Posted on September 20, 2019 by davidrobinsoncreative
Dense fog. After days of storms and turbulence, the lake was still, glassy. Quiet. DogDog and I stepped into the early morning. He pulled me toward the lake. A heron, startled by our arrival, took flight. We were startled by the heron – or I was. Time stopped. It circled and disappeared into the fog.
DogDog sat and I stood very still. Another heron lifted into flight. We listened to the morning sounds muted by the fog. There was no place else to be, nothing else to do.
The heron surprised us into presence. For a few glistening moments. Right now.
RIGHT NOW on the album RIGHT NOW is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Posted on September 13, 2019 by davidrobinsoncreative
I am marking the coming of fall. Each day on our walk I see a bit more red, yellow and burnt orange. A week ago I pulled on a sweatshirt. There was a chill in the air that penetrated the afternoon sun.
The fall brings a sweet melancholy, an inward look. We are moving slower on our walks. We can see deeper into the woods. The deer are everywhere. The apples are down. Last night at dinner, Steve had a fire in the stove. I sat beside it and let the warmth find my bones.
It is my favorite time of year. We make soup with friends. The air sharpens. I yearn for my studio. I write really bad poetry. I remember vivid yellow quaking aspen leaves. I secretly look forward to raking the front yard.
Tradition awakens with the harvest. The fruit and leaves have had their time, now the root gets its nourishment. Reaching down. Letting go. The wind encourages the resistant to release. It’s this deep ritual of return that beckons in Kerri’s Millneck Fall.
MILLNECK FALL on the album BLUEPRINT FOR MY SOUL is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Posted on September 6, 2019 by davidrobinsoncreative
Very early in my career I drove from Kentucky to California, an epic drive that the current version of me is utterly incapable of considering. The younger version of me reveled in the drive. Windows down, music roaring, sunrise to sunset, I passed through thunderous storms, coasted down the western slope, the temperature rising as I descended. Snow, salt flats and canyon lands. I’ve rarely felt more alive and carefree.
I’m certain Kerri wrote All You Can as the soundtrack of my drive. The miles of adventure, the wildly varied landscapes rich with color and transcendent. Plains to mountain to high desert. Farm land, ranch land, no-man’s land. And the epic and endless sky! Mostly, the joy of the drive. All you can feel. All you can experience. All you can see. All you can live. It’s all there in her joyous composition. Listen. Discover the magic place, memory or not, where All You Can transports you.
ALL YOU CAN on the album AS IT IS available on iTunes & CDBaby
Posted on August 30, 2019 by davidrobinsoncreative
To me, the album cover is like a time capsule. The woman who would become my wife looking through a camera lens into a future unimaginable. Over twenty years later, I look back, peeking through that triangular keyhole, the impish woman, the near smirk. Does she know the path she will walk, the mountains she will climb? The falls she will take? The sturdy resilient woman she will become?
The impishness remains intact. The brat with the wicked laugh I adore even when – especially when – I am the object of her rascal-nature. The kind of perseverance developed over a lifetime. Clinging to the cliff, against all odds, holding steadfast through the storm. This mettle must have already existed in her blueprint! And, look what life built from that blueprint! A ferocious and very kind soul. An artist.
HOLDING STEADFAST from the album BLUEPRINT FOR MY SOUL is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Posted on August 23, 2019 by davidrobinsoncreative
In mythic journeys, coming home, arriving back at the place where the adventure began, is sweet and sour. There is nothing better than returning home to comforts, patterns, and relationships that previously provided solid identity and definition. However, no one goes on an adventure without being changed by it. In other words, you arrive home but you are not the same person who left. Home didn’t change. You did.
Today, so far from home, navigating the dark woods and dark forces that come with every adventure, I especially appreciate Kerri’s gorgeous composition THE WAY HOME. It reminds me that the gift of the adventure is to open my eyes, to feel and revel in the ocean’s spray as we sail toward the edges of the earth. The dark woods, the unknowns, the trials and tribulations, are, after all, the transformers. They are the agents of change. To step beyond a comfort zone, to seek adventure, is to invite…discomfort (I know, a no-duh).
In our uncharted waters I am, on this day, most grateful for my wife’s captivating and inspiring reminder that, even this shaky-ground-discomfort, is a solid step on THE WAY HOME.
THE WAY HOME on the album THIS PART OF THE JOURNEY is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Posted on August 16, 2019 by davidrobinsoncreative
I just finished reading The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai. There is an image in the book that I adore. A fish dreaming of a root beer float. In fact, the root beer float is the fish’s greatest dream, a seemingly impossible one to achieve. A little girl offers a solution. The fish should be in the root beer float, eating the dream from the inside.
