Daily Discovery: Skye Steele, “The People Make The Music”

Skye Steele is a songwriter, improvising violinist, and composer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Click here for a list of tour dates to see if he is playing in a city near you.

ARTIST: Skye Steele

SONG: The People Make The Music

BIRTHDATE: October 24, 1980

HOMETOWN: My parents’ 1983 Volkswagen Westfalia.

CURRENT LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY

AMBITIONS: To get to bed before 2am. To tour the entire country with less than 120 miles between gigs.

TURN-OFFS: Bad Listeners, shit-talking your own family, red bull.

TURN-ONS: Expertise of any kind, flawed dancing, inability to suffer fools, optimism in the kitchen.

DREAM GIG: Gil Evans calls and says he’s written a bunch of arrangements for my songs, but when I get to the rehearsal there’s just a rhythm section and a whole arc-load of animals — primates, great cats, elephants, clouds of bees and cicadas, and birds of all kinds. There’s a screen for the owls cause they can’t take the lights. But Gil already rehearsed the hell out of them and these fauna have come correct– everybody knows the tunes inside-out and we stretch out howling wild animal-kingdom re-arrangements of my music all night on an outdoor stage in Prospect Park.

FAVORITE LYRIC: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” -Leonard Cohen

CRAZIEST PERSON I KNOW: My mom. But she’s a very good kind of crazy.

SONG I WISH I WROTE: “Off The Wall” by Rod Temperton (the Michael Jackson song). That’s one I wouldn’t mind having to play at every show for the rest of my life.

5 PEOPLE I’D MOST LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH: Flannery O’Connor, Yehudi Menuhin, Hart Crane, Chico Buarque, Toni Morrison.

MY FAVORITE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: We drove down from New York to Delaware to hear Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the DogfishHead Brewery a few summers ago– I had fallen in love with his music that year and it was one of the only gigs he was playing in the states. I felt I had to go. We drove down to the end of the Garden State Pkwy then took a ferry across to Rohoboth and set up at a campground by the beach, then jetted over to the club. It was easy to get within about 15 feet of the stage and take it all in. After about 3 songs he said, “thanks so much for coming the show everyone– goodnight!” and then launched into the next song, and played for another hour and a half.

I WROTE THIS SONG: On the way to a job I used to have teaching violin in an elementary school. I would work with about 150 3rd graders in a day, starting at 8:30AM. I loved teaching those kids, but at this time I was playing in a couple of bands that would do real long’n’late gigs on the Lower East Side, so I was clinging to a subway pole bleary and hung-over when the first line came to me. “I drink my coffee in Brooklyn, so when I get to Manhattan I’ll be ready to go, I’ll be good to go On and On!” It got stuck on top of this Brazilian fiddle tune I’d learned in Recife a couple years earlier, and it got me thinking about when I was 17-18 and new in NYC and playing fiddle in the trains to get by. So the rest of the song is talking about that– how hard we push to be heard, all the things we leave behind to follow these dreams, what we have to do to remind ourselves why we’re doing it, and the delirious intoxication when you get just a little taste of the goal.