Paul Westerberg once told me to not put my best songs at the end of the album — put them up front where people will hear them. But he doesn’t take his own advice (“Answering Machine,” etc.) so why should I?
This is another song about being sad and socially retarded, but full of sonic light and effervescence. (and some lyrical hopefulness, too: “Every day you mime a prayer though your faith is shaken.” Isn’t that the definition of hope and faith — waiting for the peace to come back; believing, even in the darkest darkness, that it will?)
“You only want to be loved” sums it up. Isn’t that all anyone wants? My dad used to say that I would never understand what it means to be happy unless/until I fell in love. Real love. He died before he got to see me really happy, but I like to think he can observe me now from time to time. My father was full of ideas. He once told me that the three best ways to get to know someone were to 1. Get drunk together 2. Play poker together or 3. Sleep together. (Did I already write about this, before, in another post?) He gave me this advice when I was about 12 years old. Even then, I thought he was right on about the poker-playing and the getting drunk. But I think that two people can sleep together and wake up knowing nothing about each other. I think that sleeping together can actually sometimes even be a way for two people to alienate themselves from each other, to drive them apart.
Anyway, David Kahne, uber-producer/mixer (he recently mixed my “Shining On” from How To Walk Away), commissioned this recording, plus a few others, so he could gauge my progress as a writer/singer and potential signee to his record company at the time (I think it was Columbia?). He set me up in a studio in a big converted barn in suburban Philadelphia with a drummer/producer named Andy Kravitz. The reverb was in the basement. David gave Andy specific instructions to not let me play guitar. “Don’t let her play guitar — I want her to play bass,” he said (or words to that effect). He thought I was a good/interesting bass player and he’d been disappointed when I gave it up for 6-string after the Blake Babies split up.
I agree that I am an interesting bass player, but playing the bass gives me a headache. It’s kind of like doing math problems, for me. And I never liked math. I like the end result of my bass playing (listening back to the finished songs) but the process of getting to the good stuff is tedious and kind of difficult, sometimes.
My playing on this song is somewhat characteristically spastic. I say “somewhat” because I held back some (probably because I was in a foreign environment — not a studio or a town I was used to). If you compare this performance to the old Blake Babies stuff, you’ll see what I mean.
There was a neighbor lady — she lived next door to the barn studio — who I met outside one afternoon with her old dog. The dog had weird milky/glassy eyes and looked blind but the neighbor lady went into a spiel about how she had discovered these amazing enzyme tablets that were healing her dog of all sorts of health problems, including bringing his sight back. And then she tried to get me to buy some for my dog. I‘d thought at first that she was just being friendly —neighborly and making conversation — but apparently she was a saleslady for the canine enzyme pills and was pitching the miracle product to me. Made me kinda sad.
Not seeing good was a recurring theme. The guy who came in and played guitar had bad sight — he may have been technically legally blind. Jim Boggia was his name. He was a sweetheart, and played great.
I recorded my vocals in the control room without using headphones, singing along to the musical tracks coming through the room speakers. That was a first for me, and it was freeing. Headphones can be stifling. The sound that comes through them is not real sound. When sound comes through the air, it is real sound, I think.
Andy played the omnichord. What a beautiful sound. I need one of those.
And the key change at the end? Why does it make me so happy to hear it, every time it happens? There isn’t enough modulating happening in music these days. I’ve got to set an example and bring it back. I vow to put a last-chorus modulation in the next song I write.
Something really weird and scary happened to me on the drive back home from Philly to Boston. I was driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, I think it was, and at the very end of the pike I was asked to present my Turnpike ticket to the toll taker and to pay my toll. But I had NO memory of ever having been given a ticket or of stopping to pick one up at any tollbooth when I got on the highway. I was absolutely 100% sure that I had never gotten a ticket but the toll taker was absolutely 100% sure that I had to have been given one in order for me to be on the road I was on and so but I had absolutely no memory of any ticket and I looked all around my driver’s seat area and couldn’t find one anywhere and so I was sitting there at the toll booth arguing with the toll taker that I HAVE NO TICKET! and so how could I be expected to pay a toll when I had been given no ticket? “But you had to have been given a ticket to get on the turnpike” the toll taker would repeat, calmly, logically. And so we went round and round for what seemed like half an hour until the toll taker said I should pull my car over and go inside and explain the situation to his superior, who was inside the building next to the tolls. I went in and plead (pled? pleaded?) my strange case to the tolltaker’s colleague, who was just as calmly unconvinced by my argument as the first guy had been. Then the new guy told me that since I had lost my ticket, I would simply have to pay the maximum — the whole toll road’s worth — and that was all there was to be done about it. ”But I was never given a ticket!” I argued, one last time.
I finally paid the full fare and got in my car and continued home, angry and confused.
A few days later I was in my car driving around Boston and I discovered the toll ticket on the floor of my car. I was horrified. Well, scared. Very scared. I felt insane. How could I have no memory of ever having stopped to pick up the ticket? I had argued and argued with the tolltakers and it turned out that my argument was completely insane and groundless.
More and more, I am convinced that I am honestly brain-damaged. I’m not sure how or when it happened, but it’s real.
I may have been abducted by aliens at the age of five. They may have done something to my brain. Experiments. Something weird happened that five-year-old summer, in Indiana, in the middle of the night one night. Something that I have never been able to fully understand or explain. I’ll try to tell you about it sometime, maybe, if you all are interested.
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October 7th, 2008
7287pwkr
This song is kind of all over the place, lyrically. Kind of stream-of-consciousness. Overall, though, it seems to be expressing discontent and frustration but also a sense of utter resignation. I like to liken “Made In China” to a sonic white flag.
I was thinking of an ex-bf who was a really good liar (“James” in my book) when I wrote “It’s a basic need to lie and be believed.” This was his need, not mine. His and so many other peoples’. Lots of people lie.
I want to tell the truth but telling the truth doesn’t always pay off like I, in my innocence, think it will. Telling the truth sometimes gets me nowhere. In fact it often hurts me. I am forever wounding myself by not holding back the truth. What is wrong with me? I wonder. Why can’t I just be like everyone else and learn how to play the games that people play? Why do I have to make everything needlessly difficult and complicated? Why am I always trying to get to the bottom of things when there is no bottom, really?
“Step out of line and you will have arrived” takes a different tack: it’s a basic contrarian stance. In this, I am proudly — not regretfully — contrarian. (To be unique is to have value.) This attitude comes naturally to me. Standing in line; joining; following; conforming never made any sense to me. I always wanted to step OUT of line, not get in it with all the other sheep. How else to distinguish myself and to feel interesting and creative?
It’s habit for me to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. On holidays — 4th of July, for example, when the whole city seems to head south or north to the Capes (Cod and Ann) and the beaches and the clambakes — I deliberately choose to stay in the city, where it becomes quiet and peaceful (as the people vacate) and empty and really…Nice. To go where others don’t, and aren’t, is instinct.
But sometimes this going against the grain — this need to be different — can be like shooting myself in the foot. Sometimes I take it too far.
