Magic brewing in the silences between

Do you know what is the most awesome thing EVER?

After Fenway Franks.  OBviously.

The best thing ever is writing lyrics that spring from the heart of your life and yourself and your work in this world... and then sending them off to some of your dearest friends to turn into songs... and getting back this musical representation of something so close to you...  and it's surprising and beautiful and crafted with such understanding and artistry and care that it aims right back at your heart... and when you get to sing that, you cannot help but really embody the expression and feel that the thing in you or in your life that you wrote about is being transformed further with each performance in this ongoing alchemy... and that as you perform it with and surrounded by these dear friends, that they are in it with you and won't let you flail in the abyss with your lonely fight to be who you are, to make your world, well... blue.  

It requires HEAPS of trust, this band thing, particularly the part where we are creating together.  It can be so hard to let go of your own ego and defenses and really open up to the process and to each other.  But collaborating in this way on art that really matters to you and with people who really matter to you is such an opportunity to experience support in a truly unique and aweing way.  

I feel totally blessed by it.  This next album (imaginary as it is at this point) is going to be special.  That will be audible, I am certain of it.

So fingers crossed to debut one of these new tunes next Thursday @ Great Scott!!!  (I know I know, ONLY if it's ready, GP...don't worry.)

On Making Something From Nothing Or How Nothing Is Always Already Something: Sleep Deprived Ramblings For People Who Like To Laugh At Whiplash

I have half a mind to post a blank page here today.

Half a mind to ask you to contemplate the awesomeness 

of emptiness, the way it sparks with potential.

No one has found a way for beginnings to come without 

endings, that's the bad news.

The good news is that every end means a new beginning, 

which means the time is ripe to create.

And that's just what we're doing 

in This Blue Heaven right now. 

It's a germination period.

An underground growth period.

The ground only looks barren.

The page only looks blank.

It's about to bust out some rhymes,  yo.

Cuz that's how we ro'.  

I'm writing lyrics.

I'm learning to write lyrics 

that might could torpedo 

a heart or two.

I didn't make that line up.

A number of years ago someone said that to me 

about music -- it was like a torpedo to her heart -- 

and it changed the way I thought about 

a lot of things, forever.

I hope these songs will torpedo a heart.  

Or two.  

I stole a line from someone's great-grandmother 

and used it in a chorus.

But man was it a good line.  

I could have said it.

I even might have said it if given enough time.  

GP and KP are writing music for these lyrics.

Music with thrust.  

Torpedos are no good sitting inert in a warehouse.

They need someone to sit down with them.

Some people need to sit down with things.

I hope there aren't so many metaphors mixing and

bumping into each other in the new lyrics 

as in this blog entry.

I'll have to check.

Blank pages have no mistakes in them yet.

So there's that, too.

But we must weigh the risk, however 

high, against how hard we may rock.

Okay I stole that line, too.

I love everyone I ever really loved 

when I sit down to write.

I love you is always a quotation.

You did not say it first and neither did I.

That line is rightfully Jeanette Winterson's.

But man is it a good line.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Case in point.

But the juxtapositions, the juxtapositions can be new!

And so can the moon if we give it a little shade.

A little chance to go underground.

Leave the sky to the sly, mysterious stars.

Poe's phrase, man, doesn't it turn good?

I heard it first last night.

Night ends where dawn begins.

Or is it the other way around?

It's all the same f*cking day, man.

Janis Joplin.

It's all good news.

Let the metaphors be bumper cars.

Just buckle up and let 'em.

