The Book of Alchemy is an inspiring compilation of essays and writing prompts, “a memoir in essays and a chorus of the most inspiring voices I know”, imagined into existence by Suleika Jaouad.

I got an advance copy because I’ve had the honor of having one of my essays, I Fall in Love, a vignette of my 2023 stay at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, selected twice—first for Suleika’s newsletter the Isolation Journals, and now for inclusion in this beautiful book. What an honor!

It gets better though. Mary Beth and I also received complimentary tickets to an unusual book release/concert celebration, hosted by Suleika and her husband Jon Batiste at the Salt Shed in Chicago later this week.

If you’d like to hear me read my essay I Fall In Love, get comfortable, slip into some headphones and click on the voiceover icon at the top of this newsletter.

Donate to the Alchemy Fund for Girls Write Now.

In 1994, the year I turned my attention away from magazine photography and started this particular specialty, I had just 14 clients (the following year, 140). I took some milestone photos that first year, and I wanted to share some of them with my studio’s social media followers, but I couldn’t find the originals in my archive of film negatives.

I’m pretty sure I had had the idea to revisit those photos before, maybe on the studio’s twentieth anniversary. I probably pulled the negatives to scan, then put them “someplace special”, outside of my filing system.

Raise your hand if you have fallen for this yourself. “Someplace special” is never a good place to put things that already have a place in a system.

“They’ll turn up,” Darby, my able and optimistic helper assured me.

One of the conundrums I’m facing as I get ready to let go of my 3000 square-foot studio space is what to do with all my stuff.

In particular, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with twelve years worth of film negatives, my pre-digital client archive (1994-2006), all tucked carefully into archival sleeves within business-sized envelopes and housed in five standard, four-drawer steel file cabinets. The originals from 2007–2025 reside inside a cubic foot of electronics.

This is a struggle that I think many people have in their creative lives, especially those of us working across several different media and engaged in a lot of different projects, and especially if we’re doing this over the course of decades. Where do you put things? How do you find them again? When and how do you part with them? In my professional life, I have excellent naming and filing conventions for digital and for physical organization. I can find a specific client’s photos in minutes. In my personal creative pursuits, not quite as much.

I once put together an exhibition of photos, a series from my personal work, of flowers just past their prime. I ordered large prints, had mats cut and then matted them myself. I ordered pretty, white metal frames from one supplier and glass from another. I cleaned all of the glass myself, framed everything up and hung them up on the walls of Café SelMarie in Chicago, where they lived for a month.

I figured I’d only need to sell three or four them to pay for the show, but though they were much loved, none of the 25 framed prints sold, leaving me with a significant collection of art stuff.

I actually built an 8' tall by 12' wide storage unit to house that show and some other framed prints I’d accumulated. All that art waited there for 10 or 12 years before I finally pulled all the pieces out and dismantled them, putting the prints into archival boxes and donating the frames and glass to a local art school. Shortly thereafter I tore the storage unit down.

I have been reluctant to mount an exhibition ever since those photos went into storage.

I started doing what I do commercially over 30 years ago, in a different world. For starters, I learned and worked in the age of film photography, an age when talented photographers could supplement their income substantially by placing their photos with stock agencies who would license them over and over again, for real money.

Early signs were good. A couple of my dog-related photos were licensed multiple times, and at least two of them pulled in over $10,000 apiece.

This growing archive of photos, created in my commercial work, was to be my yellow brick road to passive income, and perhaps even retirement.

Things changed. Digital technology took over, bringing with it many powerful advantages for photographers and also musicians. Substantial disadvantages showed up relatively quickly as well, as photos and music morphed into something called digital content.

Most notably, the ensuing superabundance of easily transferrable content meant that licensing fees fell dramatically.

So much for my yellow brick road.

Back to those missing negatives… In an effort to discover whether they’d simply been misfiled, I had Darby pull all of the envelopes containing film negatives out of their file cabinets and re-organize them into tidy white boxes by year.

The 1994 negatives I’d been looking for didn’t turn up. They had apparently not been misfiled within the archive. I must have put them “someplace special”.

Meanwhile, another savvy young woman who has been helping me with social media and marketing found beautiful scans of the exact photos I had been looking for in my studio’s Facebook feed, lending credence to my twentieth anniversary theory. So at least there’s that, for now. And, Darby assures me, the originals will turn up eventually. Maybe when we’re packing out a year from now.

What’s next for me? I haven’t figured that out yet, but I feel good about it.

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I buy these cheap, college-ruled composition books and plaster them with stickers so that I can tell them apart. Last year I named a song I wrote Pasta Luna Love Song after a sticker I’d stuck to the notebook in which I’d first sketched the lyrics.

The notebook I lost had a round pink sticker on the cover with the word NORMAL emblazoned in black at its center. I got that sticker at a café in Indianapolis a couple of years ago. I think NORMAL is the name of a coffee roaster. I chose that particular sticker because I wanted to get myself to think of writing as my new normal, just something that I do.

When my searches didn’t lead me to my NORMAL journal, I placed a water glass upside-down in my windowsill. My girlfriend MB learned this from her wasband’s girlfriend Amy. Amy, who learned it from a great aunt, believes in this practice for recovering lost things. You’re supposed to leave the glass in that position until your lost item turns up. You’re also supposed to believe that it will.

The water glass has only had three or four days to work on the problem, but I’m pretty sure this notebook’s gone for real. I’ve been to the library, to the café, to the other library, the other café, back to a restaurant I’d visited, all the places I carried it to on the day it went missing. I visited some of the places twice but… no luck.

I’ve turned my car inside out a couple of times, searched every logical place at my studio and in my tiny 800-square-foot apartment. No notebook.

I’d been adding to that journal for over a year. It still had a good thirty blank pages waiting for my thoughts.

This loss isn’t a tragedy, because I know I’ll write more, and I have many other dog-eared notebooks that I can mine for ideas and potential song lyrics.

I’ll never know exactly what was lost.

Though the journal’s disappearance frustrates and irritates me a bit, it hasn’t angered or upset me too much. Even knowing that a stranger could be reading (provided of course they could decipher my handwriting) first-person accounts of my anxieties, gratitude, insecurities and loves doesn’t bother me too much.

It’s annoying, it’s sad, it’s a little inconvenient, but… It also means it’s time to pick a new sticker for my next composition book, start a new cycle, stir my creativity into a shiny new vessel.

As I sat sipping a decaf Americano at one of the cafés that didn’t have my notebook in their lost-and-found this morning, a 2023 reflection on Tibetan sand mandalas by Anand Lal-Tabak turned up in my feed:

This process signifies the impermanent nature of all that we do and is still disconcerting to me to this day.⁴So much effort is placed into meticulously creating this beautiful patterned design. Why would someone destroy something so beautiful immediately after it is created? Who will get to experience it? And yet, it brings out one of the greatest inner struggles we face as artists. The separation of the process of creation from the reception of our created work. The destruction or loss of all of our creative efforts that is inevitable with the passing of time.

I’m moving on, but I think I’ll leave that water glass upside down for another week, and perhaps work a little harder on the believing part.

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One day when I was nine years old, I got on my brother’s three-speed English racing bike after school to go visit a friend who lived on the other side of the high school.

My brother had gone off to college the year before, leaving me his bike to use but also leaving me alone in the basement bedroom we had shared from the time I was about six.

Our basement scared me. After my brother left, I slept with a light on until I was sixteen.

As I passed the high school, a kid ran out from behind a tree, grabbed my belt and told me to get off my bike. Two other kids appeared—three kids on two bikes. I stopped. I didn’t get off my brother’s bike, though. I remained astride it, my left foot on a raised pedal.

