<\/a>Lazy Eye<\/p><\/div>\n
When I was in third grade I needed eye surgery. My right eye would often turn towards my nose and stay there. This was disconcerting to my parents. I wore a patch on my glasses. \u00a0My ophthalmologist said I had a “lazy eye.” I felt bad about my lazy eye.<\/p>\n
My ophthalmologist operated on the muscles of my eyes. After surgery I had to stay in a dark room with patches and bandages over my eyes for a week. There was no light at all. My parents came in and read to me every day, for hours on end. They read “The Five Children” by E. Nesbitt and selections from “Just So Stories” by Rudyard Kipling over and over, at my request. My brain, having no visual input, made a startlingly clear set of visual images to go with the words in Kipling’s book. “The Butterfly That Stamped” was huge, glowing, and iridescent. “The Cat That Walked Alone” was two stories high and made of rainbow-hued metal.<\/p>\n
When my parents left the hospital the images stayed. They stayed with me through the night, in dreams. When I would wake up I would not be sure I was awake. There was total darkness, and the dream animals still there, right in front of me.<\/p>\n
Years later, when I had my own studio and was able to spend a lot of time mixing the music I had recorded I noticed that my mind would always settle on some imagery to go with the music. Sometimes I would follow the imagery, and let it help direct the music. Later, I noticed this sort of thing happened all the time, not just in the mixing stage. Make a sound, see a form. Other artists have told me it happens to them as well. Draw a line, hear a sound.<\/p>\n
I had forgotten about the metal cat and the luminous butterfly until I came home from the studio one May evening, this year. My children were asleep and my wife was previewing stories on tape for the kids. She said, “Listen to this.” It was Jack Nicholson reading “The Butterfly That Stamped.” \u00a0Think of it–Jack Nicholson’s voice, all oily, soothing, menace saying, “Once upon a time…” I listened for awhile and remembered everything.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“When someone opened up a guitar case and pulled out a guitar they may as well have been pulling a sword out of a stone. The room was magnetized. This was not lost on me, the smallest and most sports-challenged kid in school.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":543,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[14,22,23,28,33,41,44,60],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
A Man About A Horse--ECM bio pt. 2 · Steve Tibbetts<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n