Last Saturday

I’m still so pleased with how the show last Saturday felt. It was probably the longest set we’ve every played, but the enthusiasm of the crowd made it go by faster than some of our shorter opening sets – I didn’t want to leave the stage, but there was nothing left to play. Thanks so everyone who came to the show. We’ll see you all in a few months.

Fashion

Aaron found a new coffee shop. It has normal people and the sun just crashes right through the front windows in the middle of the afternoon. The coffee is pretty good and so is the music. This is a nice departure from the previous over-crowded, over-poseur-artist-type coffee shop, where the first half of the first Arcade Fire record comes on every afternoon and stops right before that one song in six/eight that I really actually like, where the people watching was pretty nice but the people were pretty mean. I can feel the sun through the back of my shirt here and It’s creating a nice silhouette of shaking leaves on the wall beside me. There is even a mural on the ceiling of the sky with a Macaw flying across, and there are plants, and the subtle sound of a fountain.

I’m over the Mission, tired of looking at regrettable forearm tattoos and the no longer ironic mustaches. I remember my mom driving me around there when I was in middle school and interested in graffiti pieces. I think it was real artists then, and lesbians, and probably some junkies – I liked that. I’m gonna try to avoid it until it becomes completely yuppified. Right now its all the yuppies in denial. The tension of insecurity is too high for me. I really like areas with interesting shops and good food and coffee, but where people can bring their kids and can admit that they like The Eagles and that Plain White T’s song.

I went to H&M yesterday and finally figured out where everyone is getting those striped sweatshirts, though I still haven’t figured out where they get those sunglasses that cover three quarters of your face. When I see someone wearing those, I’ve decided its probably best to make the assumption that they are covering some sort of hideous deformity (Otherwise why would you want to hide your lovely face?). Though I always have trouble with each new wave of fashion – maybe I’m missing something. I’m going to have to stick to thrift stores to find anything individual, sifting through L after L after XL, often times leaving without any luck. I’m thinking I might just get a grip of those unique and awesome shirts that are three sizes too big for me tailored to size.

Embracing (or Erasing) The Past

My friend Emily was in town for a few days. She hitched a ride from New York on The Matches' tour bus, which was stopped at a hotel on the edge of the bay for Monday and Tuesday. I promised to take her to my favorite coffee shop in Oakland, since she’s shown me her favorites in New York, and I also promised to show her a handful of new songs.

It was interesting to give someone a tour of my hometown – especially someone who knew me first through the eleven songs on Charmingly Awkward, and is close with The Matches guys who I played my first shows opening for, who continue to help me find my way through the bustle of bands and industry, who I spent my second (and final) summer of college with on Warped Tour as a sad excuse for a guitar tech.

From her hotel to the coffee shop, I managed to pass close enough by three out of the ten places we recorded our album - two studios and a house. We passed what was once iMusicast, a sight that evokes an odd nostalgia. That place went under at just the right time for me, I needed to move on, but there will never be another venue where I feel so at home. Now it’s a bakery or something (has anyone inspected that place?).

We first stood on the sidewalk where James and I have spent hour upon hour for the last two and a half years, trading laments while he smokes and I drink cup after cup. I thought for a second about all the things that have passed since I quit school and had nothing, and found him with the same nothing. We were both working on albums that were taking more than a year to complete. The change has been so monstrous, but I never felt it occur. Last time we met there, we complained about the record companies we signed to – we need to recognize how special a thing it is to be complaining about a goal you’ve achieved – even if it isn’t exactly how you expected it to be.

Eventually we grabbed a table and Matt and Ben and Monaca joined us for coffee. I found myself getting up to take a call from Matt R about some ideas for the next record, discussing the sorts of things that we haven’t discussed for two years. After finishing Charmingly Awkward, I felt like I’d never make an album again. The future was so hazy. I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I couldn’t picture it.

I showed Emily Telegraph Avenue and after rehearsal I saw her and the others at a bar I didn’t care to go to, where kids from my high school kept walking in the door. I was pleased to see them, but not pleased at the feeling of seeing them.

