Meanwhile, elsewhere on the web . . .

Hello reader, how's it going?

Thanks for stopping by! If you're enjoying what you read here, you might also like some of my writing elsewhere around the web:

Fiction (Short Story):
https://sunlitstorytime.com/lateststory/noshovelnobacon-jeffknight

Essay (about a favorite Grateful Dead song):

http://www.radiuslit.org/2018/05/05/set-out-running-friend-of-the-devil-has-become-a-friend-of-mine/

Fiction (Romantic Comedy novella):

https://www.amazon.com/Lunchbox-Love-Letters-Smartass-Romance-ebook/dp/B01IZ1L040/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1541854111&sr=8-2&keywords=Lunchbox+love+letters

Song (the most recent addition to my youtube channel):

https://youtu.be/C5byGod0E4E

One Step Ahead of the Storm

New song on my YouTube channel, click the link!

I remember a friend of mine, years ago, saying that it’s a miracle anybody lives to be five. We were talking about all the crazy risks that little kids take on account of fearless ignorance, stuff like being drawn to high and treacherous places, or how toddlers will automatically reach for shiny bright blades, and all the other things like that. 

And it continues! As a species, we drive too fast, don’t always wear seatbelts, play dangerous games with fire, and who knows what all else. We take chances. This is one of the deep truths about being human. I bet there are people who still smoke in bed. What the hell, man? We are slow to learn our lessons. Mostly we get lucky, till we don’t. 

This past summer, my youngest son Harrison and I went on a beach trip with my cousin Lynn and her family, and while we were at the beach, we went out on boats a couple of times, to go fishing. On one of these trips, we were on Topsail Sound, on this relatively small boat. We were near the south end of the island, getting ready to head through the inlet and out to the ocean, when the boat’s captain said, hey y’all, my radar shows a ton of weather coming right at us, like right now. So we hustled back, made it to the dock just in time, with dark clouds right on top of us, and I mean two minutes after we were off the water, the sky burst open and the rain hit as hard as you can imagine, so much force! The title line for this song just jumped out at me . . . Wow, we were just one step ahead of the storm! That afternoon I started noodling with the guitar, and had a lot of the chorus done right away. 

My cousin’s husband, Tyler, is a really good musician, and also a good friend of mine,  and he chimed in with a few ideas. The conversation turned to all the close calls we’ve all had. He was remembering going out with friends in high school, walking across these slippery rocks at the top of a steep waterfall, how easy it would have been for anybody to make one wrong step and plummet to their death. Or maybe someone eventually DID make a misstep on those kinds of risky misadventures, but they were miraculously okay, just broke an arm or whatever, and had to wear a cast for six weeks. I can think of many times my brother drove his Buick at insane speeds on dangerous roads, with me and my friends in the car. And you, reading this, I bet your mind is bringing up example after example of times you had close calls. So our conversation, and Tyler’s suggestions on some of the lines, as well as a couple of musical ideas, very much informed the song. 

The whole trip was largely launched from the fact that my cousin and I used to spend a lot of time every summer at Topsail Beach at our grandparents’ cottage. Our moms were sisters, and we’d all vacation together a lot. We'd be there with all our siblings -- my older brother (who passed away in 2003; proof positive that some storms do in fact catch up to us) and Lynn’s two younger sisters. Then, you know, time passed, and all of our adult lives got going, and we scattered, and our grandparents sold their beach place, and life kept moving forward. Of the people that used to be on those family trips, we kids are now middle-aged, and most of the adults have passed on to whatever comes next. 

Anyway, there we were, working on this song, when Lynn remembered something the captain had said about Topsail Sound, that while the water seems pretty placid, this current runs through it, just like a river. And Lynn suggested that line for the end of the third verse, and it’s my favorite line in the song. 

I like the way “current” means more than one thing, you know? And this idea that in the midst of all these other lines about close calls and change and risk, danger bearing down on us all the time, the way all of us are lucky to even still be here, that there are also these steady forces moving everything forward, even when they’re hard to observe. What we see and notice are the big storms that blow in. But this other, subtler, steadier stuff is always happening too.

