Me, I play other people's music.  I can't write lyrics, and my guitar playing is limited and weak, but the reasons I do it aren't because I am trying to sell anything or get someone to listen.

It's like a prayer.  More than tribute, it is making someone's breath my own, feeling their words with enough emotion to shout them (in tune, hopefully).

Look, I don't know how to describe this because I am not only not a writer, I can't even pretend to be one anymore.  My old useless candor is very much dead and replaced by a robotic process of listing things that happened like some idiopathic television. I am useless for much, but the greatest parts of my day involve screaming some lyrics into the air around me, working my guitar in my own unique cheap-ass way until my fingers bleed because I was never tought how to play so I don't use a pick. Me and Lyndsey Buckingham, we have fucked up cuticles on our right index fingers. And blood all over our guitars.

I was just trying to figure out a way to play "Here Comes The Flood" on guitar in some semblance of the way Peter Gabriel plays it when he does it with just him and a piano and I know my voice is not as good but there are times when my honesty and lack of security is a far better thing than his knowledge of tonality and perfect inner ear.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But when I sing that song my hair stands on end and my eyes close and my brain lights up EEG machines twenty miles around and I am suddenly and perfectly in tune with the universe I have managed to inhabit and create and here, now, I don't have any sort of example for you but if you listen closely to that song as he recorded it on Shaking the Tree and sort of the way he does it here you will hear a sort of desperate honesty that has a lot more to do with ego than it does to do with the dying of a long lived and lovely planet.

And when I am in tune with that, I am in tune with something deeper than myself, though you are all not superstitious maybe it is just that the walls vibrate at those frequencies or my bones do, the gaps between them in sudden painful harmony with the universe I breathe out into this 80 degree air and maybe, just maybe it isn't just the physics of it but some sort of meta-physics some sort of quantum mechanics to the angles of the particles that vibrate keenly in the many dimensions that we inhabit or maybe it is just

my imagination

but there are times when I know for a fact that I am not at all Here

or Now.

I am somewhere, someone else entirely. In tune with something I cannot have imagined well enough to feel, in time with a rhythm too exotic to have come up with myself, I am lost outside of my body waiting for the right verse to lift that lonesome shadow and screaming

Lord, here comes the flood
We will say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island who survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
use up what we used to be.

Lord, here comes the flood
We will say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.