Redwood Musical Quotes

music is the language of the soul’.

You have something to protect and I have something to destroy. You escape into music and I’m trapped there. You hid from me and I still found you. Where you end, I begin.” He wraps long fingers around the back of my neck. “We may not be from the same world, Cadence, but we’re made of the same freaking soul.

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels With her meagre pale demoralized daughter. Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun And saying that when she was first married She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. (It is empty now, the roof has fallen But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; The place is now more solitary than ever before.) "When I was nursing my second baby My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies. Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler, Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. I had more joy from that than from the others." Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road With market-wagons, mean cares and decay. She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows, I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

Silence shudders and dies. Music fills my ears. My own creation. My own twisted beast. I form it from nothing but my own pain and torture. Dark, pulsing notes. Lashing chords. A song that’s all about bleeding and destruction. It twines with my heart and gives me energy when I had none before. I play until my fingers start throbbing. Then I stop. Spent.

People evolve. I don’t see why music can’t either. Music is a reflection of us. Of who we are, where we come from and who we want to be.” “It’s also a measure of perfection. If we don’t play it exactly right, we don’t win.” I scrunch my nose. “I think our obsession with holding on to things, trying to preserve them so they’re exactly the way they always were, can keep us from seeing what’s important.

Turbo Sasquatch, or T-Squatch, was a Redwood original, a hardrock pop-punk bhangra electro surf hybrid that did highly danceable sambas. It was a supergroup, a mighty Voltron formed from three other successful local bands. Sometimes they had a dhol drum and horn section depending on the lineup, becoming Ultra Mega Turbo Sasquatch, a musical macrophage mashup absorbing other bands at will. They played only by the light of the full moon and were not to be missed under any circumstances. “The only band that matters,” it was said.

I’ve never felt like this before. I’d give it all to her. Everything. Let her sink into all the places where only music was allowed.

Listening to Redwood play, I thought about how the medium of music is time, how if time stopped, a painting would exist unchanged but music would vanish, like a wave without an ocean.

Beneath a common banner of classically liberal ideals, countless tastes and traditions may mingle and mutate into ever new and exciting flavors. Thus would be born a homeland where the Sufi dances with the Breslover round the neon jungle of Times Square, where the Baptist of Alabama nods along to the merry melodies of Klezmer, where the secular humanist combs the Christian gospels and poems of Rumi for their many pearls of wisdom, where the Guatemalan college student learns to read Marx and Luxemburg in their original German, where the Russian refugee freely markets her own art painted in the style of Van Gogh and Monet, where the Italian chef tosses up a Lambi stew for his Haitian wife’s birthday while the operas of Verdi and Puccini play on his radio, where two brothers in exile share the wine of the Galilee and Golan while listening to the oud music of Nablus and Nazareth, where the Buddhist and the stoner hike through redwood trails and swap thoughts of life and death beneath a star-spangled sky. In this America, only the polyglot sets the lingua franca, the bully pulpit yields to the poets café, decent discourse finds favor over any cocksure shouting match, no library is so uniform as to betray to a tee its owner’s beliefs, no citizen is so selfish as to live for only themself nor so weak of will as to live only for others, and such a land—as yet a dream deferred, but still a dream we may seize—such a land would truly be worthy of you and me.