I think the rest of the world has a very wide, very slow kick. It's very simple, breaststroke. People think it's highly technical. But the more narrow, more effective and quicker you can execute it, the faster you are going to go. There's less drag, basically.
It's not about trying to be perfect. It's not about trying to walk the straight and narrow. It's about loving who you are and finding those people who love and accept you for who you are.
My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis.
I could have done a hundred songs, really. It was hard to narrow them down, because I tried to pick songs for the most part that actually did have some effect on me or influenced me in the past.
It's a game that just takes so much out of you. Every aspect of your life has to be very narrow, very focused. Everything else has to go away. And because of that, I think it's obviously not healthy. The last thing I'm looking for is sympathy.
Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.