Hillery eventually learned not to say everything that came to mind. Some were too good not to write down.
Maybe I was in awe of is his voice. It was a great voice, but more impressive was his control over it. He could evoke a range of emotions and produce the texture of a moment in the time line of musical history and then skip ahead or behind seamlessly. Genius.
There are different kinds of paternity. You have your father and your father figures and then, as we have touched on before, you have those people whose brilliance propels your craft—the fathers of your art. Much in the way that I imagine many American writers of the Twentieth Century felt when a Russian named Vladimir Nabokov came to this country and wrote in our language with more elegance, nuance, and sensitivity than any of them could, it maddens me that I cannot be Sam Shepard.