Who Are You Singing For?

I know that to you I'm just another body in the dark room, as separate from your bright stage-lit motion as some law firm in New York State. And I know that what I should be doing (what everyone else is doing, what I came here to do) is listening to your music, letting it rock me with a little motion, letting it move me to a little emotion, hearing it, feeling it, thinking it.

So I'm sorry. It's just that I'd rather cipher through the music to you, watch you, find the back wall of this song and figure out what's in your head from there. I want to know who you're singing for. I want to know if this was a song that came from four a.m. and an interrupted slumber or 1 a.m. and too much beer. Or is this an afternoon song, too tired to run, too awake to lie still? I want to know what you think of as you sing, or if you can think of anything but the adrenaline and the movement of your hands over your guitar. I want to know what you want us to think. We're a little hung over on the static side of this room; I wonder if you'd rather we all pulled our faces onto your eyes.

I'd like to find my way inside your fingers, feel the impulses that make you move to this chord and that one, then climb up your arm, over your shoulder, down into the cavity of your lungs and find the pendulum, the pressure that animates your voice. To feel the beat the way you feel it, charged with meaning, in your moving feet. To scrape the upper edge of your skull, the residual side associations you have with your lyrics.

And if you sing all night, until the rest of your band drops out, leaving you pulling out notes from your lonely guitar like a magician doing tricks with grey and brown handkerchiefs, until all the audience deserts you but me- still enthralled by the subtlety and sparrow-colors of your sleight of hand- I will come closer and closer, and you will get lower and lower. And then, we will be sitting on the edge of the stage, and I will be just close enough not to impede your guitar, and you will be just low enough not to reverse our positions. And I will ask you then, over your notes, "Who are you singing for?"