Brandi and Twins,I Firstcame to Love Your Musiconly Last Spring with the Story on Youtube

Brandi and Twins,I firstcame to love your musiconly last spring with “The Story” on YouTube. But it really started long before that, when my aunt Rosa Lee came to visit from Oklahoma. I was6, and she started twistingin the living room to old Chubby Checker & Elvis45s. She seemed to be having a blast (ok, probably drunk) & then my dad joined in with thisderanged way of twisting really,really low to the ground, like he was a corkscrewor something trying to pop the champagne cork of the planet.

And maybe even the morning when I wasthe sole remaining 4th grade band member playing clarinet for my school’s outdoor assembly—partly cuz I was the only one who ever practiced, and partly cuz no one else’s horns worked in the cold. Every third note was an ear-piercing squeak but I made it through most ofBorn Free.

Our house was always filled with hymns & boogie woogie my dad knew as a kid, also Ray Charles’ Country Western album over & over & over blasting into our backyard through speakers my dad installed on the patio, plus Julie London, movie and TV themes like Exodus, Peter Gunn, and A Summer Place, then Johnny’s prison album, a best of country western, and of course Beatles Stones Dylan DylanDylan Joni Jimi Janis Cream Led Zepplin and everybody.

Actually, my love for you guysREALLY developedover a long periodas I watched my olderbrother grow into a professional drummer. He started witha 5th grade Beatles imitation band, pots & pan lids for drums, and later was always dragging me into his room to listen tohis newest vinyl, help me hear when a guitar solo was played drunk,how to listen to progressive rock andalsojazz, and to pay attention, really pay attention, to lyrics by this guy Bernie Taupin.

Even the smell of bay laurel, rosemary, and sage all over the mountains of my hometown, sound of Southern California summer sprinklers, later cormorants and reggae in northern Calif., then trains blasting the guts out of downtown Fargo, then the loons way way up in the Northwoods of Minnesota, where they actually still have wolves, did you know?You’ve probably heard them; they loud like someone being tickled underwater.

The loons, that is.

And my dad’s garden which taught me that tomatoes, eaten straight off the vine super ripe & a little dusty in hot August sun, are sweet as candy.

Nyro to Fleetwood to TalkingHeadsto X to Springsteen Emmylou MilesDavisSonsofPioneersHankPatsyStevieRaySoulCoughingLucindaWilliams…

And that’s how I came to love your music.

You guys help me to live my life, teach me daily how to love, and keep me dancing like a banshee even with screwed upknees.

Love to you forever.

Song to the Singer

I saw some photos of your wife; self-portraits, I think? They’re beautiful

and melancholy, and I love how her gaze is turned inward.

It means she’s a world. Not something solid and sealed, ok, more like a celestial

event—quasiconjunctions, lunar occultations!—

or maybe just something that wheels and repeats, reels

and revolves, the ever-

spinning universe itself,

all in herself.

And I thank her for teaching me that

with her eyes.

I wish I could make you both cookies

or lasagna

one of these days.

*

Because all of you Real Thing, heart-hacking, trulyluminous crooners

can’t not let us answer.

I’m sorry for that last sentence. What a clunker.

But I’m going to leave it be: You Can’t

Not Let Us Answer. I know; the more brilliant your light, the truer your song, the further

away you must go

to survive your own believers.

But at such ever increasing distances, believers are rendered baffoonish

as well as mute, our hearts won’t operate

quite right, we’re ready to positively bust

with stuff to tell you, we feel the import of all those subjects

the dingdong interviewers always overlook.

We can’t make you lasagna.

We can’t answer.

And we have songs to request, so many damned songs, songs we can’t live

without, songs we wrote for you.