I found myself faced with three boys a few years older than I was, who encircled me flashing razor blades. I responded by doing the only thing I knew how to do, which was to be polite and friendly to them. I asked them their names. The apparent leader told me his name and then the names of the other two boys. I tried to make polite conversation. They asked if I had any money, and I told them I didn’t. They checked my pockets, found no money.

It must have become clear that I was not going to get off of my brother’s bike—razors or no, it was not mine to give. They weren’t getting a bike, there wasn’t any money, and since we’d run out of things to talk about, the meanest boy slashed my thigh with his razor. One of his associates, shocked, yelled, “Dang! You cut him!”

The boss said, “You got no money? Then get out of here!” I gladly did.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this was a horrifying, traumatic experience for me, a pivotal moment in my young life. Though I still bear a three-inch scar on my left thigh, I don’t talk about it much.

That night in my basement bedroom, I was terrified, and couldn’t sleep. I kept imagining the boys breaking my tiny basement window to come in and hurt me.

Unable to calm my nervous system on my own, I left my room, climbed the basement stairs in my pajamas, and timidly approached my dad.

Dad was propped on his elbows on our kitchen island, chin in hands, the South Bend Tribune spread out in front of him.

Standing behind him, “ Dad,” I said, “I can’t sleep.” Without looking up from his newspaper, he said, “Try reading a book.”

I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but his response absolutely missed the mark.

In that household, I repeatedly got the message that I should be able to take care of myself, and if I couldn’t, then I was a burden and should be ashamed. I returned to my cave-like basement bedroom, pulled a paperback collection of Peanuts cartoons off the shelf and read until I fell asleep.

When I was twelve, I decided I wanted to go shopping at Town and Country, a big shopping center on the east side of Mishawaka. We lived on the west side of South Bend. The shopping center was most of two towns away, but I had ridden city buses before and I was pretty sure I knew how to get there.

I was wrong.

I boarded the bus, paid my fare, found a seat and I sat. I sat and waited, waited and watched out the window as the bus made its way eastward, across the sister cities, pausing at every bus stop. I kept looking for the shopping center, but didn’t see it.

After the better part of an hour, when the driver got to his turnaround point, he pulled the bus over and idled. Fifteen minutes later, he put the bus back in gear, and pulled out for the trip back to the west side. I rode the entire circuit, never saying a word, and not finding the shopping center I was looking for. It didn’t once occur to me to go ask the bus driver, the adult in charge, for help.

When I arrived home, several hours after my departure, my mom asked me if I had found what I was looking for. I told her I hadn’t, because I hadn’t found the shopping center. I hadn’t gone shopping at Town and Country like I’d wanted to, I had just sat on a bus for several hours.

“You’re so bullheaded!” she said, “Just like your father. You’re both stubborn.”

Bullheaded? That was hard for me to hear. I didn’t feel stubborn, I felt afraid.

More to the point, I had learned by that time that asking for help was imposing on people, and that it would not get me what I needed.

I loved both of my parents, unequivocally. They were good and kind and loving. They just lacked the necessary resources. They were afraid, too, and they were tapped out emotionally.

I was the fourth of five children, and at the time of my mugging at age nine, they also had a three-year-old, two teenage girls and a college freshman. They were financially strapped and in a tense holding pattern in their own relationship. In many instances, they just didn’t have what was called for.

By the time of my weird bus odyssey, I’d concluded that I was on my own and it was up to me to make it through. If that was hard, or if I couldn’t figure things out, well, that was on me. I must be doing something wrong.

A little over a year ago, a spinal CSF leak which had derailed my life from 2010 to 2012, reopened, and my neurological function once again began to take a nosedive.

My girlfriend, Mary Beth, began carrying more of the weight of our day-to-day existence. With my headaches, fatigue, loss of energy, memory issues, and inability to bend over or drive, I needed help just getting through each day.

Shortly after this shift in our routines, Mary Beth put out a call to our community. She asked our friends to bring us food. I was a little puzzled. I actually wondered if she was being a bit opportunistic.

But for Mary Beth, asking for help came naturally. She had grown up under different circumstances and drawn different conclusions. For Mary Beth, asking was a natural, obvious and sensible thing to do.

She says, “Asking someone for help is giving them the gift of knowing that, when they need it, they can ask for help.”

Too often people in that caretaker position don’t ask for help and end up exhausted, depleted and unable to carry the extra weight for long.

It worked out beautifully, of course. Our friends brought us food and sent us gift cards for restaurants that offered carry out, the same things that we do when folks in our community are in need.

Recovery from the surgery and the trauma to my brain took most of the year.

Once my cognitive functions were restored, I was again able to fully engage with my business and my finances. I found myself in the midst of a financial crisis, exacerbated by a notable downturn in business during the fourth quarter, the part of the year we always count on for a good portion of our annual revenue.

I had a sit-down with a business-savvy friend and laid out the details. He made some suggestions which have guided me as I work to put my financial world back together.

He also suggested I let him and another friend start a GoFundMe campaign to help me get back on my feet.

A GoFundMe on my behalf was a tough idea for me to swallow. I didn’t like the idea of asking for help in such a public way.

They helped me see a couple of things. Something really disruptive had happened to me. Twice in ten years. I didn’t cause it, it wasn’t my fault.

They also introduced me to the concept of social capital, and urged me to consider the many, many ways I have invested in my community, my social circles and my friends over many decades.

I agreed to the GoFundMe. We set our sights on wiping out a good portion of the debt which had accumulated as I’d clawed my way through a difficult year.

They put the campaign together and helped me get the word out about it, but they noticed me dragging my feet when it came to sharing the campaign with a wider audience, through social media. But that kind of exposure is how these things work.

I wrestled with painful feelings of shame, with feeling exposed, but in the end, I saw the sense in it. I acquiesced.

Once I finally let them spread the word, a miraculous thing happened: in just twenty-one days over two hundred people had responded generously, putting us more than halfway toward our ambitious goal for contributions.

This GoFundMe experience has been, and continues to be, an eye-opening and healing experience for me. When I sat down to write this account, I wasn’t sure how it would end. The ending here is really about the beginning of a new phase, one guided by an adult’s understanding that nobody makes it alone. As I learn to shed the crippling belief that, if I can’t figure everything out by myself, there must be something wrong with me, I am becoming more adept at asking for help when I need it, and more comfortable in receiving it.

To contribute to this GoFundMe campaign, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/david-sutton

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Earlier this fall, Mary Beth (MB) and I left our city for a nearby village to spend some leisure time browsing, working and reading in their beautiful village library.

True story: Evanston, Illinois, where we live, is a city. Wilmette, to our north, is a village. I don't know why this is, but I'm sure there was a time when the distinction mattered a lot more than it does now.

At the library, we worked for a while, then did some relaxing stack wandering and book browsing. Shout out to Austin Kleon, whose Steal Like an Artist reminded me what a refreshing and affordable outing this can be. Eventually, we found ourselves in the crafts and hobbies section.

“Hey,” MB asked, “I wonder if they have your cigar box guitars book here.” We looked at where we thought it ought to be, but it wasn't there, so we headed to the card catalog. Well, we headed to the “card catalog”—the shiny computer terminal that replaced the many cubic yards and metric tons of oak cabinets, drawers and notecards that used to tell you where to look for books in the library.

My book, Cigar Box Guitars, wasn’t listed in their collection.

MB, ever resourceful and so often game for real life adventures, wanted to know if perhaps a nearby library had a copy of my book. We did a broader search and found that another nearby village, Morton Grove, owned a copy, and the status of that book was listed as AVAILABLE.

It was getting close to library closing time, but just as I was mentally filing this under [Adventure: Future], MB smiled that smile of hers and said, “Let’s go!”

Saying yes to MB's ideas has proven to be such a life enricher for me that quite often, even when I’m tired, I allow myself to be infected by her enthusiasm. I’m always glad I did.

