Dear correspondent,

Re: bad Eighties and Nineties music. Some of it was mine, unless you're referring to the non-flannel-clad variety. I try not to identify decades by their bad music. After all, the Sixties gave us, in addition to The Kinks, Stones, blah blah—Zager & Evans. The Seventies? Gilbert O'Sullivan, Paper Lace, and the Captain and Tennille, who, despite their intense suckitude, made some serious bank for the great Willis Alan Ramsey. Ultimately, I'm less offended by all the sucking of decades past (and present) than I am by the fact that a disproportionately high percentage of the purveyors of suck seem to maintain miraculously full heads of hair forever.

As for duckling-imprinting moments, there have been so many, each affecting a different part of me. My dad was a jazz singer, so "Fly Me to the Moon" was the first song I loved to sing. I may not have heard the Sinatra recording of that more than five times in my life, but the melody and lyric are happily burned into the father/music slot. I grew up with a gaggle of teenage girls in the house, and they caught me singing "My Boyfriend's Back" at the top of my lungs. I opened my bedroom door after my air guitar performance, and there they were, laughing, not mockingly, but amusedly/adoringly. That moment—that song—informs every bit of terror/reluctance I have about being a singer. But, to get to the heart of your question, there was one very clear moment centered around a song where I was possessed by the deep and utter knowledge that I would commit myself to playing music, even if it meant I had to give up the joys of uninformed listening and baseball. When I was five, my mother, sisters, brother and I took up residence with my uncle and his three daughters in Johnstown, PA. He had forsaken his über-lucrative work in finance to become a priest. The Syrian Orthodox Church he and my mother belonged to held a huge picnic every summer, and they let one of the teens in the parish and his band—The Grapes of Wrath—play on a rickety old wooden balcony. You must understand that my anti-socialism—let me re-phrase, as I have no particular problem with socialism—my anti-social tendencies were already in full bloom by that point, and I was wandering around alone when I came upon the glorious sight/sound of the GOW performing "Little Bit o' Soul." I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and, before the end of the first chorus, my life was changed. truthfully, I feel like a cheat, as there are very few questions I can answer as clearly as the one you asked. the trail of imprints is so unquestionable for me, as concrete as the history of addresses of a kid whose parents moved a lot, some stored in my brain, like "Exile on Main Street," which I don't have to physically hear in order to listen to, some in my hands, like the first time I heard Tom Verlaine, some in my genes and taste buds, like oum kalthoum, some sensual, like playing at the old Knitting Factory with Yo la Tengo, some on my iPod or in boxes and hard drives in my studio. In any event, the bank job came later, but without it, we would never have met.

How is life as a public object of adoration and criticism going? Does it make you uncomfortable to be talked about so openly? Has anyone said anything about Lola that you were particularly surprised by? At least the bulk of the commentary is in <140 character snippets. That must help.

It's 11:48 pm and I hear a lawnmower. That's fucked up.

Writer friend,

It is my theory that the engine of evolution has shifted thanks to Google and 'smart' devices, and that natural selection now favors iPhone dexterity and cellular radiation resistance over a developed cerebral cortex. Perhaps in one thousand years, we will have the skin of cockroaches, very long thumbs and pinheads. (Is pinhead a politically incorrect term?) In any event, Google has failed me. I wanted to share this quote with you, and I wanted to give it proper attribution: "art gives back in two hours what the world takes away in two weeks"— for the sake of denying "anonymous" one more asset, I am going with Keats, Yates, Blake, or my old therapist. Anyhow, I hope "the tree of life" replenished you. It has been too long a time since I wandered into a theater purely to satisfy my need for nourishment. I even had to bail on Mr. Popper's Penguins last week when my youngling threw up in line . . . in my hands. (I love that about being a parent, truly.) Indeed, I am longing to be bullied by music/picture into setting aside the mundane, and nothing does it quite so well, except, perhaps, the novel. Music, though, has its special way. It's the vagabond of the arts, the little tramp, and the vulgar and colloquial fix we crave. I played guitar for so long before I wrote songs, and it was complete expression for me. I never felt anything lacking because I had no words or face. The compulsion to become a songwriter had more to do with the fact that writing is steeped in romanticism. It's a "discipline," adding an additional level of spiritual practice to instrumentalism. Anyhow, I struggled. I spent my early youth feigning illness so that I could stay home from school and write short stories on my mother's typewriter, sometimes submitting them for publication to editors who wrote me thoughtful rejection letters in return. By the time I was 12, I became distracted, but I never stopped devouring books. I wrote more in college, had a couple short stories published in my twenties in a journal of fiction by musicians. The point is, all these words, and yet, when it came time to write verse-chorus-verse and make rhymes . . . nothing. When I moved to New York from Boston, I maintained a relationship with a woman there who introduced me to a painter whose name escapes me. He had made paintings on matchboxes that she kept on her mantle, and they were simple and astonishing. I wanted to meet him, and we had drinks a couple times. I loved the largeness of his personality, his unapologetic maleness, his benign recklessness with drugs and alcohol and his dedication to art of any form. One very drunken evening, I was speaking to him about my inability to make the transition to writing lyrics. He started ranting about Dante's canzones, of which I knew nothing, and how they were considered too pedestrian and undignified at the time of their creation. "Find simple language," he said. Honestly, I was so fucked up that I would never have remembered this fascinating ramble of his, delivered in the basement of Casablanca in Harvard Square if he had not sent a postcard to my Brooklyn address that bore only the word "canzone." that is my very long-winded way of saying that musicians are mostly bound to the dirt. I should also mention that the nameless painter also told me about fluxus boxes, hence "box of words."

