Teapot

making music with a teapot

When I’m in Los Angeles I like to wake up early, make tea, and work on writing at the kitchen table.

When I prepare the tea, there’s actually no tea involved. Just hot water, honey, and a meyer lemon I pick from the backyard.

As I spoke about in the leaf blower post, I love the unintentional music of inanimate objects that contribute to the white noise of our everyday lives. But if you focus in, they’re their own instrument. You can hear it in a tornado siren, a passing train, and in todays case - a teapot.

Years ago I covered a Bob Dylan song for Aquarium Drunkard and while I was singing the song the whistling of a tea kettle on the stove in the other room made its way into the recording forevermore.

Since then, I’ve envisioned the tea kettle as its own instrument, or rather, a singer - or something that is at least trying to sing. It’s screaming is something wildly and passionately out of tune, begging to be heard - and I can relate to that energy.

So anyways, here’s me making tea this morning. I starting improvising a song on the guitar and I really love it a lot, actually. I realized about 5 minutes in that the whistling cap was left off the kettle, which is why it took so long to start making noise, but I put it on towards the end, and the two of us make a little music together. Enjoy!

xoxo km