CW103
I guess some good things happened this week too (let’s hope they last), but it’s another one of those 2025 times where it feels crazy to not address the violent, reckless authoritarian takeover happening in the United States right now. It is so awful. Sometimes I have the ability to turn my focus back to music and poetry, and sometimes it feels wrong. Passing over the terror in silence can feel like resilience right up until it feels like complicity.
And what have I achieved by bringing this up? Would it be worse to just jump right in to this week’s subject—my usual strategy—or is it worse to tip my hat to the wider emergency and then awkwardly change the subject to… my song “Apple Season”?
I don’t know. It’s possible I’ve chosen the wrong way today, but also that it’s good I did. Because wrong is dissonance. And that dissonance is expressive, the truth. It’s apple season in Vermont.
This year I have been enjoying the Reine des Reinettes heirloom variety. My 2009 song “Apple Season,” from Fresh Sip, was also written during apple season. Here in this same location, but a universe or two away.
The song is of a nature which is strange. I won’t try to explain it, because I can’t. I do feel that I “get it,” but not in a way I can communicate. Or I can: these words sung this way to this music.
I have a funny story about this one. About a decade ago, a recent graduate of Oberlin traveled to Brattleboro from New York City to take a lesson from me. At Oberlin, he had studied with a famous jazz musician. He played this teacher “Apple Season.” His teacher said he knew what I was doing but that it “didn’t work.” (And now I’ve just smiled with delight and pride even though my country is being dismantled.)
“Apple Season” I have supplied you with the clouds And you will be the one allowed To turn the storm into a song Into a solitary wrong This is a crowded field of death This is a mushroom in the mesh Of just a hunter’s sack he left When all the candy hit his chest Of the go around Every now and then I get so lonely now Every single thing I get is older now Compliments of you too Fruit chew It is the hard-earned money man Who can be hardened by his plan To put the push into a pan And shoot the gamma at the man Because the only kind of change Is of a nature which is strange Because the God of its behavior Is the God of every range Of the go around Every now and then I get so lonely now Every single thing I get is older now Compliments of you too Of the go around Every now and then I get so lonely now Every single thing I get is older now Compliments of you too Fruit chew I have supplied you with the clouds And you will be the one allowed To turn the storm into a song Into a solitary wrong Because the only kind of change Is of a nature which is strange Because the God of its behavior Is the God of every range
“To put the push into a pan / And shoot the gamma at the man”:
I started Michael Clune’s book Pan last night. It is certifiably crackers. Sentence music like Pop Rocks going off in your brain. This is my second Clune, so he was already my favorite writer—I read the heroin memoir a few months ago. Yet I was ill-prepared for Pan. Freaking paradise.