The Thread of The Torn White T-Shirt

THE THREAD OF THE TORN WHITE T-SHIRT – published in ONTHEBUS, Issue 25, Bombshelter Press

Honest to God, if I didn’t know the world was shit, I’d be cracking open the cork of a bottle of Cristal right now. I’d be on my bed like the Queen of England. The salty air would come and go through my bedroom window as it pleased and pay no mind to the screen that couldn’t care less about the direction of the air blowing through it. I mean, if I could hit it off with people coming and going like that, I’d pony up. All I’d have to do is keep the mosquitoes out.

My phone is beside me on the table next to my bed. I try to not be distracted by my compulsion to pick it up and scroll on social media.  My beige turtle neck sweater feels lavish on my skin.  Neither the sweater nor I give a rat’s balls about how stylish I look. Well, that’s a lie. I know I look fetching in my turtleneck but it doesn’t change anything. At some point the sun is going to rise like it does every day but why hold my breath when the night feels peachy keen and the temperature is just right? If I didn’t know what was going on in the news, I’d not be troubled by imagined dragons, or lament because my dog was in heat.  Had I misspoken? I’d hate to see my poorly chosen words ricochet into an ordeal. Those old sorrows should’ve been picked up last Tuesday by the sanitation truck and I’m too greedy for the sweet life to pick through yesterday’s trash. If I didn’t see the things I’d been shown, I’d have to look up trauma in a dictionary to even know what it means. If I didn’t lose the things I’d lost, I wouldn’t have noticed they were missing. If my ludicrous plans to outwit an impossible undertaking hadn’t crashed and burned, I might be a crying hot mess instead of free to to run from the matches before they were tempted to strike. The malaise of the day commands my attention like a bratty dictator, while the cool night is my escape from the burning drudgery of the inevitable lockdown of my ill-wrought schemes. Anxiousness intrudes like copper wires through the highways of my brain. On the carpet, there’s a stray thread from the torn white t-shirt I used earlier to clean up the blood from the cut I got trying to bend the metal frames back into place after the dog mangled my reading glasses. Unless I tallied the toll of all the distractions, I didn’t know how much the silence was begging for my attention. I wanted peace more than I wanted to talk. I was in the right place at the right time to speed past the ditch in the road on the Miracle Mile and it was a pleasure to press my boot on the gas. I never needed a better life. I just needed those grapevine sleep talkers to let me live. I sped right past the Shangri-la exit without even looking back and took the shortest route home. If I didn’t know the world was shit, I wouldn’t have noticed it much at all. What the hell? It might have been the best year of my life.

Louise Goffin (February, 2021)

Louise Goffin plays Carnegie Hall with Donovan

Radio Industry News, Music Industry Updates, Nielsen Ratings, Music News and more!

Donovan and Louise Goffin rehearse for their upcoming Carnegie Hall surprise concert.  

Pictured here at the Park Lane Hotel

Photograph by singer/songwriter/producer and fellow surprise musician, Richard Barone.

What do you do if you’re a Beatle-level musical genius artist/writer/producer, who just played in front of 62,000 people at Hyde Park, London?  That’s just what Louise Goffin did back in August 2016, where she was trading guitar solo licks with world-famous guitarist and legendary music producer of Don Henley’s Building The Perfect Beast album (as well as being producer of Louise Goffin’s first solo album)–Danny Kortchmar.  Where she also performed her solo set as well as singing with iconic music genius and parent, Carole King.  So having just completed that epic performance as part of the first live performance in history of the entire Tapestry album in sequence–how can anyone follow that?  Well if you’re Louise Goffin, you follow it by performing at a tiny little NY city restaurant for your songwriting masterclass.  Then the next night on September 15, 2016, you perform onstage at the Zankel Hall venue at New York City’s Carnegie Hall.  With iconic music legend Donovan. That’s a whole lotta iconic music legends.  And as it happened, Donovan elected to sing with Louise Goffin and play guitar on a fabulous and very arty and jazzy song written by Louise Goffin in a co-write with songwriter/artists Craig Greenberg and Corinne Lee, called Deep Dark Night Of The Soul.  Donovan himself hand-picked this Louise Goffin original song for them to perform, as one of his favorites.  For any songwriter, getting music legend and close Beatles associate Donovan to sing and play on your original song–at his own concert–is quite an achievement, somewhat on a par with the universe exploding. At the Carnegie Hall gig with Donovan, they did the acoustic version with Donovan on guitar and vocals, and Louise Goffin on ukulele and vocals.  When Louise produced this track for the studio version on her brilliant 2014 album, Songs From The Mine, she had some very sultry trombone solos going on.  Corinne Lee also appears on this album.But it wouldn’t be the first time Louise Goffin worked with people at the legend level. She appeared in a music video harmonizing with another musical genius, Brian Wilson, as they performed with music geniuses David Gilmore and Kate Bush.  Louise Goffin toured with and performed a similar role playing acoustic and electric guitars and singing with Tears For Fears and it’s iconic music legend, Roland Orzabal.  What have we learned from all this?  Apparently, geniuses like to hang out together and perform with other geniuses.

