The way the fireflies come out at dusk and pepper the valley with specks of radiance. My grandfather staring out the window at a tree in the distance, infinite and whole. The panic when that first snatched crawdad lands its pincher. The breathless cold when you leap into the only spot in the creek deep enough to swim. A buffet of greasy food and your father, sleeveless holding a loaded styrofoam plate. The smell of burnt oil and cut grass behind the wheel of a blue tractor, old and abiding. The heat from a bonfire. The cold beer in your hand.

No matter our faith, we all need to believe in transubstantiation. I’m not talking about bread and wine or some figure on a cross; I’m talking about that peculiar magic of turning the meaningless, routine tasks of your day-to-day life into something meaningful, into something holy. Turn everything you do into a sacred ritual: your morning routine, that cup of coffee, your drive to work, answering all those emails, vacuuming, cracking open a beer, ordering DoorDash, brushing your teeth, taking your pills.

Art is NOT content. And nobody started writing songs because they wanted to “please the algorithm.” We started playing music and writing songs to please ourselves, to connect with others, to express the often ineffable experience of being human. We want to make art, not generate content. 

One of the best parts of being a songwriter and musician is that you’re never on an island; you’re never a “solo artist.” You're always working in tandem with so many talented and interesting people all the time. What you create is never yours alone.

Whether awake or asleep, aware or unaware, your mind is always humming away, using innate methods older than you could imagine to help you process and thrive in a world that is likewise more complex than you could imagine. Dreams have evolved to become the main conduit between ourselves as conscious agents and the unconscious workings of our minds.

We remain pilgrims stumbling through the fretful void, and the only thing we have to guide us are stories. No other creature seeks (or needs) to fill the mechanistic universe with tales of being, narratives of origins and destiny. We are the lone myth-making creature.

To exist consciously is to become aware of one’s impermanence. For some, this truth is unthinkably depressing. After all, we matter. How can it all wither away into the annals of insignificance so quickly, our existence devoured by time’s implacable black hole?

When you’ve peered behind the curtain of musical craft long enough, when you’ve lived your life with full attention to how songs are made, you don’t frequently come across lyrics that seem otherworldly. Most songs don’t bear the markings of the mystery. The lyrics of most songs seem doable, and it’s comforting to think that I could probably write something similar. But “Canola Fields” gave me the fear immediately — that this kind of writing was something I couldn’t do.

But, what I tell myself I am really doing is trying to find my persona: some Grecian mask I can put on to liberate myself from myself. To become something wholly different and other on stage — a vessel of sorts where the latent desires of performer and audience dissolve together in some phantasmic wish fulfillment.

We know more and more about so much more, and yet we find the more we know the less we know about all there is to know. You see, art offers a complementary and contemplative narrative in juxtaposition to reason alone.

Principally, sound is the process of setting air to motion. The physics of sound is waves and pressure and velocity; it’s reflection and refraction and attenuation. But sound is also a sensation: a way of perceiving a motion we cannot see. Sound is an experience — a beautiful marriage of the physical and mental — that can be appreciated purely in only the space and at the time where and when it is being created.

I spent much of my artistic energy as a young songwriter trying desperately not to rhyme. I wasn’t trying to write “Love Me Do.” Most of the songs I write now, though, revel in rhyme. More and more I’ve grown to understand and appreciate the utility of rhyme in songwriting and the radically paradoxical freedom it endows in its constraint.

When Dylan’s at his best, every line could be a great opening line. And that’s because he writes down every line that comes into his head and weaves these lines together like some mythic spider into songs that force you to keep up, force you to decode, force you to make the thematic connections that are there and not there at the same time.

I feel the sickness set in. The fear and loathing rises from a sense that we are really just glutinous beasts, that civilization runs on a stupefying mix of greed and hedonism.

The very act of creation is liminal. We stand always, in every moment, at a threshold that combines past, present, and future. T.S. Eliot proves this in The Waste Land.

Do your favorite songs make you move? Do they make you feel? Do they make you dance? It ain’t the words making your hips move like that!

Waits accomplishes a visceral and authentic feeling; the instrumentation, playing, and singing match the setting and subject matter. Waits crafts seventies hyperrealism, the sound of rusting industry and the death rattle of the Age of Aquarius.  

My favorite songwriters have always been chameleons. The hue of their voices change from song to song. They cloak themselves boldly in the colors of any and all musical genres. Some songs glow in sepia tones of the past while others sound like some iridescent future. Their souls are bedazzled in prismatic camouflage. The person disappears, and only the artist remains.

I say this with a full understanding of how blasphemous this will be to every Dylanologist out there — “Too Late (Band Version)” may be one of Dylan’s greatest songs ever. Let me explain.

Turns out a lot of people want a lot of things and want them delivered fast.