Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996
Eleven years since you left us, your poems are still here, old friends that show up like Facebook memories to catch the heart off-guard and blow it open. I never had the chance to thank you in person for the words that scored so many episodes of my life, but in a recurring daydream, the two of us are standing at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge. It’s started to rain, and the 110 bus is late. I’m glad. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our Laureate – remark on the drizzle. Colloquial, your voice reminds me of my father’s. I say something about the rain too and, before the bus comes, I find inadequate words to thank you . . .
. . . for all the times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written; for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy, the bluebells and blueberries in the heart of the forest, the sound of the Moyola rushing under the bridge; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of things; and, for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.“
Ma’s Bookshelf – By Sophie
In the very worst of times, wrecked by grief, only your words worked – certain and sure.
But when you died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only you would have been capable of producing the words that might assuage the country’s sorrow over your passing. I remember somebody saying that your death left a breach in the language itself.
Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – like Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold.
If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.
Today, I am pulled back again to “The Underground.” It’s one of my favorites, even more so since finding out it was a favorite of yours too and that once —when you were asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry—,The Underground” was one of them.
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson As the coat flapped wild and button after button Sprang off and fell in a trail Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms, Our echoes die in that corridor and now I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back.
You never looked back.
When I heard that your final words were in Latin, in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I thought of your Orpheus in the Underworld:
Noli Timere.
Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”
No longer the shy and fretting young poet who signed his first poems Incertus, you left what was needed – simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance. As you told us once before, “it is important to be reassured.”
Thanks, Seamus. I am reassured and looking forward. I am walking on air.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.
~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996
Eleven years since you left us, your poems are still here, old friends that show up like Facebook memories to catch the heart off-guard and blow it open. I never had the chance to thank you in person for the words that scored so many episodes of my life, but in a recurring daydream, the two of us are standing at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge. It’s started to rain, and the 110 bus is late. I’m glad. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our Laureate – remark on the drizzle. Colloquial, your voice reminds me of my father’s. I say something about the rain too and, before the bus comes, I find inadequate words to thank you . . .
. . . for all the times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written; for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy, the bluebells and blueberries in the heart of the forest, the sound of the Moyola rushing under the bridge; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of things; and, for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.“
Ma’s Bookshelf – By Sophie
In the very worst of times, wrecked by grief, only your words worked – certain and sure.
But when you died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only you would have been capable of producing the words that might assuage the country’s sorrow over your passing. I remember somebody saying that your death left a breach in the language itself.
Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – like Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold.
If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.
Today, I am pulled back again to “The Underground.” It’s one of my favorites, even more so since finding out it was a favorite of yours too and that once —when you were asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry—,The Underground” was one of them.
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running, You in your going-away coat speeding ahead And me, me then like a fleet god gaining Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson As the coat flapped wild and button after button Sprang off and fell in a trail Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms, Our echoes die in that corridor and now I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station After the trains have gone, the wet track Bared and tensed as I am, all attention For your step following and damned if I look back.
You never looked back.
When I heard that your final words were in Latin, in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I thought of your Orpheus in the Underworld:
Noli Timere.
Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”
No longer the shy and fretting young poet who signed his first poems Incertus, you left what was needed – simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance. As you told us once before, “it is important to be reassured.”
Thanks, Seamus. I am reassured and looking forward. I am walking on air.
Part of the magic of art is that we stitch meaning into everything we see and hear, whether artists leave us a needle and thread or not.
Robin Hilton NPR All Songs Considered
I know there’s some science involved, that a song can make us cry because of the way it was composed. In an interview with NPR, John Sloboda, professor of music psychology at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, said hat the very notes within songs can make us weep. He attributes our tears to a kind of grace note, a musical ornament – the “appoggiatura,” from the Italian word “to lean.” As an example, Adele’s ‘Someone Like You” is full of them. Sloboda explains “Generally music is consonant rather than dissonant, so we expect a nice chord. So when that chord is not quite what we expect, it gives you a little bit of an emotional frisson, because it’s strange and unexpected. The music taps into this very primitive system that we have which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy. It’s like a little upset which then gets resolved or made better in the chord that follows.” A more famous version is the opening word of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” an appoggiatura of G3 to F3 over the chord of F major.