On our way back to Texas, Harrison and I stopped for a night at their place in Atlanta. Harrison is pretty tight with their kid, Ty, which makes me happy. I had finished the song by then, and Tyler and I recorded it in his home studio (Tyler is SUCH a good player, singer, and recording engineer). This song is very much a family effort, and my daughter Cassidy, who is a filmmaker and makes the videos on my channel, put the visuals together on this. Thanks, Cassidy!

And so here it is, a new song that comes out of an old truth about danger. Sometimes we court it, sometimes we find it, and sometimes it finds us. This literal storm happened, but of course I also mean it as a metaphor for all the things we’ve all survived ... coming in off the water, one step ahead of the storm. 

Science does not cling to tradition!

You know how you might not think of something for years and then it comes back with a powerful force?  I was in a conversation the other day that turned to long-runway projects versus quick, reactive projects, and I was nudged to remember writing this video script. It was made when the science curriculum I’d been writing was suddenly in need of revision due to Pluto’s being kicked out of the planet club.

We turned this video around ridiculously fast, and I’m still proud of the work. Not only does it explain WHY Pluto is no longer classed as a planet, it ties the change to a broader way of thinking about science: change is good! It means we’ve reached an improved understanding of something. Sometimes we’ve got to Change Some Definitions!

Ch-ch-ch-changes ...

A big content development project I’ve been working on for over a year is almost at its end. It’s good work. I’m crazy-eager for the next thing. Fingers crossed that the next thing is this one particular opportunity that might happen. I’ll know soon.

Meanwhile! My new short story “No Shovel, No Bacon,” gets published later this week in a cool online literary journal (more to come on that) AND I’ll be performing/leading campfire songs at a Story Bar event Thursday evening (more later on that as well! I’ll certainly be doing this seasonally appropriate song:

Adios, Rabbit Heart . . .

For the last five years, the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival has created a context in which poet/filmmakers, or poet/filmmaker teams, could bring cool visuals to poetry. This year is the last year, and I just want to say how awesome the festival has been.

Given that I’m a poet and given that my daughter, Cassidy Parker Knight, is a really talented and dedicated filmmaker, this was a very fun way for the two of us to do some collaborative work, and strengthen some creativity muscles by trying something different.

I like all the work we did for the festivals, but want to post this first one here today, not quite as a trip down memory lane, more like a message about growth, change, and moving forward.

Have been re-reading lately, and this passage

made me laugh out loud:

“This would make a story if there was anybody to tell it,” Call said. “You want me to carry your body 

three thousand miles because you used to go picnicking with a girl on the Guadalupe River?”

“That, plus I want to see if you can do it,” said Augustus. 

The Pursuit of WOW! Also: Beer

Not just yet, but I’ll be talking about beer a little later in this post, so stay with me.

Once upon a time, when I used to teach a business communication class at the University of Texas, I would assign my students a group project, where they had to generate several different products — an annotated bibliography, a pitch presentation framed as “why-you-should-learn-more-about-X,” and an informative summary brief. I’d give them a broad topic, and then some options within that. One semester it might be about communication technology trends. Another semester it might be a deep dive into intercultural communication. The favorite, though, for them and for me, was about what I called the Creativity Biz. Each group would pick an author, an idea, or a business practitioner, and would work together to understand and communicate a particular approach to creativity in a business context.

One of my favorite books at the time was The Pursuit of Wow! Written by business guru Tom Peters (best known for In Search of Excellence), it’s written in short idea-bursts, is a fun read, and it’s got loads of examples about how businesses can harness creativity to add details that delight customers. For example, when a bottle of juice has a “use by” date, it breaks character for the brand, becoming bossy instead of fun, giving us a command, and raising the issue of spoilage in an unpleasant way. It’s so much better, Peters notes, to say something like “we hope you’ll enjoy this delicious juice by such-and-such date, while it’s still at peak freshness!” That’s the WOW that he's talking about. My students quickly grasped, and were drawn to the idea of, how to add more “wow” in creating messaging. Some of the best projects I saw in my teaching career incorporated that idea. 

