Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight

Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight

A plucked musical movement, hairpin poetic turns, mythical stories in rough harmonics. Baptize me into this Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight. No time like a pandemic to establish a new society. Perhaps by the end of this, you’ll join the membership.

Recently, I uncovered a faded list of songs I had written years ago. Songs that I want played at my wake. Songs that speak to my body while I breathe and my hope that they’ll speak to my dearest after I’ve exhaled my last breath. I can picture beers cracked open, passed around and clinked, and the occasional arm thrown over a friend to hit a high note. After rediscovering this song list, I noticed that it was all kitchen music. Rightly, you are wondering – What the hell is kitchen music?

Kitchen music plays softly while you do the dishes, is cranked to eleven while you spin your honeycomb lovely across the tiles, or can soothe the pain of fitful sleep as you wake to make coffee out of necessity, not desire, for it is company that won’t talk back. 

Kitchen music is a well-heeled dog, a companion for all moods. In fact, give me a friendly dog, kitchen music, and a Two-hearted ale and I’ll sing my praises to the wild-eyed God of the Cosmos. I’ve danced around the tune of kitchen music enough, let me explain. I first heard the term ‘kitchen music’ on the backside of a cassette tape of a hippie band called Aunt Betsy. They coined the term kitchen music for themselves. It brought to mind music made at home, amongst food, wine & friends with a sinkful of dishes in waiting. Over the years, I began to expand this title to other bands or songwriters that stoked the spirit of the hearth of home. It crosses genres; folk, hip-hop, good ol rock n roll, blues, country, and so forth. The vast majority of my albums are kitchen music. When pressed to unpack the boundaries of who falls into the category of kitchen music, I boiled it down to 3: complex songwriting that manifests simply, attentive details that showcase a songwriter’s curiosity, and songcraft that drips with authenticity. 

One evening while washing supper dishes, I played a Jeffrey Foucault album that caused my heart to ache in song and sacrament. It dawned on me that kitchen music cuts through to the bones of my spirituality. Keeping my attention on the dishes, I finished up and poured a small taste of bourbon and settled into my easy chair to see if this exposition of kitchen music in spirituality could hold up. 

So today I’m here today to talk about the spirituality of the Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight. There are three chords that run through kitchen music that also course through my own body, in my own vulnerable strumming between wisdom and reality; first…complexity is baked inside simplicity, second…curiosity paired with patient attention in a service of love, and third…humility drinking from a Mysterious source. When played with the right intention they express themselves in devotion.

These three tenets make up the charter of Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight. And I want to spend a moment practicing each chord by overlaying a lyrical reflection to better espouse how it speaks to my life. 

There is a song by my favorite songwriter, Greg Brown, called ‘China’. The lyrics are so simple and they all riff around the opening line, “Baby still looks like you’re on your way to China, China, China, far away.” To me this song is profound in its holding (its breath) of both the simplicity and complexity of love. At one point in my life, it was the gatekeeper to deeper friendships. I’d play ‘China’ for a friend and if they didn’t have a visceral response I would wonder if this friendship would past muster. A pretentious test, that I have put aside. But what I was unconsciously seeking to unveil was the appreciation for complexity baked inside of simplicity. Are they listening to the fraying heart in suspension, the truth told slant as Dickinson taught us?

In my twenties, a roommate posted this quote on the fridge from Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Let me read it again, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” All I wanted was a snack from the fridge, instead, I was presented with existential quandary pinned before eyes. The Holmes quote saluted me back to attention. How then does one live? 

Complexity marches in, stumbles and then passes out drunk in your field of vision each day. Ignoring it doesn’t help. He’ll just lay there. You can step over or around him, but his unmoveable burden is my own. I poke and prod him, but I know the only way to  startle him awake is with a cup of coffee and an open ear. Better to coax Complexity with the kindness of a shave and hot bath than to roll him into the gutter. He’ll only come back with his drinkin’ buddies. One needs clear values or a code to guide the rigamarole of Complexity’s showings. If I were to respond to each complex interloper by the whim of my mood, I would be knee deep in complex problems reeking of sweaty anxiety and cheap beer. At my best, my first response to Complexity’s early morning marches into my day is – Lord have mercy. It’s a conscious reflex at this point. And when mercy falls free from my lips, I can offer a feeble hug to Complexity. This simple practice slightly shifts my orientation to reality, one of willingness rather than wilfulness. Complexity sobers up a touch and becomes a necessary companion to the day. And with a willing redirection Complexity teaches a lesson that can only be learned through its embrace.

Always a preacher of the gospel of Greg Brown, we begin again with lyrics from Brown’s zen-like song, “Going, Going Gone.” You can hear my second tenet of Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight, curiosity paired with patient attention in service to love in this stanza. 

