"I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well"
About this Quote
Spoken with the dry, self-lacerating humor that marks Leo Kottke’s stage patter, the line compresses a childhood catastrophe into the language of routine. A sister’s death arrives as an earthquake in early adolescence, an age when identity is still assembling itself, and the instinct to imitate loved ones is especially strong. The image of a nose dive evokes both aviation disaster and the sudden plunge of mood and meaning; it is a descent that feels mechanized, inevitable. Calling it practicing introduces a chilling double edge. Practice is repetition toward mastery, the daily grind of a musician shaping muscle memory. Here the rehearsal is for self-erasure, a reflexive mimicry of the sibling he adored and lost.
The phrase follow in their footsteps is usually celebratory, a nod to legacy. Kottke turns it into an elegy, exposing how grief can warp imitation into a fatal script. Psychologically, the line sketches survivor’s guilt and the concentric circles of a family tragedy, where the dead exert a gravitational pull on the living. The casual cadence of the sentence, with its almost throwaway humor, functions as armor. Gallows wit creates a survivable distance from the abyss it names, while admitting how close the abyss once felt.
Kottke’s music often pairs kinetic, percussive fingerpicking with undertones of melancholy, and his between-song monologues have long braided absurdity with sorrow. This confession hints at the biographical wellspring of that tone. Yet embedded in the phrasing is also a pivot: practicing can be redirected. The same discipline that might have rehearsed despair eventually steadied his hands on the guitar strings. By narrating the impulse to follow and die, he chooses a different kind of echo, turning imitation into art. The line honors the sister’s absence without romanticizing the pull to vanish after her, and it acknowledges how survival sometimes begins as a dark joke told against oneself.
The phrase follow in their footsteps is usually celebratory, a nod to legacy. Kottke turns it into an elegy, exposing how grief can warp imitation into a fatal script. Psychologically, the line sketches survivor’s guilt and the concentric circles of a family tragedy, where the dead exert a gravitational pull on the living. The casual cadence of the sentence, with its almost throwaway humor, functions as armor. Gallows wit creates a survivable distance from the abyss it names, while admitting how close the abyss once felt.
Kottke’s music often pairs kinetic, percussive fingerpicking with undertones of melancholy, and his between-song monologues have long braided absurdity with sorrow. This confession hints at the biographical wellspring of that tone. Yet embedded in the phrasing is also a pivot: practicing can be redirected. The same discipline that might have rehearsed despair eventually steadied his hands on the guitar strings. By narrating the impulse to follow and die, he chooses a different kind of echo, turning imitation into art. The line honors the sister’s absence without romanticizing the pull to vanish after her, and it acknowledges how survival sometimes begins as a dark joke told against oneself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sister |
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