I find the words
the music is looking for.
For those who need their message carried on breath, rhythm, and the human voice.
The song is what the poem becomes when it needs to be heard rather than read.
Music was the first language. Before the political sociology, before the memoir, before the columns — there was the song. It arrived as a gift, through the influence of mam'ncane — her aunt — and it never left. It was contained for a time, deferred by the weight of other expectations. But it found its way out anyway. It always does.
The lyric is a precise instrument. It is not the poem — it knows it will be carried by a voice, shaped by breath, stretched and compressed by melody. It has to hold its meaning under those conditions. It has to survive being sung. That requires a different kind of writing: words that are chosen not only for what they say but for how they move in the mouth, how they land on the ear, how they open or close a phrase.
I write lyrics from the inside of a subject — from the subsoil of it. Not the obvious line. Not the first thing the melody suggests. The line that is true enough to be worth singing.
Lyric writing is a collaborative art. The words serve the music and the music serves the words — neither one is the passenger. I come into a collaboration as a listener first. What is this piece trying to say? What has it not yet found the language for? What does this melody need to become what it is reaching for?
I write across registers — devotional, personal, philosophical, political. The range comes from the same source as all the other work: the Subsoil philosophy. The willingness to go beneath the surface of a subject and stay there until something true becomes available. That is where the lyric lives — not at the first impression but at the honest one.
If you are working on something that has found its sound but not yet its words — or something that has its words but not yet its truth — let's work together.