Chris Smith: Words & Music

Music is a powerful trigger of memory; memories are often complex and conflicted. We lived in Bloomington 12 years and left a lot of our hearts and history there.

Published in the Art of Music Annual, 2003.

The Session


Listening to a tape of a session from my old home town,

Brings it back:

Voices, the clatter of glasses, tunes half-heard, never learned,
Once lost, now found.

Old lovers, old rivals;
Old victories, old loss,

Many miles and years behind;
Sliding away like a ship down a quay,
And the turning of the years between;

Like distant voices on a crackly 78,
Or static over short-wave,

Or the crisscrossed synapses of half-remembered tunes,

And the faces of friends gone by.


–cjs, 12.14.02

On hearing a recording from Bloomington; with acknowledgements to Ciarán Carson