This weekend I’m officially launching my new project “Parlando – Where Music and Words Meet.” Parlando will allow you to subscribe to a regular release of short music with spoken word pieces deliverable through podcast subscription and documented with blog posts.
Why Music and Words?
One of my favorite attempts to define poetry is to call it “Words that want to break into song”.
What is it that poetry wants to do by striving to sing? I think it wants to fold the pure pleasure of sound and rhythm into words. It wants that like a lover wants their beloved. It’s not some clever plan. Poetry’s desire here is not mere technique, not some tactic to dress up words in a fancy way. It just wants it.
And what about music? Well, it’s got its drives, its desires too. It wants to find its logic, its pattern. It’s always speaking to time, saying to time that music knows better than time itself how time sounds and moves. Music is always explaining to time what time contains.
My plan here will be to bring you pieces from two to ten minutes in length. The music will be as varied as the talents of my collaborators and I can make it. I’ll be using words from non-copyright infringing sources during the first few months, although I would like to include more recent work when I can figure out how to navigate the rights issues. In the first month you’ll also start to hear music and words from Dave Moore, a fine writer and performer who I’ve worked with for decades.
You may not like everything you hear here, but it’s my hope that this project will bring something new into being, a meeting that will surprise and intrigue you.