“My heart ain’t mine, my heart is yours –
or else I left it out-of-doors
like a baseball glove out on the lawn.
I’d walk through fire to retrieve it,
but still you never would believe it
here in the going going gone.”

Songs like this flow through the imagery of attention. Attention found by a curious spirit. Like a tongue discovering a cavity, the sting of curiosity sharpens its flow right down to the base roots of attention. The line ‘like a baseball glove out on the lawn’ slays me every time. The image of the baseball glove weathered by the elements and its vulnerability to potential loss. All of our hearts are like that. The impermanence of the moment is only caught in the harness of attention. 

We are all blindfolded to the future before us. My curious spirit emboldens me to risk the unknown steps before me, be it through a swamp or up a mountain pass, to trust the Mystery present in me and yet unfolding before me. Each step an act of faith in fidelity to curious attention. Like a woman sweeping the floor for her lost silver coin, it is in the details of this life that I have found the invisible Kingdom at hand. When the yearning of a poem drops beneath my defenses, brushes up against the tender places and asks me to wait for the fullness of its message. Or bearing witness to a friend in grief shedding tears unabashedly, sitting in abandonment, not knowing if a seed of healing is being planted. Or the trauma of racism experienced in my friends of color that also puts a spotlight on my own participation in dominant culture and trauma, I achingly ask, when will this end? Or when I cry out to God for the unknown future of my children on this ailing planet, in faith I seek out places of hope, of places where I see life. Curiosity and attention do not always lead to happiness, but Reality beckons to be the centerpiece of life. 

I see it most in how I pray. And I know not how to pray. I take solace that ol Apostle Paul speaks of prayer as wordless groans. What a relief. My prayers are cries for more of Life, of the Beloved Mystery, to break my unbridled ego into a spirit of humility. Then I immediately fear this prayer, what if God takes me seriously? My belief is weak, and my prayer pulsates from that cavity of the heart. Give me curious eyes to see and ears to hear the small details that capture the attention of God. I pray that I may recite the poetry of God.

The third tenet is humility drinking from a Mysterious source. The priest of the invisible, Greg Brown, has a homiletic and wandering song “End of the Party” that blows the dust off empty pews. I want to share a few evocative lines with you.

“Well I read the Bible ‘cause I like the soundThat kind of prose no longer around
It’s all bits and bytes now and little that’s wise
Most people don’t talk, they just advertise
The preacher said that it is all vanity
Do you love yourself babe when you’re loving me?”

Where does wisdom come from? I envision wisdom as a backcountry river tucked beneath a mountain bed.  One must seek its outpouring by foot through the thicket and bramble. When you arrive, the crow delivers the invocation. You must shed your shoes and clothes at this sacred watering hole, for this riverbend flows from the experiential realization of love. And since water yearns to move to an ever lower place, one must get on their hands and knees to drink it in. Divinity can only be gulped in a humble posture. When I sit on this river’s edge, and lower my mouth to drink in Mystery, the blades of grass prick my hands and my knees get soaked in mud. The wind climbs my spine as I pause and reach for another drink. And on the rare occasion, the river pulls me in and I am immersed in Mystery. Drenched, I laugh. I swim bucknaked in the water as long as I can. Floating on my back, water lapping against my body, I feel the wind rising over the outline of my face and the river’s movements flowing beneath me. I savor the moment. And it too passes. I pull myself out and lay on a boulder warmed by the sun, touching this world anew. 

You are cordially invited to join the Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight. The membership fees are drinkable to keep the riff-raff in, and a three-step admission process is required to enter into this cockemamy society. Admissions go like this, first, you pour yourself a drink of choice, anything from water to whiskey. Second, you select a song (or even better, an album) that has reliably been the glue holding the pieces of your broken heart together. Perhaps a song you would like to be played at your wake in remembrance of your joyful bloodstained life. Third, you listen, sip, and let the recollections that this particular song hold wash over the entirety of your life. And then wrap yourself in the cloak of beauty realized, and awake to your own aliveness.

Once completed, you are a member of the Kitchen Music Society of Sorrow and Delight. Our Society meets in kitchens, taverns, forest beds, river banks, back porches, and the field between now and not yet. Once members have been initiated through the aforementioned admission process, members tend to gather in twos or threes around a fire place with their feet outstretched before them and recognize silence as an equal companion to the conversation. Any members who plan a society meeting in an office under the hum of fluorescent lights will be immediately given the boot. Should they choose to pay the fine –  a round of drinks for a stranger looking lonely – they shall be welcomed back with open arms. Those unwilling to pay the fine, will be celebrated for their contrarian spirit and the Society will dismiss the fine on the spot.

Welcome to this esteemed society.