Do you only make love on weekends?You may wonder who the hell this Brother Roger is. I sometimes wonder too, but hey, who doesn't anyway? All I know is that everybody would like to be some kind of Brother Roger. Oh, don't worry, nobody wants to be me, or in my stead, but everybody wants to let the other self which dwells in their minds pop out and live: thus I've become some kind of a hero to myself, expressing what my ordinary me cannot say without feeling uncomfortably awkward. Therefore I dare assert: everybody wants to be Brother Roger, in a way or another. Take Iggy Pop for instance, he is said to have once muttered "I would have liked to be Brother Roger"(Sic)! Well, it was long before he even got involved in rock history though. As to David Bowie, the rumour has it that he was once heard saying that "if Brother Roger wasn't already what he is now, he would have like to be [me]"(Sic)!
First, I was not born in a small hamlet in some secluded area such as South Dakota or even the north of Michigan, nor was I brought up by some carelessly ill-mannered redneck family from which I could have inherited enough despair and despondency to be able to write good songs. I didn't leave school as early as my 15th birthday and did not spend days on end working for an alcoholic mechanic who knew almost nothing about repairing cars but just enough to be able to recognize them from vans. Concerning my musical education, since it is what you most care about, I did not play blues or country music in smoky, riotous bars, nor did I venture myself to downtown, underground clubs in some East coast metropolis.
No, I just write songs, end of discussion. Are they any good? I don't know. Do I care about being listened to? Of course I do, but if you wonder what it's like to be in such a position when you have kept your work secret for quite a long time, I can tell you that it's not so secure a situation, because from now on I will have to stand on judgement in front of people. And what frightens me most are not the negative critics I will have to undergo, but the positive ones: what can you say to someone who tells you he really likes your music? "Well thank you!" If you think about it closely, we should both be thanking each other!!! I can be grateful to be truly appreciated, but I didn't do anything to achieve that on purpose but to please myself with recording the music I had in my head. Therefore it's kind of hard to accept congratulations from someone at whom your work was not aiming in the first place. Anyway, it will still be a pleasure to be hearing such stuff, and it will still hurt to take notice of bad things about Brother Roger.P.S. as far as the religious make-up of my name, I used to go to church...and now I hate Sundays!
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