What? Music? Weekly

Two-year-olds don’t know the danger inherent in ambition, as it lays itself out in the wake of a course of action* is the question, why[?]. If you’re climbing a long hill, you can be strong and focussed, but when the tired starts to weigh your pace, when you start to falter, it coincides with that very question. Why? When you play through a cute little P.A. system in the corner of a massive, empty...

https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/gone https://youtu.be/Cv0H9CIu-a4?si=IaWc3v9iSMXcmpmB This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/where-the-covers-deep https://youtu.be/4j7ug91FUzs?si=mKUfG6FVpPQa8DSr This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This particular song ties so many things together. During the last century there were juke boxes in all the bars full of 45 RPM singles. The place where you interfaced with the Juke box might be all full of mirrors and you could see the little records mechanically take their place on the turntable. Kids in pizza joints used to get quarters from their mom and go pick the same song over and over. I...

This particular song ties so many things together. During the last century there were juke boxes in all the bars full of 45 RPM singles. The place where you interfaced with the Juke box might be all full of mirrors and you could see the little records mechanically take their place on the turntable. Kids in pizza joints used to get quarters from their mom and go pick the same song over and over. I...

This one is from the cutting room floor. Ten years ago, I had started this project. It was big and musical and it was a group of friends and we traveled and played and it ran out of steam, and I chose not to continue to push, for many reasons. I had started working on what I was determined would be a record. It became Donkey Island. We recorded on and off for more than a year before letting it lan...

I wrote this song when I was 25. For the record, I got carded for cigarettes until I was 29. I was by all accounts a kid when I was 25. I did not have financial goals or complex responsibilities. I had to make rent and I needed beer money. The rest of my head space was taken up with dreams. Kids dream differently from grown-ups. The way you imagine the world as a young person is similar to a dream...

I'd say well over 90 percent of the time I'm entirely unaware of how much of a self satisfied, egotistical prick I am. I think if I knew it all the time I'd be crippled by the notion. Oh, and I am well aware that that's a deprecating limiting description intended to keep me from going on as I am that I regurgitate from having heard humans, trusted loved ones and or strangers describe each other th...

Sometimes things become more than what they were created to be. Maybe more often than not. That’s a tough one to guage… in a general sense… about created things. Lets go with songs. I’m not certain Bob Dylan wrote, Blowin in the Wind to be performed as a hymn for a generation in flux. I think he was just a kid who thought of himself as a man that was tired of being looked at as a kid. All he reall...

Firstly, I regret nothing. Sometimes I tell people I didn't learn to talk until I was 34. It's a block off High Street where it used to be. Television and deadbeats out in front and free. Blowin’ down hallways of marching dust where the money never runs out and you don't know who to trust. That glass ceiling 's so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down…you learn to f...

Man, I have been broke. I grew up not poor, but not well to do. My dad's dad was a farmer and my mom's dad was a musician. I mention this because it creates a normalization of not being able to afford more than what is necessary to grow up without. It creates parents who tell their kids that love is more important than toys. It creates kids who grow up thrifty in a world that advertises flashy and...

I have been asked, How do you write? Sometimes, I have been asked in a journalistic way, sometimes a conversational, non chalant, how-do-you-do-that? way, sometimes by other writers. I have gone long periods of time without writing anything, nearly a decade quite recently and in those years I sometimes asked myself. I have judged the songs I write as good or bad or worthy of keeping or throwing aw...

Gentle on my Mind is a great song. I have loved it for a long time. It's notoriously challenging to play and it's one of those American classics like Paul Simon’s Graceland and Woody Guthrie’s This Land. It repeats funny. It's irregularly regular. I had learned the shapes and the changes and got part way through learning the words then quit. The guy that plays the mandolin parts is great and he pr...

The way I remember it, and I have never found it, the first line is a smarmy cute thing David Bowie said in some TV interview, “pretenders borrow, artists steal.” After recalling that to a thousand strangers in small groups it came to light that it was Stravinski who said it. There's a thing I do. I start to learn someone else's piece that's a little out of my skill set and I get partway there and...

It was 1999. In the 90s I’d made a bunch of cassette only records and tried to get booked at all the places that'd have a guy that played guitar and wrote his own songs. I recorded stuff at home on a 4-track. It was a heady time. I had long hair and I could drink. I followed a girl I was into out to the west coast, Seattle and I wrote letters home. There were rock stars in the bars that were my sa...

There are so many debts of gratitude I owe. It can get hard to remember gratitude when the kind of compassion you have to practice involves forgiving things that have aspects like, they had no choice or they know not what they do. So today and in the context of this song, I’m drumming the gratitude drum. I have gratitude for inspiration and comfort and the ways I have defined home and community. I...

Man, I could get philosophical on this one, but I don't think it’s the right move. If you are willing to overlook things like eating meat and not really having studied Buddhism per se, I am a secular Buddhist. I like the ideas in it that I have come across and I don't have to go to any meetings or throw money at it. I like the idea of trying to be present, because I struggle with it, and that’s wh...

It's been good to try to remember what was going on in my life at the times this one was written and then when it was recorded. The Iowa Opera House Project was just a twinkle in my saucey, bloodshot eye. It had begun, I suppose the IOHP, but was not yet under full sail. I am listening to it now for the first time in a long time.. I finished it at Helmer’s house on his gear during the pandy shutdo...

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

America is a vast place. I read last week that barely 30% of the land that in the contiguous United States has people living on it. I have no reason not to believe it. Depending on where you are I supose one could think there is a place you could go if where you are isn’t safe, or if you needed to run, you could escape. “The West” can be visualized as rolling short grass prarie with mountains in t...

Everybody quits eventually, is a statement that is true. You can argue it’s not, but eventually you will lose. Metaphores are fun, huh? They are the verbal punctuation reality needs to be properly understood sometimes. They ask a reader or a listener to look at what they are seeing from a different angle. A broader understandong can stem from a metaphore. A secret you might need only some people t...

My girlfriend has a horse. It's amazing for people to get what they always wanted. It is complex to succeed. Most of the examples that come readily to mind of people getting what they always wanted fall into a regretable midlife crisis variety or a make a wish foundation variety. Rarely do we get regaled with tales of the ordinary I-saved-up-for-a-bike or I-have-paid-my-debt-completely variety. I...

I hope you make art. I think everyone does. Some people put effort into conforming. It's a natural inclination to be in the pack you're in. But you can't do it exactly the same; if it's not flattery, it’s copying. That difference, that flare that makes the group member an individual- that's art. Everyone does art. All the things you try are art. When you look back at old pictures or videos from ye...

Two-year-olds don't know the danger inherent in ambition, as it lays itself out in the wake of a course of action* is the question, why[?]. If you're climbing a long hill, you can be strong and focussed, but when the tired starts to weigh your pace, when you start to falter, it coincides with that very question. Why? When you play through a cute little P.A. system in the corner of a massive, empty...

Hill country isn't the mountains. There's a whole different kind of snow at elevation, but in the planes, in places where there's hills the snow drifts out past the edges of things. Shapes change. The landscape may no longer be represented by the shape of the ground when it's all blown snow. It's beautiful, but it ain't true. It might be inches deep. It might be four five feet and you won't know t...