moving forward...

We’re minutes from October. I already pre-ordered my Radiohead download for way less than I should have paid. I feel like I’m waking up to this year all of a sudden – like I’ve been off somewhere while everyone else has been attentive and devoted to the passing time. When I think about the last nine months I get that same feeling as I did in high school when I would come across a question on a test that we learned the answer to on a day when I was home sick.

I want to elaborate more on this, but I’m exhausted. So instead, here are pictures from a trip I took through Colorado and Wyoming in August. Enjoy.

Love In The Time Of Cholera

The latest Spin.com Book Club post is up.

Click Here to read everyone's reaction to Love In the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, including my own.

Wrecking Ball

I just drove over to see Adam, one of my closest and oldest friends. I lived with him for a little while over in San Francisco this summer and I just discovered that while I was in LA doing some initial demos and pre-production for the new album, he had moved back to Oakland.

I’m off for the month of October while Matt is in North Carolina engineering another project, and I had initially planned to go back to New York for the month, but every time I went to book a flight, went on craigslist to find a sublet, I found something pulling me back. I couldn’t solidify plans, I’d put it off, sabotage it. My heart wasn’t in it this time, and I realized that I had to stay in Oakland, that I had a few more songs to write for the album and I couldn’t be out until four AM, waking up hungover in little thin-walled apartments, in hostile environments for songwriting.

Adam is living on the edge of Lake Merritt, the manmade lake that sits in the middle of downtown, attached through an estuary to the bay. At night the lit up buildings reflect in the water, along with a chain of lights that wraps around it like pearls, illuminating a walkway that is still being walked and jogged by a scattered few in the dark hours of night. Fish jump frantically at mosquitoes and ducks and geese flutter out of shadows in the grass when you approach. For a spot in the middle of a city most well known for things like its murder rate or The Raiders or more recently the ridiculous hyphy movement, its pretty damn nice. I had forgotten how unique and special my hometown is.

I checked out his place and we took a walk along the water for a ways, talked about what the last month had held for each of us. He was there at my birthday after Treasure Island but we didn’t get a chance to connect. Adam has hung in there with me through some interesting times – He was with me getting arrested to inspire “Leave The Cameras On,” “The Sun” came from a conversation he and I had over a mid-afternoon breakfast when we lived in the same house in college, he drove back from Los Angeles with me one hazy night at 5am when we were eighteen - which somehow found its way in “Miss Rolling Eyes” – needless to say, we’re good friends and know each other well.

He asked how things have been and I told him that, though some things have made it rough recently, I’m feeling great, that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter and brighter, really its nearly within reach, but those last few steps are the most painful to take – you’re weak and broken down and tired, it takes a lot of motivation to lift each foot, but the pain feels good, you’re almost there, you can see that you've made progress, that it wont be long now. I’m so excited about the songs I’m writing, its all looking more and more hopeful.

When I left, I had a desire that I haven’t had in a long time. I followed it, and found myself driving towards where I went to high school, where there’s a road that leads up to Skyline Blvd, a street that twists and winds from hairpin turn to hairpin turn along the ridge of the Oakland Hills under the canopy of pines and redwoods. When I was just old enough to drive, I used to spend many a bored and lonesome night listening to music as I aimlessly traversed the highest points of the city, reflecting on my position in the world – I did way too much of that, and obviously still do.

We used to drive up there on the weekends, three or four of us packed in one of our folk's cars. We’d find ourselves at one of those clearings, where the trees part and there’s a turnout on the side of the road. At those spots the entire world opens up below you. Millions of lights shimmer from San Jose to San Francisco, San Leandro to San Rafael. You can see the entirety of the bay area in motion below you, can make out the lights of every bridge that crosses the bay. We would sit on the hood of the car and get high, talk about inane shit that felt deep and meaningful and satisfying. I would try to picture the land before me barren of infrastructure, of houses, of people. I would think about how long it would take to walk the fifteen-minute drive from my folk’s house to school. I would vent out all of my anxieties, all of my hopes, all my ambitions and let them collect over the city, join in with the clouds of stress and worry that fill the air above any metropolis, and leave with a clear head. Those nights always ended with that feeling that you get when you're walking away from a campfire towards a tent with a tired voice and tired bones, where the quiet and dark of the night smother you with sentimental thought.

I listened to some of the demos I recorded in the last week as I drove along up there. It really put them into a different context. It felt uncomfortably familiar, dusty memories began to cumulate at the forefront of my brain. I thought about the beater ’84 Corvette that my buddy Mike saved up for and coveted as his source of pride, the same way I treated my guitar. We used to take that thing up by Skyline High where a string of small lights line the road for maybe a mile, where all the kids would kill the headlights and maneuver between two constant parallel strings of light, the only thing penetrating the dark.

