makes me cry

Somehow I quoted this verse in two separate conversations today (er... yesterday):

And I'm broke, like a bad joke
Somebody’s uncle told at a wedding reception in 1972
Where a little boy under a table with cake in his hair
Stared at the grown-up feet as they danced and swayed
And his father laughed and talked on the long ride home
And his mother laughed and talked on the long ride home
And he thought about how everyone dies someday
And when tomorrow gets here, where will yesterday be
And fell asleep in his brand new winter coat

--The Weakerthans, "Reconstruction Site" 

 

time off

It has been a while since I've posted.  Sorry about that.  I just needed a break from everything. I'm back in the Bay Area with the month of April off and I'm decompressing.  Things have been intense for me for a little while and this last week has just been a big sigh of relief.

I've been to a couple shows this week to see some friend's bands and I've often been faced with the question of when I will be finished recording and when the album will be released.  The real answer is I have no idea, things take me a long time.  I am picky, a control freak, a perfectionist, pretty obsessive, and totally not willing to settle when I know I can do better.  It will be done when I think/know it is done, and I will address the release when that time comes.

I think that the answer I have been giving, though, is pretty realistic.  I have been telling people the album will be finished this summer and released early next year.  It is quite possible it will be sooner, but as I said, things just take me a long time.

Audrye Sessions

...were kind enough to drop by and record some background vocals on their way home after the final show of their tour.  They looked great and were in high spirits for just having spent a month on the road.

I snapped a couple shitty pictures:

end of the day

my view today, all day

loner

Nearly everyone I know in Los Angeles is at SXSW this week. It's pretty strange to be in a city that is essentially a second home, where I've always taken for granted the multitude of friends and acquaintances and things to do and places to go, and to suddenly find myself a loner. I guess it has been a blessing in disguise. though. I've had no distractions, and have been able to focus more than ever on pre-production, which is going really well. The songs are starting to really pop. I've also devoured a novel and a half in the last four days at sunny tables outside various coffee shops. That's always a good feeling.

Last night, around ten or eleven, I got an itch to go out. I texted a friend and asked for a recommendation, something in the midst of the splashing lights and rattling conversation of Hollywood that I could do by myself on a Friday night. Something that wouldn't be lonely. She suggested I go and read at a dark coffee shop a little ways out from the belly of the beast, and I took her up on the suggestion. After parking my car though, and gaping upwards at Scientology's Celebrity Center, after walking past a block full of carousers pouring out in to the street from various restaurants and bars, after walking in and finding the place calm and empty save for a scattering, I turned around in the doorway and marched back to my car, throwing my book on the passenger seat and driving back to the apartment I'm staying at.

Going to the bar alone always seems like a dreary prospect. I thought about it, picturing myself perched on a stool leaning quietly over the bar, all spattered in liquor, stabbing my drink with a straw, and it seemed pretty damn depressing. But sitting there in the empty apartment, alone in the sprawling city, I thought to myself, what's the harm in seeing what happens. I was in the mood for a drink, and felt like having a conversation or two, about anything, with anyone. I said, "fuck it," and walked a few blocks to the nearest and least intimidating place, and stood in line to get in.

Two hours later, as I stumbled home after last call, I laughed and laughed to myself. I hadn't realized how perceptive people are to another's solitude, and in an alcohol soaked room, one of the few places people feel fine approaching strangers, I got effortlessly invited to join two separate groups of people, the first of which brought me in before the bouncer had even checked my ID. When they asked if I was there alone, I didn't have to explain much at all before I had been introduced around, bought shots, made to feel more welcome than I was comfortable being. Certainly I can't remember much of consequence that was discussed, but it was really the mere act of talking of clinking glasses that I was looking for. When I felt I had overstayed my welcome with the first group, I wandered off to write a drunken text message, only to be pulled immediately in with another gathering.

People surprise me sometimes.

Leonard Cohen's

US tour dates NEED to get announced.

the anticipation is totally fucking me up.

one stretch of freeway

I'm back in LA. Driving down last night, I asked Ashley where we should meet. I'm staying at her place while she is off at SXSW this week. She asked me to meet her over in Santa Monica, at the Universal building, where she was still busy at work though it was nearing 8pm.

Its been a while since I've been on that side of town, especially arriving from up north. I tend to take the 101 off of the 405 and wind up in Hollywood where the Capitol Records building rises up and evokes all sorts of emotions, but this time I kept down the 405 and passed beneath The Getty Museum, shining up on the hill across the freeway from Bel Air.

A stream of memories came to me as I sped down that stretch. First it was a clip from sometime in my earlier childhood. I was stuffed deep in my parent's station wagon with my brother and bags and bags of clothes and toys and gifts, and we were headed down to my Grandparent's house for Thanksgiving. There was an accident there under The Getty, and traffic was stopped for miles. In the dark I remember vividly the splash of light from the headlights of the wrecked car in the third lane, the metal all bent back, and the glass all shattered across the pavement as we drove around it.

