Music is like living and breathing; it's something you're born with - so I've never thought of it as a career - more of a blessing, or a curse (at times) with the advantage that people might enjoy watching you do it in public. As musicians (?) we don't just make it up to suite - everything we do derives from Traditional Vocabulary, whatever the genre, the style. One may write songs, but first one has to acquaint oneself with the discipline; the craft of songwriting is the mastery of the idiom with which to beguile one's auduience with one's own creativity. Traditional Songs, on the other hand, are already there - they are products of other song-writers from a time before copyright and recording technology, when such things ran feral through cultures and communities being adapted and adopted to suit and very rarely sung the same way twice - such was the fluidity of the medium. I see singer-songwriters today who are like that - Jane Siberry and Robin Willianson come to mind - whose own work exists in a similar state of flux and spontaneity, where nothing is fixed, and yet the mastery of their craft is such that each performance feels definitive. Like Sex, or Jazz, or maling a Stir Fry, or anything else that lives, breathes, happens, comes, goes, goes around, comes around...

Then I dream again of that 1961 Telecaster (the same age as me but it will live longer), or watch some old footage of Roy Buchanan, or hope that the latest piece of consumer product from Fender is going to engender a similar level of natural born cultural genius. Like yesterday, upstairs in Dawson's in Liverpool where a lad of 14 or so was showing off his not-inconsiderable chops to his mates on (appropriately enough) a Hofner Violin Bass. As with Language, the Feral Lore - and Love - of Human Musical Tradition is alive and well some 50,000 years since it was first begun.