When I was at Ignite! Learning, we employed this notion for our copyright protection notices in some science DVDs we produced. Instead of, you know, “this copyright is SO protected and you’re scum and the FBI will get you if you copy this, got that, slimeball?” or whatever the standard language is, we made topic-specific notices. So, for the biology dvd, it said something like “Mitosis is how cells replicate their chromosomes, but this dvd is our own copyright-protected material, so you shouldn't do any unauthorized copying or replicating.”

But I promised I’d talk about beer, so …

Odell is a very good craft brewery in Colorado. The other evening, I was enjoying a Myrcenary IPA, a beer of theirs named for Myrcene, a component of the hop flower, which imparts a particular flavor and aroma as part of the hops’ essential oils. The logo art for the beer, see the top of this post, depicts a soldier fleeing, with bags of money, which adds an engaging visual to go with the branding pun on “mercenary.” 

Bringing it all together now, stay with me, folks: The description on the can tells me that the beer has “a tropical fruit-like flavor, a pungent floral aroma, and a clean getaway.”  I actually laughed out loud at that; it’s so good! It was a pursuit-of-WOW moment for me as a consumer. 

Because the phrasing riffs off beer-nerd language like “clean finish,” it is a wink, a slightly-ironic way to access “you’re-one-of-us” tribal membership. It also tied the descriptive text back to the image in a way that locked in the brand impression. It struck me as funny and cool. It added to my experience of the beer.

And, importantly for creativity purposes, it reminded me of those long-ago discussions about Tom Peters and The Pursuit of WOW! Also, for me and I hope for you, this little moment reminded me that it’s worth it to add the cool details, even if most people won’t notice. Why? Because they can delight the very customers you want.

And do I even need to say it? This same idea applies across categories. It's as true for your novel, your song, your poem, the way you relate to people, the very sense of a self that you’re building and rebuilding all the time. 

Have a little fun, y'all. Make it at least a little cool.

Walkin’ Blues: “She Got a Elgin Movement”

So, I’m making a playlist, but instead of just pulling a song or two from the Hindu Love Gods album, I go down the rabbit hole, listening to the whole thing for the first time in a while. The name “Hindu Love Gods,” btw, is a workaround for record company contract constraints that would make the collection unreleasable under the better-known names of “Warren Zevon along with ¾ of REM.” Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry had guested on a Zevon session, after which the four gentlemen may possibly have spent the night drinking whiskey and playing covers, tape rolling. For years, my go-to songs from this session were the rough-but-inspired versions of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret,” and Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” (a blues standard best known via the Howlin’ Wolf and Koko Taylor versions, respectively).

This time around, though, the thing that’s making my ears tingle is “Walkin’ Blues,” which has been done by everybody from Robert Johnson to Eric Clapton, from Taj Mahal to the Grateful Dead, and on and on. I had always thought it was a Robert Johnson song, though I’ve since learned that Son House is the original songwriter, and first recorded the song in 1930. Robert Johnson recorded it in 1936, not only covering “Walkin’ Blues,” but also synthesizing the song with lyrical and musical elements from a couple of other Son House songs. Those changes, plus the fact that Johnson’s version is better recorded and is also a stronger performance (my opinion, sure, but I’m in good company on this), make Johnson’s version the go-to option of the early versions. In 1941, Muddy Waters reworked the song, recording it with revised lyrics, as “Country Blues.” In 1950, Waters’ first single for Chess Records was “Walkin’ Blues,” in a version more like the House and Johnson versions.

Anyway, I’m listening to the rock energy and drive of the Hindu Love Gods version, and it’s great, when I notice Zevon sing a lyric I’d never fully registered before, a lyric that gets my curiosity revved: “She got a Elgin movement, from her head down to her toes.”

