TOM JENSEN HAS BEEN WRITING
LYRICS TO SONGS FOR
OVER THIRTY YEARS.

FOR LADY WEAVER

The greatest musician, the greatest singer, the greatest human being and the greatest muse there has ever been.

A life's worth of work, offered up in gratitude.

Everything here is also a way of getting people to her.

So Tom and Lady Weaver — both of them, one of them already gone — take it on themselves to show people an entirely new way of looking at music. Not another album. A new musical experience, and a whole musical universe you can walk around inside of.

And you get to see what one man can do —
and what two people can do.

The Lady Weaver · 20 of 35 · Lady Weaver · page 36 of 35 · Lady Weaver pieces · the memorabilia

KRISTIN, THE NICEST PERSON EVER.

DENMARK GIRL.

MY ROOMMATE, EMILIO.

Three of the greatest, nicest people you will ever find. They don't have bad thoughts in their heads, and if they do it isn't often, and I haven't seen it, and I've been around them a lot in my life.

Even my ex-wife was a really, really wonderful person.

Emilio and I were having a talk the other day.
He was making a Halloween decoration for the restaurant.
It was a figurine holding a lantern, but it wasn't a lantern.
It was a candle, one of those things that hangs in your ceiling.
It looked amazing.
Emilio is an artist.

We're just talking, and the thing was that most people, when they have a gift like Emilio,
they say everybody stop and look at me. Look what I do.
And he doesn't do that.
At least he spent the last 25 years humbling himself to say, how can I serve you?
Let me look at you. Look at you. Look at you.

And everybody should have been looking at him.

If you're looking for what a true American is, it is Emilio.

He comes to this country and he does not stay his own culture.
He blends in to what is here and learns this culture,
continuing the traditions of America as opposed to staying in the Brazil culture.

When you're thinking about an ambassador of what America is, Emilio is the most perfect example.
Because he came here, and he found his place, and he didn't make this country bend to him.
He bent to this country and found his little niche in here and said,
oh, I can fit in here and I can have a life here and you can have a life here.

Emilio is the oil that makes everybody else run.

For every business person who's telling everybody what to do,
there has to be somebody who takes orders.
So for better or worse, Emilio is rarely the actioner, often the action-y.
And the world needs people like that to just sometimes not always cause a scene.

The people who don't always talk but are always thinking — that's Emilio.

In my life, I am attracted to people who are nice.
The people who are just overwhelmingly nice.
And Denmark Girl's a sweetheart.

There are people out there who are good people, who have issues and struggle with stuff.
But you can see them not giving up.
And even though they might fight themselves on the same things over and over and over and over again, they're still fighting.
And no matter what happens, they keep going.

The thing about Emilio is, I could count maybe once or twice in my entire history with him
where I could sense that he had any ill will towards anyone ever. Ever.
Pretty much no matter what happened.

They don't make a lot of people like Emilio anymore.
There's a certain percentage of people that only some people will understand and appreciate, and he's like that.
But when you are appreciative of those type of people, then when you find someone like him, you're like:

Dude, you're all right.

If there were no rules, no police, and nobody in charge,
and you let everybody do whatever they wanted, anytime,
I don't think my roommate's life would change one bit.

If you gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card and said,
you can do anything you want to anybody and we'll give you a pass,
I don't think he'd use it.
I literally don't think he would do anything bad to anybody.

Me, I'd use it. I'd buy his, and I'd use two.
That's me.

The reason I like my roommate so much is because we are the same, yet we are different.

We are both deeply flawed humans.
We're both self-haters, to a point where we self-destruct. We both have that in us.
I haven't done it for three years. Four, maybe. I don't know where he's at.

But if you just let my roommate do his own thing and stop hassling him, he would just do good things.
He's one of those people you wouldn't have to keep tabs on.
Like Denmark Girl, there are some people who just have good intentions almost all the time.
He's one of them.

What do you fear most? What is most dangerous in this world? A violation of trust.

My roommate knows his weaknesses.
He has set up his life so that the damage his weaknesses can do never lands on other people.
Just like I don't drink and drive, because I don't trust autopilot.

Rather than say, I might be happy but you might get hurt, he doesn't risk it.
So the poor guy misses out.
If you live that way, you miss out.

I am somebody who is going to hit something with a rock to fix it.
He is somebody who is going to do whatever the opposite of that is.
Half of us is wired exactly the same. The other half is completely opposite.

Put our best parts together and you'd make the best human. Put our worst parts together and you'd make the worst human. That's the reality.

So I tell him: I need to be more like you. You need to be more like me.
I'm not doing the best job, but I'm trying.

What makes him his own worst enemy is what makes him great.
Change a lot of who he is, and he won't be him.

Twenty-five years at the same job. He's loyal.
He sells the least amount of product and gets the highest percentage of tips of anyone who works there.
He sees himself as a servant, and that humbles him so much that the artist in him gets pushed back.
People don't appreciate him for it, because he never says, look at me, look what I did.

