Someone Once Told Me

Fiction by Chris Campanioni

That anyone who likes Talking Heads is by nature a good person but the person who told me that was a dickhead, so I didn’t believe him at first, or at all.

At least he is right about one thing, I thought, as “This Must Be the Place” crackled on the vinyl and fire wavered or whistled over David Byrne’s warbling croon. Talking Heads is the best thing I’ve ever heard. Maybe that isn’t true, not really. But if I told you this, you would believe me.

Music has always been beside me. We used to stand around the kitchen and put our hands on one another’s hips and dance and sing, making our own music as my mom made carne con papa or picadillo with white rice and black beans and a mound of tostones. We were hungry.

LEARNING TO PLAY THE GUITAR

Poetry by Megan Merchant

for Max, age 7

Begin as if there is no                     wrong way—

slap the strings,            rushthem,

slow-pinch    one/two    at a time,

make the whole body crackle.

(Note moments where the sounds come at you as music).   Then erase.

Victoria Theodore and the Musical Life

Interview by Rebecca Laclair

Photo: Jay Julio

When Victoria Theodore began taking piano lessons just before her twelfth birthday, one of the first songs she learned was “Overjoyed,” the 1985 R&B single by Stevie Wonder. The song came naturally to her—as natural as the environmental percussion track in the hit’s background, layers of sound emanating from crickets and birds, ocean waves, and pebbles dropping into a pond. “I had just started studying piano,” Theodore recalls, “and since I'm a strong reader, I bought the sheet music and the album.”

They say those who wish to sing always find a song, but Theodore’s choice led the chanteuse to find her mentor. In 2007, Theodore joined Stevie Wonder’s world tour as keyboardist and background singer. She accompanied Wonder and other musical icons around the world, and performed for President Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth.

“Whenever I perform ‘Overjoyed’ with Stevie, I experience pure euphoria and magic. I think to myself, ‘I'm playing one of the most beautiful songs ever, with the man who composed it. Pretty amazing.’” The song is her personal anthem—her inspiration for creating music, and helping others to find their voice. As Ella Fitzgerald said, “I sing like I feel.”

Prince: On Alchemy and Architecture

Essay by Nat Tracey-Miller

Photo: Scott Penner

After a rattled day trying to regroup, I’ve cobbled together a few of my thoughts on the death of The Purple One. The feeling of loss here is not just because Prince made some of the greatest music of all time (although he is certainly high on that list), but because he carved the world around him to fit his own vision. Out of all the rock and roll greats I could list off, only Bowie and Prince crafted entire solar systems to their fit own specifications, because the boundaries of our own weren’t big enough to contain their imaginations. In each case, what should have logically been outsider music became universally adored canon, performed on the biggest stages in the world and influential to thousands of artists who came after, and now they’re both gone within three months. We didn’t just lose musicians; we lost alchemists and architects. Even their worst records were self-confident sojourns into the unknown, worthy of adulation just on the merits of their ambition.

The Day Ziggy Died

Poetry by Justin Karcher

It is 7:15 AM in Buffalo a Monday Morning after the 73rd Golden Globe Awards And I’m hung-over smoking on the back deck And the snow is softly falling like kites with no fight left in ‘em A winter weather advisory has been issued for Western New York

And I have to go waste away in an office somewhere north of the city Where there’s a picture of the Virgin Mary on my desk and her bright eyes Like dinosaur lighthouses are always shining a spotlight on my complacency And it’s sad because rebellion used to live in me somewhere but it’s gone into hiding And I know the Virgin is trying to tell me it’s gonna be okay that there’s a meteor In the sky with my name on it and one day it’ll crash into me and wow extinction So I should live while the living’s kinda alright and do all I can to make my mistakes Look immaculate while I’m still fertile enough to be knocked up by other people’s mistakes

This is the Best Part.

Fiction by Chris Campanioni

The moment before it begins. Holding the door for you like a lover would.

Everything has to start somewhere and somewhere begins on my palm. Your shirt smells of you and I hold it to my face and through your smell I feel my lips and now I exist. Sweet sugary water on my tongue, over my mouth and lips. Sweet syrupy river of blood and flesh, of breath and spit, and what there’s not a name for.

You turn the music on and draw the blinds and feel real good. Anything can happen, you think, except you know what will happen and you’ve planned it out that way.