“I’m gonna wait ‘til it rains then I’m gonna burn everything” — my contrarian tendencies can get a bit perverse, over the top. Can make things impossible. I mean, nothing’s gonna burn while water is falling from the sky, right?
I tend to create difficulties for myself. Maybe I do this so I have an excuse when things fall apart. So I can blame myself rather than have to deal with the horror of an unfair world — a world that deals us blows with no rhyme or reason. If I fuck it up myself, at least there is a reason I can point to for its going to hell/shit/the dogs.
I am forever trying to solve unsolvable problems. I CREATE problems just so I can try to solve them.
“I’ll sing to the clock because no one came” was a direct reference to a Some Girls gig in Eugene, Oregon. I’d told my booking agent to book us in all the cities I’d never played before (Eugene, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Des Moines, and others), thinking, “I’ve never been, ever, all these years I’ve been putting out records — they’ll be DYING to see me. STARVED.” Boy was I wrong. Turns out, people forget really easily what you may have accomplished in the past. And no one showed up in any of those cities. My strategy failed.
There were literally about five people in the Eugene audience. I cried before I went on. I couldn’t help it. It just happened. The floodgates opened and I couldn’t control it. Finally I dried my eyes and tried to hide the fact that I’d wept like a wuss and then I went out on stage and focused my performance on the big clock hanging on the wall opposite me across the room, just so I didn’t get too sad (about the fact that the room was basically empty) and start crying again.
“Tell me something” is like “C’mon, show me whatcha got. Something, anything. Excite me. I’m bored, tired, weary. Entertain me. Enliven this joint. Kickstart my brain, my ho-hum/tedious/predictable existence. But “Don’t say nothing” (grammatically incorrect — in the Southern vernacular of the ex-bf) is saying, “Oh just forget it. Shut up. Just don’t talk. Don’t try to make this any better. There’s no point. It’s hopeless” — acknowledging the futility of the original entreaty (“tell me something”).
“You don’t know what it’s like to be perfect.” I am saying no one is perfect; not me, not you, not anyone. You think I think I’m perfect? If you only knew how colossally IMperfect I think I am. So how can you put me down? It’s like beating a dead horse, sort of. Ridiculous. I am saying it’s silly to attack me personally simply because you don’t like my music or my musical persona. I guess it’s okay if it makes you feel better but you don’t need to do it for my benefit or to put me in my place or anything like that because I already know I am a worm. If you think I think I’m a supercool badass motherfucking hot mama, you don’t know me — you have me ALL wrong — and so you have no real business judging me and I can’t take your judgments seriously; if your criticism is based on an untruth (I think I’m hot shit) or a misperception (“she thinks she’s better than me”), it’s not valid or fair.
You can hate my music — okay, that’s fair enough. But leave ME out of it. Please. You know — let he who is without flaws throw the first vicious personal attack on a stranger, or whatever. I am flawed, yes — I readily acknowledge this, every chance I get, and you would know this if you were paying attention — and so are you and so is everyone.
“Shine a light on a sob story”. People love to ogle a tabloid tragedy — any old sad story — overdose, disease, divorce, arrest, bankruptcy, alcoholism, sex addiction, adultery, where-is-she-now, failure, aging/beauty going to seed/plastic surgery disasters, whatever.
“This is the age of boredom.” People are numb and uninspired and directionless so they watch TMZ and stuff like that, and look at Star magazine, to distract themselves from the undeniable everpresent fact of their meaningless day to day existence. And most of them own guns. Boredom/anhedonia and deadly weapons — a scary combo.
For some, there’s nothing to believe. There’s such ennui and disillusionment and emptiness and lack of concentration and absence of deep thought and of consciousness of connections between things. “Flip a coin to live or die” That’s how random everything is; how little a life means to some people. Such disrespect for the preciousness of being alive in the world. We are all one moment away from the end of the here and now. Can’t they see that? Doesn’t that mean anything? Doesn’t it make everything — every moment — matter more?
I cherish this life — this flawed, imperfect, wondrous, mysterious, fascinating, painful, joyous little life — knowing that it is a mote in the eyelash of a blink in the history of the universe.
When I complain in my songs, it’s only because I want things to be better, and I believe things can/will be better. I wouldn’t complain if I thought everything was hopeless. I am not a nihilist. I have tons of doubt and I question everything endlessly, but I am a moral person in that I hate myself when I mess up and I want and need to always continue to try and do the right thing. But it’s not always easy to know what is the right thing. Sorry — bad English. Sorry, Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts (MGM). RIP DFW.
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October 6th, 2008
7287pwkr
I really cannot remember who I was directing my sort of muted anger in this song toward — can’t remember who the “you” is. When I sing “Please forgive me for finding something real and pure and true” and “I’m sorry that I must go so soon,” I’m not actually sorry. I’m being sarcastic. Someone is giving me a hard time for trying to grab onto some happiness; to something that might be really good and joyful like love or a connection with someone — a new someone. The skeptic is withholding his/her blessing, and I’m irritated by his/her unwillingness to let me explore and pursue my destiny and to make my own potential mistakes.
No one can protect me, after all. If I get hurt, I get hurt. No one can prevent that from happening. Well, maybe I can, by not taking chances. But that itself — not taking chances (not risking heartbreak) — is actually another form of self-damage.
Maybe the skeptic’s skepticism is protective and well-intended and in my best interest, but more likely it is a knee-jerk reaction to change to the status quo; to what has been established and experienced for a significant period of time as comfortable. It can be hard for a friend to accept and welcome a new reality in the form of a new person in his friend’s life. Hard to rise above and not feel somewhat shaken/usurped/neglected/disposable. You know how it can be: a friend falls in love, and then it seems as if you never see him/her again..
And in the case of public people, the media and gossip machine — as well as significant numbers of ordinary folks — are so quick to question and mock and condemn and speculate and prophesy doom that of course it is going to make the subject of the gossip and conjecture somewhat angry or at least sad, and maybe irritated, and stressed, and a little (or a lot) hurt.
Let me make my own mistakes, I am saying. And let me at least try to find/create/discover my own happiness. Mine, not yours or your conception of it. Let me live my life the way I choose to live it or the way it chooses to live me. I’m just trying to do my best and to live the best life.
Maybe nobody was waiting for me at the time (I wrote it at my mom’s house one Halloween evening, while housesitting — working on the song between trips to the front door to give the little ghosts and witches and princesses and Spidermen candy from the big bowl in the foyer; I was alone, single) — maybe the song was all made up or projection into the future or memory of the past. But if I ever have someone I want people to be happy for me and to not get their pants all in a twist about it (if only because I want THEM — those people — to be happy, and peaceful, and not all worked up about something over which they have no control and about which they have very little insider information). I don’t want them to question and snicker and doubt. I harbor enough intrinsic doubtfulness already (thank you very much) to supply a whole town full of people (supply them with doubt, I mean). It’s been hard enough for me to believe in my own happiness; I don’t need anyone else bad-vibing me. And I can feel it when people are sending negativity my way. Oh yes we can feel it. I am very very sensitive to everything around me and in the air, whole continents away. I am hyper-aware. So please be careful what you think.
