Cory Fay

See the boy with the cheap Silvertone guitar. It cost his Grampy a whole 72 bucks way back in 1962, standing in line at Sears behind an old woman and her moon landing play set. Skip to the year 2000. You can almost hear the old hand offer up the family axe for a second time. This here’s a two-tone achromatic wonder, his Grampy tells him, made of vinyl, fingersweat and pumpkin spice. A silver lipstick canister for a pickup. Once upon a time it belonged to your father. Now it’s yours.

His family are gardeners. They teach him how seeds take a long time to grow and how people tend to want give up on plants that don’t seem to succeed right away. But, Grammy says, they’ll usually surprise you. And in this vein the boy starts cultivating songs.
Friends and towns and jobs and bands wash over him like spring rain as he tends his baby sprouts. A handful of slow roasted melodies grow in makeshift studios until he has a full harvest.

On a clear day you’ll find him out in the pastures gathering wildflower seeds and tuning those old family strings to nitrogen levels in the soil. Go on then. It’s okay. Kneel down to gather up the fallen fruit. You might see something like indie rock printed alongside, but I assure you these crops are 100% pure uncut dirt-core, glam-country, story-wave toil of the land, pollinated by the same swarms of bees to which the boy is allergic and from whose sting once he nearly died.

But he didn’t. In fact, that boy’s never died.
Not even once.

-Josh Wagner