The Chair

This morning my mind drifted to a Thanksgiving-type memory.  Hope you enjoy it.


The Chair

It was old and wooden - brown with a sort of amber highlight running through it.  I'd guess oak, but I was never good at identifying woods.  Its legs tapered down to roughly the size of a quarter at the bottom, where little plastic discs served as feet.  It had arms - that's what really set it apart from the other chairs around the table.  Our dinner table was big - big enough to serve even more than the six in our family.  My sisters would bring boys to dinner, and they'd sit with us...and pay good attention to the man in that chair.  Growing up, I wouldn't sit in it.  If I did, I would feel the breath of God on the back of my neck.  I would feel the weight of a world on my shoulders.  There was something about that chair that told me I wasn't ready.  That seat was taken.  If you saw it in a furniture store, you wouldn't me impressed - just another dining room chair like the rest.  But where it sat in our house, it was a throne - and then it was empty.  I still recall the trepidation with which I first sat in that chair after my father's death.  My heart was heavy.  My stomach sank.  But, as many a prince has followed in the path of his King, I sat there.  I held the hands of my family and I prayed to bless our meal.  Today, I'm unsure if anyone feels the effect of that chair as I once did, but at every holiday it sits there - its emptiness reminding me of the greatness once held within.


Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Yeahcomeon


- Dukes

Object Writing

For the past few weeks, I've been waking in the mornings and working on an exercise known as "object writing."  I start with an image in mind, and write whatever comes to mind for ten solid minutes.  When my alarm goes off, I stop writing. The point of this is to unlock sense-memories that I can use in my songwriting.  I've actually found some of these to be pretty entertaining, so I'm going to start posting them occasionally on this blog.  Hope you'll enjoy.

LEAF

Golden-yellow and extremely brittle.  That is my memory of the giant magnolia leaves in the fall of my youth. They lay strewn about our entire front yard on cool autumn days.  Dad and I would go out and rake them up - well, Dad would rake.  I would mostly wait until he'd built a huge pile of them and then ceremoniously dive in to the pile.  There it was - maybe two feet high...brown, orange, gold - all the colors of autumn's pallet, and in a grand multitude of shades.  It was perfect, round, undisturbed - an island of leaves in a sea of yellow-green grass.  The lawn was then pristine with the only blemish coming in the form of the few leaf piles.  That's when I entered, as a tornado, or a missile, or giant alien - whatever destructive force I picked that day.  I plunged myself in the center of a pile, and blew the leaves out in every direction.  I heard and felt them crackle and crunch beneath me - the ones that did not escape back into the yard.  Naturally, I would climb to my feet laughing with glee, and my Dad would shake his head, and return to the duty of tidying the pile.  As I stood amid the pile, I could feel the wetness of the lower layers settle into my shoes and even begin to creep up the legs of my jeans.  Bits and pieces of broken leaves slipped down into my shoes and poked at my feet through my socks.  Still, I was a boy and I couldn't be deterred by minor discomfort or inconvenience.  I would simply step out of the pile and take aim at the next one.

- Dukes

Writing, writing....and more writing...

Last night I started combing through a pile of papers long since touched by my hands.  I found them in an old song notebook, I found them in a binder of gig material, I found them in a box of stuff I meant to throw out long ago.  Every one of these pieces of paper had my thoughts on it.  Each one had the beginning of a song, or a hook, or line, or simply an idea that had been sparked by some life event - something that had made me think...I should sit down and write about that.   And every single one of these songs and ideas and concepts was naked and unfinished.

Seems to be I leave a lot of wood by the fire when it's down to its glowing embers.  I let "life" get in the way far too often.  Whether it be some distraction I willfully bring on myself, or one for which I'll let someone else take the blame, I allow myself to be swayed, to stray from doing what I should be doing.  That's a tough situation to be in - but one I imagine we all face.  Some of us deny our families the time we should give them so that we can do things that please us instead.  Some of us deny ourselves the things we want while we strive to please a boss.  Some of us allow the little distractions to creep in one on top of the other until all we ARE is distracted.  

That was me.  

But last night I wrote three songs.  And tonight, I'll probably get a few more on paper.  I've never been the most prolific writer.  Instead, I've held on to some idea that I should write purely by inspiration...in a flurry of penstrokes, when I could write a song in a single sitting and be done with it.  But that's not how it always is.  That's not the craft - and it certainly isn't how a good album is put together - especially not under any kind of deadline.  I mean, it could take years to come up with twelve songs if I'm simply going to "wait til I have time."  

Now is the time.

I'm excited to be writing again...excited to see what stories I'll find within the recesses of my mind.  And I'm excited at the prospect of sharing them with y'all when the time comes.

Yeahcomeon. 

- Dukes