As much as you try, you can’t shake the things that make up who you are. If you don’t embrace them and keep them in good condition (however annoying or painful they may be to tend to), then they will rust and corrode and fall apart under the new weight of people and places and experiences that are constantly being added on. Maybe I’m not fond of these relics from earlier chapters of my life because in their eyes I see the reflection of a person I no longer am. It’s not a person I’m ashamed of (mostly…), but someone whose skin I have shed. I don’t want to be mistaken for that kid they knew and I don’t want to go through the trouble of correcting their misunderstanding.

Anyway….
The next night, to make good on my promise, I drove down to the hotel with my acoustic. I held up in a clumsily mood-lit hotel room with Emily and Monaca and Shawn and showed them a handful of the songs I’ve been working on in the last few months/years, and Shawn shared a few of his. I think they were pleased, and I was pleased with the responses they gave.

For better or worse, I always seem to find myself back to where I started, trading thoughts with Shawn on directions songs could go in, production ideas, lyrics and melodies and performances that stand out, comparing to favorable or unfavorable artists or songs ( “sounds like __ meets __” ). I’ve even found myself back in my folk’s house the last few nights, as it’s more convenient to sleep in Oakland when we are practicing on this side of the bay all day. I’m writing this from their kitchen table on a laptop that has been set on tables and carpets and fence posts in most every state in this country.

I’m thinking of a line I wrote a while back and have yet to find a place for in a song. Its something like, “every time I leave here, I leave for good.” Whenever I step onto a plane to New York, climb into the van before tour, or write a check for rent, I expect that it will somehow make the past into something I can never return to. I don’t know where this notion came from. I never go in with long-term intentions and I always seem to be running from something, but here I am under the same lamp that lit the table when I was having my first birthday and my last dinner before leaving for college. When I picture my favorite musicians, I don’t see them opening up presents from their grandma beside a Christmas tree, I see them manifesting in the alleyway behind the club, wearing that same jacket and haircut and expression – I wonder if that’s really the case…

Calming the Drunk

Last night after a full day of driving, and waiting around the Salt Lake City airport, I caught a flight to Oakland. I managed to get a nice aisle seat in the third row, got comfortable with my book and waited to take off. After the whole plane was boarded and we began to taxi, an obviously drunk guy in the fourth row, opposite from me, got up and tried to use the bathroom. The flight attendants asked him to sit down until we were in the air. He sat down loudly, claiming he really had to go.

The guy looked like he was in his late twenties, clean cut in a black button up shirt and jeans, and he was sitting in the middle seat leaning over and talking incessantly at the girl sitting against the window. An older man was in the aisle seat, looking perturbed as he read his book.

When we reached the runway the pilot came on the speakers and informed us that high winds were going to delay our flight for about a half hour, that we’d be on the runway for a while. At this information, the drunk yelled to the flight attendants for permission to use the bathroom, and they allowed him, despite how rude he had asked.

I tend to enjoy the spectacle of obnoxious people losing control of themselves, but this was a closed environment, we were stuck there for hours and the weather made people nervous, babies were crying.

One of these babies was sitting behind me, and once the drunkard was back in his seat, he leaned over and began to berate the infant for what must have been an entire minute. People were becoming really annoyed, turning their heads back or sitting up high in their seats to see what the hell was going on.

Eventually we took off in a very shaky manner, the sort of turbulence where you can feel the plane drop in the pit of your stomach, where you think a bit about your ideas of god and afterlife, about how ready you are to die.

The drunk continued to talk at the girl beside him and she seemed uneasy, a flight attendant asked if she was okay as she was taking drink orders and the girl indicated that she was not. At this the drunk became irritated and began yelling at the flight attendant for “disrespecting” him, asking for an apology, promising to file a grievance. She ignored him and kept taking orders while he continued to yell. I could see this all going on, and when she took my order, I offered to switch seats with the poor girl.

