For minstrel, miles go by as meaning draws close

365 songs later, one writer gladly succumbs to the influence of nature. And what a mind trip it has been for the man who calls himself Paleo.

By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
Published July 15, 2007

David Andrew Strackany, a.k.a. Paleo, works on a song in a kitchen after a show in California.
	[Handout photo]

On the Web

- Hear Paleo's song from Lutz, Woman Like Me, at www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20060508.html

- www.paleo.ws

- myspace.com/paleo

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If a man drove 54,434 miles across the country in a year, visiting 152 cities in 45 states, and he wrote and recorded a song every day of his journey for a total of 365 songs, what would the song from Lutz sound like?

David Andrew Strackany, a.k.a. Paleo, a 26-year-old minstrel you've never heard of, did what has never been done.

He started his quiet journey here in 2006, after Easter dinner. He finished in Washington, D.C., on April 15, with 365 songs posted to his Web site and a dedicated underground following. He's been compared to Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie, but that's not quite right.

We tracked Strackany down via e-mail he lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., now, and has no phone to ask about inspiration, living in a van, and one song we can't stop listening to.

You began in Lutz?

I was passing through. I was working for the Florida DOT. Me and one other fella were working our way up the state. We started in Miami . . . and my contract ended in Tampa Bay. My co-worker and I were sharing a hotel room in Tampa proper when I went up to share Easter dinner with my folks in Lutz. The idea evolved out of a conversation I was having with my folks about my plans, and I wrote and recorded the first song after dinner.

Tell me about that conversation.

It wasn't so much a conversation as me talking through the thousand and one things I thought would make for interesting projects to tackle over the course of the next few years. My folks aren't really involved with my art at all, they just try to make sure I eat enough when they see me once or twice a year. But really, I have no idea what we talked about or how I arrived at the idea, and it's possible I had the idea that afternoon and was just reporting it to them, or that I had it after the dinner. All I really remember is reporting the idea to them in a kind of eureka fashion and having both of them sort of grimace and ask: "Why not instead just write one really good song?" So then I went into the office . . . and wrote what I thought was one really good song, hoping to follow it up with 364 more.

So 365 songs was the idea in the beginning?

Yeah, but initially, I didn't think I'd make it a whole year. I thought I'd go a month or two and then something more interesting would come along. But the songs kept getting better and I was getting so much out of it spiritually, I soon found I couldn't stop.

What is your creative process like?

The days were generous with challenges. Oftentimes, there would be nowhere I could go to have quiet. In the winter, I couldn't sit in my car or go outside to work, and late at night there's little open but loud bars. So I learned to adapt to those situations. But on the rare occasion when I'd have a door to close behind me my options would change. Or when I had a piano or drum set to work with. I think many people in tackling the project might have brought a large cast of instruments with them, but I preferred to stumble upon them along the way, and just bring with me the bare minimum: a children's half-size guitar. Somehow, it made the instruments in the song part of the story of the day. If there was a piano in the song, that's because there was a piano in the room I was sleeping in that day.

Anything special for you about the songs from Lutz?

Sometimes when I listen back to them, they feel less honest than the songs I would write later. I was still wearing a lot of armor in the beginning. Twisting my voice into someone I couldn't recognize to make it easier to listen to. I would later learn to accept myself better along the way. Still, they were some of the most ornate and beautiful masks I've ever made, the ones there in Lutz.

Can you tell me about Woman Like Me (Lutz, May 8, 2006)?

I think the most elusive quality something - a person, a song, anything - can have is elegance. It has something to do with simplicity, the way a river bends. I think that's what modernist literature was after. Taking away things to make them lighter and more liable to run. Of all the songs in Lutz, Woman Like Me is the most elegant. A well you can't see the water in, but it's there and there's much of it. The songs from that period come from imagination and blanket memory. Life was pretty redundant. I had a job and a co-worker who drove around in the van with me - pretty much the least inspiring person I've ever been stuck in a car with. Tedious circumstances sometimes make for the best songs though, (because) you stoke your imagination to compensate. Woman Like Me was a daydream I had.

Did what you were seeing or eating or who you were with have bearing on what you were producing?

I'm obsessed with platonic forms of nature. Mountains, trees, rivers, oceans. You'll find examples of nature's influence in almost every song I've ever written, and from time to time I'd feel overcome by the beauty of what I was seeing and compelled to include it in the day's song. . . . All art juggles the two sides of the didactic - the particular and the universal. For The Song Diary, because I was drowning in particulars, seeing so much every day, I realized right away that the songs could easily get carried away into becoming laundry lists of things seen and done. What I was really interested in was trying to find the universal that tied all the particulars together. As I see it, that's the burden of a poet. I would rather seek what the field means and why it is there than know the man-made names of all the plants in it. Scenery is a crucial tool to storytellers, but more and more I understand poetry as a struggle to see through a story into and at the things that make it tick, understanding the gears that make up a story and tie all stories together as one story.

How are people receiving your project now that you're done?

I think when you give of yourself without reservation, people recognize and appreciate that. There's a grand handful of people who were with me from day one, and others who tacked on along the way, for whom the diary became something really special. Having those people there watching made the whole thing possible, really. That's really what the idea behind posting it on the Internet was. I wasn't trying to get famous. If you want to get famous, make a record and get a record deal. I just wanted to challenge myself and do something no one had done. But I don't think I could have done it without feedback along the way, without having people holding me accountable every day to making every single day count. Of course, the indie rock establishment has sort of rolled their eyes. They see something with a pattern and they think it's a gimmick. Some people pray every night, is prayer a gimmick? Newspapers come out on a regular basis, is news a gimmick? Is time itself a gimmick? The Earth and the sun?

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (813) 310-6066.

[Last modified July 13, 2007, 17:23:04]