Karen Solie may be known for her poetry, but judging from this essay, her prose is no slouch either. As she details her trip to (and immersion in) the music scene of Austin, Texas, she pulls together disparate strands, braiding loss and joy and creativity into a single stirring chord. All the more affecting for its spareness.
To cover a song you need to study it, understand its phrasing and changes. You need to dwell in its caesuras, hear how your voice might carry there. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind. The process is intuitive and technical, and what I learned from studying songs is that technique and intuition develop together and can’t be separated. Inside this relationship you learn your range and, with it, your limitations. If you can’t, say, lower your voice on its rope down to where the first words of “I Fall to Pieces” live as though at the bottom of a well, and if you can’t, at the apex of the first verse, allow its confession of failure to escape with the high note out of the aperture, follow it with your voice almost the way you would with your eye—then you should carry on practicing awhile longer in private, out of respect. You learn respect for how difficult it is to make a song seem simple, for the mechanics that make possible an immediacy of feeling, and you learn to love the difficulty. I can’t find it, we’d say, searching for the note, the timing, the tone. I can’t quite get there. The apprenticeship of covers never ends. It’s not about imitation, though may need to begin there. You can’t get creative with the problems songs pose until you can identify those problems. You can’t create your own songs, your own sets of problems, until you can get creative with the problems you already have.
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