Holding on. Letting go. The creative tension that describes life. Unlike other tensions, tug-of-war tensions, the creative kind is circular, a cycle as winter is to summer. It is a deep, slow moving river capable of carrying you away.
Give yourself a treat. Let go of the task at hand. Step into the river and let Kerri take you away.
HOLDING ON/LETTING GO on the album RIGHT NOW available in iTunes & CDBaby
If you’ve ever stretched out in a mountain meadow on a crystal clear night and watched the stars amble across the sky, you will recognize this piece. If you’ve ever, hand in hand, taken a midnight walk on a warm summer night, you will recognize this piece. If you’ve ever walked along the beach at night, the summer moon hanging lazy in the sky, you will recognize this piece.
Take a moment, today, and step into a memory, step in the night.
IN THE NIGHT on THIS PART OF THE JOURNEY available on iTunes & CDBaby
Sometimes I ask myself how many of my days in this very finite life have I lost just trying to get through. How many times have I looked forward to the end of the day, to the escape of sleep and the hope of a better day tomorrow. How many times have I reminded myself to BE IN my moments, to live them fully regardless of their pleasure or pain. What’s the rush?
Lately, after life handed me a second chance, rather than getting through or looking for an end, I am relearning. I ask myself, not to yearn for sleep, not to hold my days and moments so blithely but to live all of it so when I at last crawl into bed at night, I can honestly say, “I hate to say goodbye.”
HATE TO SAY GOODBYE on the album BLUEPRINT FOR MY SOUL is available on iTunes & CDBaby
I’m sure that accountants never sit at their desks and review their accounting of the past 30 years. Lawyers, I suspect, may review a case here and there but I doubt that they ever sit in a room, surrounded by all their cases, and consider them as a body of work. Artists necessarily review their work all the time.
Because of our melange both Kerri and I have been sitting in our studios surrounded by our life’s work, revisiting every era. She listens, pours through old notebooks, tinkers with pieces that never made it to the recording studio. I pull out canvases, flip through old sketchbooks, and portfolios. We compare notes. We share our favorites. We disavow our least favorites (“Someone else painted that and stuck into my stack. That piece is awful!”)
It is much more emotional than you might imagine. Each piece comes thanks to a potent life experience, a funny story, a period of loss, lostness, foundness, utter ful-fill-ment, the vast and empty void. We stare at what we achieved, we face what we aimed for and missed. We stand on the edge of what next calls to be explored.
It is not an intellectual review, a study. It is a feeling pathway, a conscious opening to experience in all its many colors. There is no rational sense to be made in what we do or have done. “Making art” is a dedication to feeling more. It is a love song.
BUT I FEEL MORE on AS SURE AS THE SUN is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Kerri composes on scraps of paper. Her notes are unintelligible to those of us outside of her mind. Lyrics peppered with mysterious hieroglyphic symbols and magical music notation that skips across multiple napkins and old homework assignments. What’s more amazing to me: she can play perfectly beautiful pieces of music as she deciphers her random-note-trail.I’ve accused her of being like John Nash, the character that Russell Crowe plays in A Beautiful Mind. “You’re not a paranoid schizophrenic are you?” I ask, scrutinizing her for clues.
“I don’t know, I’ll ask myself,” she replies. I am out-gunned at every turn.
Recently she pulled out a plastic sleeve stuffed with wrinkled paper, post-it notes, and random scraps of scribbles and jots. “This is the song They Way You Move Me,” she said.
Amazed. On this KS Friday, take a moment, put down your scraps of paper, and follow Kerri through hers. Give over and let her beautiful song, The Way You Move Me, move you.
THE WAY YOU MOVE ME on the album AS SURE AS THE SUN is available on iTunes & CDBaby
We just passed an anniversary of sorts. Five years ago, en route to a consulting job, I stopped for a few days to meet a woman. We’d never met, but for the previous five months had exchanged daily emails. It was a surprise correspondence, a deep diving conversation about art and love and divorce and aging and…life. We called our correspondence The Roadtrip. I thought it was about time to meet my Roadtrip partner. I stepped off the plane, met Kerri, we held hands and skipped out of the airport, drove to her place, sat on the roof and drank wine. And, my entire life changed. I felt as if I’d finally come home.
