|
|
 |
|
 I
cannot remember a time when music was not a major part of
my life. Both my parents loved music and my mother played
piano very well, and loved to sing. My father was a serious
student of the ukulele, and they knew all the college songs
of their era, which they sang for us with two part harmonies
at the slightest provocation.
I actually began my career as a guitar player when I was nine,
by playing my father’s ukulele, after my sister came
home from boarding school one weekend with her friend Lucy
in tow, and they sang folk songs for us while Lucy played
her nylon-stringed Goya guitar. I was completely transfixed,
and persisted on the ukulele until my parents took pity on
me and bought me a real guitar.
|
|
 I
immediately began forming my own band, and managed to send my
father into gales of laughter, fortunately in the privacy of
our home, after five of my fifth grade friends and I did a baleful
rendition of “The Times They Are A ’Changin’”
in a school program. I failed to see the humor of my position,
and was totally captured by the intensity of Dylan’s lyrics.
I still am. |
|
My
tastes were formed and informed by Dylan, Peter, Paul and
Mary, Joan Baez, The Byrds, Laura Nyro, and of course, Joni
Mitchell, whose every recorded song I can probably sing, nuance
for nuance, and will continue to remember long after I have
forgotten my children’s names and what I ate for breakfast.
|
 My
music career throughout high school and college included the
inevitable variety shows, choir concerts, coffee houses and
wedding after wedding that underlie the experience of most of
my peers. Music, my own and others’, formed the backdrop
of my inner and outer lives. As I became a working adult, it
took more of a back seat and I abandoned any hopes remotely
professional. I grew up in the era when only people who landed
recording contracts ever “made it”, and knew I was
destined to be an amateur. So I played at a few hundred more
weddings, got married, and had a family. |
 I
am much more a writer than I am a musician, so I guess it makes
sense that it was a writer who launched me into writing my own
music. Early in the 1990’s, I read Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard, and my heart was set
on fire by the way she talked and wrote about God, and the revelation
of God in the natural world. I saw all at once that writing
and singing about a life spent in the pursuit of relationship
with God did not have to be confined to the genre of “contemporary
Christian music”. |
|
 And
so, these songs, and many others, were born. I am now a glutton
for writers who spark that flame in me, a feeling I have come
to love and trust, the igniting for which I wait. It does
not consist in my efforts. It may never come again. As Annie
Dillard says, “The death of the self of which the great
writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining
of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely
the slow cessation of the will’s sprint and the intellect’s
chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with stilled tongue...The
waiting itself is the thing.” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
|
| -Alison
Kitchen |
|
|