We hurried off to my car and beat it to the Morton Grove Public Library.

Arriving just ten minutes before closing, we approached the front desk.

Me: “Can you tell me how to find a copy of a book called Cigar Box Guitars by David Sutton?”

MB: “He’s David Sutton.”

Librarian: “Oh, my!”

Not a minute later the slender young man handed us a 4"x 4" Post-It® note onto which he’d printed several numerals, a decimal point and the letters SUT.

“Crafts and hobbies,” he said, pointing to his right.

We thanked him and walked as fast as we could (running is frowned upon in public libraries) to the crafts and hobbies section where, two inches to the left of The First Fifty Songs You Should Play on the Banjo, stood my book, slender and majestic, with an official looking Dewey decimal sticker on its spine!

In the dozen or so years since Cigar Box Guitars was published, it had NEVER ONCE occurred to me to wonder if copies might be lurking in the collections of nearby libraries. Now I’m wondering what other libraries might have it, and if it might even be found in libraries very far from where it was written.

Are you a library goer? If you are, and if you have a minute the next time you’re in your local library, would you wander over to the crafts and hobbies section and take a look for me?

If you don’t see it, could you perhaps ask them to purchase one?

If you do see it, would you send me a picture and tell me what city, village, town or hamlet you found it in?

I’d love that, thanks.

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Earlier this fall, Mary Beth (MB) and I left our city for a nearby village to spend some leisure time browsing, working and reading in their beautiful village library.

True story: Evanston, Illinois, where we live, is a city. Wilmette, to our north, is a village. I don't know why this is, but I'm sure there was a time when the distinction mattered a lot more than it does now.

At the library, we worked for a while, then did some relaxing stack wandering and book browsing. Shout out to Austin Kleon, whose Steal Like an Artist reminded me what a refreshing and affordable outing this can be. Eventually, we found ourselves in the crafts and hobbies section.

“Hey,” MB asked, “I wonder if they have your cigar box guitars book here.” We looked at where we thought it ought to be, but it wasn't there, so we headed to the card catalog. Well, we headed to the “card catalog”—the shiny computer terminal that replaced the many cubic yards and metric tons of oak cabinets, drawers and notecards that used to tell you where to look for books in the library.

My book, Cigar Box Guitars, wasn’t listed in their collection.

MB, ever resourceful and so often game for real life adventures, wanted to know if perhaps a nearby library had a copy of my book. We did a broader search and found that another nearby village, Morton Grove, owned a copy, and the status of that book was listed as AVAILABLE.

It was getting close to library closing time, but just as I was mentally filing this under [Adventure: Future], MB smiled that smile of hers and said, “Let’s go!”

Saying yes to MB's ideas has proven to be such a life enricher for me that quite often, even when I’m tired, I allow myself to be infected by her enthusiasm. I’m always glad I did.

We hurried off to my car and beat it to the Morton Grove Public Library.

Arriving just ten minutes before closing, we approached the front desk.

Me: “Can you tell me how to find a copy of a book called Cigar Box Guitars by David Sutton?”

MB: “He’s David Sutton.”

Librarian: “Oh, my!”

Not a minute later the slender young man handed us a 4"x 4" Post-It® note onto which he’d printed several numerals, a decimal point and the letters SUT.

“Crafts and hobbies,” he said, pointing to his right.

We thanked him and walked as fast as we could (running is frowned upon in public libraries) to the crafts and hobbies section where, two inches to the left of The First Fifty Songs You Should Play on the Banjo, stood my book, slender and majestic, with an official looking Dewey decimal sticker on its spine!

In the dozen or so years since Cigar Box Guitars was published, it had NEVER ONCE occurred to me to wonder if copies might be lurking in the collections of nearby libraries. Now I’m wondering what other libraries might have it, and if it might even be found in libraries very far from where it was written.

Are you a library goer? If you are, and if you have a minute the next time you’re in your local library, would you wander over to the crafts and hobbies section and take a look for me?

If you don’t see it, could you perhaps ask them to purchase one?

If you do see it, would you send me a picture and tell me what city, village, town or hamlet you found it in?

I’d love that, thanks.

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After I took the music theory classes that got me started writing songs, new neural pathways helped me hear things I hadn’t noticed before.

When I reached to “Crazy” again recently, I noticed a moment in the song, right at the 0:54 second mark, that always makes me feel a joyful release, like the sun just came out on a cloudy day.

I needed to know what was behind that magic, so I went to see my friend (and longtime music mentor) Justin Amolsch, and asked him about it.

Justin listened to the song with me a couple of times, then sat down at his piano to explain.

The song is written and plays out in the key of C minor. People often describe music composed in minor keys as solemn, sad or mysterious. The minor tone suits the lyrical atmosphere of this song, which is about how we sometimes question our own sanity during difficult times.

“I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind…”

“Crazy” has three distinct sections. The A section (let’s call it the verse) and the B section (I’ll call that one the chorus) each begins with a C minor chord, defining the key and setting the stage by pulling us down into that solemn place. The first minute of the song gives a gray, cloudy feeling.

It also sets up the expectation that each section will begin with a C minor. That brings us to the 0:54 second mark again, where the C section (which I’ll call the bridge), begins.

This bridge kicks off on a major chord. It lands solidly, with both feet, on C major, a chord not typically found in the key of C minor. It’s unexpected. To the western ear, major chords and songs in major keys are experienced as upbeat and happy. Most of our pop songs play out in major keys.

When that C major lands, it lifts the song and the listener up. It creates a feeling like the sun just punched through a cloud cover.

To accentuate this effect, there’s a short pause in the vocals here, too. We get to bask in that C major sunshine for two full measures before the song returns to its heavier C minor moorings.

The clouds then remain for another verse and chorus. This time, though, things feel a little different, because we know we have something to look forward to. Sure enough, at 1:45, the sun busts through again, giving us that major lift (the one Leonard Cohen sings about in “Hallelujah”), a second time.

“Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

But you don’t really care for music, do ya?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah”

This major lift happens a total of three times in “Crazy”. The third time around, the C major sets up the outro, doing us the kindness of sending us on our way on a hopeful note.

“There was something so pleasant about that place

Even your emotions had an echo

In so much space”

“Crazy” never lets me down.

When I need a boost, I don't want someone to tell me to put on a happy face. I want to have my sadness, and the gravity of this life-in-human-form acknowledged. I want someone to give my emotions an echo, but also to give me some hope.

With their song, CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse show their willingness to sit with us, to reflect what we’re feeling back to us with an earnest look, with a little ribbing, and most importantly, with a little eye twinkle that communicates hope.

“Ha ha ha, bless your soul… you really think you’re in control?”

In setting up the ending with that C major chord, the outro acts like a friend putting out a hand to help us get up and back on our way. It says, “Me too. We’re together in this.”

“Maybe I’m crazy

Maybe you’re crazy

Maybe we’re crazy

Probably”

In reading about this song I discovered that this seventeen-year-old gem is having a TikTok moment right now with a thing called The “Crazy” Challenge.

I also learned that CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse share writing credit with two Italian composers, brothers named Gianfranco and Gianpiero Reverberi, whose tune “Last Men Standing” they sampled for the main riff.

I wonder how many of the people rising to The “Crazy” Challenge realize that “Crazy” began life as theme music in a spaghetti western!

Aw, c’mon. Let’s hear CeeLo again:

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P.S. Pets

For your enjoyment.

Sutton Studios: Celebrating thirty years in service to people who love their pets.

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When I was nineteen, I thought I was a pretty good photographer, but I wondered if I could be a great one. I told myself that if I had some time to focus my attention solely on taking photos, out in the world, I might find out.

