Specimens from the Boneyard

Words and music from Chuck Pinnell.

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Welcome to my Substack world!

Starting today and going forward this is the place where I’ll be releasing albums, commenting on life, music, and literature, and also sharing excerpts from my first published novel The Irish Singer, and from its 2nd and concluding volume, which I’m currently a little over 70,000 words into.

First up, musically speaking, is the guitar and orchestra score for Chasing the Tide, a new PBS Series about two scientists who walk the barrier islands of the Gulf of Mexico—to rediscover the past, find the present, and look into the future of our vital coastal wetlands. Season 1 is out there and production on Season 2 is about to begin! One thing I’ve discovered late in life is how much I love the ocean, especially the magic of the place where water meets land—the endless beach. Being a part of this oceanic adventure and finding the music of it—has been a dream come true.

This is the first of eight albums I’ll be releasing here in 2025; there will be five film scores, my first singer/songwriter album, Volume 2 of my Austin All Star compilation Dark River, and a highly unusual classical guitar album, Strange Dreams.

After the recent election I made an instant decision to unplug from the news cycle and media America, in all its forms. I figured anything big I’ll hear about first hand and that has proved to be a correct and healthy approach. For one thing a huge amount of space and time opened up immediately. Time to finally read Swan’s Way by Proust, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, Moby Dick by Melville, Go Down Moses by Faulkner. Time to do my own thinking about whats happening. Time to hike long rocky trails, time to write, time to create music, time to help and time to share. Sharing is what I’m here on Substack to do and I believe its the best way I can help the world.

I recently turned 70 and though I sometimes feel every bit as old as that sounds, yet its confusing—because I more often feel youthful and full of energy, and that I still have so much to learn and to do. I’m still fired by an artistic ambition that seems to constantly renew itself and may it always be so. Two things are for certain; only the rocks live forever and I have no time to waste.

Looking back at a long life is like looking at layers of exposed sediment in an eroded riverbank, season upon season upon season upon season. The shear number of them is a daunting thing at 70. Some are more consequential than others. Here are a couple of layers of note.

When I left home for my first year of college in the fall of 1972, I had a vague intention of becoming a writer, perhaps a journalist. I had certainly enjoyed writing for my high school newspaper. I was good at it—but the guitar sailed into my life the next year and that changed everything.

Music held sway until SXSW 2016, when during the premier of the restored version of my late brother’s 1983 Indie Classic, Last Night at the Alamo--I realized it was time to go back to work on the revisionist Western that Eagle and I had wanted to make way back then. Our idea was based on a huge untold true story that I had stumbled on and we were both obsessed with from then on. Only I had no real inkling in 1983 of how long it would take, how many crooked alleyways I would wonder down, or how much work it would end up being, to finally tell that story.

If you’ve lost a brother or sister to an untimely death, and had big unfinished business, you know how that can come back to haunt you. It did for me.

Something came full circle for me that night at the SXSW screening. Eagle reached through the screen and spoke directly to me—hey little brother get off your ass and get to work. Well, no one thought it a good idea for me to suddenly become a writer, director, a show runner. Least of all me, but then I didn't really have a choice. Fortunately for me I did recieve encouragement from an unlikely but powerful source. Turns out Eagle’s friend and colleague, Rick Linklater, knew all about the Western Eagle and I didn’t get to make. Eagle had enthused about it to him often enough for Rick to know it was a worthy cause. He told me essentially the same thing Eagle did—great idea, dust it off and get to work!

I started writing without knowing where to go with it, other than to try and find the true narrative. In time I realized I had to write it as a novel, not a teleplay or a screenplay, and it was then I began to find my voice. I began writing in present tense, as if it was all happening—now. Later on I understood I was writing a journalistic novel in the Truman(In Cold Blood)Capote vein. Something with “the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry”, as Truman famously said of his masterpiece. We were both looking at a historical event and wanting to breathe new life into it. It certainly worked for him and I believe it worked for me as well.

Here is the first paragraph of The Irish Singer, set in 1870’s New Mexico with a prologue cast in 1931.

An ocean of parched buffalo grass stretches tight over the hard bones of the earth. Solitary straggles of mesquite stand like lost souls awaiting perdition. Old time New Mexicans called it La Ceja de Dios, the Eyebrow of God. Nothing moves on the great high plain but a Ford pickup, plying the dusty length of Mayhill Road and pulling for the highway.

See you soon, looking forward to it!

Chuck Pinnell

Austin, Tx

March 19th, 2025

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