A Conversation with Kami Lyle (continued)

PM: What are you listening to--I mean, besides the coffee brewing? [Earlier, our subject had apologized for spacing out while listening to the coffee brew.]

KL: [laughs] Let me think. The last thing is--there's a guy up here named Chandler Travis.

PM: Oh, yeah, I know Chandler. I like him. [See our account of running into the amazing Chandler Travis at the San Diego Folk Alliance.]

KL: You know Chandler. I've been playing with his band on the Cape. It's really fun. You know, it's not every day you get to wear your pajamas on stage.

PM: Right. When I met him he was in his pajamas.

KL: And he still is.

PM: [laughs] Yeah, I was at Folk Alliance, and I walked past a room where there was a whole room full of grown men in their pajamas and top hats, playing. I said, "Ooh, I'm going back there."

KL: [laughs] Was there one amazing trumpet player wearing rabbit ears? That wasn't me, that's the other trumpet player.

PM: [laughs] You know, it's amazing, I've done two interviews today, and both of them led to conversing about Chandler Travis.

KL: Really? Who's the other one?

PM: It was a great singer songwriter, a young person from Boston named Sarah Borges, who's making a big name for herself. And she also used Dinty Child on her record. [Dinty is part of that band of merry men featured in the Folk Alliance recap.]

KL: Oh, I just met him at the gig last week. He was really nice. He wants to help me get some gigs in Boston.

PM: So you must send my regards to the Chandler Travis gang.

KL: For sure I will.

PM: They put a live version on their website of me playing "If Love Turns Its Back On You" with them in the bedroom.

[laughter] 

PM: It was the first song they featured in this thing called I'd Love to Turn You On.

KL: Oh, that is cool.

PM: And that is the same song that I once planned to get Joey to write the bridge to, and that we just never got together. And I wrote a bridge for it, but it was never as good a bridge as Joey would have written.

KL: Oh.

PM: So later on I played it for him. I said, "I finally finished that song." And I played it for him and he looked at me and he says, "Oh, well. At least you finished it."

[laughter]

PM: I mean, that was so classic. That was right up there with, "I like what you're trying to do there."

[laughter]

KL: Oh, no!

PM: And it was so true...every time I get to that bridge, before or after I think, "Jeez, Joey would have written a better bridge than that." I still want him to write me a bridge for that song someday. That song will forever be undone until he does.

KL: [talking to Joey, telling him what Frank just said]

PM: [laughs]

KL: He's laughing really hard. [One of the first Puremusic interviews was with NRBQ's Joey Spampinato, see it here.]

PM: So tell me this: Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

KL: Oh, yes.

PM: Yeah. In any special way? Because as friendly as we are, we've never talked about that in that way.

KL: Well, gosh, am I a spiritual person? Well, I don't really believe in death. I mean, I talk to people all the time who aren't here. I don't mean that in a spooky way. But I don't think there's a big separation...

PM: Between people with bodies and people who have shed their bodies.

KL: Yeah. I think you kind of learn how to talk in signs, like different people send different things your way, and you know that that different person is saying "hi," depending on what you saw while you were driving down the street or walking.

PM: I agree, totally.

KL: [laughs]

PM: And I think that makes you a spiritual person.

KL: I think so.

PM: And I'll bet there are other ways you're spiritual, too. Are you, for instance:  "Well, I'm kind of a Christian, I'm kind of a Buddhist, I'm kind of a free-former"?

KL: I think God is God, and that God likes you when you're nice. I think it's pretty much that simple.

PM: Yeah, I think that's definitely a school of thought. I hear that.

KL: [laughs]  continue

print (pdf)     listen to clips      puremusic home