Floridians: An Introduction

It seems to me I’ve always traveled with a guitar, but the truth is I’ve only been doing it for a decade or so, ever since I confiscated my brother’s Yamaha from a junk heap in our parents’ basement. I’d been through a lifetime’s worth of guitars by then—a nylon-stringed Yamaha; two Celebrity Ovations with rounded, plastic backs, one of them a twelve-string; a black, lacquered Kramer; a Fender Stratocaster—but it wasn’t until I dug that old, rusty steel-string out of its cellar graveyard that I first fell in love with one.

When I took the strings off to change them, the heads (or tuning knobs) fell off. They’d rusted through to the point where the only things holding them on were the strings. I had new heads (fancy shmancy German heads, in fact) put on at the local music shop, tuned it up, and took it for a spin. It was perfect.

I started playing standing up with a strap around my neck, which is something I’d never really done before. I started performing on a regular basis. I started writing with more clarity. It had to be the guitar.

I took her to Mexico and wrote on the beach; I took her to California and played by the Hollywood sign; I took her to Utah and serenaded coyotes by rust-colored hoodoos and to Colorado where I excitedly plucked out John Denver’s Starwood in Aspen by a dancing campfire.

I wrote Up There in a hotel room on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and White Horse in a car in upstate New York. I wrote the first verse of La Linea on a picnic table in Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the second in a motel room in Bowman, North Dakota. But more often than not, I leaned her against the wall in the closet in the hotel and left her there, untouched, for days. That’s how it was on my most recent trip to Florida this past December. Inspiration was AWOL.

But on my first night in Orlando, riding the shuttle from the airport to my hotel, I was consumed by the urge to write and I berated myself internally for deciding, after much deliberation, not to pack my laptop. For the next seven days, I poked and prodded my ideas, eventually molding them into a bona fide theme, and sometime during my five days in South Beach, I wrote down chapter titles on a piece of hotel stationary.

When I got home, I was still consumed, but I wasn’t ready to start writing until two weeks later, when I finally sat down at my desk and began to type out these pages. On these rare occasions when inspiration strikes, I become so absorbed, I’ll often leave food that’s just been delivered sitting out for hours while I follow the bouncing ball. There’s a Jackson Hole cheeseburger sitting on my coffee table as I type this very sentence. That’s how it is with muses—they stop by at their convenience, which is why I always travel with my guitar.

I finally procured my dream guitar last year—a Taylor 614CE with a maple top—but when I'm on the road, I still take that old, trusty Yamaha. First loves are binding.

I’m going to be posting these pieces as I write them, and I’ll make additions, subtractions, alterations, and title changes as they occur to me. These things often develop from the inside out and only gradually evolve into cohesive, relevant themes, if they ever do at all. It is true that they sometimes arrive whole, gifts, so to speak, from the muse. (Snapdragon was done in twenty minutes, for instance.) Most days, though, it’s more like a wrestling match. And I don’t always win.

So here, for better or worse, are riffs on a few moments that struck me during my recent vacation. Let’s start with the shuttle...