Salon.com > musician

I quit my job to make music

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

OK, tough guy, you asked for it.

I'm quitting my stupid job to make an album and work on my musicianship for hours a day.

So my question to you is, Why the hell would I want to do that?

Seriously, I can't figure out why I so desperately need to do it. It creeps up and bites me in the ass every day when I'm sitting in my ugly cube.

I guess a more pertinent question would be, What the HELL am I going to do every day? How do you be creative all day? How do I get up every morning with the energy to create something from nothing, for hours a day? Can I still take breaks for lunch?

Take that.

Bill

Dear Bill,

Wham. Ugh! Poof! Zouch! Wow.

Geez, man, go easy on me!

That was rough. Lemme get this straight. You are asking me why you would want to quit your job and play music? It makes perfect sense to me, because I've done it, and when I did it it made perfect sense.

My junkie friend secretly died

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Hi Cary,

I have never written a letter seeking advice from a columnist before, but since I think you are the best advice columnist that has ever lived, and since you are quite well and alive, I thought I would ask for your advice today.

I recently had a friend die, a friend that I had not seen in over a decade, but whom, nonetheless, I had remained quasi-close to during most of that time. He was a musician, as am I, and so we both influenced each other at times although I consider him my mentor still, to this day. He taught me a great deal about old-time country music, from Dock Boggs to the Carter Family; from Doc Watson to Norman Blake. He was a god to me.

And he was also a junkie.

He quit junk a few years after I met him -- we all knew this. I did not find out until later that he had been smoking crack to keep himself "straight," however.

I have never so much as more than smoked a joint in my life, so you can imagine how distraught I was the first time I learned that my friend, "Nephew" Jimmy, was a junkie. One night, as I remember, at some party, I actually begged him on my knees in front of all of our friends, hysterical and in tears, to stop shooting smack. Silly me.

Broken toe spurred Neil Young to write first book

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:57:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- Neil Young's fans have come to expect wild swings if they've followed his music career since the 1960s. There's the near-violent guitar solos and throbbing rock of his collaborations with Crazy Horse. Lilting acoustic melodies like "Harvest Moon." Electronic experiments. Moments of genius and ill-advised detours.

No one should be surprised to feel exactly the same when reading his first book, the memoir "Waging Heavy Peace."

Young's scatter-shot style includes a description of Crazy Horse as a living organism that illustrates an artistic sensibility better than any non-musician can, along with a recitation of a shopping trip he took once in Hawaii and praise for his electric toothbrush.

He generally avoids specific talk about songwriting. Yet he candidly admits that his song "Alabama," a trigger for Lynyrd Skynyrd's answer "Sweet Home Alabama," was ill-advised. Young's passions - his family, electric trains, cars and a system to sonically improve digital music files - get as much space as music.

"If you hang out with somebody, the conversation doesn't always run out in a linear fashion, from A to B," he said. "It's what's on their minds. Things happen. You see things out the window, you get interested in that. You get distracted by things. I always thought that was a natural way to go with it."