I don’t care SO much, anymore, what people say and think about me, but I hear it and see it and feel it and it can be hurtful when it is based on anything other than the whole clear honest 100% truth.
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September 24th, 2008
7287pwkr
Already people are getting it wrong. Or not quite right. People are saying it’s about a guy; about a romantic love guy. (They’re saying the same thing about “Now I’m Gone,” too. [They are mistaken in that case as well.])
“This Lonely Love” is the love of a song; of somebody else’s music — it’s love for a voice or for the spirit in the voice. When I listen to certain singers (a certain singer, in this case) I feel an intense and painful longing because of the fact that the voice hits me like an arrow in some deep primal elemental part of my being, of my psyche, of all the lives I have lived and don’t even remember but can feel when I hear the sound.
And sometimes it feels stronger than any connection I have ever had with any actual person that I actually knew.
But it is a lonely love, the love of a song or for the God in a singer’s voice. It is a lonely love because you can’t touch what you love. You never can. You can’t even see it. You can’t hold it. It can’t put its arms around you.
I remember once cradling my boom box in my arms and crying and then hugging the boom box close to me and, like, squeezing it, with one speaker next to my ear. Something in the singer’s voice and melody (and words, I guess) touched my heart so hard and moved me and I just wanted so badly to grab onto it!
“I saw you in my mind in flashing colors.” That’s music. It’s a song, a voice, a melody, that I can’t get out of my head. It haunts me and taunts me and I love it more than anything and I can never have it.
There was a guy. He made music. I was a fan, obviously. Had been for a long time. I was staying in Manhattan and I went to see him sing/play in some tiny back room of an already-tiny bar in Brooklyn and it was a great show and everything (about seven people in the audience made it more special/secret/private/mysterious) and then I got a car to take me back to NYC and then I went home to Boston eventually and overall I just felt so bereft. I sort of trailed this guy out to the deepest boondocks of Brooklyn, with which I am totally unfamiliar, thinking that maybe it was the guy himself that I felt connected to, even after all this time knowing that it is never the guy. It is always only his music. Always. Only. The guy is never what I want. What I want is in the music and it is never in the person.
I think that it finally sunk in after that night. And then I wrote the song.
It was Andy Chase’s idea to take the piano and guitar riff from “It Should’ve Been You” and to build a new song around them. I went along with it because I too felt something more could be made out of the two parts. And it was fun. And I don’t have to pay myself for the sample.
I’m not trying to keep it a secret that I sampled myself. In fact, the opposite is true. I wanted to see if people were paying attention. You are. Good. I would have been worried/disappointed if no one had noticed that I’d blatantly ripped off the piano part and the guitar riff from the In Exile Deo song.
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September 1st, 2008
7287pwkr
I imagined a young girl signing a record contract, but with the mind of someone who had been in the business for years. She is a girl who is aware of the whims of the marketplace and who understands the fickle loyalties that waver and in some cases disappear. She knows that they’ll forget about her at some point (unless she dies young and pretty [which she has every intention of not doing], in which case she will be remembered forever) and she knows that her worth as cultural currency will inevitably diminish, as it does.
“We’re defeated before we start,” a friend once said to me, of our generation.
I don’t know if I agree with him.
We just have to try to hold on to something really hard and see if it takes us somewhere good.
The girl decides, with bitter sweetness, (young-old), to use the money now for splendid things because she knows it’s most likely the only money she’s ever going to see from the powers that determine the (financial) fates of sensitive young artists. But she’s grateful, so grateful and humble (even while resigned and jaded) for ever having been considered for the deal, for the position she’s in (signee); it’s more than she ever dreamed of.
It’s almost like she’s giving up, in a way, before she has had the chance to prove anything to anybody. But maybe this is the smartest, correct position to take. Because why should we ever have to prove anything to anybody? Why do we bother competing and performing and such? You learn that the people with the power don’t really have real power — they just have money. And that real power is within you. Real power is integrity and faith in oneself. So to “throw money away,” to “blow it all” is in a sense a defensible attitude. Not hoarding money for oneself is a kind of celebration of what really matters. It’s celebrating real power. It is laughing in the face of the powered-by-money. And in this case it is using the money for good causes (except for the crashing the car part — that’s kind of nihilistic and meaninglessly destructive and unreal. The deliberate crashing of the car was meant to be more of a symbolic idea than a real plan. The money is better spent in productive ways.)
What is good and true and meaningful and lasting are all of those things (good, true, etc.) no matter what — with or without the money, with or without the record deal, with or without the hype, the praise, the accolades, the strong record sales, the TV appearances. Either you are beautiful on the inside or you’re not. Either you believe in yourself and your worth or you don’t, regardless of what the world says or doesn’t say.
“This can’t be real…” That’s exactly how I felt when I held my first record company advance check in my hands. (Well, in a sense I was exactly right; “advance” money is an advance against the artist’s future earnings. It is basically a loan. In this sense, it isn’t real. It’s play money. Or negative money. It’s the illusion of money. But, still.) How did I get so lucky? I knew I hadn’t earned it yet — it was too soon! I didn’t deserve it. And I knew others would think the same of me. (Because if I think something, chances are someone else will think it, too, as I am not that radically different from anyone else.) My voice, my songs, my personality, my confidence, weren’t developed yet. I was going to let them down. Wasn’t it obvious? I was a baby. A shy, scared, nervous, insecure, self-hating little girl, a deer in the headlights holding a power that I couldn’t believe was real.
Yes, others agreed with me that it wasn’t real and that I didn’t deserve it. And those people weren’t shy about stating their case (“Juliana Hatfield is lame”, etc.).
“Success” or “dreams coming true” is complicated — never as simple and perfect as you think it’s going to be.
So she makes the most of it now, while she has the opportunity, because one day, probably not too far from now, they will forget about her. They will stop throwing money her way. They will stop believing in her. They will stop returning her calls.
She lets one kid finally buy his girl an engagement ring. Throws a pile of bills out the window and sticks her head out and watches the happy people down below catching the free money floating down from heaven.
It’s her one chance to live it up now, before They take it (the money, the chance) away. Enjoy it (the freedom) while she has it, because it will never be like this again. She knows she is nothing more to Them than a commodity — an object. They don’t care about her art. Or her heart. She knows it is thus. And They are not the bad guy. They are just what they are. There’s her and there’s Them. Just the way it is. Just the way the world turns. It has always been thus, she thinks.
She orders room service, surrounded by friends — penniless friends, struggling friends, goodhearted friends who live hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. It’s like she’s Robin Hood. She is sharing the spoils. She orders room service — one of everything (and leaves a 100% tip), because she has always wanted to do that (and now she can!). Just like I’ve always wanted to run into the airport and go up to the nearest ticket counter and say, “Get me on the next plane outta here.”