My first thought is that maybe he’s saying “elegant” with an alternate/rural pronunciation. I’ve heard this kind of thing lots of times, especially from older folks in Eastern North Carolina, where I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  For example, the word “kindly” sometimes gets used in a context where it’s clear that “kind of” is more what’s meant, as in “he’s kindly short-tempered.” “Irish potatoes” morphs, passing through “Ahrshtaters” to wind up sounding almost like “ice-taters.” But it’s not cold potatoes, it’s just regular old boiled potatoes with salt and butter. 

So, my experience with local ways of saying things had me thinking that this “Elgin movement” is something like that, maybe a regional quirk of pronunciation that Zevon has picked up from Mississippi by way of Mr. Johnson.  But nope. This is the kind of thing I might have puzzled over for weeks back in the pre-internet era, but as things are now, a name-brand search engine set me straight right away.  

Elgin was a brand of watches, well known and well-advertised back when the song was written, and for decades afterward. The image from this blues song, then, is that the woman being referenced has, um, you know, a steady and reliably rhythmic movement, from her head down to her toes. It’s a sexy and arresting image, that the enticing way she moves is as steady as the motion of a watch. The company’s long been out of business, so a sly reference that was easily understood at the time requires a little context now.

Now that I knew the answer, I started wondering, is this a pretty commonly known thing that I somehow missed? I mean, it’s a famous song, so surely somebody else has wondered about this. I posed the question, with no context, to a panel of knowledgeable bluesologists: Carl Settles (longtime Austin musician and accomplished blues pianist), Darcie Fromholz (Austin music expert and an employee at Antone’s, Austin’s Home of the Blues, way on back in The Day), Woody Russell (noted blues-Americana-jazz artist), Leeann Atherton (folk-blues-Americana singer-songwriter, as well as a music educator), and Wammo (spoken word artist/musician/singer-songwriter, formerly of the acoustic blues band The Asylum Street Spankers). 

“So, y’all,” I asked, “in ‘Walkin’ Blues’ what does the phrase ‘Elgin movement’ mean?” While it was a head scratcher for four of my five experts, Darcie Fromholz not only knew, she had a cool story about how she had come to know. One night long ago at Antone’s, in the Austin of hazy recollection, the question occurred to her, in about the way it had to me. “Huh. What’s THAT lyric all about?” Fortunately for her, she began to wonder this while located in a legendary blues venue, and thus was able to ask one of the cornerstones of the Austin blues scene, recording artist Angela Strehli, who was present at the time. Angela Strehli wasn’t sure, but she did know who was certain to know the answer: Albert Collins (!!!), who was playing there that night. If you don’t know who Albert Collins is, I’m not gonna help you out. Look him up. Anyway, Mr. Collins told Ms. Strehli, Ms. Strehli told Ms. Fromholz, and Ms. Fromholz then got to kinda blow my mind decades later, with her cool response to my query.  

All this makes for an interesting bit of lyrical context for “Walkin’ Blues,” but it also turned my mind to other lyrics that make very specific references that may be hard for future listeners to parse. Will Elliott Smith’s 1997 song “Rose Parade,” with its reference to marching “like the Duracell Bunny” make sense to people decades from now? In the Grateful Dead song “Sugar Magnolia,” written by Bob Weir and Robert Hunter, there’s a reference to a woman who can not only dance a Cajun rhythm, but can also “jump like a Willys in four-wheel drive.” I know, and you may also happen to know, that a Willys is an early version of a Jeep, but that reference obviously had much wider currency back in 1970, when the song was first released. At what point will it quit making sense to most people? Moving across the pond, Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” extols the virtues of that particular model of motorcycle, with the protagonist stating that “Nortons and Indians and Greeveses just won’t do/They ain’t got the soul of a Vincent ’52.” These types of motorcycles are British bikes [Correction: while the other two are/were British bikes, Indian is an American brand], and one of the bunch—Greeves — isn’t even made anymore. As with the other examples, then, understanding the Thompson lyric in its particularity requires some information, some specific context that is at some point going to move out of common cultural knowledge.

P.s.: guess what song I now cannot stop playing every time I pick up the guitar? Yup.

