Dear Chris, 
 
I saw you perform last night in Great Barrington and was blown away. Thank you for a great performance! I dont know if this is a question really, or a comment, maybe both, and perhaps it is too personal and this may not be the forum. I am a speech pathologist and noticed your stutter, and I felt so happy that you express yourself so beautifully through your music and get up and do what you do despite the stutter. I have worked with little guys who at times struggle so much with this. I suspect, perhaps incorrectly, that it took so much courage in the beginning to be able to get up on stage and speak to hundreds or thousands of people. How has this shaped you, your music, if at all, and how has your experience up on stage been? You are incredibly gifted! Thanks - Linda in NY

Linda,

The funny thing is most people at shows don't even notice that I have a stutter, but I can remember the particular moment in Great Barrington that you most likely realized it, because I was so acutely aware of it. I should say, first of all, that I was a little rusty performance-wise. And I was already a little more nervous than usual, seeing as I went from barbecuing and gardening the day before, to performing for 1,000 people that night. Usually,if I'm in tour mode, my lines are well rehearsed.

That being said (and hopefully I've bored most of the readers away before I get to the real answer here) in truth it did take a lot of courage, or at least a little reckless abandonment on my part. At one point, I would have literally rather died than talk on stage, but a magical thing has happened on my musical journey, which is less by design and more on improvisation. The substance of my work has become more important than my insecurity, so I almost forget about the stuttering in the thrill, connection, and ultimately, escape of the stage. I wish I could take credit for really working on it, but the courage (as we're referring to it here) came from years of just plowing ahead and doing it.

There was a moment a few years back when I had to give a speech at an awards ceremony in Canada, in front of hundreds of well dressed on- lookers. (I was recieving a song writing award.) There was even a teletron broadcasting the speech throughout the hall. I remember thinking as I walked up to the podium, "Be the person you have become, not the person you once were." I got up and gave a short but flawless speech and walked off the stage directly outside the hall and smoked a celebratory cigar, and I remember that moment in the clear night air feeling one of the rare triumphs of my life, when I really felt the power of spiritual and emotional growth. And the conquest in facing your fears.

Now, that moment was rare, and I still am inconvenienced on a day to day basis with stuttering, and it sucks. Especially when you're a kid it sucks worse. It's not so much the act of stuttering itself, although that is awful, but worse is the mental anguish around it, the preparation for the fall, the excuses, explanations and the cleanup. I can remember calling girls up in high school to ask them out, and I would pre-record my greeting on a boombox, so as to have a fluent introduction to whoever picked up the phone. The worst day was when my boombox decided to short out on me during one such call.

To return to your question, the positive side to all of this is that I don't think I would have ever started songwriting without my limited ability to communicate when I was younger. I had SO much to say, and could only get out a fraction, so songwriting completed me, and, in short, saved me.

P.S. I actually went to talk to a stuttering support group near Boston a few years back, and I fell in love with the kids, because I saw in them some of the courage I never had, to plow ahead into the most humiliating situations with a "whatever" attitude. It's one thing to do it when you're 30, quite another to do it when you're 13.

So I walked in the room as a local celebrity and walked out humbled and amazed.

CT

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