She’s having a big fun little-bit-mournful bittersweet celebration of the fleeting never-again-ness of Now. In the midst of joy and love there is the consciousness that nothing lasts. Moments must be savored (because they disappear so fast, like cigarette smoke).
“The fugitive tenderness of those eyes” — I read that somewhere. It sums up a lot of stuff for me.
It is wasteful, yes, to order one of everything on the menu but I wasn’t thinking of the realistic repercussions of ordering one of everything off the menu when I wrote the song. And remember, it’s a party! (A party for/at the end of the world.) People will partake of the everything. They’ll savor every last bite and sip. Like a house-wrecking party, at the end there’ll be nothing left.
She buys guitars “for all the kids.” Isn’t that a worthy use — one of the worthiest — of the — of any — money? (The importance of arts — and arts funding — is the subtext of my new song “Such A Beautiful Girl,” from How To Walk Away.)
She also uses some of the money to set up one of her addicted friends in a nice (“posh”) rehab in the country so he can get clean (in a comfortable environment).
She should be happy, right? Record deal=happiness/success, right? But the equation isn’t that simple for her. She’s conflicted. She’s getting attention now, but it doesn’t mean that anyone really cares about her. And money doesn’t fix everything.
For me, it’s not true that “they never cared.” Some did. Some still do. A select, loyal few. When I wrote the song I had just been let go by the label who had signed me up five or so years earlier, so I was feeling like I’d been thrown out like a piece of trash. The song was a snapshot of a moment of extreme hurt. Keep that in mind.
This was, I think, my first recorded slide guitar. I love how this particular slide part makes me feel. It does something to my heart, and I can’t explain it, and I didn’t do it on purpose. I was so pleasantly surprised by what came through my hands. It’s the mystery of music. The part is so pretty and sad and nostalgic and heartbreaking, even to me, the one who played it.
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August 20th, 2008
7287pwkr
I bought a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation about fifteen years ago, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it. I’m too afraid. Every time I pick it up to take a peek I seem to open right onto the page with the photograph of the rabbit that has been maimed by laboratory testing.
I think it is almost never okay to knowingly, intentionally inflict pain on an animal. We have no right. We humans are not innately “superior” to any other species. Our best efforts should go toward avoiding causing animal suffering when we can, because it is unethical and immoral not to. Just because a creature has so-called limited intelligence, it shouldn’t be thought of as any less deserving of generally kind and sensitive treatment.
Would you kick or slap a mentally retarded person for not behaving the way you want him to? For being slow/dim, in your eyes? For thinking differently than you? Would you hit a baby? No? Why is it okay to hit a dog? Both the dog and the baby have brains that are less developed and complex than you with the power to potentially inflict punitive (or just mean) blows. Can you not see the similarities between dogs and babies?
I am not trying to say that no one should ever kill an animal. I know there is a food chain and I know that all species kill, I think. We all need to look out for ourselves in order to survive. I’m not saying that everyone should be a vegetarian. (I myself used to eat meat, when I was a kid. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time — when I was still growing, and before I developed an emotional and psychological aversion to the idea of eating dead animals and before I developed a capacity for empathy.) I’m just saying that how animals are treated, and how animals — dead and alive — figure into our lives is something to think about. There are day to day decisions we have to make which ought to involve questions of morals and ethics.
For example, if you are going to eat chicken, are you going to eat the chicken that you know has come from the factory farm in which the chickens quite possibly suffer constant discomfort and maybe agony and even terror, if you have a choice not to?
I know that some of you laugh off the whole subject. You say: “They’re just chickens.” Or: “They’re stupid, dirty animals.” Well, someday we may discover that there is life — a different, highly-developed, highly-intelligent, physically-bigger-than-us species — on another planet; a species that looks at us humans as some of us humans (not me) look at, say, chickens. “They’re just humans. Stupid, dirty humans” they might say as they shove us into small dark cages in which we can’t stand up or turn around, as we crap and pee on ourselves, and scream and tear our hair out, pleading for answers, for an explanation as to why this foreign species is giving us no indication of what the hell is happening to us or why it is happening or what they are going to do to us.
Does it not bother you a tiny bit when you realize that the animal you are eating might have been, in a sense, tortured — so that it could become food on your plate? And if it doesn’t bother you at all, why doesn’t it bother you? I’m genuinely curious to know what goes on the brain/heart/soul of a person who has zero empathy for the human-caused suffering of creatures that are weaker than us. Because that attitude (“They’re just chickens”) is incomprehensible to me. Any speciesists out there — feel free to respond and explain and defend your position.
And are you going to consciously decide to wear fur from animals that you know were trapped in traps and were maybe left for hours with their legs crushed and bleeding, stuck in the metal vices, dying slow, agonizing, unimaginably painful deaths for the sake of money and fashion? It would be one thing if you lived in Siberia or Mongolia or some Eskimo land where your main source of food and warmth is, like, the yak — the life-sustaining yak that you and your family depend upon for its meat and its fur. But if you wear fur in, say, New York City, or L.A., or really even in most of the United States, which is overall a pretty temperate and wealthy region (by saying “wealthy,” I mean that we aren’t forced to kill furry animals and wrap their fur/skin around us in order to stay warm in the wintertime), you have to be prepared to withstand the dirty looks of random strangers on the street. (Well, if you live way up in Fargo and you work outside all day in the sub-zero winter, then maybe fur is sensible and maybe you could even call it a necessity, depending on the type of work you do — I mean, an argument could maybe be made.)
I start bawling, immediately, every time I come upon that rabbit photograph and I have to close the book and try to block out the image and the idea that people are deliberately, methodically putting harsh, blinding chemicals into the eyes of small innocent defenseless animals. It hurts me so much to think of it. It’s unbearable.
I have the same extreme reaction when I come across that Animal Planet TV show about animal police who rescue abused and neglected and abandoned animals in different cities. Or when that Sarah MacLachlan PSA about the ASPCA comes on, showing various still shots of adorable, wounded-looking shelter mutts looking sadly into the camera while MacLachlan’s heartbreaking “Angel” plays in the background. I literally can’t take it. Any of it. I am overwhelmed with pain in the depths of my heart and I immediately start crying and change the channel as fast as I can.
Where does my intense and extreme empathy for animals come from? I don’t know. Maybe I was an abused animal in a past life. (That would explain a lot about me, actually.) I know that animals, in the natural world, suffer and die or are killed all the time. That’s life (and death). It’s very hard to avoid confronting this truth because this truth is all around. But I find myself constantly trying to erase the reality from my mind.
But recently I had a breakthrough. I suddenly came to terms with the fact of life and death. At least for a few minutes.