Check out my essay on Radius

I’m a fan of this online litzine, and of Victor Infante—journalist, poet, fiction writer—who runs the joint, so I am very happy to have an essay included there. It’s pretty much on-brand for me, a chatty and music-nerdy personal reflection on a favorite Grateful Dead song:

http://www.radiuslit.org/2018/05/05/set-out-running-friend-of-the-devil-has-become-a-friend-of-mine/

My Path in Songwriting, Part Three

There is a way of thinking about life that, after my educational media songwriting gig in the aughts, might say something like: hey, Jeff, dude, having had some rewarding experiences and even a little monetary success, maybe you should chalk it all up as a win and let go of this whole songwriting thing? To which I say, no thanks.

I’ll concede that (a) creative projects involve hard work and (b) it is great when your creative work generates any kind of external success. So why would you keep doing that work with little expectation of reward? Because it’s also true that exercising your creativity is beneficial in and of itself. The work is worth it, even without acclaim and/or money. It wakes your brain up. Your soul, too. It’s a way of being in the world, and that can be a beautiful thing. If your life is a car engine, doing creative work can be like gunning it on the freeway: it not only feels good, it’s also a way to blow out some of the accumulated gunk and get things running more smoothly.   

So, in recounting my path in songwriting, we’re up to this decade now, and the main things going on for me and my wife Tonie have been balancing our careers (for me that’s corporate writing) with a busy and satisfying (and often challenging) family life. At one point, we had five kids at home, going to five different schools, ranging from elementary school to high school! And yet all that time I was still playing guitar and occasionally writing songs for fun. And then way led on to way, like it do.

We used to camp regularly with my youngest son’s YMCA Adventure Guides group, and I started doing storytelling and campfire song-leading in that context. One of the coolest things about this is that my friend Quentin Thomas-Oliver, violist extraordinaire and evil genius behind Ponytrap, would often add a semi-improvised viola score to the stories, and join in on the songs. This was hugely fun and popular, and provided momentum. I wrote a new campfire-style audience participation song, “Ordinary Day” (maybe one of the best songs ever written about the misadventures of a fire-sneezing pig).  In my little microcosm, it was a hit.

This was all so energizing that it boosted my appetite for more, and we started hosting a lot of musical get-togethers, still a regular and energizing thing. My ability and confidence as a singer and player crossed some threshold, and, here in my fifties, I decided to launch this blog to talk about my creative projects in a broad sense, and began to perform and record my original songs, publishing them on my youtube channel, Jeff’s Next Page. It’s funny to me to have been writing songs all this time, but just now reach the point of doing this. Note to self: you can always access beginners mind and be a rookie at any age. It’s liberating. 

And that brings us up to date. I have tons of songs, written and co-written, for which no recorded versions exist.  I’m chipping away at recording the backlog, while writing new material all the time. And I’m co-writing again with my friend Greg, my first collaborator from way back at the start.

A word on money: I have very talented and skilled friends who are willing to play and sing and design the visuals on my tracks for rates ranging from very reasonable to free. I deeply appreciate and value this, and want to make a point of acknowledging it here. Even so, in terms of economic priority, I can only afford to create a few new recordings at a time, so it is slow going as I’m populating my channel and seeking listeners. I hope to build more audience, to begin pitching some songs to be recorded by other people, maybe even to make a few dollars, someday. And even if I have zero success with my extrinsic goals, I’m okay with that. Exercising my craft and creativity in this way feels good. And when the songs are more personal — whether that’s celebrating the good stuff or making sense of life through writing about the hard stuff — that’s better than good; it’s an amazing feeling. 

As a friend says (hey George, I’m totally stealing the line you already stole): if you don’t want to be ripe and rotting, you’d better be green and growing.  Stay tuned, y’all.

My Path in Songwriting, Part Two

I’d been doing some freelance writing and editing, and managed to land a scriptwriting job with a startup company that wanted to make educational multimedia curriculum. This was a huge thing for me on any number of levels—it revitalized my professional and economic life, forced me to more deeply embrace digital media, and introduced me to more friends and collaborators.  

