Phil Kline’s Zippo Songs

These two fabulous writers join forces in a duo show at the Mondavi Performing Arts Center in Dixon coming this Spring 2012. Composer and guitarist, Phil Kline’s Zippo Songs (2003) set to music texts that American GIs engraved on their Zippo lighters in Vietnam.
The songs follow like a harrowing sense of Haiku, expressing the gamut of emotions young men feel under the threat of imminent oblivion.
Alex Ross of the New Yorker calls it, “One of the most brutally frank song cycles ever penned.” And Anne Midgett of the New York Times says, “Phil Kline has fashioned brilliant American lieder for the Twenty First Century. Tinged with elements of the psychedelic sixties, they communicate with a direct vernacular eloquence.”