As spring was blooming into green in Massachusetts and animals were coming out of hibernation and birds migrated and built nests, I was, as usual, hyper-aware of it all. In the course of one short up-and-down-the-block walk of my dog, I encountered three incidences of bird death and/or suffering (like in “For The Birds”): Just outside my door there was a bird’s wing — a single torn-off starling wing — lying on the brick sidewalk. At the end of the block, in the spot in the dirt at the back of a parking lot where my dog likes to do her morning business (I always pick it up, of course — who was it that said that the true test of a man’s character is how he conducts himself when he thinks no one is watching? I always — always — clean up my dog’s doo, even when no one is looking and no one would know if I left it on the ground, because it’s the right thing to do, in the city, especially if it’s in a place where someone could step in it or be grossed-out by encountering it), there was a dead headless sparrow. The head had been devoured, already, and bugs were swarming around its body. Then on the walk back to my building I noticed a small young grey bird making little hopping motions on the sidewalk. Its feathers were sort of mussed, like it had been roughed-up in some kind of a tussle. As I approached this bird hopping forward on its little feet an inch or so every few seconds, I wondered why it didn’t take flight away from me, as birds usually do when a human walks toward them. As I came close I saw that the bird was missing part of both of its wings — the back/outer part of each wing seemed to have been ripped off. Only the front part of its wings, close to its body, had survived whatever the bird had been through. It was hobbling around, looking unsure and confused and disoriented.
I tried to look away and to put it out of my mind because it was too painful for me to bear. (I am the opposite of a rubbernecker [a “stiffnecker”?]. I don’t look toward destruction and violence; I look away. [All I could think while watching the new Batman movie was that there were kids — little kids — all over the audience and there was SO much violence in the film — guns, knives, beatings, horrendous facial burns, horrible car accidents. I couldn’t help but silently question the parenting skills of all the people in the crowd who had brought their little children to witness all the slamming and punching and knifing and shooting and blood and blowing up and killing. Mightn’t those kids be scarred for life from seeing all that violence or is it now a given that everyone born in the late-20th and early 21st centuries has been inured to violence and blood and cruelty and destruction from birth?])
That evening, just after dark had fallen, I took my dog for another walk. We went back behind my building where there are a couple of big old trees and some holly and hydrangea bushes. I heard a strange and unfamiliar sound above my head. It was not a human sound, I didn’t think, but an animal sound, but not like anything I had heard before. It was a kind of screeching cry. I was pretty certain it wasn’t any bird, because it sounded bigger, heavier, more substantial than that. I looked up at the branches of the big tree next to me, thinking, “What the hell is making that sound?” The repetitive cries of apparent distress continued. I kept searching with my eyes up in the thick tree leaves until I saw it — a small raccoon. A young-un. It was stuck on the edge of the roof of the building next to mine while its mother and another little one had apparently already jumped from that next-door roof onto a branch of the tree towering over me and were making their way up and across the branches away from the roof next door and to wherever they were going.
The stranded one kept scurrying back and forth along the edge of the roof and I could tell it was scared — it kept screaming — and wanted to follow in the safety of its parent and sibling, but couldn’t find its footing (or courage) to make the jump. It was very windy and all the leaves and branches were shaking around. Was that part of the problem? The young raccoon’s fear was palpable (and audible) and its panic and helplessness and its abandonment were very upsetting to me. The mother raccoon and other young raccoon just kept on going, up the tree and away from the stranded one.
I went inside, finally, to try and put it out of my mind, hoping for the best — needing to believe that the stranded little raccoon child would eventually make her way to her Mom and sibling and the rest of her family, and to happiness and contentment. I hoped I wouldn’t find the little raccoon dead on the ground the next morning, having fallen in a fearful shaky tentative jump from roof to tree branch or been blown from the roof.
A couple of days later, I was in the suburbs all alone in a house I sometimes visit where there is a rabbit that lives in the big back yard. She is often out there, munching on plants and flowers, hopping around, living her life.
That day I went outdoors and I saw, at the edge of the driveway, a small creature roll onto its back. I thought, “Oh, a chipmunk. How cute! It’s scratching its back on the pavement…or…something.” As I got closer I saw it sort of roll from its back to its front and then onto its back again. It was…weird. Not normal chipmunk behavior. And it wasn’t a chipmunk. And it didn’t run away when I got close, as chipmunks always do.
It was a baby rabbit — a little bunny, just a bit larger than a chipmunk. It was trying to roll itself from the pavement into the bushes at the edge of the lawn next to the driveway. It had been injured somehow and apparently couldn’t use its feet or legs and was doing a sort of grotesque hurling of its body — the only way it could move itself to relative safety.
There was a little pile of wet rabbit dung on the pavement next to the bunny, like it had shat itself in pain/fear.
It looked like something had poked deeply into its side — there was an indentation there. I couldn’t see any blood but there was that wound hole and some ragged matted fur had been torn away from the spot.
I froze as the truth of what was happening became clear. It was too horrible: Animal suffering. My worst nightmare. The one thing I cannot bear. I thought, “What do I do? What can I do?” Right then I noticed the grown rabbit (who lived somewhere on the property) sitting, very still, in the middle of the yard, about fifty feet away from me and the injured bunny.
Maybe, I thought, if I pick up the injured bunny and carry it to the mother (I assumed it was the mother…or at least related. Because what are the chances that a grown rabbit and a young rabbit hanging out in the same suburban back yard weren’t related? Let’s just say the grown rabbit was the small rabbit’s mother, for the sake of narrative cohesion.) or at least carry it closer to the mother, and place it in the grass where the mom can see it, the mom will come and help.
It seemed the mom wasn’t aware of the young one’s injury or even its presence over there at the edge of the driveway near the low bushes, or she would have come and tried to help, right? And carry the baby to their hole or wherever they lived? Right?
I ran inside the house and grabbed a pair of woolen gloves (I’d heard stories of a deadly infectious rabbit-borne disease that was killing people on Martha’s Vineyard a few years ago. Plus, the injury could have involved blood and/or pus/guts that I couldn’t see from where I’d stood looking down at the bunny — and which I’d rather have not gotten on my hands.)
Then I went back outside and I gently picked up the bunny and cradled it in my hands and walked slowly toward the grown rabbit. I didn’t want to scare the big rabbit away so I lay the bunny down in the grass about fifteen feet from the mom. The grown rabbit then hopped away from me toward the fence on the other side of the yard. I went inside, hoping that with me gone, the mom would run back to help its wounded baby.
I watched, unseen, from inside the house as the mother rabbit proceeded to casually feast on plants growing all around the base of a big maple tree. Five minutes went by during which I thought, “What are you doing, rabbit? Your kin is hurt. Go help her! Stop stuffing your face and go save her! Bring her to your lair and nurse her back to health, you selfish coldhearted bitch! What the hell are you doing? How can you be munching away, with not a care in the world, at a time like this??”
But the rabbit seemed totally unconcerned or at least unaware of the suffering baby. So then I thought, frantically, “Should I call the vet? The animal rescue police? Should I try to help the bunny myself?” It was 6:30 p.m. and I knew the local animal hospital was closed already for the day and I wasn’t sure who else to call, locally, and if I did call, would they laugh at me and refuse to come? Would anyone think it was legitimate enough an emergency to try and save a very seriously wounded baby rabbit? “They’ll probably tell me there’s nothing they can do. They won’t care. It’s just a bunny, they’ll say. ‘Sorry,’ they will say. ‘We have bigger fish to fry/pets to save. Let it go. Lat nature run its course.’”
