My name is Portugal Tuma and one of the things I love about music is that when it's music with lyrics

accompanied those lyrics are a form of poetry. I'm the kind that I'm years ago when I

would have bought a cassette. I would have read all the lyrics of the songs before I'd

have gotten home to put the cassette in the player and I'm always interested in how poetry

can pick up music by rhyme and by rhythm and by vowel sounds that repeat them. Not just

for the point of technique but because music is a language of emotion and it touches

much deeper than the individual word can. When we were 13, Jeff's father left the needle

down on a journey record before leaving the house one morning and never coming back by

Hannif Abdul-Akibe. When we were 13, Jeff's father left the needle down on a journey

record before leaving the house one morning and never coming back. And this is why none of us

sing along to don't stop believing when we are being driven by Jeff's mom. Four boys packed in

the back seat tight like the tobacco in them cigarettes Jeff's mom got, riding shotgun with us around

I-270 in a powder blue Ford Taurus where four years later, Jeff will lose his virginity to a girl

behind the East High School football field. Then later that night his keys and pants in the school

pool so that he has to run home crying to his mother with an oversized shirt and no pants like a

cartoon bear. And the next day when I hear this story I will think about what it means for someone

to become naked two times in one night to rush into the warmth of two women once becoming a man

and once becoming a boy all over again. But right now it is just us in this car with Jeff's mother

that cigarette smoke dancing from her lips until it catches the breeze from the cracked front

window and glides back towards us. A vagabond searching for a throat to move into and cripple

while Neil Sean's guitar rides out the speakers and I don't know how many open windows a man has

to climb out of in the middle of the night in order to have hands that can make anything scream

...