I took a semester off of college, and worked long hours in a steel fabricating shop to put together a little bit of money. I stuffed my Nikon F camera and four lenses into an army surplus, gas-mask satchel that I’d modified with stiff cardboard. With thirty-five rolls of Kodak Tri-X film sealed into a Ziploc bag, I flew off to England to begin a ten-week, European photo safari. It was early February, 1978.

From London, I took a train to Canterbury to visit my friend Jack, who was studying at Keynes College. On my first morning there, I got up early, ate breakfast and ventured out from his dormitory, on my own, to begin my photo expedition.

As I hiked into the surrounding fields, an early morning fog clung close to the ground. Looking across a valley filled with post-war tract houses, I saw the faint outline of Canterbury Cathedral, just visible in the town center two miles away.

Housing developments sprawled between me and the cathedral, cluttering the foreground. With my eye on the ghostlike cathedral, I walked deeper into the field in search of a better view. I found a place where, laying down in the grass, behind a small rise, I could work around the houses in the foreground.

I framed the cathedral’s hazy silhouette between two wintery trees and shot a few frames. I felt good, but not quite satisfied by what I’d seen in my viewfinder. In the pre-digital world, there was no monitor on the back providing instant feedback. You had to trust your instincts. Just as I was considering moving on, a man walked into the frame with his dog. I released the shutter one more time.

It would be several months before I saw the photos I’d taken that day.

When I returned from my trip, I spent a week in the darkroom, developing film, making contact sheets, and finally making prints. Roll-by-roll, frame-by-frame, I saw the photos I’d made while I was abroad, each one taking me back to a different location, a different mood, a different experience. In among those, I found a dozen or so that made me proud, and provided the confidence I needed to begin to pursue a career in photography.

For the next sixteen years I would pursue a number of different ways of making photography my career. When I finally turned my lens to the relationships between people and their pets, I found my niche, and things began to open up.

It has been a good many years since I was nineteen. Since that morning in Canterbury, thousands of people have made it a point to wander into my studio and into my frame with their pets.

Now, I see this photo as a portent, an intimation that sometimes in art, as in life (or in a career), it takes a dog to complete the picture.

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New Feature!

P.S. Pets

For your enjoyment–a weekly glimpse into what I do when I’m not writing these newsletters for you.

Sutton Studios: Celebrating thirty years in service to people who love their pets.

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Dear Jeff Daniels,

If we’d reserved a table rather than getting SRO tickets to your show at Evanston Space; if the young couple behind us had not been so effusively and loudly into one another; if their mutual infatuation had not rendered them oblivious to the effects of their conversation on the older couple in front of them; if my girlfriend Mary Beth and I had been able to figure out a tactful way to quiet them without completely raining on their parade; if we could have found another place to stand; if we, both virtual non-drinkers, had opted to split a soft drink instead of a dark beer (which made us tired)... then I might not be sending you this letter to tell you of my disappointment at having missed the cigar box guitar part of your set, and the story you told.

In a more perfect world, Mary Beth and I would have stayed to the end of your last encore, and you and I would have chatted a bit after your show about cigar box guitars. In a more perfect world, I’d have had one of my books with me and I’d have given it to you, autographing it with an ironic flourish, as if I were the screen actor and you the fan.

In this imperfect world, though we never leave a show early, Mary Beth and I left your concert just after you left the stage to the Ben Daniels Band, but not before you had earned our respect as a singer, guitarist, raconteur and songwriter (we both found “Back When You Were Into Me” particularly moving).

In this imperfect world, a friend of ours who stayed to the end called the next day to say that you had returned to the stage that night with a cigar box guitar, and an amusing story about where you’d found it and what you love about it.

As we’re now part of the same cigar box guitar community, I thought you might enjoy some of the stories in my book.

Thanks again for a wonderful, if star-crossed, night out last month.

All the best,

David

* Called “First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Lawyers”, S2E1 starts: ”If Ben Furusho hadn’t broken his ankle; if Jim Harper hadn’t gone to New Hampshire to cover for him…”

Mike Snowden’s cigar box guitars.

Concert footage (not from the Evanston Space show):

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In family systems theory, there’s a lot of talk about triangles. In music theory, it’s triads. While noodling around on my cigar box guitar recently, a simple chord change revealed a surprising connection between these two different theories that helped me actually hear one of family systems theory’s central concepts.

In simplified terms, family systems theory looks at difficulties expressed in one individual in terms of group dynamics, rather than in terms of that one person having a problem and needing help. Challenging behaviors are seen in the context of an overall group dynamic.

Change within such a system can be very difficult. When two people are experiencing discord or stress or anxiety, they'll often loop in a third person to take on part of their emotional burden. They effectively off-load some of their anxiety to this third person. Once an equilibrium has been arrived at within such a triangle, it becomes difficult for any one person to change their behavior because that change necessitates changes in all the relationships within the group.

A change in one person not only affects three different relationships, but also the overall group dynamic, and the other members of the group might be unwilling or unable to make the necessary adjustments, due to the discomfort involved.

I remember learning how to play a C major chord on a piano keyboard, and how simply and beautifully three notes (C, E and G) relate, how they blend together to make a powerful, pleasing, balanced sound. On the piano, this chord is made up by playing every other white key starting at the C.

I also learned how to turn a C major into a C minor chord by moving my middle finger ever so slightly to the left, changing just the middle note by the smallest increment available, one half-step. C minor provides a very different sound experience. Where the major chord communicates strength, stability and sunshine, the minor chord sounds sad, pensive, cloudy. I thought it remarkable that all this happens just by changing one note, the E, by a tiny amount.

Whenever I sit down at a piano keyboard, I'll play a C major chord and then a C minor chord before I do anything else. Truth be told, there's not much else I can do on a piano keyboard, but this change never fails to fascinate me.

I build my cigar box guitars with three strings, tuned to a major chord (or triad). On them, I can amuse myself for minutes at a time just pedaling back and forth between a major and a minor chord, changing that one note back and forth, one half-step.

I had a revelation about this recently. Applying the lens of family systems theory, I looked at the major/minor shift, not just in terms of changes in one note, but in terms of changes in a whole set of tonal relationships.

In going from a major chord to a minor, the first note hasn't changed, but the relationship between the first note and the second has changed, and the two notes sound very different together. The space between the two notes, the interval, is smaller. Together, they no longer sound as comfortable or settled. They communicate more tension, a little too close for comfort.

The relationship between the middle note and the top note has been affected as well. Those two notes, now farther apart, sound a different interval. There’s more room and less tension.

While we haven’t changed the distance between the first and third note, that relationship is powerfully colored by the changes in the other relationships. When strumming all three notes together, we hear that a greater change has taken place, the result of a shift in the overall dynamic of the system.

The completed triad now creates a minor chord. Where there was sonic sunshine, we now hear clouds.

A suspended fourth (sus4) chord illustrates the same concept, but a little differently, by raising, rather than lowering, the middle note, again by just one half-step. Where the minor chord creates a more somber sound, the suspended fourth creates a feeling of expectation which can be met, settled or resolved by shifting the middle note back down one half-step to the major chord (phew!).

This revelation helps me understand why change is hard, and that this is why, in a family systems approach to problem solving, everyone is part of the process. Though it's tempting to try to solve problems by asking for changes in the one person who seems to be having issues, the individual can’t make a change without affecting the others, creating changes that unsettle the entire system.

While I’ve had an intellectual grasp of family systems theory for years, and felt it in my gut, it wasn’t until this moment of musical insight that I heard it through my ears. Experiencing this theoretical concept through sound opened me up to a more sensory understanding. It also gave me a clue as to how some musical compositions are capable of affecting us on a deep, emotional level.

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One day last year, at the very moment I awoke, I was the recipient of a gift. A song lyric dropped into my consciousness by who knows what mechanism. Was it a ghost? One of the nine Greek muses? Or did it come from someone else?

