I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.
Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.
To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.
Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.
They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?
I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.
Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.
We know how rough the road will be, how heavy here the load will be, we know about the barricades that wait along the track, but we have set our soul ahead upon a certain goal ahead and nothing left from hell to sky shall ever turn us back.
A smile costs less than electricity, but gives much light.
As with other movements of the spirit, simplicity can be both a cause and an effect. As a spiritual path develops, so there is a yearning for a simpler life; as we simplify our life, so the inner voice becomes clearer.
Staring down hard truth takes guts.