Musical theory aside, when I started singing with my partner here in Mexico, it was as a duo. This was a convenient arrangement during that time when COVID social distancing measures were in place—no dancing, couples sitting with a chair between them at tables 6ft apart, waiters in face masks offering a bottle of hand sanitizer. Remember that time? We were different, weren’t we? Introspective. Quiet. Uncertain.
Because we were unable to make the music we used to make with a full band behind us – and also because we were cloistered at home for months, we sang together. Unplugged. No backing tracks. Just the two of us, we carefully selected songs that told stories and touched our hearts and, as it turned out, included those appoggiaturas, those little upsets that might make us cry . We made each song ours, finding our blend of harmonies on deep cuts from the likes of Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Guy Clarke, Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, and Townes van Zandt.
Lyrics first. For us, it’s about the lyrics. Always.
As restaurants and venues slowly reopened, we ventured out— just the two of us—with our voices and an acoustic guitar, sometimes providing little more than musical wallpaper in restaurants trying their best to stay solvent, but sometimes connecting with people through lyrics crafted by master story-tellers. Every once in a while during a set—and this is still true— I’d spot a stranger singing along with their eyes closed, the lyrics transporting them to a place only they know. I’d realize we were singing ‘their’ song. This requires a reverence.
In those duo days, we always ended our set with my song. I didn’t write it, but it is mine. I remember one night a bartender asked me why we perform it, Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” the sad song that more than once made her cry. There’s a deeply personal reason that I kept to myself at that moment, because I didn’t want to break open my own heart. And, there’s also what Emmylou Harris said in an interview she gave about her love for Gram Parsons, her partner in song, and with whom she recorded “Love Hurts,” a pivotal song for her:
There is something about the uniqueness of two voices creating a sound that does not come when they are singing solo. That song, and our harmony, is a kind of a pinnacle of our duet-singing together.
Emmylou Harris
Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” is the song that has been pivotal for me. Appropriately enough, it was Steve Earl on acoustic guitar when Emmylou covered it on her “Wrecking Ball” record. It was ‘my song,’ before I met my partner in song and in life.
I’d been a Steve Earle fan since the 1980s when I had a vinyl record collection that I miss today. The last album I bought before leaving Northern Ireland in 1987 was “Guitar Town.” Until then, I had lied to myself that I didn’t like country music, dismissing it as the music of my parent’s generation, but when somebody in Rolling Stone or Q magazine said Steve Earle was somebody to pay attention to – along with Dwight Yoakam – I did. For a while, his “Fearless Heart” was my touchstone, Steve Earle introducing it at performances with his characteristic take-no-prisoners wisdom:
You can either get through life or you can live it. If you’re gonna live it, there’s only two things you need … an inquisitive mind and a fearless heart.
Steve Earle
But this is not just about my fearless heart. It’s about a “Goodbye” that I never got to say. One day I’ll tell that story too.
Over our first few years of singing together in Arizona, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
On night, shortly after we met Scott finally picked up a harmonica and began to lay. It was on this song, the first song we sang together, finding harmonies as if we had never not sang together. It’s in the key of C. Naturally. If you were to ask anyone who’s ever played with us, they will tell you that C is my key. Scott knows that’s not really true, but to see me panic for just a second before he begins his signature picking, he’ll call it up in A minor.
I don’t have to remind him anymore not to sing—not even harmonies— on my verse, the quiet one about Novembers and why they always make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C.”
I wrote it when I was still in treatment, before I even got to that step, the first time I got my hands on a guitar. It wasn’t a very good guitar, but I hadn’t written anything in a very long time, so it was kind of reassuring to write something and to write something that good.
Steve Earle
He also said Emmy Lou is possessive about it too, telling a Scottsdale audience before performing it with Shawn Colvin at the MIM a few years ago, that Emmylou gets mad when he performs it with someone else. He might have been joking … but I know I wished it had been Emmylou on stage with him that night.
There was a ‘meet and greet’ after the show, and I made my way towards a very warm and approachable Steve Earle. I told him that there were days when “Fearless Heart” had helped me put one foot in front of the other, that it had become a kind of mantra that I whispered before jumping into the deep end, which I realize might actually be where I belong.
