For Words project, chapter 1

For Words: Gregory Alan Isakov reads Loren Eiseley from Todd Roeth on Vimeo.

Words have always been the real ignition that starts most any fire in my mind, particularly in music and increasingly in book-bound literature. I am becoming more and more convinced that bare words are the purest minerals by which to build our towers of intelligence and bridge ideas between ourselves. This notion is not new, but this project is my attempt to acknowledge the power and place of writing, in both music and literature. Like mental moonshine, words – good words – are distilled thoughts that do not need the hubris of extravagant typefaces, sexy photography, blinking marquees, gigantic billboards, but which intoxicate us just the same. Like simple sips from a mason jar under a full moon, sometimes you don’t need anything else. (Yeah, I know. It does help sometimes, but not for this project.)

This video is the first in a series to pay a little reverence to good words, what they can mean, and to those who write them, be it for books on shelves or songs on stages. The readers in these videos are songwriters who I admire. They are reading, in their own way, prose that are of my – or their own – choosing. These videos are portraits. Not just of the reader but of the words they read, of pronunciation, of cadence, of gesture and interpretation. This project is portraits of good words being performed by musicians who sing their own, quite well.

I hope this project will take better shape with future episodes, and cut a clearer path for me into the understanding of the musicians, the authors, and – by crossing mediums between the performers of songs with the usually private and silent act of reading a book – the differences in how we experience both.