I ran out to the yard, to where I had put the bunny down in the grass. It was lying there in the same spot I had left it in. I picked it up again, gently, thinking, “Maybe I can save it. Should I feed it some milk? Isn’t that what they do with sick baby animals? How? Is there a dropper in the house? Where? Probably not. Why would they have a dropper? And do they have any milk?”
I sat down in the grass, not knowing what else to do, with the bunny on its side in my woolen gloved hand, the wheels in my brain frantically turning: “What can I do? How can I help?”
The bunny gasped for air. It wasn’t breathing in a regular in/out pattern. I looked for a visual heartbeat pumping under the fur and I couldn’t see one. Then I counted. One one thousand, two one thousand…every four seconds the bunny would tilt its head back and open its tiny mouth wide and gasp for air. Every four seconds. Four long seconds. I sat there for about ten minutes with the bunny laying in my hand. This bunny was dying, I realized. I began to cry. My panic was turning into sadness and something like resignation.
But part of me still thought that if I cradled it and spoke soft, kind words to the bunny, I could make it feel less afraid and alone, at least — it might think my glove’s warm wool was a friendly nurturing animal.
Right then the bunny squirmed and with every ounce of energy it could muster, it rolled its wounded little body off my hand and onto the grass. Apparently it didn’t want to be held by me. I wasn’t helping.
I looked down at the bunny. It was still gasping for air once every four long seconds.
I had, earlier that very day, heard an interview on NPR with a man who was talking about his recently-deceased father who, on his deathbed, acknowledged that he was ready to go and was looking forward to it; that he wasn’t scared of death. The father was sick of being in pain and he thought it would be a relief for the suffering, the sickness, the deterioration, to finally end.
Who knows what it feels like to be dying? No one that I knew ever died a slow, drawn-out death. They went quickly, unexpectedly, suddenly. So I’ve never had the chance to ask anyone how it feels. I imagine it is a very solitary experience, facing your end — turning away from the world, and the people in it. One must begin to ease out and away, to somewhere else, where other people (or your kind — rabbit, human, dog, whatever) are no longer necessary. Maybe others are even a nuisance in the way of the path to the new place.
I went inside the house again to think. I had apparently not gone fully into acceptance mode. “But maybe, though,” I thought, “if the bunny rests for a while, its wound will heal! Maybe if it lies there it will get better! Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it just needs to rest and then it will regain the strength to walk away. Maybe when I leave here to go back to the city, the mother rabbit will emerge and take the baby away and nurse it back to health.”
After about twenty minutes of this delusional force-fed hopefulness I went back outside to where I’d left the bunny lying in the grass. I crouched down and watched, looking for signs of renewed life and a stronger heartbeat. I counted: one one thousand, two one thousand, etc. Now the strained opened-mouth gasps for air were coming every ten seconds. This bunny was most definitely dying.
I left the house to go back to my apartment.
I called the next day and asked the owner of the house to go and look to see if there was a dead baby rabbit in her back yard. I told her the story and then I directed her, on the phone, to the spot in the yard where I had left the bunny. I hoped she wouldn’t find the bunny, so that I could believe it had survived; recovered enough to go back into the woods. I had my fingers crossed that she would say, “Nope, there’s no rabbit lying anywhere around here. All I see is grass.”
But then, “Oh! Here it is,” she said.
“Is it dead?” I asked.
“Yeah. There’s already flies on it. Poor thing.”
I asked her not to put the bunny in the garbage can in the garage (because she is the kind of unsentimental woman who might’ve done that). I asked her to put it in the woods somewhere, where it could become part of the natural environment, and maybe feed some other animal.
She said OK and that she would grab a shovel and scoop up the dead bunny and carry it out to some spot in the woods at the edge of the yard.
I contemplated going back out to the house and burying the bunny, but placing its body on top of the dirt seemed just as good a resting place as a hole in the ground. Besides, I’d already held a private funeral in my head as I’d held the bunny in my hands. I prayed for it to be free of its suffering and to be peaceful and happy after life and for its soul to rest without any more pain or fear, ever.
I had a rare moment of clarity and acceptance and understanding when I held that dying bunny: There comes a time when it is impossible to deny that it is time to go. And maybe our experience of suffering, as observers of that suffering, doesn’t correlate with the experience of the actual sufferer. No one knows what it feels like to die except the people (and creatures) who have died. We don’t know if it hurts like we think it will. And maybe the dying just want to be left alone. Maybe the dying don’t need us (like we think they must) to comfort them. We just don’t know.
I am tougher than I thought I was. I didn’t fall apart completely when I came upon that injured rabbit. I didn’t even avert my eyes. I looked straight at it, and I learned something by doing so.
After this experience back in the spring, I started volunteering at an animal shelter. I walk the dogs, clean up after them, play with them, feed them, treat them with kindness. I used to think that working in a shelter would be too sad, too painful — all those strays, abandoneds, abuseds, neglecteds; the given up, the put out, but it’s not sad — it’s great to see a whole new crop of dogs every week (a whole new crop of dogs coming in means that a whole crop was adopted).
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August 12th, 2008
7287pwkr
I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote this song. I really can’t remember. It was so long ago. Was I talking about some concept of God? Was I talking about my mad crush on a guy — a crush that I was sure was not just a crush but was true, lasting, faithful forever love?
In the song it sounds like I am asserting my undying faith or my integrity or my stick-to-it-ive-ness or my love or my loyalty. To what, to whom, I’m not sure. And it seems I don’t understand why others — for example, the love-object in the song — don’t see what I see and believe what I believe.
It’s odd to have written a song and to not have any memory of writing it, or of what was going through my mind when I wrote it. When I listen to this song, it’s kind of like you listening to this song; kind of a mystery. It sounds like a person I don’t know — a stranger — is singing.
Whatever I meant with this song, I really meant it. I was very serious. But funny, too, though, don’t you think? Quoting Mae West (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime”) — that’s funny, right? Why doesn’t anyone think my songs are funny? I do. I just listened to “Get Off Your Knees” and I dissolved in a puddle of giggles. Mike Watt’s bass line alone is good for a huge, song-long grin.
In “No Answer” I reference, yet again, escaping, in my car, with no plan but to just go — “Jump in my car/turn the music on/I’m gonna be gone but I don’t know how long.” People can criticize me for many things; they can make multiple harsh negative judgments about me and my music, but they can’t say that I’m inconsistent. I’ve always written about driving in my car as a way to feel free and to think without any distractions. It’s a theme I have often returned to.
I’m wearing a wig on all the “Hey Babe” album photographs. Does everyone know that? I had a short, dirty-blond, boyish haircut at the time. The photographer who took the album shots — Jesse Peretz, who was the bass player in the original Lemonheads — brought a dark wig with bangs to the shoot and had me try it on. I was game. Later, Jesse directed my “Everybody Loves Me But You” video and he brought the same wig along to the video shoot in New York. (You can see my short hair in a couple of shots in the video.)
