Tonight was one of those nights where a song and a musician provided a span of the bridge that will take us through that still-distant stretch of adolescence to whatever conversation there will be when we sit down to share music on the other side.
After nearly a year of listening to an emerging pop-folk master named Paul Johnson, who commercially plies is craftsmanship under the guise of Canyon City, Gabriel was asking to hear, "The one that starts, 'I woke before the sun rose...'" during his bath and asked for it again as I turned him in for the night. As we went on to listen to said song, titled "Needles and Pins," eleven to twelve times in a row until his breathing finally eased into the rhythm that portended sleep we talked and talked - the lad not merely stalling sleep, but asking questions that would not come from anywhere else.
"What is grace?" and, in response to my attempt to capture it for a 5-year-old, "What is a virtue?"
We lay in the dark exchanging favorite passages of the song. He, the chorus, with its fairy tale mention of plastic crowns and the certainty about where home is; me the more adult world evocations about "wear(ing) a tie to go to work and tell(ing)... lies like everything's okay" and "los(ing) some keys in the dust." With each repetition of the song in the dark, Gabriel's questions continued about the song, the individual words that emerged and caught his ear more easily with each listening and I'm sure there were unasked questions planted there to bloom later about music, craft, poetry and love that he will ask when he has the words in the weeks and years ahead.
I have every confidence that Mr. Johnson/Canyon City will have a wonderful career ahead of him as songs such as "Needles and Pins" continue to find their path to ears and hearts in the days ahead. If it has not happened already, he will nightly have audience members who will tell him that he wrote their song, whether it is the one they make love to, danced for the first time as husband and wife or any other milestone in life of someone following their romantic path to one-and-onlys that he describes so aptly in song and song again. In about ten years or so, there will also be a 60-year-old man with his 15-year-old son -- the lad possibly doing a great job of portraying adolescent indifference to anything the old man springs on him or indulging in some patience with me for the night -- and, with a wink, I'll simply say that I used his first album to lull that lad asleep not so long ago.
Thanks Paul.
