Translator: Ian Edwards Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
(Electric piano tones)
When you're reaching for something,
or running away from something,
or both at the same time,
and you hit the end of the road ...
When the shoreline literally stops you in your tracks ...
Your dreams and your fears ricochet out of your body
and rush across the water toward the horizon line,
and you stand and you watch,
and you wonder and hope,
and you start to breath as if for the very first time.
(Music)
♪ I tripped over myself on the ...
way to nowhere
Hanging onto love
that I couldn't spare
To find there's no cure for all these doubts
So ...
Mostly
I'm not around
I watch the night like an injured hawk
Thinking of the prey
that I once caught
Knowing my days are counting down
So ...
Mostly
I'm not around
I looked up at God and I said,
"When do I get out?"
God glared back and gave me a frown
So, I'm on this shelf
at the lost and found
Mostly
I'm not around
Mostly
I'm not around ♪
So, if you want to find something new,
you have to be willing to get lost
and leave behind at least one familiar thing,
maybe every familiar thing.
And after living in New York City for almost 20 years
and thinking of myself as a lifelong New Yorker,
who would probably die there,
and having been drawn to New York by all the things most people hate,
the noise and the rush and the tall buildings and the crowds and the smells,
I chose to get lost in Provincetown,
a town of 2,700 registered voters,
a fishing village, an artists' colony, a gay enclave and tourist town
all rolled into one, at the end of the road,
at the tip of Cape Cod, surrounded on three sides by water,
with only two main streets.
I had no plans to leave New York, the place I loved and called home.
And as a singer-songwriter,
I thought New York City was the place you had to be.
New York City was where you played "the" clubs,
and met "the" people, and got "the" deals.
But I did have this little fantasy in the back of my head
of going somewhere quiet, on my own creative retreat,
and writing full time for a few months,
a luxury I couldn't afford in the city.
So, I put all of my stuff in storage in Brooklyn
and I came to Provincetown for four months,
ten years ago.
My plan was to write the next great American rock album
In four months.
But what I didn't see, what I couldn't plan,
was that by getting lost here in Provincetown,
even with all the confusion and fear
that come with going off script in your own life,
or probably, because of that confusion,
new creative pathways and possibilities opened up for me
that I couldn't have imagined for myself,
that exploded my assumptions
of how my singer-songwriter life was supposed to go.
What I couldn't see was that I would spend five summers street-performing -
or "busking," as the pros call it -
which means that I played 50 to 60 two-hour sets each summer
to thousands of tourists from all over the world,
the equivalent of a national tour each year,
reaching far more people and playing far more hours
than I could have in "the" clubs in New York.
What I couldn't see was that, one day,
an award-winning theater artist would sit down on a bench
and listen to me sing a song on the street,
and ask,
"Do you want to be in a play?"
Which would bring acting back into my life,
a love I thought was buried in my past.
And what I couldn't see
was that in the process of writing and recording two albums,
my vision would morph from quirky, yet pretty straight-forward, indie folk rock
to embrace more eclectic and expansive song forms and sound textures.
And what I can see now,
having walked through the door
of these various creative opportunities and challenges,
is that my idea of how to be a writer and performer
had been getting in the way of me being a writer and performer.
Getting lost is disorienting.
And believe me,
I was plenty disoriented my first few years in Provincetown,
even with just two main streets.
But while I was asking myself,
"What the hell have you done?" and, "How long are we staying here?",
I was already forming new writing routines
and coming at my work from different perspectives,
because it's precisely the disorientation of getting lost,
the discomfort and confusion we all want to avoid,
that can break open your ideas
of how you should be living or should be creating,
and can help you uncover passions that have probably always been there,
just hidden or obscured.
Provincetown's influence on my work isn't literal.
I don't watch the sunset and then go home and write a song about the sunset.
I don't play guitar in a live rock drag show
and then go home and write songs about drag queens ...
yet.
But in the dead of winter,
if you go out to the beach
at exactly the moment that the bottom of the sun touches the horizon line,
and you start walking,
you'll witness the sun reflect its magic across the sky as it slides westward,
and the ocean will mirror that light show
and then shadow up its own blues and greens and blacks.
And pretty soon it's dusk,
and you're hanging in the moment that was the day and will be the night.
And slowly, imperceptibly,
you can't really see anymore,
and you find that it's your hearing telling you where to walk,
not your sight,
that the sound of the waves hitting the shoreline is guiding your feet.
And those dreams and fears that had shot out of your body
start filtering back to you across the ocean through the salt air.
Only now,
they're intermingled with the ghosts of the Yankee and Portuguese sailors
whose ships wrecked on the shoals just off shore,
with the artists who followed the light to the end of the road,
with the poets and playwrights and novelists
who wrote their way through summers in dune shacks,
with the queers who fought their way to this swirl of sand
where they could live without fear,
with the Wampanoag people on whose land we're standing right now,
and with the fractured promise of the country's beginnings.
And your dreams and fears are changed.
And that one moment of getting lost,
wherever and however you choose to get lost,
will translate into dozens of other new pathways, new horizons,
new ideas, new inspirations, new influences, new challenges, new passions
that will make your life more rich ...
more wild ...
and more true.
(Music)
♪ What do you know?
Where do you go from here?
From here
Why did you pretend?
When you knew the end was near?
Oh, so near
Something in you
Something in her
Something that changed
Something that hurt
Hold on, maybe til
Hold on, quick thrill
Hold on, tighter still
Jump Go!
Afternoon, half moon
Hangs low half truths not said
Still not said
Can't stop, can't start
Can't find a beating heart to rent
Just to rent
Something in you
Something in her
Something that changed
Something that hurt
Hold on, maybe til
Hold on, tighter still
Hold on, quick thrill
Hold on, overkill
Hold on, spilled milk
Hold on, free guilt
Hold on, so still
Jump Go! ♪
(Applause)