No one — except for JT Leroy, who had much hands-on experience with wigs, as he made a life of concealing his/her true identity through the use of wigs and sunglasses and fake names and things — ever commented on my “Hey Babe” wig, so I assume most people (with the lone exception of JT Leroy) thought it was my real hair.
One other thing no one ever discussed was the fact that I pretty much invented a whole genre of music with “Hey Babe.” Indie prog. People called it “indie pop” or “indie rock,” but it’s totally prog! (executed with an indie sensibility). Okay, well, maybe “Everybody Loves Me But You” and “Forever Baby” are, basically, basic trad pop. But some of the deeper cuts — “Quit” (probably the prog-est song on the album), “No Outlet,” “Nirvana,” and this one — are not unprog at all. Maybe because the record is, overall, so tuneful and sing-songy and melodically nursery-rhyme-like, and because the lyrics are vulnerable and innocent and angsty and girlishly tortured in the way that only an adolescent love-struck gurl can be (and also maybe because most if not all prog rock has been created by men), no one ever classified the album properly.
One noticeably prog-y thing in this song is the two bars of 7 bookended with the bars of 8 in the pre-choruses. Another is the excruciatingly long, painstakingly choreographed outro. And then there is my spazzy bass playing throughout the album and the willfully weird song structures. There’s even a fucking GONG smash in this song, at the start of the excruciatingly long, painstakingly choreographed outro.
I would like to play this song live again, but I can’t figure out how to play the weird chords and voicings that my bold, young, nerdy brain dreamed up. And I’m afraid that my band and I — all of us of a certain, increasingly forgetful, closer-to-Alzheimer’s-onset age — won’t be able to remember all the parts, if we are able to ever learn them (or in my case, re-learn them).
One of the reasons John and Freda followed me up to my Berklee dorm room in 1986 to introduce themselves to me was that I was carrying a King Crimson album (the blue one) and they thought that was totally cool in a so-uncool-it’s-cool way. (But it was also the pineapple — I was carrying a whole fresh pineapple back to my room that winter night. I had the King Crimson album in one hand and the pineapple in the other. John and Freda claim it was the combination of the large tropical fruit and the King Crimson album that made them want to meet me.)
I have a feeling, listening now, that “Hey Babe” was influenced by Throwing Muses, who were popular in Boston (and super duper popular in Europe) in the late eighties/early nineties, when I was writing/working on “Hey Babe.” I liked the band a lot. I was intrigued by them. They were way more arty and oddball and enigmatic and mysterious and intense (and prog) than I was, than my music was. Kinda scary-witchy but cute and dreamy and kooky at the same time. Interesting, complicated, thoroughly original music, produced by Gary Smith, the guy who produced “Hey Babe.”
One last note: you may have noticed that on the “Hey Babe” album notes, two men are listed as “executive producers.” Just so you know, “executive producer” is, at least in this case, a misleading if not meaningless term. The guy who ran the label and financed “Hey Babe,” along with his right hand man, slapped their names on the album so they could, I guess, take some credit for its creation, but for all intents and purposes they had nothing to do with the making of the album. They weren’t in the studio. They were in North Carolina, where Mammoth (my record label) was. My producer and musicians and I made the record in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The “executive producer” title was a kind of questionable (to me) attempt to bestow upon themselves some quasi-prestigious title that didn’t jibe with anything they actually did in terms of the album’s recording and production. They didn’t “produce” anything, in the traditional album-recording sense of the word, unless you call fronting the money to record an album — and giving us musicians and my recording team the thumbs up — “producing.” I guess they thought they’d bought the right to put their names on the album. They were like a bank; like the loan officers, taking a chance on my idea — on my recording project — because they believed in my music/my songs and in the talents and skills of my actual producer, Gary Smith, and they thought we/it/the project/the plan/the artist (me) would be a good investment.
I went into the studio and made the record I wanted to make, and Jay and Steve (the Mammoth guys) trusted me to do what I wanted to do. To their credit, Jay and Steve did not butt in on my sessions. They left me alone to make my indie-prog tour de force.
I have no hard feelings toward Jay and Steve. I almost have to admire them for having had the moxie to pronounce themselves “executive producers.”
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August 4th, 2008
7287pwkr
I think I started out trying to describe what it’s like to feel alone while surrounded by people; to feel like an alien in an invisible space suit, trapped inside, shut in, looking out as if through a whole-body-encasing bubble or a locked, unopenable cage.
In the song I’ve situated myself in a rock club. “Through the smoke (I hear a sound)” refers to the cigarette smoke in the club. (I wrote the song before smoking was banned.) Remember when people smoked in public? Remember smoking on airplanes? When smoking wasn’t seen as bad, evil, and immoral but was just something some people did, and that it was everyone’s own choice to smoke or not? Remember choice? Remember taking responsibility for oneself? Remember when we were free? Remember live and let live? Anybody?
I have no idea why I am defending smoking; I actually really love the smoking ban. As a health-conscious non-smoking person, I love not having to breathe in large gulpfuls of stinky, throat-burning clouds anymore when I sing in front of tightly-packed crowds in badly-ventilated little rock clubs. I suppose I am bitching about the ban because it represents some harsh new intrusive, judgmental, punitive, uptight, overly-regulated, mean, and kind of totalitarian attitude in this society. It’s like there is a bitter, angry old schoolmaster with tightly pursed lips watching over us all, scolding and scowling.
Maybe there’s a bit of nostalgia involved — I miss being able to smoke, myself, without the fear that it (smoking) is going to kill me /give me a terrible disease/shrivel and blacken my lungs/make my teeth yellow and give me vertical wrinkle lines above my top lip from sucking in on cig after cig. You can smoke when you are young and not worry about the future consequences because the young are not, for the most part, conscious of the certainty of death.
Sometimes I feel that I inhabit a different world than other people. That I am other. “I think in slow motion. I move in slow motion.” That is, slow motion compared to other people. Everything is relative to something else. There is no objective reality. My reality may make sense to me, but it doesn’t seem to make sense to a lot of other people.
My reactions or lack of reaction — and my answers or non-answers — are often unsuitable or unsatisfying in the eyes of whatever interlocutor happens to be directing his attention toward me. I’m not so good at picking up non-verbal cues and speaking the common language of shit-shooting. I get stuck. A lot. I must come across as a little clueless. I am clueless.
I think people are put off by my blank stares. They must assume that I am empty inside, numb, that I lack a center or a personality or that I don’t care. But the fact is I care way too much. I am shell-shocked and frozen in fear, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing — afraid of hurting someone (by saying or doing the wrong thing) and afraid of getting hurt, myself (by mixing up the signals; by not understanding how people are supposed to get along.) People are so easily, instantly, lastingly/permanently wounded. I am so easily, instantly, lastingly/permanently wounded.