And if you haven’t made it to NY City to catch the smash musical, Beautiful, the touring company has been taking it nationwide, and it just opened in Las Vegas for a few days only.  In this musical, Louise Goffin as a baby is represented by a plastic doll, in the middle of some momentous events in the music industry.  One way or another, Louise Goffin has been in a lot of places, influencing a lot of things.

So after Louise Goffin’s September 15th, 2016 Carnegie Hall performance  playing acoustic guitar and singing with the legendary Donovan himself, don’t be too surprised if she throws more surprises your way.  If you want ordinary–go somewhere else. We warned you quite some time ago. She’s a curveball.

Featured Tracks “New and Notable” for free on Noisetrade

Louise Goffin Featured Tracks

The best collection of free downloads ever on offer from three of Goffin’s independent releases: Bad Little Animals, Songs From The Mine, and Appleonfire, plus several never-released rare demos: Girlfriend, from her band South of Venus, Idle Days, which appeared in ‘Glastonbury The Movie’, and the demo version of Good Life (a different version appeared later on her Songs From The Mine album). Also offered for the first time, Starfish Girl, originally released on vinyl, on Fish Of Death Records. Ms. Goffin, the heir apparent to a legacy of the richest body of work to emerge from New York’s fabled Brill Building, carries the lineage forward with a treasure of influences you won’t want to miss out on.

 

photo by Ben Steinberger Photography

Louise Goffin Talks Marilyn Manson’s The Pale Emperor

Louise Goffin Talks Marilyn Manson’s The Pale Emperor.

Louise Goffin Talks Marilyn Manson’s The Pale Emperor

News From Singer-Songwriter Louise Goffin

A classic piece of television history is Marilyn Manson’s 1997 appearance on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.  As part of the promotion of Antichrist Superstar, Marilyn (born Brian Warner and raised in Canton, Ohio) appears on the same episode as The Brady Bunch’s Florence Henderson, right-wing radio host and convicted Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, and rapper, activist and self-proclaimed Christian Lakita Garth. Liddy interrupts Bill Maher before he even asks his first question and says, “I want to protest something… Now, here you’ve got a guy [i.e., Manson], as far as I know, has never been busted for impersonating a human being or anything. And I’ve got nine felonies for which I am totally unrepellent [sic], and he is supposed to be the bad guy. What’s going on? Where are the standards in this country?” To which Marilyn replies, “It’s the lipstick. If we put some…

View original post 1,251 more words

What Happens When A Couple of Teenage Songwriters Have A Baby?

this is a unique project!

News From Singer-Songwriter Louise Goffin

Find out what happens when a couple of songwriting teenagers have a baby

Peek through a window and get a glimpse of what a daughter’s love inspires, singing the poetic lyrics of Gerry Goffin.

Gerry Goffin as a young father with Louise Goffin as a baby (click photo for stellar update!)

View original post

‘Off the Cuff’ Podcast: Louise Goffin Makes Her Own Mark In Music History

by Jessie Katz

9/15/2014 11:18am PDT

“If you didn’t bring them up, I’d go, ‘Wow, I must be really getting somewhere in life!'” Louise Goffinsays of parents Carole King and the late Gerry Goffin, on the heels of releasing her sixth solo album, Songs from the Mine. While she hasn’t quite escaped their spotlight for good – nor is she likely to, considering what upper echelons of musical royalty she was born to – Goffin has carved out a life and career for herself that is uniquely her own.

“I’m extremely in the moment,” she tells Off the Cuff in a recording studio on Sunset Boulevard, where she arrived on a hot late-summer morning toting her signature ukelele. This accounts for her genuine outpouring of appreciation for her audience when performing, which was on display during her recent appearance at L.A.’s famed club The Viper Room. Goffin will be hitting up the East Coast soon for more performances to promote the new album, a collection of songs she’s amassed from her deep archive of original material.

“I have a lot of songs I forget I’ve written,” she notes. (It’s easy to believe, considering that family friend Jackson Browne gave Goffin her first-ever gig opening for him at The Troubador when she was just 17-years-old.)

Before playing one of her new songs for us, Goffin explains what it was like to come up in a business in which her parents were already mega-stars (“I felt I was perceived as ‘daughter of…’ and taken for granted”) and how she nabbed some major names from Hollywood to collaborate on the new album.

“I called my younger son and said, ‘Johnny Depp is at the studio!'” she recalls. “He said, ‘Oh my God! Don’t let him leave!’

Listen to Goffin’s full interview and performance in this episode of Off the Cuff and be sure to subscribe to #pretapodcasts on iTunes for all the latest episodes.

https://soundcloud.com/hollywoodreporter/off-the-cuff-louise-goffin