I would apologize for rambling, but I'm too relieved that I'm writing anything. I've always enjoyed our correspondence, but feel that lately, from my own wind tunnel, I have resorted to un-punctuated express lane emails that barely even qualify as a response. The minimum, conservation of energy.

Somehow, I knew you'd zero in on "My Boyfriend's Back." As I was telling you that story, I felt like I was handing you a twitterature-sized version of "The Rocking Horse Winner" meets "Ziggy Stardust." I'm glad the encapsulation wasn't lost on you, and I do look okay in drag, thank you, though I wish I had a pretty voice.

To the present: today, I spent the day with Lola, my guitar, another musician friend, Brian Kelly, and a tape machine. I love holding the hardcover in my hand, love having it in my studio on the console. It is a strange exercise, this. I have done it, sort of, before with Dos Passos, Nathaniel West and William Burroughs books, but that was just keeping them close as cultural markers and finding phrases, the vibe of language. Despite the lingering sense of what you call "samsara," I find, in Lola, California, optimism in the form of invitation to walk back into the lives we think we've forsaken, our own and others'. This afternoon, under the spell of your story, I found myself writing in a way I never have, abandoning the formulaic part of pop music colloquialism (canzone!) that I usually cling to, and instead using the kind of frank, literary approach to words that I normally reject. As my friend and I discussed the sound of guitars ringing and the book, a story started to form of a man whose arms carry him to the top of a tree and then become wings. He dives from the sky into the sea; afraid of choking, discovering he is able to breathe the water. Finally back on solid ground, he finds his feet and returns to his home, free of the fear of time and limits. I'll send it to you and put it on your music player this weekend.

I'm also captivated by the California-ness of Lola. I've really just started to accept California as the "other" place I work. I have a little bungalow in Laurel Canyon where I stay just around the corner from the country store. I think when we first met; I gave you a book about the canyon's musical history. Not sure. I wanted to write your readers a song that is an urging for forgiveness and the embrace of an optimistic fatalism, and my indulgence is to marry it to those beautiful records from the late ‘60's, despite the fact that I have the totally wrong sideburns for the job. That, too, is on its way. For now though, and on the subject of Cali, I was there in October in my flat in the hills, where I wrote and recorded the attached with my friend Chelsea Williams.

Finally, an answer: yes, the "troubled songs of our youth" help us to know that suffering is the universal language. But to qualify your follow-up, the community is real. The imagined community we create has a big blue logo with a white "f" in the middle and harvests your personal data for marketeers.

It's late. I'm going to read the day's news, disappear into political despair and wake up semi-happy. If it rains tomorrow, I could take my daughter to whatever kid movie is at the mall: art that gives back, in two hours, half of what the popcorn vendor takes away in two seconds.

e,

Once again, you've posed a question I can actually answer without hesitation. I think the opening riff to "Rocks Off" encapsulates, in four measures, the totality of rebellion, sexuality, anger and elation that makes rock and roll equal to life, and hence, what I want to hear always. I anticipate it. Easy.

I was at a pool party with my shy daughter last Saturday when "Superstition" came on the giant speakers. Uncharacteristically, she commented on the drumming, which led to a conversation about Stevie Wonder (by the way, and among other things, my favorite drummer). He was basically our children's age when he had his first hit. It hardly seems possible that our two little e's could address their culture so boldly at such a tender age, in a time when most parents are hesitant to let their little ones cross country lanes on their own at nine years. I'm writing this and thinking two or three things at the same time. Digression. I'll be right back...

