And club owners and others who knew him commonly told stories about his walking down the sidewalk at night after a gig giving his earnings away to tramps and panhandlers. His songs are of parting rites, of greetings and goodbyes, of unappeasable aggrievements, love dissolved in despair, of spiritual leave-takings and the precariousness of human joy. Townes set out on the road a dozen years ago as a solitary performer singing songs, for the most part, about aloneness . . . and how to come to terms with it. Loneliness I hardly ever feel during the day. At night sometimes after a gig I feel it a bunch.
People sense that.
They can tell he's part of a dying breed. I just want to keep on writin' good songs. And, too, I'd like to alter the course of the Universe, make it a happier place. Nobody getting older, but once they start getting too much older they die. I'm not sure how exactly to do this.