I know I’m not the first fangirl he’s encountered, so he indulged me and didn’t seem to mind that I was holding up the line of people waiting for him to sign their posters and ticket stubs and album covers. I also wanted to talk to him about the lovely Belfast singer, Bap Kennedy, whose record he had produced and about Belfast and about the late Seamus Heaney. Thus one of my favorite moments with a famous person: “Did you study at Queens?” he asked me. “Were you a literature major?” Yes. Yes. I was. A Music major too. “Damn! Was Seamus Heaney there when you were there? I fucking love Seamus Heaney. I’ve read everything he ever wrote. And Michael Longley. I fucking love him too. Do you know him? Damn. Goddamn.”
In the way things go around and come around, years later, when I had an essay published in a literary magazine with none other than Michael Longley, my first thought was that there was the teeniest possibility that Steve Earle might read it.
I wanted to ask him more about Emmylou and “Goodbye,” but Shawn Colvin was clearly weary of me. To be fair, there were people waiting. So off I went without telling him how grateful I am for “Goodbye,” the sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – and for everyone who’s sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it.
It’s a song for the work of a November in my life.
I’m grateful for the sound and the harmonies it pulls so naturally from Scott and me, even when we haven’t sung it for months, even when we’re not talking to each other over a mountain we’ve made out of a molehill, a storm in a teacup.
I can hear it in my head right now. Quiet, steady, and familiar—it lives in that realm reserved for country songs and Psalms from the hymnal I recall from the church of my childhood. I can hear that sound that only comes when I’m singing with my partner.
Part of the magic of art is that we stitch meaning into everything we see and hear, whether artists leave us a needle and thread or not.
Robin Hilton NPR All Songs Considered
I know there’s some science involved, that a song can make us cry because of the way it was composed. John Sloboda, professor of music psychology at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, once told NPR that the very notes within songs can make us weep. He attributes our tears to a kind of grace note, a musical ornament – the “appoggiatura,” from the Italian word “to lean.” As an example, Adele’s ‘Someone Like You” is full of them. Sloboda explains “Generally music is consonant rather than dissonant, so we expect a nice chord. So when that chord is not quite what we expect, it gives you a little bit of an emotional frisson, because it’s strange and unexpected. The music taps into this very primitive system that we have which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy. It’s like a little upset which then gets resolved or made better in the chord that follows.” A more famous version is the opening word of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” an appoggiatura of G3 to F3 over the chord of F major.
Musical theory aside, when I first started singing with my partner here in Mexico, it was as a duo. This was a convenient arrangement during that time when COVID social distancing measures were in place -no dancing, couples sitting with a chair between them at tables 6ft apart, in face masks with a bottle of hand sanitizer at the ready. You remember that time. Introspective. Quiet. Uncertain.
Because we were unable to make the music we would have made with a full band behind us – and also because we were cloistered at home for months, we sang together. Unplugged. No band. No backing tracks. Just the two of us, carefully selecting songs that told stories and touched our hearts and included those appoggiaturas, those little upsets that might make us cry . We’d make each song our own, finding our own harmonies on deep cuts from the likes of Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Guy Clarke, Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch, and Townes van Zandt. Lyrics first. For us, it’s about the lyrics. Always.
As restaurants and venues slowly reopened, we ventured out – just the two of us – with our voices and an acoustic guitar, sometimes providing little more than musical wallpaper in restaurants trying their best to stay solvent, but sometimes connecting with people through lyrics crafted by master story-tellers. Every once in a while during a set – and this is still true – I’d notice someone singing along with their eyes closed, the lyrics transporting them to a place only they know. And, I’d realize we were singing ‘their’ song. That requires a reverence.
In those duo days, we always ended our set with my song. No, I didn’t write it, but it is mine. I remember one night someone asked me why we perform it, Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” the sad song that more than once made the bartender cry. There’s a deeply personal reason that I kept to myself at that moment, because I didn’t want to break open my own heart. There’s also what Emmylou Harris said in an interview she gave about her love for Gram Parsons, her partner in song, and with whom she recorded “Love Hurts,” a pivotal song for her:
There is something about the uniqueness of two voices creating a sound that does not come when they are singing solo. That song, and our harmony, is a kind of a pinnacle of our duet-singing together.
