John Vanderslice, Poet

Most poets can't sing. Though most do try, while cleaning their houses, or driving their cars or scrubbing their bodies in their impossibly small showers. Just like the rest of us, they try to sing. They test it out. After a few minutes - just like the rest of us - they decided that, no, they are not singers. They cannot carry tunes the way some carry pales of water, or waitresses carry plates up their arms; they cannot pull it off the way strippers pull off articles of clothing, or nurses pull off bandages.

John Vanderslice is not one of those poets. John Vanderslice is a poet who can sing.

Though we're not sure if he ever identified as such, we do know that he went to school for, and thought he become, an economist.

Picture him now, toiling over numbers, trying to concoct theories. Can't do it, can you? Us either.

But that could be because we like his music too much to conjure an alternate reality for the singer/songwriter who could have had a career as a confessional poet if he didn't know how to sing or play the guitar, or lay it all out over subtle electronic beats that make his music the perfect combination of the analog and the digital; the past and the present.