August Ache

It’s the last day of August, little sweetheart. And somehow it feels terribly sad.

There’s maybe something about the season you are named for and feeling, fearing its passing. There’s a kind of ache to it, somehow. I know I just have to live, to breathe in these moments and let them pass, feeling whatever comes up. There’s no fighting it.

And maybe somehow it will help inform the next moment and the next as I do my best to do as you would have me do.

I used to feel something else, I remember, in these days as autumn neared. It was a kind of renewed resolve to do good work and diligently as the last four months of the year lay ahead. Let me do that, now, little sweetheart. Let me continue with fervor and discipline and make you proud in these days ahead.

Please be near me, won’t you? Keep me on your true path. With all my love forever.

Incoming

Somehow, little sweetheart, it seems like the new album, our 9th, is beginning to come forward.

I’m not working on it in a concentrated way yet, tracking or anything. But I do record voice memos of ideas and guitar parts and sounds and melodies that you bring to me in dreams and the half waking hours.

I keep putting them in a playlist to listen back to and work from and it’s up 29 tracks just now! More than a few are just pieces, fragments, but even so, listening to the while thing in there background as I’m writing or working on something else, it catches my ear.

I’ve got a lot of work to do before I really get started in earnest but it’s surprised me how this us coming forward and how much of it already has.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised after all because how well I know that it’s you! It’s you who guide my hand and my heart. You who send me what I need to know and hear and have. My angel. My true love.

Yes, I won’t tarry. I will keep on, move forward and do as you lead me to. Thank you, my little sweetheart. In all things, please be with me. With all my love forever.

In A Wonderful Dream!

In a wonderful dream last night you were with me again, little sweetheart!

We were in SF and going around places together. You had little errands to run and were were stopping by places meeting up with people briefly who you had to check in with, have a word or two. I was so overjoyed to be with you and finally understanding that even though it seems like we die, we don’t really - we’re always and eternal and just have to find our way back to that, back to one another. I told you, my heart racing with emotion, how broken I had been when you passed, when you fell. How I stood every day in the ICU holding your hand praying for a miracle and waiting for you, giving you all my love. I told you now I understood better because of what had happened to me myself when my own heart stopped for ten minutes.

Life and death are not what we think they are until we really know and now I was so grateful just to be with you. I was worried about things from before. I didn’t want to make mistakes or let my ego ever get in the way, to be jealous or do anything that would be in even mild disagreement ever again. I just wanted to treasure and be with you. Always.

One of the places we stopped was to talk to a guy, he was sitting at a production table or some kind of desk maybe, at work, and you were talking to him about an apartment. I thought maybe it was the idea of trying to find me a place near you, near your old apartment in the Sunset but what you actually wanted and told me was something new - you wanted to buy a house that we could live in together. Also, this guy had something to do with theatrical venue or something. He was going to help us put on a play for you to be in, one of my plays, I think.

Mostly what I remember of the dream though, little sweetheart, is just the feeling it gave me. It was so real being with you, back at your side. It was absolutely exhilarating. My heart really was racing,. And it was such proof positive that nothing else in my life could ever compare to that feeling of being with you and belonging. Just magic. You are. My love, my true love. My miracle. Forever.

On Wings, of the Wind

Little sweetheart, we’re going back over the footage now of the documentary we shot that I was telling you about.

All of it is done on location and meant to evoke the nature of a quiet conversation and as it was recorded that way - quietly, with the ambient sounds of the city and other environs all around - Sylvia had the idea to add subtitles and close captioning (in both English and French). We’re working on that now, working ahead. A few episodes are already up but we’re working on ones that won’t be aired until next month.

The last one, part six, was filmed in Central Park. We went up to the north of the park to The Ravine, where I had never been, and saw the little waterfalls there and the big green pond they call “The Pool”. It went well but we tried a second time a little farther south by The Great Lawn and the light was really nice there, so I think that one is the keeper. The other one will probably be an “extra” after all six parts have been published.

Anyway, like I said, we both felt so close to you during all of this and maybe especially so on this day because I was talking about you a lot. And we didn’t even notice this until now, but listening to playback there is a moment where I’m talking about how I feel that the there of us, you, myself and Sylvia, almost become like one voice during the album, and this incredibly mysterious gust of wind just appears, like underscoring all of that as I say it and then ascends.

How well I know that you near, my little sweetheart. How blest I am. How very much I love you. Forever. Forever.

"The Making Of..."

Little sweetheart, we’ve completed a documentary about the making of last year’s album, Til Morning is Nigh.

It’s a six part interview with me that Sylvia filmed just absolutely gorgeously on location in iconic setting here in NYC - up at The Cloisters, on the roof of the studio with the skyline at dusk, in Central Park near The Great Lawn - and it’s being released via Slugg Records episodically, a new part each Friday over the next several weeks. There’s also five music videos from the album.

It was so interesting to work on and you felt so close to us both as we did.

As ever, it’s all for you, little sweetheart. With all my love…

Days...

I so don’t want them to be, little sweetheart, but sometimes it seems that most days are bad days. I miss you so very much and the ache leaves me to just give up, lay down, hope that you’ll find me in dreams, linger in sleep.

And it hurts doubly because I know I need to be doing things - the things like writing for you that keep you near me and honor you. I feel bad and then I feel guilty and even worse.

I’m trying to get better at it. I’m trying to forgive myself when these feelings so twist me and bring me to a halt. If I can just live in the quiet of it and ask for your help, pray quietly and sincerely, in time the darker clouds will lift, they will pass and I’ll be able to do as I’m meant to, of, for and about you.

Please help today, little sweetheart. I miss you so.