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I’ve always allowed the musical instruments of my life to influence me more than I did actual people. Then at one point I thought to maybe somehow join the two, to adhere the human influence with the tone wood. When they are all put together like this I feel that they tell an extra-dimensional story to and beyond me, which affirms in it’s own biography, of what I have been pointing myself at, and into, as far back as I can even remember, that maybe, just maybe, all this is not a fluke.
When debating with long time friend John York about the subject of what we ourselves are actually doing in the arts, we kept coming back to the same conclusion, that what we do is plain and simple “beauty recognition”. There is no higher job, nor one more transparent to the ego. Just even the story of the history of the luthier’s craft here, and the voice given to a sawn tree, should be enough in itself. But I like layers and layers there are. For me, it’s not just the fact that they represent periods of American history, they are embedded with my own particular time phases, and then, not to mention the songs I’ve written on them, which there contain little head-of-a-pin portraits of threadbare family and foothill friendships, swaying naturally, because no one is watching. All this ending in, or bottoming out, in a sort of mythological lore.
Sometimes I was inspired by the shear humor of it, like getting author Joan Didion to sign my Dan Electro Longhorn bass. Still profound, perhaps diamond witted, but it was worth it just for the devilishly sweet cut-eye look in her eyes.
Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and The New York Times once heralded him as “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.”
