Hvaðan tónlistin kemur - Rowland Salley

Undanfarið hef ég mikið hlustað á tónlistarmanninn Rowland Salley sem helst er þekktur fyrir að vera bassaleikari Chris Isaak. Færri vita að hann er fantagóður lagasmiður. Lögin hans hafa sterkar rætur í miðvesturríkjum Bandaríkjanna, enda er Roly þaðan, og flokkast líklega sem þjóðlagarokk með kántrí og blúsívafi. Í textum sínum horfir hann heilmikið til æskuáranna við Mississippifljót og það er kannski ekki skrítið þegar maður les lýsingu hans sjálfs á því hvers vegna hann varð tónlistarmaður. Mér finnst þetta ein fallegasta lýsing sem ég hef lesið. Ég er of löt í kvöld til að þýða þetta:

One day when I was about five or six my ma and dad suddenly informed my sister and brother and me that we were going to take a drive. We were going south from our place in Northern Illinois to visit some people in a place called Louisiana. This was my first big road trip and it wound right down along the Mississippi river toward Shreveport. The friends had a house on the edge of a small town and there was a railroad that ran by about a half mile off in the open flatlands behind their place. One of the sweetest things I can recall from my earliest days happened one night on this trip. It was hours after supper and everyone was asleep in the house but me. I was still wide awake in my cot out on the upper porch looking at the stars when a train came along, slow and easy. I listened to the thing approach...feeling that the sound it was making was multiplying the size of the world around both me and it, with no apparent limit. This was completely fantastic to me. Then this train did something chilling. Over the rhythm of its huge mechanical self it let out a long combination of deep whistle notes...a chord in fact. This sound rolled through the wide open night and seemed to hold and to offer me everything that you could possibly want or need...and it set my life to music. It’s amazing how this man-made thing of steel forged for commerce can be such a musical phenomenon... that it is. When I write songs I try to make them do what that whistle did to me that night.

P.S. Myndin hér á síðunni er vatnslitamynd eftir Rowland Salley - af járnbraut. Þessi mynd skreytti m.a. sólóplötu hans.