muthaf**kin' ying-yang. I have a Long Island accent and have no clue of its origin. I'm fed up with self-congratulatory irony. I consider this profile far too long. Ultimately, I'll get everything I want out of life. Just give me another hundred years, baby...