I was raised by an Irish Catholic mother and a father who was, and still is, a moonlighting big band musician. I've always held fast to the territory between those two rather broad boundaries of my youth, believing that most grown men need a field they can mark off and conquer like a gridiron. And yet the territory is portable. I take it with me wherever I go. The things I write about lie inexhaustibly within those boundaries and at the same time a few of my songs have ventured out on their own across borders into lands I've never seen.

I came of age on the streets of sprawling urban Philadelphia in the era of post-60s disillusionment; a bewildering time to go through the rites of passage. My roots run deep in that period and that geography. My ideas, metaphors and images still germinate in the fertile Pennsylvania soil and coil upward into an atmosphere that is forever a combination of oil refinery smoke and the scent of apple orchards in autumn. Pennsylvania made my artist's palette heavy with the mid-Atlantic blues and greens that I still use in my work.

As soon as I finished school I dug in with some good musicians. We rented an old farmhouse near Chaddsford and Kennett Square; home of the Wyeths, mushroom capital of America, land of green rolling hills and stone barns. We wrote songs during the days and in the evenings worked out harmonies in the large upstairs room while the window panes glowed with the magenta light of N. C. Wyeth's sunsets. It was the point of departure for me. Every new song stretched the horizon a little further and made me want to explore what lay beyond.

For me, a song has always been an expression of exhilaration about some aspect of life; like the exhilaration of pulling out onto an open highway at dawn. Those early days were buzzing with it. The whole world seemed on the verge of becoming some penultimate thing, capable of the perfect fulfillment of possibilities, and I was alert for the moment's arrival. I wrote to discharge the voltage in my over-amped wires.

Soon I found myself 3000 miles away, in a landscape of brown hills, pink stucco and palms. I never learned to write in hues of pink, palm green and Pacific blue. For a while I lived in Hollywood, where I walked between the transvestites and the hookers on Argyle and Vine most evenings to get my dinner. My songs took me to California at the beckoning of a dream. Unfortunately most west coast dreams are like the yachts that sit idly soaking up the sun in Santa Monica Harbor: they go nowhere and eventually they get repossessed.

I'm the product, as I've said, of my geographical roots. Returning to the east coast was as inevitable as my going west. But the songs remained restless. They proceeded to take me across the Great Plains, through the muggy delta, over an ocean, high into the pristine Alps, down the Italian coast and back to the New England hills. They will take me still further until I'm too old to follow, and then they will take only the parcel of me that I imparted to them the day they were written. Always, I will be traveling within my songs- if I'm lucky.

It seems necessary, this wandering. As Sherwood Anderson once said, we need to write "out of the people and not for the people". Writing "out of the people" requires seeking them where they live, taking in the pathos, the crudity, and the brio as we find it. For that reason I've been led down many meandering roads and tried to memorize it all as best I could. Though I remain the observer and somewhat the outsider, my songs have been welcomed into the lives of folks I've never met. In this way I've shared their labors, their tables, and their Friday night revelries.

The wandering has been internal, too. Songs have taken me through a house of mirrors, giving me fleeting glimpses of variations of myself. All writing is a quest for the unknowable: a need to understand the force that "rusts iron and ripens corn". It is an attempt at the creation of more than just words and music, but all too often it ends up being merely that.

The saving salt of any song is the emotional connection it makes with a listener. Jung believed in the existence of the collective unconscious. A writer must also believe there is a place of shared mythology inside each of us. Finding this source has also been a part of the journey. When I write, I am going on record about the things I've seen in these travels. A song is something I bring into a world that got along just fine without it. So I must ask myself; what have I really added by my efforts? In the end, not much; maybe a sign post here or there. With any luck I haven't marred the landscape too badly.

Fortunately, there is another reason I write. It's simply that the creative act brings the highest quality to the moments of my day. There is nothing new in this concept. Artists have known since the beginning of time that they are selfishly hedonistic in their pursuits. Who would not choose to be lifted out of the mundane tasks of daily life if there remained any hope of surviving adequately in the process?

So I'll take the requisite trip that my music insists I take, and I'll carry only the baggage I can afford to lose along the way. These days as I sit here in my house in Tennessee, still nearly 1000 miles away from the place I will always call home, I realize that a song is a one way ticket. It will travel with me, or I will travel within it, and there will never really be a final destination. At least, not one I can name.

© 2001-2006 by Craig Bickhardt, all rights reserved.

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