For my purposes in this essay, though, the biggest thing about the job was that it included songwriting. The courses included Schoolhouse-Rock-type songs in a variety of musical styles. We had other writers who contributed lyrics, but on balance, for most of the time I was there, I was the main lyrics songwriter, as well as a sometimes-contributor of musical ideas. I’d write lyrics for a song that would teach whatever concept the new module needed to cover, and then either send it to a freelance producer or an in-house musician/producer, who would turn it into a finished audio track. Or, sometimes I’d make a demo with a basic musical idea, and in those cases that’s what would go to the producer. 

Either way, and this is still amazing to me all these years later:  I was regularly writing songs as part of a salaried job, while earning a middle-class income. This was another period of creative growth and opportunity.

The cast of characters changed over the years, but I got to work on songs with a number of really cool musicians and writers, and the discipline of writing songs to length, on assignment, was an ongoing fun challenge. And we did some cool work. Such as? Glad you asked!

Here are a couple of samples:

--Here’s a bluegrass song on the basics of the water cycle.

--Here's a pop song reviewing how place value works with decimal numbers, and introducing the concept of the thousandth place and the ten thousandths place to the right of the decimal.

Sounds riveting, right?  It is, in fact pretty catchy. I'm proud of the work we did.   

I worked in that capacity for over nine years, until the company finally became stretched too thin on resources to keep making new content, and I was laid off. At that point, I moved into a more lucrative (but less creative) corporate writing job. Other than occasionally playing guitar or writing songs for fun, music took and back seat for the next several years. 

My Path in Songwriting, Part One

Author's note: This is long, because (a) I'm old and (b) songwriting has been part of my life since I was 19. Some of the timing is fudged, because real life doesn't unfold in all that neat of a sequence. This is offered in the spirit of one writer's experience, and especially with a feeling of gratitude toward people I've worked with and generosity toward younger writers who might not ever make much or any money from doing this, but could still find it a rewarding part of life. If that's you, I hope you'll take this as encouragement.

I started writing song lyrics as a college student in Chapel Hill. I was in my late teens, imitating — pretty badly — the songwriters I admired for their artful and memorable turns of phrase. I was probably more interested in trying to write a cool line than I was in anything else. The main thing, looking back at it, is that I started. I actually wrote some things, and then was brave enough to show some people what I’d written. That's a hard thing to do, the first hundred or so times. Greg Lee, a musician friend I’d grown up with, set some of these lyrics to music. To hear something I’d written being played and performed as a finished song was a powerful and formative experience. He'd say the same, I'm pretty sure, about having original lyrics to shape into a song.

In my early twenties, I started learning to play guitar and trying to sing. This was slow going, really bad, I’m sure very tough on anybody I could get to listen. It did get a little better, and by my mid-twenties, having moved to L.A. to go to graduate school, I would sometimes get together with a professor and friend of mine, a really accomplished songwriter named Peter Marston. We’d play and sing for fun, and would talk a lot about songs and about writing. He was deeply generous in this, and I remain humbled by the way he encouraged me and helped me believe I could improve my weaknesses and build my strengths, that I could get good at this. By direct help and by his example, he fostered my improvement as a writer, player, and singer, and — just as important — he helped me develop as a thinker-about-writing, bringing to articulated awareness some things I’d previously only sort-of intuited. He and I wrote a few songs together, at least one of which I still think is pretty good (it's called "Barn Burning," based on the William Faulkner short story, and is on my list to eventually record). The song was included as part of a story-adaptation theater production I directed at California State University, Northridge.  [Peter, by the way, remains active as a musician and has a catchy and beautiful 2015 album you could download or listen to through several platforms. It's titled The Invisible Girl, and it's on CD Baby here, and also on Spotify].

By my late twenties, I’d come to Austin for (yet more) grad school, and I played and sang and wrote with several different people I met here. A couple of them had professional ambitions, which kind of wowed me. I don't know if the collaborations led to more than a decent song or two, and in any case these folks moved on to do their own thing and those collaborations wound down. Still, they were people to play with, they were mostly encouraging, and I was putting in my time working at my craft. I got braver. I played some open mics. And, a big deal to me at that time, I went to regular guitar hangouts that a couple of my professors would host.

