What? Music? Weekly

Sometimes you start to make something and you don't see what it is until it's out, as it were. I believe that often a song isn't something you make so much as it's something that reveals itself to you as whole cloth if not in meaning alone. I'm not retirement age but the first line sang itself out, “I’ve given up days down at the place.” And then, sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy, seemed an...

Sometimes I like it more than you do and sometimes you like it more than I do and English isn't sophisticated enough for us to know the difference in any real way. You have to believe it’s true in order for the truth to be true. When an english speaker wonders, they wonder in English. Is this any good? Someone might answer yes and that yes can be the truth to that person but in a very real way the...

I got these new bar clips to hang stereo pair bars from theater battens. I had to make sure they worked so I made a little recording spot right where I take my coffee in the morning. Then I laid out this chestnut. It's on the album Donkey Island with dueling fiddles. Worth a listen. I checked it out to remind myself how the lyrics go. https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/as-night-falls Buy yourse...

I wrote this song last week. [first week of December 2025] Sometimes I write songs because it's an elegant way to say something you can't really say. Sometimes the example a person is in your life is a gift, something that broadens your understanding of yourself as renewable, as someone who doesn't need to be what you have always been. It's hard not to be what people know you to be. It's hard to a...

I used to do these in-studio spots at the college radio station where I live back when radio was still a thing. There was a DJ there who had worked at a public radio station in Chicago the summer before he started college. I was older than he was but barely. I had long curly hair. I was always hung over and a little high on weed. And unbeknownst to me the staff at the station all referred to me as...

This song was written and recorded 25 years ago for an album of the same age. I was old. I was 30. I was thinking about the wrinkley old b******s who I had split bills with in coffee shops when I was in my 20s, the small town players who never ammounted to anything and got old, the hapless weirdos who kept on keeping on after it was no longer even remotely possible for them to come to any quantifi...

This one was kind of a throw away song. We played it live, but I’m not certain it’s about anything. It’s simple and catchy, and I have had people tell me, “I know what you meant there.” But it’s been forever and I truly meant to ask, what I meant because I am not certain. It's great. I suppose it starts with my unwillingness to be observed. Maybe you are like this. I wish I could be invisible some...

Man… I’m not sure how to approach this one. A song is a lot of things- It’s like the social media version of yourself, a shell, a presentation. It can be like a prayer or a wish. A song can be a confession, the kind of utterance you make to clear your soul. I think there’s a certain amount of magic in a song, not unlike anything you give your focus to. There's a term for when you learn a new word...

I have uttered the phrase, “..because my momma raised me right..” in response to being asked why I did something the way I did it. I think that that is probably true, but I have still managed to acheive the status of situational shitheel enough to wonder if I am not defined as one to certain individuals. I have been short fused. I have at times even decided to operate with enmity, which, though th...

Recording to an 8-track reel to real machine when everyone had time, I had laid down a number of things performed on this unique sounding harmony tenor guitar. The top of it was split. One of the ladder braces under the front, under the strings was not just broken- it was gone. The string tension was loosely goosey and the action was low and it needed to be played sweetly. It was touchy. I loved i...

I took a little vacation. I went to war-torn Portland, the place presidentially purported to be burning. It's funny because sometimes social media is spreading inflammatory b******t, and sometimes it's the source for true, on-the-scene reporting. More often than not in my 55 years I have seen a preponderance of attempted truth coming down the conduits that connect the world to me: internet, TV new...

How do you see yourself? When you get well into a complicated task or a long term project do you see yourself or start to see yourself as a character in the project, reflecting the characteristics of the people who came before you chasing the same goals? I think I do. For the same reason that- kids who were into the movie Rattatouille or older kids who really dug Anthony Bourdain's whole deal, tak...

I used to introduce this song by telling the audience that it took as long to write as it takes to play it. It's true. It refers to a night spent in a bar called the Cloud Room which was on the top of the Camlin Hotel in downtown Seattle and from when it was built in 1926 until the year 2000 had a clear view of the Sound. It was glass on three sides. The beers were expensive and the clientele was...

I have always been a quitter. I have successfully quit smoking cigarettes nearly a dozen times. I give up. A thing that I value in songwriting is the kind of connection you get to an artist who has decided to be fully honest in spirit if not wholely. You can tell when something comes from the middle of a person, from inside them. People have a subconscious understanding of the intimacy of an unspo...

Portland is radical. During the pandemic shutdowns a part of the city got cordoned off by some radicals. It got some national attention. There was a big vocal effort to get the police defunded. People were being pulled off the street by paramilitary dudes in uniforms with no insignia into unmarked black vans. There has been some pretty radical progressive drug policy reform and unreform. There is...

People get forgiven. People you love get to get away with things. There are limits of course. You can't let people walk all over you. There's a point at which the allowance you give someone you can't fault out of respect or love becomes them abusing you. You can't let it go that far. It's an esoteric set of parameters, Wax Lips, Wax Wings. Wax Wings by their very nature keep you from flying close...

This one has a tragic history. I wrote it from an honest place. It took about as long to write as it takes to play it. Sometimes they just fall out. The band was still a thing but my life was a mess. It's like a love song for the type of swinging heathan I was and the sort of partnering that seemed to happen amicably at the time. Being the kind of “public figure” that I was, dating harlots briefly...

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I suppose I have mentioned The Country Blues as a thing. It’s a thing. The Blues form came to America from West Africa in the unfortunate way that most of the cultural things that came to America from Africa came. Country music came on a long strange path from India. Carnatic music left india as little groups of string players that exchanged melodic “solos” and went from place to place to place, m...

This song is on a relatively long list of songs I mean to learn how to play. I played a week ago friday and I started and stopped a song I wrote and breifly explained that I had just learned it. The audience laughed. I bet half of those people had seen me play that song before. “Its a 25 year old song!” I excused. It was a 30 year old song I hadn't played in probably 20 years before the week prece...

There is this song that gets called Country Blues that was first recorded by Doc Boggs in 1928. You have heard parts of it in other songs or as other songs. It’s a lament detailing what happens to gentle people when they move somewhere where the people are on a scale of gentle - urbane, more down the way toward urbane. If you come from where people wear the clothes their momma made, you take what...

This song is called: The Belmonte It was a special time. I was in a cool band. I was pretty high most of the time and really high some of the time. Like fifties professional drinkers- you drink a little bit all day and then you have a nice dinner and get hammered with your friends. I drank, but it was only part of the blend I was applying. I have always been and still am fascinated with the kind o...