Living inside the dream rather than chasing it. Language matters. Dreams are notoriously ethereal, very difficult to grasp. Impossible to chase. Wrap your fingers around a dream and it changes shape.
But, to stand within the dream, to live inside it, savoring each moment lived as a bite from life. A taste of the dream. No chase necessary. A fish in a root beer float. Each new day a bite to be relished. Each new day a taste of the dream.
EACH NEW DAY on the album RIGHT NOW is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Lately, in my new role as co-managing director of a performing arts space, I find myself repeating the same simile/metaphor over and over and over and over… (insert Kerri’s eye roll). This week, my favorite-simile-repetition goes something like this: communication is like a river, it needs proper banks if it is going to flow. Without banks, it spills out all over the place flooding basements and creating havoc.
Needless to say, our job thus far is largely about placing proper banks on this flood plain of communication. Placing proper banks, at first, creates consternation and resistance. No one likes a limit until the limit works in their favor, until the constraint makes life easier.
Boundaries. Limits. Constraints. It is what I adore about the arts: freedom of artistic expression is the result of discipline, technique, and practice. And, the heart-desire of discipline, technique and practice is unfettered play. It is a paradox. It is boundaries placed on a rushing torrent so it can flow. The harnessing of creative energy. Communication is an intentional art and art is communication with an intention.
Kerri’s BOUNDARIES is a bubbling brook, bright with the morning sun, tumbling and playful within its banks. It seems so easy, her flow. But I know the truth. This ease and flow, this call to put your feet in the brook and rest for awhile with the sun on your face, comes from the years and years of hours and hours and hours of practice. Boundaries. A riverbank, a limit that will work in your favor. It is the creative flow through a heart that desires to play and play and play.
BOUNDARIES on the album RIGHT NOW is available on iTunes & CDBaby
I just broke the first rule of the melange. I peeked over Kerri’s shoulder to see what she was writing. It’s true, she misses her piano. It’s true, last night, as we were closing the theatre, after a day of high anxiety, she walked onto the dark stage, opened the 9 foot grand piano delivered for the chamber music festival currently performing from our TPAC, and began to play. I sat in the dark and listened. Her anxiety and frustration transformed. She nurtured herself into artistry. And, once again, as I always do in these moments, I thought what a pity it is that I am the only person on this planet privy to the full breadth and depth of her artistry.
Streaming services, although great and free for listeners worldwide, have filled artists like my wife with a gigantic Why Bother. The streaming services are making a great living off of her music. More than a million people each year listen to Kerri’s compositions. She profits not at all. The streaming services stand between her and the money her music produces. They toss her less than a bone.
She just wrote that she misses her piano but I think it is more than that. I think she misses the vitality, the good heart that grows inside an artist when they produce, when they challenge themselves, when they explore new territory and bring what they find back for the rest of us to hear. It nurtures the artist. It nurtures the audience. Left unexplored, an artist’s heart fills with anxiety and depression, it closes against the pain.
Last night, after the chamber music had died, in a dark theatre, I listened to a second concert. It was more powerful than the first because it was pure. It was an artist talking to herself, reaching through the Why Bother door and touching, even for a moment, the answer: because it nurtures you to play. It nurtures you to create. I know it nurtures me to listen.
NURTURE ME on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Standing on the deck, looking out over the water at the setting sun, he said, “Why is it that you have to grow old before you realize that life passes too quickly? You’d think that would be important to know when you were young.”
These days we’re hanging out with lots of parents whose children have grown up and flown the coop. Kerri is one of those parents. The conversation always includes a variation of this phrase: it went by so fast.
A little girl in a ballet class. Not just any little girl. Yours. Learning how to lean into her dream and bumping into a funny adult words: practice. Repetition.
This ballet is indeed sweet. And, as I’m learning, the dance is over in the blink of an eye.
SWEET BALLET on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Stepping off the plane, walking down the concourse, filled with curiosity and a bit of trepidation. I was about to meet someone for the first time, someone I’d been writing to everyday for 6 months. We had two phone calls. I knew her voice but had never before seen her.
We didn’t intend for our email conversation to be ongoing. It began as business. A response warranted a reply. And another. And a week of exchanges somehow became a month of deep-diving, heart-opening communication and then many months. A business trip across the country afforded us the opportunity to meet.
I stepped out of the concourse. Standing in front of me was a woman dressed exactly like me. Black sweater. Blue jeans. Boots. We laughed in recognition. We said hello. We held hands and skipped out of the airport. Kindred spirits…away.
KINDRED SPIRITS…AWAY on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART is available on iTunes & CDBaby
The Direction of Intention 