Bart heard it in voices the way others hear pitch. A kind of emotional dissonance. At first he ignored it. Then he started writing songs about it. Observational ones. Fragments of dialogue, the way tension moves through a room and settles on the nearest surface. Bart thought of it as documentation. After shows, there would be conversations. Not arguments exactly. Clarifications. \u201cThat line wasn\u2019t about me, right?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some people heard themselves. That was the problem. Bart would answer carefully, trying to keep the songs separate from the individuals. The songs were composites. Patterns, not portraits. This did not reassure everyone. One night, after a set where he played several in a row, a man approached him outside. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou think you\u2019re clever,\u201d the man said. Bart did not respond. The man continued, explaining in heated terms how certain things should not be said publicly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m not exposing anyone,\u201d the said Bart. \u201cI\u2019m describing what I see.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The distinction did not land. He was hit. Not severely. Enough to register. Others intervened. The man was pulled away. Bart stood there, trying to understand what just happened, in terms of mechanism. He went home. The next day, he considered stopping. If describing small hostilities produced larger ones, perhaps it was not worth it. But then he thought about the songs. They were not about individuals. They were about patterns. The way people carry things they do not examine. The way those things leak out in small, everyday interactions. He wrote another song. Not about the incident. About the moment before it. The tone of the conversation. The shift. The way something unspoken becomes suddenly visible. He played it the next week. No one approached him afterward. He understood something then. Not everyone wants to be seen and some will resist the mirror, even if the mirror is simply made of sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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