“Suddenly, these lines came into my head, ‘Gently the rains of purification wash my mind.’ …Something told me to write them down and I’ve been writing since then. “I wrote a set of 20 lines. It was not something I expected. Then I started writing and I started writing a lot. And I saw, well, there’s some reason I’m doing this and I’ll see where the writing takes me.” – Regarding writing his first lyrics.
” His writing found its way on tape with friend and guitarist Jesse Ed Davis composing backing tracks for two albums. Unable to sign with any record label, Trudell formed Peace Music and released the songs on mail-order cassettes. In 1986, “a.k.a. Grafitti Man” wound up in the hands of Bob Dylan, who called it the best record of the year.
“I think he was doing the Grateful Dead tour that year and he played our tape at his concerts. The effect wasn’t monetary at that time. What it was was more recognition from other artists.” – On Bob Dylan
“I knew how to handle the stage for myself, but I had never worked it this way, with four or five other people. That’s something that I’m not trained for. I’m not familiar with the poets. I never really listened to any poets. Their lines may have had great symbolic meanings, but they were not real to my world. What was real to my world was country music and rock ‘n’ roll music and blues.” -On performing
“When things changed in my life…I realized I needed to survive, but surviving isn’t enough. There’s got to be something else that goes with it. Otherwise, a lot of things lose their meaning and purpose. I was trying to figure out how I was going to deal with that.” -Why he began writing.
“I knew the realities in my reservation and life of the reservations and I knew the reality of racism and a whole lot things. But when I was in the military it showed me that there were a lot of Indians around the world as far as America was concerned…I had the experiences of the military, and then I went to college for a little while. Basically, college taught me the same thing the navy taught me. There are many realities here, and what the controlling class taught me was you’ve got to submit to be successful.”
“Because the music industry, with all its high tech, has basically gone as far as it could go, it’s stagnant. It needs a new infusion of human energy. I think spoken word can be that infusion of human energy. In our generation, all our poets got sucked up as musicians and are identified as musicians and that put it out of reach of your average person. Poets are within every person’s reach.” -Trudell speaks of spoken word as the next new wave in music. ~