Let the Music do the Talking

[David Cotrone]

It's easy to say that songs are like poetry, but I don't think that's always true. I think songs are like stories, and that poems are too. There's a point where genre is irrelevant. It's all a way for people to talk to you about what they've lived, or at least about what's on their minds. I was watching a documentary about U2 and their music and Bono was on, talking about the band's early songs. He was talking about how how no one really knew how to define them, how to classify what they were making. He said he didn't know what they were either, that they were tapping into part of their Irish heritage, that they were angry. And sad. 

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Monsters by Tessa Fontaine

Three poems by Sierra DeMulder

Ben Marcus, author of the forthcoming The Flame Alphabet, talks with furniture, saying, "I write to an audience I have internalized. It both hates and loves me, but mostly is suspicious in the extreme of everything I do. It's an invented audience, but it is made up of parts of me, the soft, wet, dark pieces." 

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Later, in the same documentary, he said their producer got that they wanted to kill themselves, but couldn't understand why. The reason wasn't explicit. That's when it clicked. That's when the band started writing better songs. Elsewhere, Antony Hegarty kind of gets it right. "Oh I'm scared of the middle place between light and nowhere," he sings. "I don't want to be the one left in there, left in there." 

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We've started a music section, and we're open to essays about music, and also reviews and interviews. We already had a lot of music content, so now we've made it official. There's an interview with one of my favorite bands out there right now, for example. We have another interview going up early next week, with one of the best storytellers around. 

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Sorry this one had a lot of links. But maybe you could call it a lot of love. By the way, when someone says You have a place in my heart what do you think that place looks like?

Always,

David