Cantrips by Buddha on the Moon

“Cantrips and Tails” began as a synthesizer squiggle, a throwaway line made during a lull at work using an iPad app I no longer remember. It was paired with a robot drummer in GarageBand, set to a video of our friends’ cats cavorting, and posted to Instagram with the caption “Catnip.” That was in 2012.

At some point, the soft synth stem migrated-along with the drummer-into Ableton Live. It was joined by a Steinberger bass (an early-00s overseas reissue: all wood, no carbon fiber, a four-string cricket wicket with active pickups and an appetite for 9-volt batteries) and a Jazzmaster missing its high E string, coaxed into motion with an e-bow. Vocals followed. And then it sat.

For more than a decade, the track moved quietly between machines-laptops, desktops, external drives, network storage-resurfacing every few years to be reassessed, tweaked, and returned to dormancy. Last year it grew a tail: a subdued synth-and-sampler coda that felt both extraneous and necessary. A cantrip, after all, is the smallest of magics. Sometimes it needs an appendage.

From time to time I think of Bob and Hamish, the two cats in that original video, and of their humans, Brian and Jill. Hamish passed away some time ago, and Bob not long after. They’ve had another cat since. We adopted Wanda around the time “Cantrips” began taking shape. We’ve since left Texas, and Wanda left us last year. We live with Delia now. I still think of Wanda a lot.

If life is a fabric, holes wear thin, rips and tears happen, threads unravel. You mend what you can, patch what you must, and learn to live with the wear. This particular patch of cloth has had its stitches, its modest embroidery, its frayed edges-and it feels like time to let this little spell loose: to throw a small spark, and fade out.

“Return of the Grievous Angel” is our fun song. It took me about a year to parse out and internalize Gram Parsons’ part of the “duet”-quotation marks very much intentional, because it’s my firm belief that this song is actually Emmylou Harris’s shining moment. She doesn’t just harmonize; she carries the song.

The internet, in its strange benevolence, has provided AI voice-removal tools that let Nancy and me do a little proto-Americana cosplay at karaoke. This particular rendition tries to iron out the twang and pave the highway with the guitar wall that’s been my go-to for a long time. “Did we really need three guitar tracks?” asked Nancy. “Yes.”

Like “Cantrips,” this track took its time. It didn’t linger on the shelf for quite as long, but it did wait until it knew what it wanted to be. Consider it another small conjuration-less spellwork, more invocation-set loose with affection, reverence, and a willingness to let the ghosts sing through us.