I captured it like an insect in amber before it went wispy on me. I have learned from sad experience, that when a gift such as this shows up, the words or melodies must be written down or recorded immediately or they will be lost as I move from fuzzy semi-consciousness to full wakefulness.

This had happened before, but as you might imagine, this time the line: “Hi, it’s your dad. I never died, I’m out here walkin’ ” really caught me up short. Arriving as it did some 15 years after my dad had died, I received it with respect, wrote it down, and then mulled it over.

It was late summer, the leaves outside my window already hinting at autumn. My dad had died on Halloween, the very day in that season when many cultures feel the veil between worlds is at its thinnest.

The next few lines appeared without effort, perhaps with Dad’s help:

Hi, it’s your dad, I never died

I’m out here walkin’.

These autumn leaves smell mighty sweet

Beneath my feet.”

That, “Hi, it’s your dad” sounded like a phone call. It seemed my dad wanted to talk to me, so the next verse came easily:

Wish you were here, I think it’s time

We did some talkin’

Just you and me with autumn leaves

Beneath our feet”

A few weeks later, I did some freewriting on this topic. If my dad had wanted to talk to me from wherever he’d gone, what would he want to talk to me about?

Knowing my dad, he'd feel the need to apologize for something. For not having been enough, or done enough, for not getting the dad thing quite right. I took some of what I’d written and worked on lyrics off-and-on for a few weeks, then set it aside for a while.

Deep into that fall, I attended a retreat in New Mexico. Also on the retreat were two women friends who had recently lost their fathers. The grief expressed around those losses fueled my desire to finish this song. While in New Mexico I found a chord progression on my cigar box guitar that seemed to fit. Over the next few days I built a melody on that chord progression.

My dad’s presence (in the song and in my mind) took on the character of a restless ghost, a sort of unsettled spirit searching for peace. I wanted to answer him, to absolve him, to provide him with the means to forgive himself. I found another chord progression in the same chord family and wrote a “B” part, from my point of view, to sing back to him.

I later brought this unfinished work to a songwriting class taught by songwriter Steve Dawson. It was in that class, called Finish Your Damn Song, that one of my classmates suggested an ending that was so spot-on it gave me a chill.

Through autumn leaves, me resting here

Beneath your feet.

The new ending was good, insofar as my dad changed his attitude, got the absolution that he needed, then moved on, but I found the transition he underwent too abrupt, and a bit facile. It seemed to me there should be some struggle.

At this point, I made a connection between this song I was working on and a Cat Stevens song I had loved as a kid, called “Father and Son”, which contained a dialogue between two generations. I came up with another chord progression, one with a little more tension, and started writing a “C” part for the segment that would present the struggle required for the resolution at the end to make more sense.

I’d made really good progress with the conversation segment at first, but then I stalled out, I couldn’t find the last few words for this back-and-forth.

Just a few weeks ago, I was at a retreat at the same lodge in New Mexico where I had been the year before, with some of the same people. This time two different people were working through the loss of their fathers. The two from the previous year were also part of the group.

I decided it was time to finish my damn song, so that I could play it for them at the end of our retreat. I asked my friend Terence Mickey if he’d sing the second part, the voice of the son, and lend me some guitar help, and Terence graciously agreed.

I tend to work primarily with pencil and paper when I’m writing songs, and not, perhaps enough, with a guitar in my lap instead. One solution that rarely occurs to me when I’m pushing a pencil around is to repeat words or phrases.

Just a few minutes into our first practice session, the missing words for the “C” part of the song revealed themselves, and sure enough, the solution was to repeat a phrase.

After just three or four practice sessions, on our last evening together, Terence and I sat in front of a dozen people and debuted the newly completed song, “I Never Died”, for our friends.

As the last chord faded away, we were met with complete silence for three or four seconds. It would have been tempting to wonder if they knew the song had ended, but I could feel in those seconds that the song had landed, really, truly landed, and that, hearing it for the first time, those gathered needed to sit for a moment to fully reckon with their emotions before they let loose with appreciative, enthusiastic applause.

I Never Died by David Sutton

[A Part–Father]

Hi, it’s your dad, I never died

I’m out here walkin’

These autumn leaves smell mighty sweet

Beneath my feet.

Wish you were here, I think it’s time

We did some talkin’

Just you and me, with autumn leaves

Beneath our feet.

Thought you should know how I believed

I’d stop you fallin’

But looking back

I see the ways I let you down.

Too little play and too much time

With work and worry

The dying know

The living have things turned around.

[B Part–Son]

Hello, Old Man

I see you’re still melancholy

Leave all you did

Or didn’t behind.

You blazed a good trail

With both your wisdom and folly

You’re never far

From my mind.

[C Part–Both]

Dad: How can I go?

Son: Leave what you didn’t do.

Dad: Too little time for play.

Son: You paved the way.

Dad: I let you fall.

Son: I got up stronger.

Dad: So much worrying

Son: Let it go now

Both: Let it go now

Son: Let it go!

Dad: Look at you now

Son: You did your part

Dad: Who would’ve known what a son could teach his dad.

[A Part–Dad]

It’s sweet to see you’ve grown into

A man worth knowin’

Heart open wide,

Feet on the ground, I feel complete

I’ve got to go, I need some rest

You go on walkin’

Through autumn leaves,

Me resting here beneath your feet.

©2023 David B. Sutton

*** Listen to the “Article Voiceover” at top to hear the finished song.

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Bruce is the only son in a legendary, Chicago-based folk trio called the Sons of the Never Wrong that has been pleasing audiences for over 30 years. In addition to being a builder, Bruce repairs 200 to 300 guitars every year through Chicago’s Old Town School Music Store. He also teaches guitar building.

I was telling him that I'd been thinking about how to get started on my next cigar box guitar, and imagining it would be fun, and maybe funny, to build a solid-body electric guitar around the three-string configuration I favor for strumming chords.

Our conversation turned to neck angles.

When it comes to cigar box lutherie, I'm unschooled and untrained. I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants for a dozen years.

My first few guitars were the more traditional fretless style, for playing with a slide. When I began building guitars with frets, so that I could strum chords, I got in the habit of adding a quarter-inch fingerboard to the neck. This is a common practice. It makes the neck a bit stronger and it also means you don’t have to scrap the whole neck if you botch the fret installation. This appealed to me.

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But, I installed the necks so that the fingerboard ended up flush and parallel with the body of the guitar, in this case the lid of the box, which acts as the soundboard.

This results in the strings being very close, some might say too close, to the soundboard/lid/body.

My solution for getting those strings up a little higher at the bridge had been to angle the neck back away from the soundboard by a couple of degrees.

The strings still meet the box pretty low, but by the time they reach the saddle/bridge, they're high enough to strum and to finger-pick, and even to accommodate a low-profile pickup.

When I built my first fully acoustic cigar box guitar from an old, solid cedar box, I fitted the neck with the fingerboard proud of the box lid, but I also angled the neck, out of habit and out of not knowing any better. This combination made the strings extra high at the bridge, so I had to build up the bridge and saddle until the strings came up right.

Bruce explained that most Gibson electric guitars have set necks. A set neck is built right into the guitar body and glued in place. Gibson sets most of those necks angled slightly back from the body.

Orville Gibson began as a mandolin builder, making acoustic instruments, mandolins whose arched tops required an angled neck for the strings to be in the right position.

Fender favors bolt-on necks for its electrics, with the fretboard parallel to the guitar top.

Leo Fender was more of an electronics nerd who came to guitar building because of his work in amplification. Leo’s first guitars dispensed with the acoustic model and were solid slabs of wood. He built them with no-nonsense, bolt-on necks, rather than glued-in, set necks, which made his guitars easier and cheaper to produce, repair and customize.

This whole Gibson/Fender split is Guitar Building 101, but I didn't know any of it.

