Dear Arthur Russell: Your Music Changed My Life

It is now over 20 years since I really got to know you and you became a constant presence in my life. Though we never met, I think of you as a great friend, as your music has helped me through hard times and heightened many good times. It has inspired me and driven me to try to be more creative. People overuse the expression “____ changed my life,” but your music truly did change mine. In the mid ‘90s, I was a little lost and was having quite a hard time—both in my personal life and trying to figure out where I wanted my life to go—and it was the constant presence of your Another Thought album that helped me find my way.

Your words and how you sing them, your cello playing, your use of Peter Zummo’s sublime trombone and Mustafa Ahmed’s sparse percussion, your use of echo and the glorious warmth and strangeness that oozes out of your songs—these things never cease to transfix me. There is an engagement with the soul in your music that I find in only a tiny amount of the music I encounter.

If there is such a thing as healing music, which I believe there is, yours is it.

It still saddens me that your music really engaged and infatuated a larger audience only long after you had left us; you never got to witness the deep love for your music and how it enriched so many lives and influenced so many artists. I wonder what you would make of all the wild enthusiasm for your work. Would it feel bittersweet, or would it be gratifying that a lot of people finally got it? I’m sure you would be heartened to know that so many of your nearest and dearest have made it a mission to keep your flame alive and that so much of the wonderful music you made that never saw the light of day during your lifetime is today widely available and deeply, deeply cherished. I can only dream about the kind of music you would have made had you remained with us, but I am glad that while you were here, you were so devoted to your art that you left us a beguiling catalog of love—an endless treasure trove of audio riches.

I do all I can to help spread your gospel. Through that, I have met many people who have become great friends, whom I would never have encountered otherwise. For that, too, I will always be in your debt.

Thank you, Arthur Russell. You are the best friend I ever had whom I never got to meet.

Always in my heart,
Keith McIvor (JD Twitch)

Illustrator Credit: Emily Fromm

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