Kelly Joe Phelps, you old so and so. You put me in a song once. I'll help you with the details, because you won't remember. Every song you performed was invented right there on the spot, then ephemeral like coastal fog. All mood and feeling and spirit and then gone. Sometimes it gave us the shivers. It was Thanksgiving weekend of 1999, at a supper club in Newport, Oregon. You and Nicola drove down. You were playing multiple nights. I think there was a mudslide on the way that backed up traffic. I was there with the woman who would become my wife, though she wasn't yet. An hour before the show you spotted us through the windows of the club and waved us inside. You teased me about my red suspenders, saying I'd taken on the classic Oregon look and was blending in like a local. I bought them in Medford! I said. We had a good laugh.

Had we eaten yet? you asked. The club owner found us a prime table. "See, man!" you winked, "sometimes everything just works out."

It was about halfway through your set, in the middle of some improvised part of a forgotten song, when we made the briefest of eye contact and you dropped a line about how everybody around here looks the same. You said it with a wince, a little derision and self-incrimination mixed with that smile that looked a little painful, a little rueful. And I felt so seen in that moment, a private little exchange with someone I admired so much.

You had that affect on people. Your kindness and generosity and humility and good humour endeared you to people. We loved to hear you play because it was excellent music, but moreso because you were always risking so much of your self and the possibility of utter disaster, from which you skipped away, impossibly, every time I saw you play. Sometimes you surprised yourself with the notes you managed to find, the melody that found you.

You were a broken vessel, relentlessly imploring the spirit to move and fill you with song, knowing it would all leak out. You were a broken vessel who knew he was broken, which made you just a hair's breadth better off than the other broken vessels who hadn't yet realized it. And that kept you humble. You told me once that "in spite of yourself, you still end up finding some really nice things about being alive, which ought to make you feel like nothing is really being taken away from you by being confused, or questioning, or doubting, or walking away from it entirely or whatever. It's all human frailty, and everyone is going to be subject to that. In spite of that I think you can still walk amazingly humble, and recognize the gifts that are constantly falling on your head."

You have been a gift to me, constantly falling on my head. Your music yes, but moreso your person. Your example of remaining open to life, of your commitment to this method acting we call living. A year ago I came back to your recordings after 20 years away. You were heavy in my heart a year ago. I still don't know why. I tried to track you down, but you left only footprints. I listened to your final two records for the first time, and immediately thought, of course he stopped performing. You came full circle, like T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding". You were like a comet, on a long arc that no one, likely not even you, could recognize or predict. Like a comet you spent a lot of time alone in the cold vacuum of space. I know it took a toll. Those of us lucky enough to come into your orbit periodically do not forget the experience. I only wished for your happiness. That you were close to people who loved you. I hoped you found some peace. I wished I could have told you how much you meant to me. I felt a kinship with you, a couple of West Coast church kids, each of us trying to figure out how to find that feeling we'd had once, wrestling with our patterns, trying to get a little more free. You told me once that you loved my writing, that it was gorgeous. I'd be lying if I said I didn't live off your praise for years.

You said something else to me that night in Newport. You said in that self-deprecating way, it's only music. And these are only words. They are all we have, and kindness. We do the best we can with them. You did well.