a poem by t lavois thiebaud
music by t lavois thiebaud with anthony barilla
I wrote, recorded, and filmed this piece in the composer’s studio of a converted cattle barn on a hankering old mountain nestled high above the west coast horizon. I left a life I’d carved into a shape I fit for a gut yes what if across the country at a bad time for staying and a bad time for going I guess. I arrived in May 2020 and spent the better part of the year in relative seclusion in a barn made for artists who were no longer cows and I felt real small and I felt real big. And I read books and took hikes, cooked what we pulled from the garden that day, drank too much wine, played the same side of all the same records all that smokey summer. On clear days I flew and flew and flew a kite. I sang songs and told stories and got sad and got sick and I even got front row tickets to the sold-out lightning show. There were snakes and bobcats and ticks and quail and mama deer and little deer and two whole libraries of books and stuff, a hot tub carved from a redwood tree- big enough for three if you squeeze just a little— a few familiar faces scattered up the mountain, and every now and again a friend with a cold coke in a can if you were lucky and carrying in her teeth the only scrap of gossip for miles around and she lays it at your feet. And so I laughed and I loved and I dreamed and I worried and I wondered and I waited and I watched and I wrote poems and postcards and we ran out of gossip and I ran out of stamps and I fumbled with sounds on the keys I found there— the glossy grand p, a whirring Wurlitzer, that heavy as all fuck brick of a synth I erected from the back of a closet. I never watched the sky before not like that not like there not in all my life how always my eyes would find her every window facing westward and wondering what mirage or mania what medicine or melancholy what moveable magnetism lures a warm-blooded mammal from the hovel and hearth of a heartbreak or a heartmake out into the mouth of the next unknown. How the body crosses the landscape alone. I get by how I get by but here I got by SUV.
- t l t