| Description |
Songs After America depends upon the fact that each song was written in the order in which it appears. By emerging in a chronological series, each song plays an equally projective role that results in a consequence or effect. One of these effects is sound. Sound generates sound by reverberation and echo, and this activity creates polyphony. The concern of this book is with building the only company any of us wants to keep, a company of love. If this project has any courage whatsoever, it is not because of its wanting love, but its seeking after it. These songs must be innocent and honest, because if they are not, as the grail legend reminds us, the object of their quest will disappear. So, as E. Dickenson tells us in the epigraph, there is no time to stop because this is a business of love, and the business of love is urgent. It is this urgency I am attempting to explore, the urgency that makes life a life of love and love a life of possibility. Love, being possible, will eventually multiply until it is abundant and various, like the imagination, a large thing that can grow larger. The imagination needs room, a space for the new and ever-expanding heart of the mind. Love and imagination headed west, and the songs in this book followed. Songs After America is simply a record to say this happened-America is happening-we followed it here. Regardless of politics, America remains a home for the imagination, a wild place that finds its light not in the setting sun but at the horizon toward which our sun sets. This book, I hope, reminds our heroes that they still have a place to go. |