Emmylou Harris
Steve Earle’s “Goodbye,” is the song that has been pivotal for me – and, appropriately enough, he played acoustic guitar when Emmylou covered it on her “Wrecking Ball” record. It was ‘my song,’ before I met my own partner in song and in life.
I’d been a Steve Earle fan since the 1980s when I had a vinyl record collection that I miss today. The last vinyl record I bought before coming to to American in 1987 was “Guitar Town.” I had lied to myself that I didn’t like country music, dismissing it as the music of my parent’s generation, but when somebody in Rolling Stone or Q magazine said Steve Earle was somebody to pay attention to – along with Dwight Yoakam – I did. For a while, his “Fearless Heart” was my touchstone, Steve Earle introducing it at performances with his characteristic take-no-prisoners wisdom:
You can either get through life or you can live it. If you’re gonna live it, there’s only two things you need … an inquisitive mind and a fearless heart.
Steve Earle
But this isn’t just about my fearless heart. It’s about a “Goodbye” that I never got to say, and one day I’ll tell that story too.
Over our first few years of singing together, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which our listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
The first time Scott ever picked up a harmonica to play it, was shortly after we met – and it was on this song, the first song we sang together, finding harmonies as if we had never not sang together. It’s in the key of C. Naturally. If you were to ask anyone who’s ever played with us, they will tell you that C is my key. Scott knows that’s not really true, but to see me panic for just a second before he begins the signature picking, he’ll call it up in A minor.
I don’t have to remind him anymore not to sing – not even harmonies – on my verse – the quiet one about Novembers and why they always make me cry. I’m possessive about “Goodbye,” Steve Earle’s “ninth step in the key of C.”
I wrote it when I was still in treatment, before I even got to that step, the first time I got my hands on a guitar. It wasn’t a very good guitar, but I hadn’t written anything in a very long time, so it was kind of reassuring to write something and to write something that good.
Steve Earle
He also said Emmy Lou is possessive about it too, telling a Scottsdale audience before performing it with Shawn Colvin at the MIM a few years ago, that Emmylou gets mad when he performs it with someone else. He might have been joking … but I know I wished it had been Emmylou on stage with him that night.
There was a ‘meet and greet’ after the show, and I made my way towards a very warm and approachable Steve Earle. I told him that there were days when “Fearless Heart” had helped me put one foot in front of the other, that it had become a kind of mantra that I whispered before jumping into the deep end, which I realize might actually be where I belong. I know I’m not the first fangirl he’s encountered, so he indulged me and didn’t seem to mind that I was holding up the line of people waiting for him to sign their posters and ticket stubs and album covers. I also wanted to talk to him about the lovely Belfast singer, Bap Kennedy, whose record he had produced and about Belfast and about the late Seamus Heaney. Thus one of my favorite moments with a famous person: “Did you study at Queens?” he asked me. “Were you a literature major?” Yes. Yes. I was. A Music major too. “Damn! Was Seamus Heaney there when you were there? I fucking love Seamus Heaney. I’ve read everything he ever wrote. And Michael Longley. I fucking love him too. Do you know him? Damn. Goddamn.”
Years later, I must tell you that when I had an essay published in a literary magazine with none other than Michael Longley, my first thought was that there was the teeniest possibility that Steve Earle might read it.
I wanted to ask him more about Emmylou and “Goodbye,” but Shawn Colvin was clearly weary of me. To be fair, there were people waiting. So off I went without telling him how grateful I am for “Goodbye,” the sober song for anyone who has ever been to hell – and back – and for everyone who’s sorry for the harm they caused even when they don’t remember causing it. It’s a song for the work of a November in my life.
I’m grateful for the sound and the harmonies it pulls so naturally from Scott and me, even when we haven’t sung it for months, even when we’re not talking to each other over a mountain we’ve made out of a molehill, a storm in a teacup.
I can hear it in my head right now – quiet, steady, familiar – in that realm reserved for country songs and Psalms from the hymnal I recall from the church pf my childhood. I can hear that sound that only comes when I’m singing with my partner. Breath by breath … finding home in a song.