Building for me has been a personal discovery process. I enjoy the unfolding. When I started building, I learned what I could from a single site on GeoCities. YouTube was only five years old, not yet the vast repository of how-to and DIY knowledge that it has since become.

I think my discovery approach is more aligned with the cigar box guitar tradition, and also in keeping with my preference for using traditional hand-tools as much as possible. All that really matters is that my approach suits me. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Creative work is a magic trick, an act of making something appear out of nothing. It’s hard not to doubt magic, especially magic that requires work, and so sometimes, when I complete a project and start looking for the next one, I wonder if I really know what I’m doing.

That’s where I am now. I’m thinking about building a cigar box guitar, but I haven't built one in several years. The thought of getting started on a new build puts me in this place of wondering, “Do I know how to do that? Will I remember what to do, and when? Will it work?”.

I have a number of perfectly healthy me-built cigar box guitars, at home and at work, that I play all the time. I must know something about making them, because these instruments function, and I enjoy playing them and using them to write songs.

But still, I doubt.

Okay, well then I’ll write a song instead. Yesterday I saw some ideas I’d written down, and a couple of nice turns of phrase that seemed to have potential. Then I had a momentary, vertiginous feeling. Write a song? How would I do that? Where would I start?

I’ve written a couple of dozen songs that don't embarrass me, not even a little, and I've translated a dozen more that worked well enough to have been released as an album. When I listen to any of those songs, it’s plain to hear that they’re fully fledged, each flapping about on its own musical wings.

Again, I doubt.

I’ve realized that things are a bit different at work. In my photo studio, my creative work is part of a commercial relationship, and in that context, with livelihoods and other people’s expectations on the line, I just have to start. It also helps that we have an actual start time, this thing called an appointment.

Still, even there, in that moment before taking the first photo, especially if I’m just back from a break, I’ll sometimes look at my subjects and wonder, how am I going to do this? Where do I start?

There must be others out there who experience some doubt or apprehension at the start of a new project. What do you do to get yourself going?

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When we headed to Montreal last summer, I had only one real objective: to visit the Mile End Guitar Builders Cooperative in order to meet Lenny Piroth-Robert, founder of Daddy Mojo Electrics, whom I’d interviewed by phone for my first book in 2011. But a different Lenny provided an unexpected trip down memory lane, a moment of reverence, and a meaningful photo.

I hadn’t thought much about what sorts of marks Leonard Cohen might have left on Montreal’s soul, but I got a hint on my third day there in the form of a nine-story mural depicting the singer wearing his classic fedora and a challenging mien, as if he’s sizing you up.

Montreal hosts a week-long mural festival each June, so every year more of Montreal’s plain brick walls are transformed into paintings by well-known muralists.

My girlfriend and travel companion Mary Beth wanted to take a walking tour during our stay, and we settled on the Original Montreal Mural Arts Tour, which focused on St. Laurent Blvd. in le Plateau-Mont-Royal, where we were staying.

Enriched and enlivened by their backstories, the giant paintings, which seemed to be everywhere, took on deeper meaning. Our guide also brought us up to speed on local graffiti trends and traditions.

At one of the tour’s first stops, we learned more about the borough of Plateau-Mont-Royal, and how the massive Leonard Cohen tribute I’d seen the day before had found its home in that neighborhood.

Beginning in the 1940s, the borough Plateau-Mont-Royal had a robust and lively Jewish population, evinced by the lines out the door of the world famous Schwartz’s Deli. Since the sixties, nearly fifty-thousand Portuguese immigrants also settled in that neighborhood.

Montreal-based artist Kevin Ledo, who specializes in large-scale murals celebrating diversity, and whose parents are Portuguese, created the painting for the 2017 mural festival. Choosing Ledo to represent Cohen, a Jewish artist, knitted the borough’s past and present together.

Festival organizers had approached the owner of the building several years in a row about hosting various murals on his building, but he’d turned down all previous requests. Approached about having a Leonard Cohen tribute on his wall, he happily agreed.

Our guide told us that when Cohen returned to Montreal later in life, he settled down in Plateau-Mont-Royal, where he’d owned a home since the seventies, and that that home was located just a short walk from where we stood!

Hearing that, I wanted to go, and here’s why: Leonard Cohen got me through.

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When my older brother moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan for med school in 1970, he sold me his vinyl collection along with a portable Magnavox stereo with a drop-down turntable. I was twelve at the time, and as a result, my musical tastes ended up skewing ten years out of sync with my cohort. My musical tastes were (and are) heavily influenced by what my big brother had been listening to in college from 1966 to 1970.

I got my sixty dollars worth! In among The Ultimate Spinach, Traffic, Blood, Sweat and Tears and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, I found the hauntingly beautiful Songs From a Room, Leonard Cohen’s second album.

Growing up as I did in a working class neighborhood in South Bend, Indiana, I wasn’t used to seeing Cohen regarded as he is in Montreal, where he’s both a star and a local hero. Other than my older brother and sister and some of my misfit friends, few people I met in those days were attuned to his music.

I went deep with Leonard Cohen, researching and ordering albums through my local record store. I spent hours and hours in my basement bedroom, listening to his voice, his poetry, his stories.

Cohen’s songs played a big part in getting me through some troubled times, the nature and origins of which I wouldn’t begin to understand until well into adulthood. He came to my aid and helped me to see that, amid all of life’s pain and sorrow, one could find a messy and twisted way in to love. In his voice and in his words, I found a deep pool of calm and compassion that I had not found anywhere else.

Nowadays, when I mention Leonard Cohen, people under fifty, and even people in their twenties, often respond with, “Oh yeah, Shrek! The ‘Hallelujah’ guy”.

Well, yes, “Hallelujah” is a great song, and it’s been covered by over three-hundred other artists, but I, and my boomer cohort, tend to think of Leonard Cohen as the guy who wrote the ethereal, mysterious “Suzanne”, which Cohen released as a single in 1966, and which Judy Collins covered the same year.

“Hallelujah” was released a generation later in 1984, but would achieve much greater fame in the following millennium, thanks to a cover version by John Cale, which was used in the soundtrack to the 2001 movie Shrek.

I considered going early the next morning, but something told me to grab the moment, so while Mary Beth stopped to rest and enjoy a latte after our tour, I queried my phone and immediately turned up the address, listed simply as “Leonard Cohen Home”.

I headed northwest along St. Laurent Blvd., walking into the late afternoon sun. The map listing made me wonder if I’d find this historical site overcrowded, overdone, commercialized, cloying.

That would not be the case. Seeing the modest three-flat at 28 rue Vallières, I was taken by its nondescript appearance. There’s no signage, no brass plate, nothing remotely commercial. Not a thing had been placed in the service of tourism.

I took a few photos from one angle, warming up, wondering what I could possibly make of these gray doors, this stone box of a house. How could I create a photo that would possess a hint of the emotion I felt being at this locale?

Then I saw them: a small pile of visitation stones left by pilgrims who’d engaged in a Jewish bereavement practice, normally seen in cemeteries, of placing small stones on graves as an act of remembrance.

I walked from one side of the door to the other, and noticed my shadow in the frame. A beam of sunlight piercing the treetops formed a momentary spotlight directly on the pile of remembrance stones, a miracle, for this moment.

I hadn’t planned a Leonard Cohen pilgrimage. Had I done pre-vacation research and planning, visiting Cohen’s house might have been more like checking a box and less like the unfolding I experienced. My visit might have happened on a different day, at a different time of day, and the light and moment would not have been the same.

A second, even grander mural tribute to Cohen towers twenty-two stories over Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, on Crescent Street, the painting situated so that it can be seen from the outlook at the top of Mount Royal, four kilometers away.