One of my fellow grad students, a guy named Dan Modaff, was (and is) really good as a player and singer. He was the immediate star at those get-togethers. Also, a good thing for my purposes, I thought his style would suit my material. [Dan, by the way, continues to make music, and here he is, still doing his thing.]

By this time, my wife and I had a baby on the way, and I was inspired to write a bunch of kid-friendly songs. I recruited Dan to learn and perform these songs, because I still wasn’t good enough (or brave enough) to do my own material outside of an open mic or social setting. We booked a studio, recorded the songs, and self-released a cassette tape, Fun Just Like Today. We had a release party at a cool old-Austin bookstore called Toad Hall, got a little press attention, got favorably reviewed here and there, sold a surprising number of tapes, and were even played on KGSR’s “Daily Demo” feature once.

You can listen to one of the songs from that project in this video, which Dan released as part of a 2009 fundraising effort that helped his son Caden acquire a service dog. And, just by the way, that's the late great Austin multi-instrumental legend Champ Hood on mandolin. Ultimately, though, we didn’t have budget enough, or industry knowledge enough, or connections enough, to keep the project going.

And so I moved back into a development and improvement phase. Couldn't get a project going. I’d occasionally write or co-write a song, and I was slowly improving as a player and singer. I read songwriter interviews all the time. I still love hearing masters of the craft as they talk about their life and work. I got some paid writing work for the Austin Chronicle, reviewing concerts and records. I played at open mics sometimes. Songwriting was just a thing I did, part of my sense of self, a way to build creativity muscles, and a way I processed my life. But I wasn’t promoting my songs, wasn't putting them out there in any even slightly professional way. It's particularly hard to get your songs out in the world if you're not an excellent singer and player, and I was neither. And I was having an up-and-down time of it on several fronts, with big life changes (kids arriving, career struggles, the painful end of a marriage, and a sometimes-draining caregiving role due to illness in my family).  And then I found poetry.

I’d never written poetry in a sustained way until I was thirty, but over several years, I got into it, got good at it, got published here and there. I started doing spoken word with music, collaborating with other musicians and even performing a few gigs, first as the Jeff Knight Trio, then under the name Blue Haiku. I graduated from being a newbie at the open mics to being one of the good poets in town, a sometimes-winner in a strong local poetry slam scene. I met some of my closest friends while I was in that world (particularly my friends Hilary and Ernie), who could not have been more perfect amigos through a hard rebuilding phase of my life. Given the fuel of this fantastically competitive and supportive scene, and given the encouragement I was getting, my creative energy started burning hotter and brighter. I started writing fiction, and did a staged reading of one of my stories. I wrote poems all the time. I kept writing songs. Somewhere near the end of this chapter, I fell in love with a recently-single girl I’d known way back in grad school (yes, I am referring here to my wife Tonie). As new romance sometimes does, this revved the creative engines even more (hers too, but that’s another story).

And then came Ignitelearning, and an honest-to-Jah professional gig where I was making real money as a writer and songwriter, so ... stay tuned for part two. 

Get Out for Best Picture, IMO

Have now seen 7 of the Academy’s nominated movies for best picture. I won’t make a prediction, but if I had a vote, I’d vote for Get Out.  It’s brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed (omfg, those performances!), culturally resonant at a deep level, scary, funny, and thought-provoking. I also think that Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” is as appealing and smooth an instance as I can think of in recent years, as far as a song that fits its movie that perfectly.

Shape of Water would be my next choice. The Cold War, homophobia, male privilege, and disability issues as a set of intersecting contexts is amazing and hypnotic for this kind of beauty-falls-in-love-with-the-beast love story. So good! 

But, imo, Get Out takes bigger strides in a more original and perfect way in how it relates the tropes of its genre to the moment we’re in. It is excellent, the very thing I want from art, in balancing originality and established form, and in keeping me thinking and feeling and awake and alive while I’m also being entertained and amazed.