And valleys and fields and it crowns kings in every movement

My grandfather was a butcher in a small Iowa town with a big train station. This was long before he started working for the Gummy Bear factory and started bringing us 5lb bags of gummy stuff at holidays. Anyway, back in the days when hobos rode the rails, sometimes one would come around the butcher shop to see if my grandpa had any scraps of meat. My grandpa is one of the most accepting and friendly people I know, and would of course give them what he had and chat a little. He told me that there was a celebration every year to crown a Hobo King, and the time it was held in this small Iowa town, he gave them meat for their hobo stew. I can just imagine my grandpa taking a break behind the meat locker, smoking a cigarette in the humid Iowa heat and passing a bottle back and forth with a man who smelled like railroad and all of America at once. I can hear their voices, the crickets, and the liquor sloshing in the bottle. Maybe they stepped into the locker to cool off among the monolith-like hunks of meat that hung from the ceiling. I remember them from when I was very little. 

I don't know how to justify or explain writing a blog entry about this, it was just on my mind. I feel sad I missed out on this time. Rail riders and barnstormers.... Slow dancing.... I'm nostalgic for an older generation's past.

Hell, I feel sad that soon the phrase "mixed tape" will be obsolete.

Insight into my soul:

This just made me incredibly beamingly happy.

Today I am grateful for

1.  Lisa Hannigan's new album, Sea Sew

2.  Orange-flavored Tootsie Rolls

3.  The sky is so big that we all fit under the same one.  (And even if it's rainin' here, some other patch not so far away has a sun, a flock of pelicans, a Milky Way, a 95% full waxing gibbous moon.)

4.  This ring I got in California just in case I forget about #3.

More on inner v. outer

We are discreet sheep: we wait to see how the drove is going, then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express: and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. 

- Mark Twain

What lies within

Death is not the greatest loss in life.  

The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

-Norman Cousins

I told my dreams to the desert

Today I miss the desert.  I keep trying to write lyrics about it, but somehow I can't make something so vast and empty and silent and  full of tiny sharp movements and smooth hot surfaces fit into a pop song.  

(I'll bet Ben Gibbard could do it.  Speaking of whom, Death Cab's new EP The Open Door is totally worth a spin.)  This must be why it was so difficult to find music that seemed to fit the scenery as we drove further into California and further away from the sweet Pacific.  Bob Dylan's Honest With Me is perfect.  It was played on repeat for much of the drive between San Diego and Indio.  And yes it's true:  Joshua Tree National Park is indeed the right setting for, y'know, The Joshua Tree. 

Forget pop lyrics, even poetry seems too simple to capture the interplay between your inner self and the outer space that is the desert.  Somehow all that pure heat bypasses the usual clutter and burns through the layers of insulation that allow you to avoid the bare bones of yourself most days.  

And so you are left in the quiet howling wide-open, having the rare experience of facing your own mind.

  

And there is nowhere to run.  

There is only yourself.

No Mistakes Just Art

Soooo much to catch up on after that crazy rockstar weekend! Between the WERS appearance and the Thumbprint productions filming of our Portsmouth show Friday, the 'Dise show Saturday night, and the video shoot for "Bliss" by Salem filmmaker Christopher Gaines on Sunday, I am BEAT.  (Day job?  Wha?)

I did want to take a minute, though, to tell you about the awesome organization where Chris works by day:  Raw Art Works in Lynn, MA.  Essentially, they provide the creative space and supercool programs for kids ages 6 through the upper teens to come and create art of all kinds, including film in the case of Chris's program for teens, Real to Reel.  Not only does RAW give the kids somewhere to be after 3pm while their parents are busting their hides to provide, but it also gives them invaluable tools for exploration and expression.  

RAW's annual bash is coming up on May 16th @ 37 Central Square in Lynn, 7-11:30pm.  The party includes music, food and an auction of artwork made by participants in the programs (I got a sneak preview of some work yesterday and I was Just.  Blown.  Away.)

If you can't make it to the party, donating to RAW is super easy.  Just go here -- the secure form's done in two shakes and your karmic points for the day skyrocket!  Win.  You can also get on their mailing list here.  I just did.  Glancing around at the piles of bureaucracy around my desk, I gotta say I'm wicked jealous of Chris's day job, but I'm also excited to get involved however I can.  Good good stuff.  Pass it on.

Shooting "Bliss"