In this painting, an older Cohen looks over his beloved city with a soft smile, his expression open, perhaps because the photo upon which the mural is based was taken by his daughter.

A bit more conceptual, Cohen presses his hand to his heart, from which a warm glow appears to be emanating.

We did visit Lenny Piroth-Robert at the Mile End Guitar Builders’ Co-op, and I’ll tell you about that inspiring visit another time.

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Music by David Sutton and Friedel Geratsch

Released December 9, 2022 on Yellow Snake Records (distributed by Timezone Records) and available on all major platforms.

Original cigar-box-guitar-based music. All songs, originally composed and performed by Friedel Geratsch (aka Cigar Box Gery), translated and performed in English by David Sutton.

Available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon.com, Amazon.de, YouTube Music and Deezer.
Cover art: Joerg Metzner

=====

From Gold to Brown to Blue, is an album of 12 original blues-laced Americana songs originally composed and performed on that most American of instruments, the cigar-box-guitar (CBG), by German musician Friedel Geratsch, then reimagined in English by American singer/songwriter (and cigar box guitar champion) David Sutton.

Friedel Geratsch—founder and frontman of Geier Sturzflug, the ‘80s Neue Duetsche Welle (or NDW, the New German Wave) hit-makers— worked for several decades as a prolific German language songwriter and singer before beginning, in the mid-2010s, to build and perform music on his own homemade instruments with his power trio, Garage 3.

David Sutton, American musician, writer, photographer, and author of the book Cigar Box Guitars: The Ultimate DIY Guide for Makers and Players of the Handmade Music Revolution, became an über-Fan of the Neue Deutsche Welle as a study-abroad student in Germany in the early 80s..

This genre-defying collection of soulful tunes, originally composed and performed by Geratsch, then translated and performed in English by Sutton, represents the first collaboration for these kindred CBG celebrants.

Mit dem Abstand der Jahre, by Friedel Geratsch - original source material for 8/12 songs:

Lustige Zeiten, by Friedel Geratsch and Adi Hauk - original source material for 4/12 songs:

VIDEOS:

Train is Coming (Album Version)

Zug Wird Kommen (Train is Coming: Original German lyrics/vocals)

Turn to Me (Album Version)

Wirf ’nen Blick Auf Mich (Turn to Me: Original German lyrics/vocals)

Friedel Geratsch and Geier Sturzflug, Bruttosozialprodukt, 1983

Friedel Geratsch and Geier Sturzflug, Pure Lust am Leben, 2009

An announcement, an invitation and an offer.

First, the announcement.

I’m writing to tell you about a new forum called Through Three Lenses, a bi-weekly journal where we’ll look at integrated creative living through the related lenses of cigar box guitars, songwriting and photography.

If you are unfamiliar with this particular home-made music concept, a cigar box guitar (CBG) is a simple, stringed instrument that you build yourself, usually by poking a dowel or a stick through an empty wooden cigar box to form a neck, then outfitting it with strings and tuning machines. I make mine with three strings. For a lot of builders and enthusiasts, the cigar box guitar then becomes a point of departure to begin making music.

Why Through Three Lenses?

While Through Three Lenses will train its central lens on building and playing three-string cigar box guitars, we’ll direct a second lens at ways you can use this humble but capable instrument to write songs (yes, you can write songs). We’ll direct a third lens at the art and business of photography, and photos will also be a big part of how we share information here.

The invitation? Join the fun by subscribing, which you can do by simply clicking the Subscribe Now button below.

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Who is through three lenses for? Why should you subscribe?

Through Three Lenses is for you if:

you like the idea of playing a real musical instrument that you built yourself.

you like to build things, and would love to build something that you’ll find more engaging than an end table.

you’re DIY music curious– you have heard of cigar box guitars and want to learn more about them.

you’re already into cigar box guitar building and playing and would welcome a new approach, a chance to expand your range of styles, or an opportunity to see what others are building and playing.

you’re a crafting armchair traveller, who likes spending time with your nose in woodworking magazines, but not necessarily with sawdust in your nose.

you sing and would like to be able to accompany yourself with an instrument that’s even simpler to play than an ukulele. I’m not kidding. Just three strings.

you aspire to play music and would like an easy way in (If you don’t want to wait until you’ve built one, or if crafting isn’t your thing but music is, you can also buy a cigar box guitar ready made).

you want to learn to write songs, with or without an instrument.

you are a singer/songwriter looking for a compact, versatile, user-friendly song composing tool.

you’re a guitar player or other musician, or an experimental sound artist/innovator/designer looking for new ways to make sounds.

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Who is David Sutton?

I am a writer/photographer/singer/songwriter/musician/animal lover/woodworker/tinkerer living in Evanston, Illinois. I am:

• the author/photographer of Cigar Box Guitars and Obsessed with Cigar Box Guitars, both published by Fox Chapel Publishing;

• a singer and novice songwriter with an album, From Gold to Brown to Blue in release (details) and another (These Strings I Know) currently in production;

• a lifelong lover of singing and vocal harmony, which I learned while holding my half of a Lutheran hymnal at my dad’s elbow;

• the owner of David Sutton Studios Inc., a genre-creating photo studio specializing in the artful celebration, through portrait photography, of the deep and meaningful relationships people have with their pets.

I’ve also contributed to Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals, and I perform annually in a much vaunted Purim parody band called The Alte Rockers.

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What you get with your free subscription.

Subscribers will be first in line to receive this weekly journal, where we’ll be showing you how to build three different kinds of three-string cigar box guitars (acoustic, acoustic/electric and electric). I’ll illustrate the process with photos, like I’ve done in my books, and with audio and video.

You’ll also learn my chord inversion system for powering up your CBG, and just enough music theory to unlock your inner songwriter.

I’ll provide opportunities for you to meet some of my favorite guitar builders, musicians and sound artists, and to learn from them.

We’ll also provide opportunities for you to show off your builds and talk through challenges. I’ll show you the CBGs that I’ve built and that I play, and other instruments that I keep around for company. Even my more conventional instruments have stories to tell.

In my workshop, I’ll demonstrate some of my favorite and most useful hand tools, share their back-stories, explain why I like them and what I use them for.

All this, delivered right to your inbox.

What you get with your paid subscription.

So here at last is the offer.

Through Three Lenses is funded entirely by paid subscriptions from readers like you. Paying for a subscription will help keep Through Three Lenses going for everyone and will make more time available for me to bring you amazing content.

While everything on Through Three Lenses is currently available to all subscribers, the first 50 paid annual subscribers will also receive a hard copy of one of my cigar box guitar books* (this is a limited offer, because when I’m out of books, I’m out).

Beginning in 2024, paid subscribers will also get to watch the serialized unfolding of my newest book about building and playing cigar box guitars, These Strings I Know. This new book is even more comprehensive than the first two, and it’s author is rumored to be a decade older and a bit more knowledgeable.

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Does someone you know need more music, sawdust and photos in their life? Then by all means, pass the word by hitting the share button below.

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*Books can only be shipped to the continental United States.

If you're not familiar with cigar box guitars, I hope you’ll jump in with us here and start to get acquainted. If you're already familiar, but have been frustrated because perhaps you're not a delta blues player and you don’t find gritty slide-playing the be-all and end-all, then get ready for a little relief. We’re here to strum chords!

I started Through Three Lenses because I’m excited about what’s happening here and about the potential for building community. The structure provides me with an opportunity to gather all of my creative pursuits under one umbrella.

As long as I've played guitar, I’ve played to accompany my own singing. When I built my first fretless cigar box guitars, strung them with heavy, wound strings and then took a slide to them, I thought the sound was amazing! It made me laugh out loud. Smoke on the Water in four easy moves!!

But when I tried playing the kinds of songs I like to sing along with, I found that most didn’t fit into that style. I’d been strumming acoustic six-string guitars ever since my angst-filled teens. I grew up listening to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Cat Stevens and Woodie and Arlo Guthrie.

