I'm scaling back again this week to an acoustic song befitting of the New England forest from which I just returned. At a time like this when the contrast is fresh in my memory, New York seems so incredibly pointless. Absolutely nothing here is justified when there might just as well be fields and woods and streams. The only lake I can find here is fake. Really dumb. Yes, coming here changed my whole life in positive and self-affirming ways that I haven't yet really begun to unpack, but the trees are stunted from exhaust fumes, and my cat has never seen a pinecone. The old part of me lives someplace up there, and some new part of me is a creature of concrete. There is a tension between those two men. Even as I marvel at this man made wilderness, I have taken to wearing a belt buckle with a picture of canoes on it. I look at it and long for something. I revel in how uncool it is, and I think about going back there. These and other things are in the song I wrote this week. And something about a radio.
lyrics
I ain't hip to all the latest shit
They're playing on the radio
I ain't counting on the relevance
Of anything at all
It's against the rules
For me to act too cool
At this point
I smell the rain and I imagine
I'm the man I was an age ago
I count my blessings it's a game
And that ain't who I am at all
When I set a fire
I know I'll put it out
At some point
And praying to the radio
And it's the voice of god that's singing low
And the frequency rolls over ground
And I'm reaching up to steal the sound
Like this
If I'm being real
You keep what you can steal
You're in America
And guys like me
Have never stolen much of anything at all
It's only petty crime
I think I can commit
This time
I'm in the forest
And I listen to it creaking like a radio
I'm in the city and for once
I don't hear anything at all
It's against the law
To say something bad
About New York
And praying to the radio
And it's the voice of god that's singing low
And the frequency rolls over ground
And I'm reaching up to steal the sound
Like this