Guy Clark:
"And that poetic nature that's so richly inside Townes' work is like standing in front of a Van Gogh or a Renoir. You want to be able to access that part of any artist or writer or poet... They show you what a true artist is capable of doing."
14-year-old Elijah Berlow (Proctor School, NH)"
"He's such a poet, a really, really sad depressed poet. I tell my friends: 'Listen to the words...,' because at first, you know, they don't; they're about the sounds. But you put on 'Flyin' Shoes' and they don't have a chance. I tell 'em, 'Keep listening! Over and over 'til you get it' and they always come back blown away. My friends are inspired. They wanna write songs, but then they realize this is way hard."
Grace Potter:
"...you hear a song like "Waiting Around To Die" and there's such enormous despair, you're consumed by it. Taken whole from a very few, very pure lines... and as a writer, who doesn't want to do that? The way he does it so completely? Wow.
"And it sets a standard. Even his voice is poetry: The beauty is in the broken places! He always chose the perfect place, the perfect word to break... and he never overdid it. As a singer, that's part of it, too: He knew his voice inside out, how to deliver his lines so he could deliver that pain and never let the emotion take over, but be so real because it's true when he wrote it; you know that, but it doesn't make it true every time you sing it. That's the deeper poetry."
Good things come in threes, so I'm sure supposed to get into him now. The good Lord thinks I'm ready to learn from his songs.
And this is just brilliant:
Legs to walk and thoughts to fly
Eyes to laugh and lips to cry
A restless tongue to classify
All born to grown and all grown to die.
From "Rex's Blues" by TVZ