Drawn to stories, then as now, I was more likely to be listening to music where lyrics mattered most. Once I’d learned a few six-string guitar chords and someone clued me in about the magical (and ubiquitous) 1-4-5 chord progression, I taught myself to decipher the songs I liked so I could play along with my LPs of Cat, Leonard and Bob.

That’s what I wanted to be able to do with my CBGs, and the fretless builds weren’t cutting it. I dug a little deeper into conventional guitar building and learned to make cigar box guitars with frets. Thanks to a fortuitous guitar class experience at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, and with the help of several bright tutors, I developed a strategy using chord inversions to strum a broad and colorful spectrum of chords on my simple three-stringed instruments.

That’s the background for this newsletter. What’s the foreground look like?

We shall see. I have ideas, but I’d prefer we build this thing together. I’ve recently learned the word sandboxing, so this is our sandbox. I’m going to try a little bit of this and that, you’ll tell me what you like, I’ll line your feedback up with what I can offer and it will all evolve.

I like the idea that this strand of Through Three Lenses can be a place to try new ideas, see what people like and discover more of what we enjoy.

So… I want to hear from you. If you like something you see, and you want to see more of it, let me know! If you’re not seeing what you’d like to see, ask for it, and if I can help, if I can work it in, I surely will.

Once I get my workbench cleared off again, I plan to step-by-step build a guitar or two, right before your very eyes, with photos, like I did in my books, but enhanced, if all goes well, with audio and/or video.

I thought it might also be fun to introduce you to the small family of cigar box guitars I’ve built and kept for myself. Even the more conventional guitars and ukuleles I keep around are quirky and come with stories in tow. Some have names. If you’d like to see some of those, let me know.

In my workshop, I’ll also be showing off some of my favorite and most useful hand tools, talking about why I like them and how I use them.

As soon as I can offer them a decent-sized audience, I’d like to introduce you to some of the people I’ve met who play cigar box guitar much better than I ever will.

Finally, beginning next year, you can expect to see the serialized appearance of my next book about cigar box guitars, this one more comprehensive than the first two, and revealing itself section by section, exclusively here on Through Three Lenses.

I love taking photos, talking about photos, and looking at photos other people have taken. I’ll show you some of my photos here, and offer you opportunities to show yours off, too. I’ll also gladly share what I’ve gleaned about running a high-end portrait studio, something I’ve been doing for thirty years.

I’d known from very early on that I wanted to earn my living doing something I loved, and something that didn’t require wearing a tie or sitting at a desk. Photography filled the bill. It captivated me early, in childhood, and continues to hold my attention both as a way of making a living and as a part of other creative pursuits.

My childhood ambition involved traveling the world for National Geographic Magazine. I was also powerfully drawn to black and white portraiture. I started out processing my own pictures–that’s what photography was in the sixties–so my photography world was written largely in black and white.

The one thing I was sure that I did not want was to operate a retail (business-to-consumer) portrait studio, like the one in my home town.

Ideally, I wanted to become a writer/photographer. My vision for that was to hang out with interesting people, interview them, take compelling pictures of them in their own environments, and then write articles based on those interviews. Magazine-style profiles.

I did shoot assignments for magazines for about ten years, based in the Chicago area, and I enjoyed getting out, seeing new things, and meeting the people these magazines were writing about. I particularly liked going into manufacturing settings and seeing how things were made. I tried a lot of other ways of making money with my camera, too, everything from architectural interiors to actors’ headshots.

During this time I had a couple of opportunities to do the kind of writer/photographer profile work I’d aspired to. I published several artist’s profiles in a Chicago newspaper called Strong Coffee, and a half dozen or so for a photographer’s trade magazine called The Loupe. Those experiences really lit me up, but they were unpaid.

From the mid-eighties into the early nineties, more and more of my assignment work involved shooting for tech magazines like PC week, and coming up with visually interesting ways of photographing middle-aged white guys wearing neckties, sitting at (or holding) computers. All my work was on location, which was hard on my body and hard on my equipment.

In the early nineties, a number of things flowed together in ways I could not have planned. I found a little corner store to live in that also provided me with open space to try out studio lighting. I got a puppy, named him Zane!. I started inviting interesting people in so that I could practice black and white portraiture. I blew a disc in my lower back and had to take several months off of location work for surgery and rehab.

About that puppy. At the tail end of a magazine shoot in my corner store, I invited Zane! out onto my backdrop and shot a single roll of film of him with an old, twin-lens Rolleiflex. Marge Gibbs, our puppy class teacher, looked thoughtfully at an 8x10 I’d pulled from that session and said, simply, “you could make a lot of money doing this”. That got me thinking. I ran some ads.

I had long admired Marc Hauser’s black and white portraits, which first came to my attention when he did the photography for John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow album, so I chose Marc to interview for the Loupe. He talked very little about photography, and a lot about self-promotion.

Out of that interview, and an unexpected call from a local TV news producer who’d seen my ad and put me on the morning news, grew the idea to make me the dog guy.

I like a good counter-addage. We’ve all heard the admonition to not put all our eggs in one basket. One writer, writing about investing, offered this: Put all of your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket.

Making a clear decision to focus on one thing, to put all of my eggs in one basket, changed everything. Up to that moment, professionally, I had always felt that I was swimming against the current, working hard and not moving forward. When I made the decision put all my eggs in one basket, to commit to one thing and to stick to it, it was as if I turned around and started swimming with the river.

“I did not mean to become a “dog photographer.” Then one day, trudging against the undertow of a relationship's recent end, I met an eight-week-old border collie/cattle dog mix. I took him home, named him Zane!, and things began to shift. Important things. His presence in my life and my commitment to his care set the stage for a series of developments I could not have predicted.” (read: For Zane! full story)

I have been lucky enough now to have supported myself and a number of other people with my photography for four decades. It’s a love-fest if ever there was one. I’m repeatedly surprised at how much I continue to enjoy the work that pays my bills–photographing people with their pets–and at how often I turn to photography in my spare time as well.

A few years back I met a lovely young man named Ryan who, when I told him what I did for a living, told me that he “used to be a photographer”.

It was the first time I’d considered the possibility of a post-photographer future for myself. I’ve come to SubStack in part because at sixty five, I aspire to “used to be” a photographer, and I can see that happening soon.

I may never be done with photography, but in the not-too-distant future, I plan to relieve photography of the responsibility of feeding me and making my mortgage payments. But I have learned a lot along the way, and I’d love to be able to pass the torch, or maybe a handful of little torches, as I move into my next chapter. I’m here to mentor, if I may be so bold, and to learn as I write.

There’s never been a better time produce and share your original music. The means of production and distribution are widely available and inexpensive. Thousands of people in all age groups have mad production skills and can help you record and produce the songs you write.

Why are we here? To build a supportive community of creative folks who help each other learn to write songs, and if you’re already writing songs, to write better songs. We’re here to have fun, to learn, and to lift each other up.

Notice I’m not using the word “teach”.

I’m a novice songwriter, an advanced beginner–not an expert, and my qualifications are non-academic (my BA is in German). I do, however, have a collaborative album available on all the major platforms, and a second album of original songs in production, and I only just began engaging with songwriting earnestly in 2018.

I enjoy the heck out of watching my songs come together, and then playing and hearing the songs I’ve written. The twined process of composing music and writing lyrics uses so many different parts of the brain and integrates the use of different skill sets. It draws them to work together in an integrated and harmonious way. It takes time and concentration, but at the end of the process, you might just find you’ve created something beautiful, memorable, meaningful and fun.

Join us, won’t you? Learn about songwriting by watching me and others work and talk through the process. Show us your songs, coach others, and share what you know.

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