Dispatch #17
Are You Writing the Song, or Is It Writing You?
Bedroom and back-porch players, a notebook of unfinished songs, and the mysterious Somewhere Else that art comes from.
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Deep-Fried America
Dispatches from David Biddle on music, mind, and the strange currents that shaped Sound Effect Infinity — a novel 50 years in the making.
Dispatches
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How Did All Those Moving Parts Become a Funky Science Fiction?
Loud guitar, CIA paranormal research, crossroads myths, flyover country, and two Columbia loners.
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How Quantum Physics Solved My Novel’s Ending
How one video on zero-point energy inspired the finale of my new novel.
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Easter Eggs and Secrets Everywhere
Hidden gems sitting right between the lines.
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Sharing your Joy and Enthusiasm
The gifts of your artistry are the ones that last.
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My Dad Told Me Not to Write Novels
Thirty years later, I finally decided to prove him wrong.
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Why Do You Think They Call it Playing Music?
Why I stopped “practicing” music 50 years ago, and why I haven’t failed since.
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Remembering the Man Who Inspired Me Endlessly
An ethnobotanist, philosopher, and psychologist (among other things).
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A Version of Infinity I’m Listening to here in July
Jack DeJohnette’s Sound Travels — piano, percussion, global jazz, and the blues standard that still shows up in warmups.
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How long before music becomes a long strange trip?
After fifty years of guitar, twenty minutes of noodling, and the mysterious natural high of waking up your own musicality.
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Creativity and Improvisational Expression as a Higher Form of Consciousness
Paul McCartney, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and the human magic of jazz, blues, and jam bands.
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Hearing vs. Listening
What it means to actually listen to music — memory, expectation, and how deep sound goes inside.
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Mongos
Mixed-race America, the limits of racial labels, and who we might become by 2052.
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Counting Sunsets
What I've Been Listening to Here in June — SUSS and the ephemeral beauty of ambient music.
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Are There Really Decommissioned Nuclear Missile Silos in the Midwest?
Myths from a Missouri childhood, Nate Hofer's pedal-steel in an Atlas silo, and the Subterranean LSD Palace.
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Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll — and Mind Control
From a bestseller pitch to CIA experiments, paranormal fringe, and the physics of sound.
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The Magic Inside Music
How a summer night in 1968 sparked a lifelong search for the magic inside music.
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