Then I thought about visiting the Museum with my grandparents a few years later. They are both now deceased and buried on the other side of Hollywood. It was a big deal to the family to see it, and to see it together. I cant remember much of the art. I want to say that I saw a few Van Goghs but I don't know. I just remember talking with my father as we walked along the concrete courtyards between the buildings. I remember a feeling of importance to the night.

I tried to visit another time, during that quick moment that I attended UCLA. My girlfriend was an art student and we planned to make a day of it, only to get in my car and up to the parking lot, to find it closed. We ended up driving around aimlessly through Bel Air and Beverly Hills looking at the huge houses and shiny cars, and I remember what she was wearing on that day and that she was more beautiful than on any other.

I've passed it a few times since, but it's been a long time. Even when I stopped going to school over there I would stay with friends in that area while we recorded Charmingly Awkward, and I remember the frustration, the nights where I just couldn't get to sleep on the couch, where I kept tossing around with ideas and concerns and excitement.

And right now it's just like that, only on a different side of town, on a different couch, and with a different set of songs and their own set of concerns. It still feels like life or death. It's funny how everything can change and it will all still feel the same.

spring forward

What the fuck? How did this happen already?!

silent flashing screens

It's Saturday night and the bar is packed and we're gradually getting shoved into a smaller and smaller cluster between a table and the hoards of people waiting to order a drink. When the conversation dies down, as it does from time to time, I glance around at people, look up at the old and strange and empty bottles lining the walls, but ultimately my eyes are always drawn back to a glowing TV set that's flashing above the hustling bartenders.

Now, the TV in this bar is tuned to one of the remotely educational channels, and the current program is on injured animals and emergency rescue workers. So while my brain is processing what Aaron and Evan are saying, along with what the brunette with her back turned to me to the left of Chris might look like, and how long the bathroom line might be, and how I need to respond to what was just said in the conversation, and what my beer tastes like, and the chill of the glass on my hands, somehow injured and bleeding cats and dogs are being thrown into the mix. Someone's hand is pressing on my shoulder, a voice is saying, "excuse me, can I get by," and my vision is captured by latex gloves and fur and scalpels.

I don't watch a lot of television. I don't own one, and when I'm staying where one is, I never really think to turn it on. I have my issues with it, but I'm not trying to take any stand or making any big statement. I just don't have much interest, and the thought hardly ever occurs to me.

I was in a restaurant on another recent night, having a pretty emotionally intensive conversation with a friend, when she commented on a TV blaring in the corner. She asked me if it had been on the whole time, and thinking about it I realized that I had just caught the entire silent second half of a basketball game without it breaking through to my consciousness.

And tonight, at another dark and crowded bar, a friend was in a conversation with someone they know well and I don't know at all, and while I was standing there fumbling with my phone, glancing around, I caught myself once again being hypnotized by a commercial for multi-vitamins all lit up between the liquor bottles and a stack of glasses.

There is something unsettling to me about TVs following us into the night, pouring always out into the room, pulling constantly at our sight while we try to pay no mind. I would like to think that our conversations alone can get us through the evening. But I could be wrong.

getting schooled

I've been practicing all week to head down to LA for another recording session this Sunday. I guess I've been posting about it consistently without a lot of explanation, but I've been meeting with several different producers, doing a few quick tracks with each to see how they feel. This is obviously the time-consuming approach, but I made the last album over the course of a year with a buddy of mine and we didn't allow it to be finished until the results were just what we wanted. I liked that. I had hoped that I would be able to jump in the studio and in just a couple weeks come out with something absolutely satisfying, but as always it takes a lot of time and patience to get what you want. I'm really excited about the basics I have so far though.

I was talking to a friend near the merch table at a bar show the other day and I noticed that one band had three albums for sale. I exclaimed to him what an impossible feat three albums feels like to me. The amount of energy and stress and thought that go into making an album, the long days in the studio, the cross-state and country traveling, the breakdowns, the manic hours of practicing, not to mention the months and years I spend on a single song, however serious or novelty, that may be left on the cutting room floor when all is said and done.

His band had spent three years on their album which is just getting released this spring, so he nodded along in sympathy.

There is another element here as well. I'm learning a lot about where I stand as a musician, and I'm gaining a ton of experience with long hours in the same rooms with guys that have done and seen a lot of shit. This is sort of like college for me, or if that last album and it's following cycle were college - which many people I've lamented to have related it, this is like grad school. And the consequences a lot more real.

facade

I really appreciate the comments from yesterdays post. Thanks for sharing.

A few people touched on some related things that I have been thinking about recently. Someone responded saying how they felt that in New York people tend to feel more comfortable expressing themselves in public than in the small town they grew up in. Another person mentioned that they felt our restraint is product of habitual attempts to fit in at an early age.