When the flight attendant got to the front of the plane, he got out of his seat and walked to the front, demanding some sort of apology, making threats, getting way the fuck out of line. Everyone in the plane was uncomfortable, in such an enclosed space, in frightening weather, this man was taking the form of a wild animal, needing a leash and muzzle.

Having so many friends that have had issues with belligerent and self destructive tendencies when they drink, I was nervous about my offer to sit beside this guy, but I felt prepared.

I did all I could do, I ignored him while he went on and on at the top of his lungs about how the girl was a coke head, was just out of rehab, about how he was going to “lynch” the black flight attendant. I got so angry that I could feel the red deepening in my face - I swallowed my pride and did the one thing that I knew could shut him up. I asked him about himself, and then I listened as he went off in a much more restrained fashion in my ear about the girl and flight attendant. Then he began to lament about serving in Afghanistan, about getting shot, about having to shoot a 10 year old kid because he had a AK-47 pointed at him ready to fire. It seemed like he was still pretty messed up over it, he told me wanted a beer. When he stopped a male flight attendant making a fuss about not getting peanuts, I gave him the pack I wasn’t going to eat. Then I focused on my book, ignoring most of what he said unless it really needed some sort of reply.

He then went out of his way to make sure he wasn’t disturbing my reading. He shut up for a while. He apologized to me for interrupting to ask what city I thought we were flying over. He even apologized to the flight attendant, though still demanding an apology from her.

Once we arrived at the gate, the pilot asked everyone to stay in their seats. The door opened and an Alameda County sheriff walked in, asked me and the man sitting beside me to stand up, and he put the drunk in hand cuffs, pulled him off the plane.

New Spin Book Club Post

the next installment of the Spin Book Club is online now.

We read The Cosmic Serpent by Jason Narby. Colin from Circa Survive chose it, and I liked it a lot while I read, and less and less as I digested it. I didnt totally feel everything the guy was getting at, but I did like a lot of his reasons for getting at it. If anything it made me grind the rust of the gears in my brain a little bit. Nice to try some (nearly) non-fiction.

Right now we're reading Garcia Marquez's 'Love In The Time Of Cholera' - which is a little more of my thing.

anyway, do check out what a bunch of people in random bands thought of it. not that our opinions are any more valid than the next person...

x-amount

I dropped my acoustic on my laptop today and put a small spider shaped crack in the screen. I need to be more careful with the two things that accompany me everywhere I go. I took my first acoustic out of its misery by putting my fist through it a few weeks back. Actually, I’m shocked that guitar made it so long. My folks got it for me when I was fifteen and having my first interest in playing. The day I brought it home I put the first hole in it, one that I kept covered up with the original electrical tape that I’d placed over it that day. For the entire last year of tour it sat, in an incomprehensible tuning, in the second bench of our van, getting brought to life on long drives when Will and I would have the desire to jam or I’d have the discipline to practice my scales. I put my fist through it on the morning we returned from our final tour stretch in June. I couldn’t find my keys.

Things are good now, though. I’ve been a complete flake when it comes to seeing anyone, even people that I care for deeply. I’ve been very content in a routine of coffee shop afternoons, mostly alone, but at times meeting friends on their lunch breaks or wrangling unemployed buddies to bring their job search to the coffee shop while I spill through my fingertips onto my fresh cracked screen.

It’s strange to now be back home, surrounded by friends that are somehow all at least a year removed from college. What happened? Everyone has a real job, is getting up at a very real hour of morning, is bearing real adult responsibility. More and more friends are confounding me with the concept of making X-amount each year. I had no idea that this number, which is more of mark of profession than value, would be chained to us once we got released from the collegiate incubator. Now as I walk down Market, passing those businessmen in their confident suits, I know that in the back of their head they are turning this number over and over, breaking it down, adding it up, comparing and contrasting, dividing it by their age or the amount of women they’ve fucked. I keep to the shadows in my t-shirt and jeans, smile at the junkies, and shuffle along, counting only my blessings. I’m working on songs and writing it all down, I’m practicing guitar and doing my vocal warm-ups, I’m avoiding the brand of the dollar and decimal as long as I can.

