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© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.

Punch up www.wyliewebsite.com to peruse the booklet of lyrics, liner notes, and photos which accompany the recently published full-dressed digi-pack for Hang-n-Rattle!—formerly offered in its bare bones pre-release cardboard sleeve, sans “text.” A few samples of said “text” follow:

Hang-n-Rattle! Bear down! Cowboy up! Try! Charge hard! “Did you come to hide, or did you come to ride!”: to ride, with heart, your work, your journey, your trek, your quest, your time here on earth. Grit it out! Dig deep! Endure! Metaphorically speaking, we titled this remuda of songs with a human, universal mantra and mandate. In fact, Wylie and I strived to practice precisely what the title preaches while we spurred the words together over a 10-month span in 2008. During the same time, it’s no small coincidence perhaps that I was encouraging my beloved, extremely ill father to hang tough—“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” To regain his health, Dad reached deeper than any cowboy, hanging and rattling in the middle of an impossible bronc ride, ever reached way down inside himself to make it to the welcome whistle. I, on the other hand, felt helpless. All I could do—thanks to Wylie beckoning me toward the healing powers of the creative spirit—was to faithfully kneel and pray my lyrics (“... our daily poem, our prayer”) at the holy threshold of Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song.”

Leonard Zarzyski died on October 10. I saw to it that “Knocking On Heaven’s Door” was included in the hymns sung from the choir loft during the service at St. Mary’s Church in Hurley, Wisconsin, a hundred or so crow-flown miles from Bob Dylan’s childhood homeground. My Dad loved to fish and, thus, I also magically planted a symbolic “trout” in the most light-hearted lyric of this cowboy album—a blues lyric, no less. Writing these songs, along with our spiritful recording of them, a month after my Dad’s passing, with John Carter Cash at the Cash Cabin Studio graced with the sacred memorabilia and memories—with the very presence—of his dad, offered a colossal poultice, an anodyne applied to my anguished soul. For this blessing of friendship beamed down lovingly from the Musical Universe,

Thank You, Brother Wylie
— Paul
June 30, 2009