I'm here. I had to go to the iTunes store and listen to "The Rapper." for some reason, as I collected Lola songs for you the other day, I was tempted to put "Funky Music" into the playlist (a word we wouldn't have used ten years ago). Had we talked about that song? I don't think so. Growing up near Pittsburgh, Wild Cherry were ubiquitous, but their singer, a guy called Donnie Iris, had a band called the Jaggerz at the end of the Sixties. I was utterly addicted to their big hit, the song I escaped to the market to listen to moments ago. A few years ago, I produced a record by another Pittsburgher, Bill Deasy, and Donnie Iris sang on the song I've attached here. As it turned out, Bill was a pretty fair writer and has had a couple of novels published.

Digression #2. Music is playing as I write. Good music. But I'm thinking about a conversation we had on a tennis court last summer. You were talking about what I perceived as a grand impressionistic process of writing. I asked if you knew how the then-untitled Lola would end when you started writing. You drew a canvas in the air with your hands and told me how you would begin filling it with ideas, that different elements of the picture would draw you to the story, that certain images would dominate and others recede, until the hidden intention became clear and the path from the first page to the last was, if not inevitable, a definitive result of choices. so, this music is playing now, and on this early Saturday morning, I am struck by the rigidity of songwriting, the mathematical adherence to rhyme and scan that characterizes ninety per cent of everything we hear. As a singer and songwriter, I've always felt happily acquiescent to that, perhaps because it limits choice when inspiration is lacking and gives a force to rebel against when ideas are running wild. listening now, though, I'm bothered by this conventionality. In any event, I don't think Coltrane was so constrained. Mass confusion setting in.

Back on course . . . our children, not crossing streets, our adaptation as parents to the perceived risks "out there" and the resultant tightening of the reins. Do you think our children will get to experience what you so beautifully referred to as the "criminal joy" of adolescent freedom that rose and Lana (and we) did, or will they be subtly tethered to compliance by their culture's fears? Does that mean their writing will be wilder as they struggle to break our fear, or does it mean that rock and roll will become. . . boring. It may mean that I need breakfast. Yes, I think that's it. Then. I'm sending my daughter to the store—on her own. Maybe I'll tail her, just in case.

E,

How fitting that I opened my eyes this morning and thought, "where the fuck am I?" I know where I was. I know where I usually am upon waking. It's not that I necessarily had much to drink, but I did spend the night sacrificing my interiority while celebrating my porosity. Thank you for those word . . . interiority complex.

I worked in New York yesterday, finished early, perfectly happy to just go back to Woodstock and watch pre-teen TV with my little one, but a friend was having a rooftop party. There were other friends in town, intersecting on different tours, and degrees of separation were completely useless by two a.m. None of which absolves me of my fatherly or musicianly duties today, hence the iPhone reveille.

Interiority returning. Slowly. Or, maybe that's just sinuses clearing and some slight sense of self, induced by the urgency of unmet responsibilities.

I am not sure there could be a Flaubert or Dickens in an era that demands mastery of social media forms as a requisite skill for authors. I do, however, remember a show called "Fishing with John Lurie," and an episode where Tom Waits got seasick on a rowboat, fishing for trout. As I write, I am resisting the temptation to Google this all to make sure I'm not making it up. If I could make that kind of stuff up, I'd do what you do for a living, so I will trust that I am at least partially accurate in what's left of my memory of that scintillating half-hour of television, and wholly accurate in saying that Melville's publicist would have suffered many rude awakenings, one for each insistence that Herman open a twitter account:

@mobymelville catch me on daily show with jon stewart thursday to discuss my story of sperm-whale fishery #mobydick
@littledickens it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. find out why at amazon.com/buymybook #mybookslongerthanyours
@thecatcherintherye no. #no

Did you know, by the way, that they changed the title of Moby Dick to The Whale in its initial publication so as not to offend the public sensibility. Dicks. I'd laugh about it if I weren't 100% positive that the same would happen today.

As I told you in a previous email, the work of writing songs with Lola has taken me happily out of my usual comfort zone, much in the same way our performances with Amii have. I am humbled in the company of Rebecca, you and Amii, always in awe of your innocent insistence on connecting people. so, if the last thought is mine, it is simply: thank you, on we go, and, attached for your morning pleasure, hallelujah.