Twenty-ish

I counted and I have a little more than twenty songs I’m working on right now. I’m trying to figure out at this point what I really want from the next record. Everything that anyone may have heard from us at this point was written before my twenty first birthday, before I passed into the snake pit of the music industry, before I saw the country spread itself before me, before I let my concept of love diminish from a bursting idealism to burnt out skepticism, before I wandered the streets of Manhattan in the stupor of four AM, before I made the error of believing the chirping record execs… My concept of the world has changed so much and my music taste hasn’t excluded many old favorites, but I have placed a lot of new and different songwriters in their company.

My voice is not significantly different though, and I think that I’m still stitched together by the same thread, but I’ve sewn myself into such a mishmash of varied elements that may or may not fit together or make sense to anyone but me. I don’t want to put out an album that strays too far from Charmingly Awkward, I want the progression of my songs to be gradual so that each album builds on the foundation of the last, hopefully leaving behind a cohesive catalogue that I can be proud of, that slowly but surely reached some sort of genuine destination. I also dont want to be fashionable, I may walk and drink coffee and pabst amongst the hipsters, but the moment I hear one of them humming my tune, i'll know I fucked up and will be tossed into the closet in a few months along with their clothes and haircut of the day. Charmingly Awkward is a compilation of the best songs I wrote in the last couple years of my teens, so naturally what I’m writing now should be the best songs from my early twenties, but what if the me in my early twenties has given up on a certain forced cleverness, has read too much Henry Miller and over-saturated himself in The Band and Leonard Cohen instead of Weezer and The Pumpkins?

I hope what I’m writing now will make complete sense to anyone who has given us more than a casual listen. It’s my life, but I’m bound to change, and I like to change my environment often as well. What I create is product of the time and place I’m in, I guess. There was a certain insecurity, a certain sense of humor, that I feel like late-teenage me had as a symptom of his age, that may have been altered slightly by the change in years and all the oddities of the last year of my life, though to anyone but me it may be too small of a change to notice.

All I know is I’m glad that we’re getting to a new record now and not any later, because I don’t want too much time to pass by before you see me again. I want to keep it familiar and consistent enough that you can’t sense the change, I don’t want to come around next time like a cousin you only see on Thanksgiving and have you say, “my how you’ve grown!”

Making Dinner

Blonde on Blonde plays on my laptop which is sitting uncomfortably on an unplugged microwave which wobbles atop a kitchen stool. I’m making dinner. Its Friday night around eight and in a little bit Joey will pick me up to go see The Format who are playing tonight at Great American Music Hall. I’ve scarcely seen those guys since our tour with them last summer.

My stove top is bustling now with simmering pans and boiling water. A cutting board is strewn with the entrails of slaughtered vegetables now popping and hissing as they cook. I’m pretty excited about this month's apartment. Its central enough that I can get downtown or to the mission in about the same amount of time, I have no door to my makeshift room, but I like the light and my roommates are absent with work most of the day and night.

The neighborhood is a little sketchy as usual, though. It’s “transitional” they might say, mostly furniture stores and mechanics, goodwill and liquor stores, unmarked black doors with rainbow flags hanging above, a few yuppie bars and nice restaurants and music venues. Day and night my heart gets yanked down to my feet at the sight of the destitute walking the streets alongside me. There are so many shelters constructed of sheets and shopping carts, cardboard and newspapers. The addiction is gut wrenching. At certain times when I am the only person walking along that appears to have a place to live, I feel like I’m in a zombie movie – as sad as that is to say.

A taxi driver who took me to my place after last call the other night, who had commented on my blue striped sweater and black rimmed glasses as the Lovin’ Spoonful look, who I had endeared myself to through a discussion of bars that he had worked at in tough areas of Oakland over the last several decades, warned me to watch myself day and night. This is not far from where Ryan got assaulted a few months back. I’m being cautious – especially when there is not another person on the street for blocks and blocks.