So, this past week, five years down the road, we’ve been taking stock of all that has happened, all that we’ve experienced together. We are telling each other the story of us. So much extraordinary life in all of its color, bumps, losses, discoveries, illnesses, good coffee, frustrations, delights and small moments of appreciation.
I sit next to H in the choir. He is 92 years young. He inspires me. I told him about the week of taking stock. He nodded. It’s good to look at where you’ve been. It’s the only way to know where you next want to go. I told him that it seems to me that life moves really fast and he laughed and said, “You got that right!”
On this KS Friday, take a moment. Take stock and tell yourself the story of you. Let this beautiful composition, Kerri’s Taking Stock from her album RIGHT NOW, inspire you to look back and, as H said, “Touch the riches.”
TAKING STOCK on the album RIGHT NOW is available on iTunes & CDBaby
Before Kerri and I were married, I asked her daughter, Kirsten, to tell me ‘the one thing’ I should know and understand about her mother. Kirsten’s answer was immediate. “Mom’s the most thready person you will ever meet,” she said.
It is true. Kerri is the most ‘thready’ person I have ever met. Thready means threaded to the past. We mark auspicious days. Each piece of furniture in our house carries a story. Every day she writes in her calendar what we did or what happened; at the end of the year it is our ritual to read the calendar and retell the stories of the days just lived. We light candles for lost loved ones.
She is rooted, deeply rooted, in family, in ancestry, and she actively and consciously tends the root through her thready-ness. And, what is most remarkable to me, is that her thready-ness is not weighty. It is in no way heavy. It is light-hearted and surprising and lively, just like her composition Let Me Take You Back. On this KS Friday, take a moment, and let Kerri give your spirit a lift. Let her take you back.
LET ME TAKE YOU BACK on the album AS IT IS available (track 12) on iTunes & CDBaby
This image took my breath away when Kerri showed me. And so, we decided to share it.
A brief explanation: many weeks ago, standing amidst the stacks of music, paintings, cartoons, and designs that we’d created, work that populated proposals & submission after submission after submission but had yet to find an audience, we decided to create our own channel to share it. We called the channel “the melange,” a medley, a daily offer of a design, cartoon, painting or piece of music and the thoughts they inspired in us. We launched it 14 weeks ago.
And, because we are artists trying to make a living, we established a product line through society6.com for each day of the melange [if a painting is out of reach perhaps a cool tote bag or fine art print is more accessible]. This morning, as we prepared the multiple sites and completed our writing for the upcoming week’s melange, Kerri showed me a compilation image of all the products she’d designed just THIS WEEK!
Look at this image and multiply what you see by 14 weeks. Breathless. And so much fun.
Some things need no interpretation and this song, going into Mother’s Day, is one of those. So, from studio melange, a gift-song from a mom, Kerri, to mothers everywhere.
FISTFUL OF DANDELIONS available on iTunes and CDBaby
Kerri and I share this in common: behind each composition there is a story. My favorite moment each week as we prepare our melange blog posts is to ask Kerri about the story behind her ks friday music pick. There is always a top-layer story and then a deeper-layer story. And then a deeper story-layer still.
The best art is like that. It opens stories. It reaches deep down to the roots of being and then, through story, propels the human spirit to soar. Art is communal connective tissue.
This week in her blog Kerri shares the story behind Give Me Roots, Give Them Wings. My story, as I listen and give over to the music is this: the first time I stepped into this house I was overwhelmed with the feeling of “home.” It was something I’d never in my life experienced. It was a warm rush of surprise and I laughed. Give Me Roots, Give Them Wings reminds me of that moment, of stepping through a door for the first time and knowing that I was finally home.
GIVE ME ROOTS, GIVE THEM WINGS on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART available on iTunes and CDBaby
The Direction of Intention 