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Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye - Leonard Cohen [Cover]
November, mist, departure, valediction, church spire, memory, loss, rediscovery. I busked this (badly) when I was sixteen.
The Return of Don Chihuahua
I spoke to Don Chihuahua today.
He told me that he recently discovered something alarming. More than a decade ago, in his teens, he had stood on a prosaic street corner in a northern English town, and had busked Famous Blue Raincoat, but Avalanche and the Story of Isaac were beyond him.
There was something mature in them; something beyond him. He simply couldn't control his fingers - couldn't even imagine his fingers doing that. Looking back, this was unsurprising. Just as a journeyman could not understand what it meant for a soul to be swallowed, so it was not for a journeyman to master that arpeggio.
So it was with alarm that the Don discovered purely by chance that, nearly 20 years later, he was playing those arpeggios almost without thought, for the first time in his life. He was not playing them with technical excellence; he did not really know what he was playing; and notwithstanding the discovery of a new ability, it felt more appropriate to go to the major rather than the minor for now.
"My fingers may grow old, but I swear my soul does not, and I am still an apprentice."
I understood him, I think: in adolescence one's purpose is to murder one's forefathers - whether it is in one's power or not. In later years, though, it seems more important to defer to them. They have created the paths that we now walk on.
I'll try to tell his story here.
Download: Leonard (mp3)
