Letting the spirit sing
Musician and poet William Curius acts as an antenna for the arts
SOMETIMES SONGS follow William Curius around. Like smoke circling the skull, wispy and whispering.
He remembers biking to work when he lived in Olympia, Washington and “Planet of the Jumpers” — his tune about the metals, plants and the rest of creation unfolding into the material plane — persistently pushing his pedals. He’d sit in work meetings and write down lyrics. Curius like a conduit for Spirit — that creative force, inspiration for all — which he believes makes itself known in the mountain-big silence, and which is instigated by symbol.
The symbol. That’s what started all this anyway. Curius — wise to the ways of alchemy and “chaos magic” — remixing the ancient six-pointed star (two triangles representing fire and water) by keeping the downward triangle and curving the top one. WTRBEL (or Waterbell), he calls the sigil, the name for his manifestation of music.
“It’s an instrument for the earthly elements to work through,” says the “forevermore-35”-year-old. Like the rain chimes in Japan, or a water drum used in peyote ceremonies, or the human voice.
“Oh sky, I breathe your breath / Oh storm, I run in your shower / Oh river, I bathe in your power,” Curius sings on “River of Honey,” which swirls with swelling cello, echoing chimes and soft harmony. The 2016 album, “Comunion,” is a meditation on Earth — whether her birds (“Up in the air where the eagles dare”) or her waters (“We have a silver well where the water swells”) or her pleadings (“Fire in the middle as the water runs out / Air so thick that the earth does shout / Love me baby like the body you use / Talk to me sweetly like the lovers you choose”). It’s written in reverence to mystery, what’s seen and unseen.
Walk down the brick-lined alley next to Manzanita Market during a winter’s afternoon sunny pocket and you might hear Curius cracking into the Waterbell tunes, a little black guitar’s strum under his thumb. Curius — born in Germany — started playing guitar at 15 when he traded his tennis racket that he volleyed across Europe tournaments for a Fender Lead II his dad (“from a line of roughneck Arkansas cowboys”) bought him. It electrified Curius, who was already blasting The Rembrandts and The Beach Boys. Now medicine music — ceremonial songs that speak to the sacred plants, celebrate the Mother Earth and give thanks to Father Sky — tone from his skinny, stylish-jumpsuit-wearin’ bones. He rings these prayers outside of Manzanita, too, in a real lively fun-cloud with friend and Chicago-born songbird, Jillian Grace.
“A big part of my job in this life is to bring the sacred to the streets,” says Curius, who dreams of a new earth fueled by community and compassion.
When he’s not singing the streets, he’s typing them. Clacking on-the-spot poems on his old-school Remington typewriter as people pass by with their Farmers Market or Chokola goodies. A simple set-up of fold-out table and chair become a “Poem Store,” where you can pick your topic at your price. It’s a line of work that’s followed Curius from outside a Trader Joe’s in New York City (where he’d make at least $15 an hour) into Miami’s Wynwood Art District to making bank gigging at Seattle techie conferences and on into Taos, where he’s lived for two years.
E.E. Cummings was a big inspiration in Curius’s beginning days. “Poetry was an umbrella of no rules,” says Curius, a self-proclaimed rebel who says he never wrote poetry before the Poem Store. Now he writes about the new earth, the voice of the heart. “I’m more interested in channeling the spirit of the poem. There’s freedom in that.”
Find Curius’s songs on Spotify or bandcamp, and his poetry on yourtopicyourprice.com.