I was saying to someone a little while back how ridiculous these insecurities, these fears of rejection we all have are, that if you are acting and speaking from the heart and others aren't feeling it, it might be a good filtering process - you can always just go find some new friends, a new scene. There's no need to be around people that don't get you.

For the most part I think that is true, but then I thought about high school, and offices, and small towns - things that I am free from at this moment. I realized that the consequences of your actions in those places can be very real. Fucking up in the eye of the flock, or stating your mind differently from others in school could mean eating alone at lunch every day, getting the shit kicked out of you at the bus stop, being unfairly graded. In the office it could mean getting similarly alienated or even fired, in a small town it could make your daily life really difficult. I haven't studied it, but I would imagine a lot of these are innate civilization, tribe, herd tendencies in us. Changing schools, finding a new job or moving to a new town are much more strenuous tasks than finding a new bar to hang at.

I had forgotten the root of that anxiety in school and work - what made me a shitty waiter, being so flustered and nervous sometimes I could barely talk. In New York, I agree that in public it is easier to show yourself, you can be pretty sure no matter what sort of emotion you are letting out, people around you have seen someone much crazier already that day. In the tight-knit music scene there, though, I feel very insecure, am always sort of walking on eggshells.

We need other people, but we lie to one another all day out of convenience or inability to actually pronounce the truth. Language isn't capable of expressing everything. Maybe it's important to accept that the only person you can every be fully real to is yourself, and to make sure you invest time and energy in that relationship.

losing it in public

I got upset at a friend last night over nothing. He just provoked me in a joking manner and it somehow released some rotten emotion that had been stewing all night. It sort of amazes me that when you publicly show yourself being affected - and in this case it was merely with a pained look on my face - you feel guilty and embarrassed afterwards, and the people who care pull you aside, tell you to chill out. You gotta take a deep breath, get your facade back in order and face the world.

I wonder what it would be like if we could let down our guard, if we didn't laugh on the outside when we are hurting on the inside, if we weren't insecure about expressing those battered feelings, if we didn't hold them in until they release themselves.

I can't even quite get my head around it - how any interaction I have with another person is really an interaction of my facade with their facade, that I can't really ever get what's in my head to connect with what is in theirs - not with words at least. I never think of it that way in the moment, but in retrospect I always replay scenes keeping in mind what I was thinking and speculating on the other person's thoughts.

When I was living in New York for a while last year, I remember walking down the street one afternoon in a calm neighborhood, and sitting on a stoop, with her head in her hands, was a girl about my age. She was crying, and she didn't appear to be making any attempts to mask it. She just wailed away. I wanted to pick a flower and walk back and hand it to her then disappear. Something stopped me though, made me afraid to do it, so I just pretended not to notice and moved along down the sidewalk.

Had I had acted on that impulse, I wonder if she would have felt better, or if she would have felt embarrassed for balling so obliviously and publicly, or even guilty for swooping up a moment of a stranger's life in her own burdens. Maybe she would be angry with me for not minding my own business. I guess she may have felt a little of all of that, though I wish I had done something now that I think about it. There is certainly nothing wrong what she was doing, but i've grown to expect a stone face from those I pass on the street. Letting it out like that, for everyone to see, is bold in my opinion. I admire those that can express when they are hurt.

respect

You know, it is super exciting to have everyone around me paying so much attention to the elections this year, and the rising current behind Obama is incredible - it is inspiring, and regardless of what the actual presidential race will be like, this is real history, and we're a part of it, we're making it happen.

I have a complaint though.

I keep finding myself in situations where someone asks me who I support, and before I can open my mouth to speak, they say in a very militant manner, "You're for Obama. RIGHT??!!" And then look at me with disdain until I say, "of course..."

I wasn't always for him, I had to be convinced - and that sort of pushy manner always turns me off, makes me want to step away from it all - it is not convincing.

My best friend works for a social justice non-profit and is often working on bills to be presented to the state legislature, or meeting with city counsels and planning commissions. He knows his facts and cares deeply. When I am with him and one of these 'who do YOU support?' conversations comes up, I pay attention to how he acts.

First of all, he listens, and he listens with an open mind. He doesn't glare, he doesn't interrupt, and when he responds, he doesn't raise his voice. Then, being educated, he explains why he supports who and what he supports in great but concise detail, and he says why it means something to him in his own life and also in his work. He tells them what he agrees with, and when he disagrees he gives examples of why he disagrees. He doesn't tell the person they should do anything, and he doesn't try to make them feel like an asshole for having a different opinion.

Now, I'm not overwhelmingly educated with all of this. I read what articles I can and I ask around, but I have my own life to deal with. I take it a lot more from the gut than he does, and when someone tries aggressively to push me towards something, it usually pushes me away.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, that's what this country is based on, and I really think it is possible to swing it back into place with respect.