Out of the Blue

Singer-songwriter Mary Lee Kortes, whose most recent album was the critically-acclaimed Love, Loss and Lunacy, and who gained notoriety for recording and releasing a live song-forsong performance of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, here talks about her music touching people's lives: "The wonder of the Internet has been, for the most part I would guess, a phenomenal gift for musicians. For me, finding out not only that my songs have reached people all over the world but that they've had an important impact has been invaluable to me. The first of these email missives came several years ago when I received a letter from a woman who said she'd heard my song about domestic violence, "Why Don't You Leave Him." She was in a violent and threatening situation at the time she heard the song and said it gave her the push she needed. She wrote that she immediately called her brother who came over with his van and quickly moved her out of her house. Imagine how it feels to receive that kind of information.

"My most recent wonderful surprise was from an American school teacher named Jim Walsh, who now teaches in Taiwan. He said he'd found the American school system too limiting for the way he wanted to teach and so he moved to Taiwan and started a school there called "The English Bridge School." He wrote me because he said he wanted to confirm that he'd transcribed all my lyrics correctly, since they're not all currently available at www.maryleescorvette.com. I wrote back to him with a few minor corrections and asked him a few questions about himself. That's when he gave me his brief bio and added that he'd been using my lyrics to teach English to students at his school, all that way around the globe. Mr. Walsh elaborated to me why he was using my lyrics: ‘Early on, I learned that emotionally charged language grabs students and it stays with them longer. Songs, poems, scenes from movies, role-playing and pictures are examples of ways to enhance the emotional reaction to language. My Saturday morning adult class loved and were touched by your "700 Miles." They also thought your version of "Simple Twist of Fate" was more beautiful than Dylan's.' To know that words you wrote to express your own personal experience — maybe written in your apartment or on a New York City subway car — have reached all the way around the world to help open up a new language for other people, is moving beyond description. Maybe I'll write a song about it."