is the only song i can play on the piano…. but that’s not what i’m writing about today. yesterday, i wrote about gram parsons and  i kept returning to the post to listen to it and read it about a hundred times. the more time i spent with it, the more humble and vulnerable it made me.

needless to say i was hard pressed to find someone to follow up gram with. i racked my brain, the rolodex of records in my mind, and could not for the life of me come up with anything that sounded as open and vulnerable as gram. and i thought about it for a long time. what happens to the artist’s heart and soul in the recording process? surely i know a million songs where a singer is vulnerable. but almost never can i find a record that translates a genuine feeling of heart and soul and vulnerability.

it occurs to me that perhaps the very act of recording, the purposeful-ness of that act, somehow doesn’t allow for vulnerability. it’s premeditated. i was thinking that every one of those 24 tracks strips away one level of vulnerability and replaces it with a layer of pretentiousness. so by the time you mix down, you’ve completely wrung out every ounce of heart and soul and human emotion that’s hidden somewhere underneath the drums or something.

i have reached no conclusions on that theory, but it is a fact that production in and of itself, has a tendency to gloss up a record and the price we pay for the polish is the loss of emotion…. or so it seems to me today.

suddenly almost out of nowhere, when i had given up all hope of finding a song, one song, that gave me the same feeling that gram can… a singer who could convey real vulnerability, heart, soul, and so much depth that i could feel it as well….. as i was falling asleep, in my head i started singing ‘girls keith,’  tarka’s song.

some of you may be familiar with tarka cordell, if you aren’t you most certainly should be. early this morning i rushed to my ipod to listen to tarka sing ‘girls keith’ and i smiled from the sound of the first guitar; midway through the song, tears were streaming down my face.

tarka’s music should be filed under the rare, the brilliant, the magical. tarka, the man, the musician is held in the most extraordinary place…. he who can cut through those 24 tracks, pre production, mixdown, with vulnerability intact. that is nothing short of miraculous.

as circumstances would have it, i found out this afternoon that today is the second anniversary of tarka’s death. i did not know that and was quite shocked at having spent the entire day with him on my mind, in my ears, in my heart, and in those tears that streamed down my face early this morning. i don’t know why today i needed to write about tarka. i only know that he lives in his music, in my heart, in me.