To Love Somebody

I'm Not The Only One

another Sam Smith cover! he's perfectly in my vocal range, which is why i love him.

Open Arms

Not In That Way

practice helps everything:

Wild Horses

a new one. i'm pretty much at a rate of one new song every other day. a great feeling!

Demon Host

not sure what this song is about... the lyrics are a bit creepy, but i was watching Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley last night (highly recommended!) and this song caught my ear. (it's also what inspired me to try out Skinny Love by Bon Iver).

hope y'all enjoy it. and hope my raspy voice disappears soon.

Stay With Me

another entry in my growing ukulele/guitar repertoire: a cover of Sam Smith's "Stay With Me"

if you're not familiar with Sam Smith, he's great. his cover of Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know" is so heartwrenchingly good that i feel compelled to post it here.

Mystery Girl

heard this song on NPR the other day in a story on Roy Orbison and it's been stuck in my head since. here's my ukulele attempt at it:

i should leave it alone but you're not right

today brings: more acoustic distractions from the pain i can't stop feeling. one day i'll be able to write and speak with clarity the sorrow of love lost, will be able to give shape to my pain and then discard it like a husk. but until then, these songs are all i have to offer for utterance.

edited to add:
a few hours after the initial video was posted, i rode my bike to the lake and i cried as i stared out across the water. when i got home, my longtime partner and former fiance packed up his stuff and moved out. empty bookshelves and half an apartment vacated... literally holes all around me where a person i loved used to fill it. in the trash i found a note he'd written me last christmas: "Happy Christmas, Baby! Want to color and/or read together tonight? I love you so much, Your Baby Boy" -- so much lost in a year. and he took the activist coloring books he gave me as presents with him. he left other things... frames of us on the floor, a copy of a book i gave him when we first started dating, piles of laundry. such an empty hollow feeling. right now i don't know how i'll ever not be sad, this feeling seems like it was built to last.

so i cried and i cried and when i had no tears left i tried this song again and this is what came of it:

because i was in love

Sharon Van Etten is having her moment, and good for her. i was driving around Syracuse this morning, feeling so sad and lost, and then this song emerged from a long playlist i made in college.

it was like being thrown a parachute. i felt lifted above the gravity of my sadness for a moment.

i wanted to keep singing it and singing it and thus soothe all these heart wounds. apply it generously like a salve.

you can see i'm breaking up a bit over here. there are some words that are harder to say and swallow than others.