Building a Home Together in the Pines
An excerpt from Paul Lisicky's latest book, 'Song So Wild and Blue: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell'
From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians—a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell's mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and lost himself in prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and into the professional world of letters.
As the decades passed, Paul's connection to Mitchell's artistry only deepened. Joni's music was a constant, a guide to life and an artist's manual in one. As Paul navigated love and heartbreak and imaginative struggles and the vicissitudes of a creative career, he would return again and again to the lessons found in Joni's songs, to the solace and challenges that only her musicianship could give.
Song So Wild and Blue is a gorgeously written, beautifully intimate, and unique tribute to the woman whose artistry shaped generations of creators and thinkers. Lisicky offers his own coming-of-adulthood as testimony to the power of songwriting and staying true to your creative vision. A guide to life that is part memoir, part biography, and part homage, Song So Wild and Blue is a joy for devoted Joni enthusiasts, budding writers, and artists of all stripes.
Published with permission by the author and publisher, below is an excerpted passage from the “The Jungle Line” section of Paul Liskicky’s Song So Wild and Blue, set on Fire Island in the Pines.
The skin between the inside and outside was so thin, the trees might have been in the living room and vice versa. The sound of the ocean, five hundred feet on the other side of the dune, filling the kitchen with a roar, but friendly. Friendly lion.
Here I was as deep in my life as I’d ever been. I wasn’t thinking about it from above, from the height of our apartment. I wasn’t already thinking about March when I was in September. But how far I was from my Provincetown life, which in its best years was a life of new people all the time, of not knowing what was next. I loved Fire Island for the way the human intertwined with the world of animals and plants. No cars or roads—instead, raised boardwalks with white stripes painted along the edge. Streetlights? Nonexistent. Deer wandering around with astonishing nonchalance. Rabbits, box turtles, snakes, Fowler’s toads in the places you couldn’t see. Maybe it was simply concealment that I was drawn to, a place that refused to prune and tame itself for convention, the sake of sunlight and display. When you walked at night, you had to tune yourself to your muscles, nerves, and senses. Especially true in the Meat Rack (also known as the Judy Garland Memorial Forest), if you were walking from Cherry Grove back to the Pines, in which aiming a flashlight down the path was not just gauche but lacking in substance, character. You had to look, squint, listen for the sounds around you. That rustling at night? Monster? No, just some guy deep in the bayberry with a cigarette aglow, looking to hook up.
During the day, sunlight poured on the beach, south-facing, Caribbean. It went through your pupils all the way to the back of your head until your vision went deep red, veins branching. The ocean was similarly intense. Bodysurf a wave and you risked getting driven into the slope, sinuses filling, your neck jolted into shock, electric. It was said that the son of one long-term resident broke his back by doing just that and was a quadriplegic for the rest of his life.
If a place could be as strange as one of Joni’s songs, then this was it. The south-facing beach was as beautiful as any beach I’d ever seen, holly forest up against the secondary dune. The sun struck it as if it had waited all night to do so and couldn’t wait to saturate and heat it up, to get down into the cool, dark spaces between trees. But something was off about the place, something wonky. It tried to be glamorous with its mid-century modern houses, some with flat roofs, others with soaring peaks, but the land would never be as trim and tidy as any part of the Hamptons or even Loveladies on Long Beach Island, its nearest relative. There was too much greenery, burgeoning, creeping. The few lawns looked wrong. It suggested a swamp, an Everglades, but wrenched out of its expected geography, lifted to northern latitudes: litter in the woods, propane tanks exposed, the occasional sagging electric line, summer downpours turning the single dirt road into a stagnant, muddy lake that wouldn’t evaporate for weeks. But this low-level chaos was central to its appeal. Beauty required rot—it was its closest sibling. Rot kept its participants awake. And in that way the landscape felt like the correlative to so many Joni songs. The meticulousness of those songs! Every second wanted to be extraordinary, but the extraordinary also required some mess for the sake of contrast: slack strings, dissonance, more words shoveled into the line than a melody to contain them. They weren’t designed to make you feel comfortable. You couldn’t simply listen to them on autopilot as you could so many other songs. But they, like this place, made you love them for their sense of reaching, for embodying imperfection and thus horror. The sublime is never easy, because the longer you look and listen to it, the more it is pointing to decay, endings, and death.
Not to mention that none of it was guaranteed beyond next week. In just the last year, the water had eroded the bank along the bay, exposing the gnarled roots of the trees, a major footpath gone, ledge worn away by the tides. Every winter, storms of longer duration stole away some beachside pools, staircases, decks, leaving mangled wreckage in their wake. It was impossible to calculate how much time the place had left, even when a dredge churned fresh sand out onto the beach every few years, a masquerade of safety.
Maybe what I’m not getting down here is that we were trying to build a home together. We’d had a home before, but everything about the Provincetown house was haunted, not just by the life my partner and his former partner had built—all the signs, ceramic pitchers, and hutches collected at Vermont flea markets—but by all the people who’d cooked and slept there back to 1790. This was a house that hadn’t had much past in it. We’d had enough past. We were soaked in it. To be a gay man in 2007 was to have nothing but the past and its weight, but this place felt light, new. Here everything was determinedly new, if a charcoal-colored mid-century modern ranch built in the late 1960s could be called new. It was too casual to be taken seriously, when all the props surrounding us said, You are serious. You must maintain that. We could buy things for the house together, a painting for the wall, a rice paper light fixture, four black Eames chairs around the glass dining table. The meaning of us as a couple could be found in those things, all the occasions we marked by deciding on that together. Two points of view, fused. That felt precious to me twelve years into our relationship. It was startling to me that it took that long.
Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, is available now.