Songbird

Poetry by Ophelia Leong

It is a toss up between

A smoky dive and a midnight bar

Pouty puckered pomegranate lips perfect the scene

As she steps out of the sleek car

His sweet mistress songbird opens her mouth, begins

Possible Reasons Why Dan Thought I Would Like Rickie Lee Jones’s Album ‘Pirates’

Poetry by Jessy Randall

because of the line “the girls like to touch it just to find out if it works”

because of the line “if you promise you won’t make so much … noise”

because of the cat-in-heat howl sound of her voice in some places in some songs

because of the line “we should move to the west side, they still believe in things, that give a kid, half a chance”

because of the line “the only ones” repeated in Living It Up, foretelling the title of a book my son would one day recommend to me, which we would both love and which is about time travel

because Dan can time travel

because Dan is magic

Radio Head (Excerpt)

Fiction by Rebecca Laclair

CHAPTER ONE

Shelby

White-coats say I’m crazy.

I never met anyone else who can do it, get an earful of everything that makes up a person just by touching them. It’s a one-sided conversation, a blind confessional, listening to a stranger who can’t hear me. And lonely.

Music is my only friend. How’s that for crazy?

Of All the Suburban Dreams

Poetry by Daniel M. Shapiro

You start each sentence with before, a nod to the nostalgia of people who act like they didn’t win. You picture a city without crime, a city with more people who speak your language. In books, the hardest choice used to be what hat to wear, which vegetable paired best with which meat from a once-living being. You love the highway bypass high above the city, the route that avoids check cashers, tax preparers, furniture rentals. There’s so much to skip between work and home. Twenty minutes from the city, the city, your neighborhood comforts you with dogs that roam the streets, dogs that feast on unfinished business. You retire to the safety of home, the living room surrounded by boxes you won’t open. The downtown you boarded up, the communities you filed under after, they know everyone by name, know whose backs to watch.

Chainés

Poetry by Sarah Clayville

It begins with the slow unwinding of the melody,

When she throws her dance shoes

Over the barbed fence

Preferring the barefoot notes of the pebbles

Under her calloused toes.

A Brief Examination of High and Mighty Low’s “Blackbird”

Interview by Rebecca Laclair

What’s your jam? Maybe you heard your latest fave last night at the club. Or is your best-loved song an old favorite? Many music fans create playlists or vinyl collections featuring songs marking a significant time, or a rite of passage. The beginning of a relationship. Or its end. A song played on repeat in the privacy of headphones or on your morning commute is, for that moment, yours alone. What you listen to forms a lens calibrating your worldview. When one powerful song becomes “my jam,” it’s the manifestation of your own anthem.

It’s Great to be Home

Poetry by Justin Karcher

It’s music to my ears Drunk on Ballantine’s and machete moonbeams And choking on my own swordfish trombone Across the street, there’s a hooker chasing after another hooker Like it’s the carrying of the Olympic Torch The clicking of their heels on the pavement is like some Morse code of loneliness

How to Attract Hummingbirds on the Last Day of Your Life

Poetry by Justin Karcher

Last night at a party, Naomi displayed her cleavage In this strapless low-cut little black dress I think I’m still turned on and bacteria is clinging to the mind Looking out the window, morning seems beyond repair Abandoned cars, electrical workers wandering in the dark Hungry hummingbirds crawling on their hands and knees The howling of Soviet space dogs two yards over The canine cosmonauts are caught up in a torrid infatuation with Taylor Swift She barely knows they’re alive, but the stage-struck beasts can’t shake it off

Guides

Essay by Jill LaBrack

On a recent Sunday night my wife and I drove north from New Haven, Connecticut to Northampton, Massachusetts to see the singer-songwriter Tanya Donelly. She was participating in Robin Lane's Songbird Sings, a benefit for women subjected to violence. After a tough New England winter that paired eternal snowfall with freezing temperatures, this early May evening was thankfully on the warm side.

Our first stop was supper. In my youthful days attending club shows, I never bothered with the triviality of sustenance if arriving less than two hours before the first act went on stage. I wanted to be stationed right up front, so I prepared by anxiously smoking cigarettes in the growing line outside. Now, I eat regularly and eschew cigarettes for vitamins. I also reluctantly had to admit that smoking was not quelling my nerves, as cool as I tried to play it back then.

Michete: Strolling Rap’s Left Hand Path

Interview by B.R. Yeager

Call your girlfriend / Tell her that it's over / Got you switching teams / So they call me Red Rover. Synthetic pep-rally kick drums and hand claps intermingle with pins and needles arpeggio, while rapper/producer Michete spits line after line about “targeting a straight man and persuading him to come to the dark side.” I'm the type of bitch to make you lose your religion / Going all night trying every position. It's all a gloriously queered, devil worshipping take on ratchet music.

This Must be the Place

Poetry by Chris Campanioni