Emilio, you have insane talents. You've done twenty-five years of bending to other people's whims. Now it's your time. It's overdue.

That is the project I'm on now.
Get Emilio into the music project. Get the artist in him involved.
Album covers, for a start. It's long overdue.

When you have a good experience with someone like my roommate, it restores your faith in humanity.
He's not a robot. He is very personal and very human.
If you look up human, it's a picture of my roommate.

He came here from another country and started a life.
He never forgot where he came from, but he knows:
this is my country. Not where I came from. Where I am, where I'm going.
Choosing to be an American, first and foremost.
The American story, a positive one.
Someone who isn't perfect, who has gone through some struggles,
but who fights every day, almost every hour of the day, to prove he's worth something.
To say: you think I'm this? I'm not this.

I'm this.

A lot of people are just handed things.
My roommate is the least entitled person, at least from what you can see from afar.
It's actions, not anything else.
Do, do, do. Go, go, go. That's how he gets things.

He's like the dog that just keeps going forward, no matter how many fights it's been in, no matter what's broken. He won't give up. And that inspires me.

I look forward to the day somebody like my roommate catches a break,
and the world realizes what they have in him while he's still here.
He's the type of person who gets recognized after he's gone.
We would like to get him a little earlier recognition.

So that's my next mission:
improve the standard of living for my roommate and my cat.

I have never been without a cat. Once, for seven months, after my two cats died.
And over the last three or four years, I realized I didn't love anything or anybody.
That's dangerous. That's when people hit a low point, and it can go one of two ways.

When things could have broken bad, I said:
I don't really do humans at all, but this dude's so awesome, I'm going to keep him in my life.
Not lovers. Just somebody I care about, and he cares about me.

I was a male lion. He was a male lion. We were both getting beat up. So we said: I'll watch your back, you watch mine.

Now we're two male lions roaming the savanna.
It's safer than being the only lion.

When I needed to trust in something, when I didn't believe in anything, I chose my roommate.
I said, he'll do.
Because I didn't want to lose my own humanity.

THANKS, DAD.

I appreciate everything that you did for me. Here's what I did with it.

Your dime paid for this.

THE FINAL WORD GOES TO DAD

Everybody, anyone and everybody who does anything ever, should thank Robert F. Jensen for this. He is the only reason all of this happened. For good or bad.

My father was a hippie, the most typical baby-booming hippie you could ever imagine. Very Northern Massachusetts, very Bostonian. He's 81 years old, he's got a full head of curly hair, and by 21 I shaved my head. He read me stories every night, and I used to always ask him: tell me something you and your friends used to do.

I love baby boomers and their music and everything, sixties culture. At the same time, I see what they're doing. If you're over fifty, I'm a threat to you. I know what you've done, and I've been keeping track of it for the last thirty years.

Most of my life I had three places to live, then two, then back up to three, and now it's back to two. My mother always had an apartment in Salem; she's always been around. My father's been in Lynnfield or two other states. So I was never going to worry about having a place to live, and for thirty years I put songwriting first.

He had a bigger appetite than stomach. He might go after people out of his league, and I got that too. I was a six who always went after tens. Don't do that. It usually ends up at Anne's Rule. If you don't know what that means, keep reading.

I think Daddy's last woman broke him too. And I think he retired about twenty years ago. Seems it anyway.

Everything my parents did that was good, I tried to emulate. Everything they did that was bad, I tried to avoid. At least that was the theory. It didn't end up that way. If I had gone thirty percent to the middle, as opposed to being such an extremist, I could have had enough money to support Denmark Girl, and life would have been a different story. I was the idealist. Blind. Had the surgery. Get LASIKs.

Here's the thing though. Not everybody has a dad. Having a dad can be a big blessing, and plenty of people never got one.

I didn't have any children, so my father didn't get to be a grandfather. I'm sure that's very disappointing. He didn't get that one.

What he did get to do was pay for thirty-four albums of music. That was the last straw - that's the reason I give the thirty-four albums away free to everybody. Because my father paid for them. Not everybody has a father who pays for thirty-four albums of music he's never heard and may not want anything to do with. That was a gift he gave me. He didn't have to.

So I figured: in the name of that gift, and in the name of the nicest people I've ever known.

And my first girlfriend, Rachel. God bless her. She was a peach. I did that poor girl wrong. I broke up with her right before finals at a really expensive college, and it never even dawned on me that that's what I'd done until just now. That could have had long lasting implications on her life. I'm sure I was writing poems then, but I wasn't thinking about a whole lot else, I guess. That's disappointing. So - sorry, Rachel. And sorry to her mother and father, paying for that.

You make mistakes in life. You can either close up and feel defeated and give up, or you can own up and say I dropped the ball, and I'm going to pick it up next game and run with it. And there we go.

Yeah, Dad, I love you. But I get the feeling your generation, on its deathbed, will sell my generation out to the highest bidder to get one more blood transfusion. One more dialysis treatment. One more day at the home, baby.

Let me know if you need me to bring home milk.

Read the uncut tribute (rated R)