I pulled over at one of the outlooks we used to sit at and thought about the distance that time drives between a feeling and a place. I thought about how much bigger this chunk of the world was to me then, how it just keeps on closing in. I thought about how the difficulty of any moment, of any transition, of success or failure is all worth it if the end result is a new and better perspective. That’s the shit that all the people I respect are made of - tears of pain, tears of joy – It comes out in explosions, however they feel, but it takes them somewhere else, somewhere closer.

As I sat there looking out, Emmylou Harris was singing a Neil Young song on my stereo. She was singing, “Meet me at the wrecking ball, wrecking ball…”

Voice Mails I Recieve At 2am On A Saturday.

Every now and then, in the middle of the night, I'll recieve a call from an unknown or blocked number only to find something like this on my voice mail:

Good Problems

Tomorrow is the Treasure Island Festival. The next day is my Twenty Third birthday. One year ago today we were in Texas playing the Austin City Limits Festival. I remember curling up exhausted in the front passenger seat of our van in a dirt parking lot listening to Van Morrison singing “Brown Eyed Girl” a couple hundred feet away, watching bleary eyed through a chain link fence as concert-goers trudged to find their cars in far away lots, all sore with the sun and drunk with the music.

I went to bed that night despite the knowledge that the black ARTIST wristband I was sporting could get me anywhere I wanted on 6th street. I was so proud to have been a part of such a thing, I wore it for days and days. I wore it while Joey recounted his night out to all of us as we drove up to Dallas the next day. I wore it that night as we played a side room of some venue whose name escapes me, a handful of kids trickling over from the show next door. I was admiring it on my arm a few minutes before midnight that night when I walked out of the bathroom at Café Brazil to the entire restaurant singing “Happy Birthday”. I’ve since gone back to that place each time we’re in Dallas, not because the food or coffee is really that great, they use styrofoam cups which bums me out, but because it reminds me of that night. Nothing makes you blush like someone singing a song with your name in it.

We slept that night at the friend of a friend of a girl Bryce was seeing's apartment. She made us food and gave us liquor and insisted on sleeping on the couch and letting me have her bed since it was my birthday. Joey, Will, Aaron, Bryce and I played Dominos and drank and talked about stuff way deeper than we usually get into until we were way too drunk to talk anymore - though there was more to be said I’m sure. I think I demanded that everyone wear silly hats that night in honor of my birth, there was a surplus of them in our van, but that’s another story…

On my birthday proper, we staggered to the van and drove to Oklahoma City. It was raining as we pulled up in behind the venue. That night Tom Petty was headlining the third and final day of Austin City Limits and I would have killed to see him, but we weren’t on tour to see shows, we were there to play them. We took refuge in a record store beside the venue and the band bought me the new TV On The Radio album that had just come out. After we loaded in we discovered a whole bunch of friends we had made on the road that summer had driven out to see us, someone informed the other bands that it was my birthday, and while we played, members of Murder By Death came out on stage with brimming shots of whiskey. After the set people kept buying me drinks, I was of such little help packing up our gear that I was instructed to just go sit in the van. I fought the tugging and spinning of gravity around me and put on TV On The Radio, stared out into the muddy Oklahoma night, feeling complacent for once. I got a second wind at the hotel but made little sense to those around me.

The last year hasn’t felt like actual time passing, it feels more like the memory of a dream than of actual events - I sometimes wonder if it all really happened, if its maybe some big dillusion. The record label we signed to had a big merger and fired a couple hundred people, in the shuffle our record didn’t get promoted as we had hoped, but we found ourselves on amazing tours. I spent a few months in New York. I couldn’t write there, though I found a million things to write about now. I’ve been able to venture down into the heart of it all, into the corner offices of CEOs, into the dressing rooms of icons, across all the main thoroughfares, down the side-streets and back roads, into the ghettos and suburbs, into the homes and apartments and dorm rooms of people of all ages and shapes and backgrounds - and what I’ve found has been disappointingly, yet refreshingly, human.

When we first had a couple record labels clawing at us a while back, we got an entertainment lawyer. The first time he sat down with us, he told us that he was there for our problems but we should recognize that there are "good problems" like which record label to sign to, and "bad problems" like illness or incarceration. It takes a way bigger person than me to not take a good problem for granted. I've been doing way too much of that this last year.

Tomorrow night at midnight, after we’ve loaded up the van, after I’ve finally seen Modest Mouse perform, I hope to be doing something special with people I care about. I don’t want to hit the bars, I know what I’m missing there and I’m glad to be missing it. I want it to have some meaning to me. I know birthdays are just notches on the yardstick of life, just another day, but I need a reason to have a fresh start, a fresh point of view on things, wrongs to right and write about, rights to re-right, and so on and so forth. I feel like I’m on the brink of something good, I just gotta be patient and keep it together.

Cant wait to see everyone on Treasure Island tomorrow.

In the studio now.

Things are good