NOVELLA STONE
A few weeks ago I came across some old progress videos I had made with horses I loved.
Lil. Wilz. Nigel. Vivian.
They’re all gone now.
The videos weren’t really meant to be love letters when I made them. I was trying to capture progress, to show what we were working on and what was changing. But all these years later, that’s not what I see when I watch them.
I see what it felt like to be their friend.
I am so grateful I have them.
And almost immediately, I wanted to make something for the horses who are here now.
That was all.
I wasn’t trying to start making music again. If you had told me a month ago that this would become a thing in my life, I would have known for sure you were joking.
But I went looking for a way to make those films, and somewhere along the way I opened a cabinet that had been closed for thirty years.
Apparently I left some things in there.
Once upon a time, I sang and wrote songs. Quite passionately, actually.
And I do remember why I stopped.
I wanted to be outside.
Making music then meant a lot of being inside. Studios. Jazz clubs in the middle of the night. I wanted daylight and horses, and eventually I chose them.
Thirty years is a long time not to miss something.
Or maybe I did miss it. Maybe I just found other places to put it.
I’ve spent a lot of those years trying to say things about horses that are surprisingly difficult to say. Not the mechanics so much. The other things. The things I sometimes find myself trying to put enough emphasis underneath at a clinic, or circling around in my writing, or trying to show rather than tell the people inside Horsemanship Insider.
The things that may not actually be about horses at all.
They might be about making something. Or changing something. Or becoming something.
And apparently, some of them wanted music.
Fall has started showing up.
In the mornings I feed the horses and look up the hill toward the arena. A few leaves have started swirling around. The fog seems to boil out from inside the arena, spilling around the edges and into the fir trees. Summer is still hanging on, but not by much.
The horses are damp even though it hasn’t rained. The tiniest birds crash around in the blackberry bracken making far more noise than seems possible. Everyone keeps saying we’re in for an especially wet winter, which I have decided not to believe.
And lately, there is a girl in the fog too. At first I couldn’t see much of her, but she’s getting clearer. Definitely blonde. And I think she’s wearing half chaps.
As she stepped out of the mist and came a little closer, I could hear her singing.
I still sing well enough to find my way into a song. I sit down at the piano and play around until I catch a melody, or a rhythm, or sometimes just a sentence that seems to know where it wants to go.
But Ol’ Novi Stone can SING.
And somewhere along the way, I’ve learned to let her go for it. Sometimes a line comes back through the speakers and I burst into tears.
That’s usually how I know she got it right.
Because I know these words.
Some of them have been said standing in the middle of an arena. Some have been written here. Some have been said to friends, or worked out with the people inside Horsemanship Insider while they watched the blood, sweat and tears, the good and bad and ugly of making horses.
I’ve been trying to say some of these things for years.
Now I get to hear them with bass.
One of the songs I’ve been working on has a section that reminds me a little of “Sixteen Tons.” Not because it sounds like it. It’s the work of it. The steady beat underneath the words, one after another, like laying bricks.
Sometimes you’re not soaring.
Sometimes you’re just marching along.
Fifteen minutes, one ride at a time.
Another fifteen minutes.
Another ride.
I listened to that section the other night and started dancing around the room.
And somewhere in there I started thinking about how many times I’ve swung a leg over.
The years start to blur when I try to count them. Long drives to clinics. Rides with my teeth chattering. Rides when I wondered if I had enough electrolytes on board or would be regretting my choices by the end of the day. Fifteen minutes squeezed in before dark.
For years, our horsemanship challenges have carried a very simple mantra: Every 15 Minutes Counts.
It does.
Fifteen minutes, one ride at a time.
And then one day you wake up and something is different.
Maybe the horse is different. Maybe you are. Usually both.
Horses I’ve felt change. Horses who changed me.
I think that’s why I’m writing these songs—for you guys, for me, for our friends, for our horses. I suppose Novi Stone is my alter ego. I hope you enjoy her music, and if one of her songs fits a love letter of your own, use it.
Full disclosure: I seem to write an alarming number of songs involving hammers and blood. I guess some of my patches got scratches too.
You can find these tunes by searching Novella Stone on your favorite streaming service. Here we go. One ride at a time.
