Song one of six

Kitchen at Four

From Long Thaw. Written January in the Hardwick house, recorded live to two microphones in the front room.

i

The furnace ticks itself awake at four.

I take the cold floor barefoot to the sink.

Outside, the road is one long sheet of tin.

Nobody has driven it yet.

Written at the kitchen table in January. The furnace really did tick. The second draft moved the whole verse out of the past tense and into the present, which is the only reason it works.
ii

I put the kettle on for the sound of it.

Your coat is still on the second hook.

I have stopped moving it. I have stopped

telling people that I have stopped.

This was three lines for a year. The fourth arrived in a parking lot in Barre and I wrote it on the back of a gas receipt, which I still have in the case with the capo.
iii

The light comes up the way a bruise comes up,

slow and from underneath, and then at once.

The dog wants out. The dog does not want out.

We stand there with the door between us.

The dog was real and her name was Junie. Two different people cut the bruise line and I put it back both times, so it stays.
iv

By seven there is traffic and a plow.

By eight it is a Tuesday like the rest.

I keep the four o'clock. It is the only hour

that still lets me say your name out loud.

One take. If you know to listen for it you can hear the furnace come on again near the end, which is the sort of thing I would once have paid to remove.

SAMPLE Line cue points are sample timings. Replace each data-at with your own seconds: [set your timings]

SAMPLE Kitchen at Four from Long Thaw 3:41

This player is not connected to a recording yet. The artist is fictional, so no audio is claimed here. Put your track address, SoundCloud or Spotify, in data-track on this player and the cue below becomes a real transport wearing that platform's mark.

Connect this player

When a track is connected, pressing play loads that platform's own player into this page, and the platform sets its cookies at that moment. Until you press it, this page makes no request to SoundCloud or Spotify at all. A Spotify slot also says, right here, that it plays a thirty-second preview without a Premium sign-in.

The lyric above is the transcript. It is real text on the page, it prints as one sheet, and it does not depend on any player loading.

Contents

The songs

Six of them so far. Each one gets a sheet like the one above, with whatever I can remember about where it came from and what the second draft did to it.

Kitchen at Four Long Thaw · 3:41 · this page
The Ice Went Out Long Thaw · 4:12 · full sheet
Borrowed Coat Long Thaw · sheet not typed up yet
Salt on the Steps Long Thaw · sheet not typed up yet
Hardwick, February Kitchen Tapes · sheet not typed up yet
Nothing Was Wrong Kitchen Tapes · sheet not typed up yet

Long Thaw, everywhere it lives

SAMPLE These go straight to the platform. There is no redirect service in between counting you. The player on the sheet above can run on SoundCloud or on Spotify, whichever address it is given; every link in this row stays a plain link either way, and a Spotify-run player says on its own plate that it plays a thirty-second preview unless the listener is signed into Premium.

Where I will be

Shows

Small rooms on purpose. If the room is quiet enough that the last verse of Kitchen at Four can be sung at a whisper, it is the right room.

SAMPLE Dates, rooms and prices are placeholders until you set your own.
Date	Town	Room	Tickets
11 July 2026	Craftsbury, VT	[set your room]	Played
18 September 2026	Montpelier, VT	[set your room]	On sale Tickets for 18 September, Montpelier
3 October 2026	Portsmouth, NH	[set your room]	Few left Tickets for 3 October, Portsmouth
24 October 2026	Northampton, MA	[set your room]	Sold out
7 November 2026	Hudson, NY	[set your room]	On sale Tickets for 7 November, Hudson

A date that has passed stays on the list and is marked as played. Nothing vanishes.

Or your front room

House concerts are half of how this works. Thirty chairs, no microphone, you make the soup. I ask for a guarantee of [set your house concert fee] plus gas, and I sleep on the couch if there is one. If your town is not on the list above, say so below and I will write when I am near it.

Your name

Town

What are you asking about

Anything I should know How many chairs, whether there is a piano, how far the driveway is in February.

While you type, this form keeps a copy of what is in these boxes in this browser only, so a reload does not lose it. It is erased the moment the message is handed to your mail app, and you can erase it now with the button that appears once you start typing.

Scripts are off or did not load, so this form will open your mail app with the message already written. If that does not suit you, write to letters@hollowandpine.example or telephone (555) 010-0188 SAMPLE.

Things you can hold

The records

I would rather you owned one. The vinyl was cut at [set your cutting house] and the tapes were dubbed one at a time on a deck in the same front room the record was made in.

Long Thaw on vinyl

Black vinyl, 180g, printed inner sleeve with all six sheets and their margin notes. Edition of [set your edition size].

SAMPLE [set your price]

Buy the LP at the store you choose
Long Thaw on cassette

Chrome tape, hand numbered, dubbed in real time. Includes the front-room take of Borrowed Coat that did not fit the record.

SAMPLE [set your price]

Buy the tape at the store you choose
Kitchen Tapes on CDR

The first six songs, recorded before I knew what I was doing, sold at shows and nowhere else until now. Sleeve is a photocopy and always was.

SAMPLE [set your price]

Buy the CDR at the store you choose

Buying happens at whichever shop you point these links at. This page has no cart and takes no card numbers.

Plainly

The story

My name is Della Marchant. I grew up in Barre and I have lived in the same rented farmhouse outside Hardwick for eleven years, which is long enough that the neighbours have stopped calling it the Petersons' place. I work three days a week at the library in Morrisville. The rest of the week I am here.

I started writing songs late, at thirty-one, after a winter I did not handle well. The first six went onto a CDR called Kitchen Tapes that I sold out of a shoebox at the farmers market. Long Thaw came six years later and was made across four days in the front room with two microphones, a borrowed preamp, and Marian next door agreeing not to run her chainsaw.

What I care about is the writing, so this site is built around the sheets rather than the songs. If you want to know why a line is the way it is, the note is right there beside it. That is the whole idea and there is not a second one.

SAMPLE Della Marchant is a fictional artist written for this demonstration. Names, towns, dates and prices are placeholders for yours.

Letters, not newsletters

I write about four times a year

When there is a record, when there is a run of shows, and twice more because something happened worth telling. It is one long letter, not a template with a header image. You can leave at the bottom of any of them and I will not write to ask why.