talk into your phone, and enunciate

     There's a new movie coming out called A Hidden Life.  It's about an Austrian farmer who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II.

     The film's director, Terrence Malick, "creates spaces rather than produces scenes," according to one observer.


     Talking about spaces rather than the thing on the spaces put me in mind of Keith Richards discussing music and the space between the notes.

[excerpt from Richards' autobiography Life] -- What can you do with those three chords?  Tell it to John Lee Hooker; 

most of his songs are on one chord.  Howlin' Wolf stuff, one chord, and Bo Diddley.  

It was listening to them that made me realize that silence was the canvas.  Filling it all in and speeding about all over the place was certainly not my game and it wasn't what I enjoyed listening to.  

With five strings you can be sparse; that's your frame, that's what you work on.  "Start me Up," "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," "Honky Tonk Women," all leave those gaps between the chords.  That's what I think "Heartbreak Hotel" did to me.

It was the first time I'd heard something so stark.  I wasn't thinking like that in those days, but that's what hit me.  It was the incredible depth, instead of everything being filled in with curlicues.  To a kid of my age back then, it was startling.  With the five-string it was just like turning a page; there's another story.  And I'm still exploring.

-------------------- There's something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it.  

We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute.  

The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. 

It echoes something in the human body.  

So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us.  The human body will feel rhythms even when there's not one.  

Listen to "Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley.  One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it.  It's just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm.  Rhythm really only has to be suggested.  Doesn't have to be pronounced.

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