Death Ain't Nothing But a Speckled Pony

MC Taylor

Jan 14, 2025

∙ Paid

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open

to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes more like a tree

rusting over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots

embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from ‘Book of Hours’

Starting here with a mea culpa: I’m sorry for not writing etc etc. Times are tough for so many out there. I’ve been watching the news with something akin to disbelief as the Angeleno cities of Altadena and Pacifica Palisades, not so far from where I grew up, burn to their foundations. Altadena in particular has been home to so many in my music community that I consider friends, peers and inspirations; they’ve lost their homes, their studios, lifetimes worth of instruments, art, books, records, clothing. I’ll admit to having a hard time wrapping my head around it all. As a native of Southern California, and someone that feels very much a part of that landscape still, I’m feeling something like survivor’s guilt. There are many, many organizations doing good and noble work on behalf of the victims of the fires, and you can easily find them online. Musicares is one such organization.

The soul gets fatigued, watching disaster—much of it climate-related—parade across our screens. Catastrophe commodified, sandwiched between memes and celebrity and the flotsam and jetsam of 21st century online culture. It’s exhausting and, at least for me, almost entirely devoid of inspiration, poetry, mystery. I’m not saying anything here that someone more astute hasn’t said better. Sometime around the turn of the year, I just put my phone down, far from my hands, and walked away. Not to say that I’m not still reaching out for my phone as though it’s going to offer me something new and good and illuminating. But maybe not as much. I don’t want my kids watching me scroll through bullshit and bad news on my phone.

Another thing that has me feeling displaced is that I’m currently in the midst of a massive rebuild and renovation of my studio. This is something that has been many, many years in the offing. Lots of dreaming and scheming. And while this is a great thing that I’m extremely fortunate to be in process with, it also means that everything that isn’t absolutely essential is packed away in boxes and tubs. I’ll have a lot more to say about this space as it starts to take actual shape, but I’m determined to turn it into the sanctuary that I’ve been fantasizing about for so long, a place full of recording gear, instruments, books, records. A little clubhouse.

So, without most of my creature comforts handy, I’ve been listening to lots of music, and reading a lot. In the past few weeks, I’ve reread my way through two volumes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove trilogy. I think I may like it even more this second time around. I wish I could ask him some questions about how he wrote it. Somewhere in there, I also read a book about Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward called Everybody Thought We Were Crazy. If you’re interested in Los Angeles and contemporary art in the 1960s and 70s, it’s fascinating—as a couple, Hopper and Hayward were on the absolute vanguard of art collecting, and owned multiple pieces by Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and so many others. Then Hopper kind of lost his mind.

I’ve been toggling back and forth lately between cowboy music and Japanese ambient music, and finding that they coexist very harmoniously together. Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green is a masterpiece that I would recommend to anyone searching for something peacefully melodious to start the day. It’s sort of a perfect album.

One album I’ve really taken a shine to, sort of out of the blue, is Bobby Bare’s record Cowboys and Daddys, which came out on RCA in 1975, and is full of incredible songs by left-of-center songwriters like Terry Allen and Dave Hickey. Below the paywall, I’m putting up a video that I made yesterday of Hickey’s tune “Speckled Pony,” a song that I’ve loved forever. I don’t think Bobby Bare gets nearly enough credit as a true Nashville tastemaker, and honestly everything I’ve heard of his from his run of recordings in the 1970s is truly great.