The Winterlings: Tin Angel CD Release Show

After soundcheck, and a long tuning session with our rebellious banjitar, Jagadeesh, we spent several hours in the red-graffiti-walled green room. It was a tight space with two huge armchairs and a few feet of carpet between. In the corner sat a massive ice machine which periodically made a sound like a sudden car wreck or a barking dinosaur. Ten minutes after eight, we were called to the stage and found the club sardine packed, wall to wall ears, spotlights bright upon my tuxedo shirt as we launched into “You & I.” And on went the night. With voices singing along from the tidepools of flickering candles spread through the club. With lyrics like invisible arms reaching out of us into the dark. With cameras flashing like handfuls of sunlight thrown like confetti. With stories pouring from our lungs in winds shaped into language by our tongues. With clapping and tambourine stomping and bodies swaying from chorus into silence.

Wolff Bowden & The Winterlings

A Final Note

A Final Note

There will be people making music

on the day the world ends. They will

be rosining their horsestrings as a comet

the size of Egypt takes us all into the dark.

As the sky goes supernova, human hands

will touch the skin of mammals long extinct,

from a time when there were more than

just insects and us.

But we wanted to trade wind and trees

for larger numbers on larger screens

so we might sit in larger rooms and eat larger

pieces of genetic meat, the kind we grew on

cows we changed so they were born without

eyes or legs.

In every billion-peopled city where the smog

drifts through the streets like liquid whales,

consuming cars, high above, in shoebox rooms,

they will be strumming plastic guitars.

Or perhaps the world will end at night, will end soft.

A black blanket thrown down upon a mostly sleeping crowd.

And a single cricket on a stone, in a river void of fish,

will lift his song against the end,

will know just what note to sing.

Wolff Bowden, 2010