Singer-songwriter John Gorka performs in Manchester
Even if he’s performed since the late 1970s, winning the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Award in 1984 and coming up in the Greenwich Village Fast Folk Scene during that decade, John Gorka still feels a touch of nervousness every time he walks on stage.
“The only time I don’t … is if I’ve done a bunch of shows in a row and I’m too tired to be nervous,” Gorka said in a Zoom interview from his home in Minnesota. It means it still matters, he added. “Frank Sinatra said something about having nerves, he said that’s just a sign that you care.”
He’s still working the muscle he began to hone when the late Jack Hardy told him in 1979 that success comes from a schedule. “I told him, ‘I basically wait for inspiration to strike,’ and he said, ‘that’s a copout — you’ll come up with more songs quicker if you put the time in, even if you throw out three quarters of what you come up with.’”
On “Favorite Place,” a song that leads off his most recent album unentitled, Gorka mused on a process that’s “still mysterious and still calls me.” It’s about the joy he finds in the middle of writing, when he knows it’s going to be a song and it’s just a matter of getting all the details right. Throughout, Hardy’s admonition echoes.
“Hope follows action … you start out with showing up and going to work,” he said. “Hopefully, during the working on stuff, a spark of inspiration will come along that’ll fuel you for the rest of the time. These days, despair is not an option, so I’ve got to do something … then the hope will come.”
Gorka deftly manifests that feeling on a standout track from unentitled called “Particle & Wave.”
The song came in response to the 2018 March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.
“Watching the coverage on CNN, a still small voice in my head said, ‘never stop believing there’s goodness in the world,’” Gorka recalled. “It was like, ‘OK, that sounds like the language of a song.’”
With lines like “Though justice seems to hesitate / It’s not too late,” he introduces it at concerts with a background story. More often, though, Gorka prefers to let audiences infer the meaning of his songs. Sometimes he’s surprised, like the time a woman told him “I Saw a Stranger With Your Hair” reminded her of a son she’d lost.
“I’d thought of it mainly as a romantic song, but that’s the way it hit her, and that’s why it meant something to her,” he said. “People will figure out what the song is about to them … you don’t want to put blinders on the listener by describing what it’s about too much or where it came from.”
The new record, his 10th for Red House Records, is Gorka’s first release in seven years, with some songs that date even further back.
“There were some things from a while ago that I started to record but never finished, some were new and some were old,” he said. “It was over a fairly long period of time.”
He hosts virtual songwriting workshops multiple times a year with Eliza Gilkyson — the next is in October — and one piece of advice he shares is that modest ambitions are best. “So you’re not trying to write a song for all mankind,” he said. “Set some limits and then work within those limits — and there’s an infinity even within those.”
Hardy and the habit of writing as a bedrock guide him.
“Clear a physical space, as well as your mind, then monitor the thoughts and images coming through,” he said. “For me, morning brain is the most productive. Before going to bed, that’s also a good time — because the song will keep playing through the day.”
As he sings on another great song from unentitled, “Stay until the night’s gone / Stay till you can dream again.”
John Gorka
When: Saturday, Aug. 29, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $40 at palacetheatre.org
Featured photo: John Gorka. Photo by Robert Hakalski.
