-The lyric is meant to be sung. With or without instrumentation it is inseparable from music, the purpose of which is to express the inexpressible.
-The lyric is language compressed. All poetry is a condensation of language; the lyric exists at the event horizon between what can be said and silence.
-The lyric exerts tensile force on human emotions, drawing them to the edge of breakage.
-The lyric is the emotional landscape of narrative. Stories would be flat without the tectonic faults and folds that occur when the terrain is under stress. The lyric is the topography of the human heart.
-The lyric doesn’t have to make sense. It makes cracks. The lyric fractures. Broken logic has its own sense.
-The lyric is always dirge, elegy, ode, supplication and praise. It is the refrain sung by every human heart.
-The lyric bears our thousand faces. It is shadow and light, and the portal of transformation.
-The lyric carries us through the knowledge of our death and sustains us on the journey so that we don’t lose heart.
-The lyric is losing a lover, birthing a daughter, your son’s illness, the difficulty of killing, going blind, inhaling smoke, watching a man burn, burning cities, washing the dead, the deep aloneness of a crowd. We are always on the brink of the void. Only those who embrace the lyric can see it and hold it back–only just–by singing.
-Even if your voice wavers, even if your phrasing is off, even if you are wailing more than singing, the lyric wields it power. It is the scab that stops you from bleeding to death. It is the scar that saved your life.