I Choose Not To Give Energy To

As I Started Writing About Loss And Grief, I Was Taking What Felt Unmanageable And Using My Songwriting, My Sense Of Poetry And Discipline, To Try And Make It Manageable.

My Dad Had More Compassion Than Me. He Was Nonjudgmental. He Didn't Care Where You Stood Politically. He Just Took You As A Person On Face Value. He Could Love All Stripes, And That's Why All Stripes Claim Him. He Didn't Judge.

When I Was Eleven I Stopped Dreaming The Dreams That Didn't Come True, I Stopped Talking To People Who Didn't Listen, I Lost Hope And I Retreated. I Assumed That The Root Of The Problem Was That I Was Too Strange For The Real World. That Being The Case, I Created A Charming And Dynamic Personality To Make The Necessary Forays Into The Outside, And I Kept My Strangeness For Myself; My Own Peculiar Jewels Under Lock And Key.

Celtic Music Is Part Of The Language In Scotland And Ireland, Where Every Kid And Grandparent Knows Those Songs, Music By The Likes Of Woody Guthrie And Hank Snow Is Getting Entrenched Here. They Are Part Of Our Cultural Language. It's Part Of A Living Treasure. It Doesn't Just Belong To A Museum.

As John Adams Said, All Democracies Will Eventually Self-destruct. We Seem To Be Doing It Very Quickly.