People confuse me and muddle up the rare moments of clarity that I sometimes manage to enjoy on my own. All their noise and needs and demands — spoken or not; explicit or implied — leave me weak and depleted. My brain needs time to process it all because it’s overwhelming. And while I’m in the middle of the act of trying to process it I have to be really careful about what I say and do, because I haven’t figured it out yet and I don’t want to act or speak before I know exactly where I — and the other(s) —stand.
Words are so easily thrown out like water from a cup into the sink, but words can maim. I have done irreparable damage with a small handful of uncareful words. It is terrifying to know that I possess this terrible, dark power. I can alter the whole DNA of a relationship — of a person — with a few well — (or badly-) placed barbs. Knives.
There are certain widely-accepted rules of discourse that are kosher among the general public (like: Don’t tell too much truth. And: Smile.) and anything that falls outside of this box of established social norms tends to offend or befuddle a majority of the human race. I am afraid I am a repeat offender. I don’t get along very easily with others because I can’t seem to remember the rules. Or I never learnt them. I’m like an untrainable dog. A dog that was kicked (please don’t take that literally), repeatedly, and neglected as a puppy and now, full-grown, it lives in a permanent state of anxiety and dread (and so is unrehabilitatable), cowering in its cage, skittish and whimpering when anyone comes near.
When people — friends — come to try and get me to go out at night and “have fun” or go to a party or any other social activity, they have to drag me by the collar across the floor, my toenails scraping on the wood, getting splinters in my feet, and then they have to push me out the door and then lift me up and shove me into the car.
So in the song I’m in a rock club. (“Through the smoke…”) There is a band playing, but there’s also someone speaking to me, at first, and there is the music in my head — the melodies, ideas, daydreams, worries, memories, thoughts — clouding everything around me, always. “Through the smoke I hear a sound.” Through the haze, or the interior music, in my brain. Is the “sound” someone speaking to me, asking me a question? Or is it a melody coming to me from somewhere? Is it the band playing? Is it a memory of a melody from the past? A memory of a person?
And so with all that going on — the self-absorption — what eventually comes out of my mouth (or what I think comes out of my mouth) doesn’t come out very clearly or pointedly or audibly.
So I have established that I feel very Other and yet I’m trying to live in the world. Because I have to. And I really do want to make the best of my time in the world. I may be a downer, but I’m not a nihilist. I don’t not care. I worry about what people think of me and how I come across and whether or not I am doing the right thing. I really want to communicate, to connect, to understand and be understood, but I don’t know how so I often walk away because it all just seems too impossible.
In the song, I finally work up the nerve to try to respond. I make an attempt, I “turn to look at you with an answer” but “you have gone” from the room.” I am, apparently, too late, or too weird, too dark, too removed, too confused — my answers don’t come out quick or right or effortlessly enough. Or I give the wrong answers. Answers that don’t make any sense. I am not what you thought I was.
So I’m in a bar in the song so I figure I should have a drink in my hand. I (the songwriter) give myself (the character in the song) a vodka and cranberry, although that’s a drink I would never drink, now, these days, and can’t remember ever having drunk before, either, and so I don’t know why I chose it. Maybe I chose it because it’s colorful and descriptive. A friend of mine used to say that vodka and cranberry was the “alcoholic’s drink.” But he was a drug addict so isn’t that kind of like the pot calling the kettle cranberry? (I’ve known plenty of alcoholix who never wanted anything to do with a vodka and cranberry.)
“I dropped it eventually” like I do every attempt at communication or making a connection with anyone. I give up. It always ends in something like a shattered glass or a photograph ripped in half or a string of angry expletives (that can’t be taken back), anyway, so I might as well drop it sooner rather than later; before anyone has gotten too hurt; before it all goes, predictably, to hell.
In the song, I think I’m thinking, “He walked away, I will too. And I will not try again (to talk to or even look at anyone) for the rest of the night (and for the rest of my life). I’ll retreat again into my own closed-off, dreary little head-world for the rest of the night until I can go home and really be really alone, and free. Free from worrying about not connecting, about hurting and being hurt- — about miscommunication.”
I imagine the drink falling fatalistically out of my hand in slow motion — like in a maudlin, overdramatic, existential foreign film; or through a drug haze; or like when time slows down in the horrible dragged-out seconds of a bad traffic accident, when your life “flashes before your eyes” — and shattering on the hard cement floor of the dark club, frame by frame, soundlessly, like it was always going to do.
This is the natural conclusion. To anything. Gravity is, in the end, supreme and undeniable. Everything — everyone — ends up on the ground. Things that are breakable eventually break.
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July 28th, 2008
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I wanted someone to take care of me, to help me; I wanted to feel safe, to be like a child again, lying in the backseat of the grownups’ car, with the humming of the engine and the motion and the dark outside and the music on the radio lulling me to sleep. But I was alone in the metaphorical car; in whatever I was struggling with — whatever “path” I was trying to “tread” without “running out of gas.”
But I have written quite a few driving-in-a-car (an actual, real car) songs. The world can always use more driving-in-a-car songs, don’t you think?
Driving has always felt like a kind of freedom to me, and an escape. I have clarity in my car. It is so nice, sometimes, to get away — from a boring party, from a fight, from the confusion that is other people. From whatever. From everything.
Travel — even just traveling a few miles, on a road — makes life feel different; more important, more spectacular, more meaningful, more electrified. The motion and the world going past — and going past the world — lends everything a kind of transcendence. It’s exciting to leave something behind and to go toward something else, even if you don’t know what it is you are heading toward; even if it is toward the unknown. And when you’re driving, you’re always, necessarily, leaving something behind (even if temporarily). And you’re always going toward something else.
The “angel takes the wheel” part is a fantasy — it’s me wanting things to not be so difficult, wanting a hand (to help, to hold), wanting to just take a break — from my life that had veered off track since I’d just been dropped from my record label (Atlantic) and which, come to think of it, I was realizing, had never really been very on track, emotionally-speaking. I was tired of having to figure out everything on my own, tired of feeling bad and not understanding why or how to change it. I wanted to rest, to stop struggling, to be comforted, to let my tears pour out of me and release the pain/fear/sadness/worry/frustration/loneliness; to drop the façade and stop pretending I was happy; to not have the responsibility of making myself happy. To “take a backseat” to my own life, when it seemed too overwhelming and confusing. To let someone else run my life — to give it over to some benign, loving, nonjudgmental, understanding force. To God? To the fantasy angel.
“Love and empathy” and understanding were lacking in my personal life. People seemed to not be there when I needed them. Or if they were there, I wouldn’t know how to begin to reach out and tell them how I felt — to say what I wanted to say — to tell them what I needed so badly to get off my chest.
“How hard can it be to speak clearly?” I asked (of) myself, angrily. My inability to express myself to others who would conceivably be sympathetic, understanding and helpful was my main source of woe. You’d think communication would be simple for a writer, but that isn’t always the case. Simply conversing was difficult and complicated for me and as a result, I felt bereft and invisible and mute. I gave nothing so I got nothing. I still give nothing and get nothing. But the difference between now and then is that now I want nothing.
In class, in school, if I had the right answer in my head when the teacher asked a question, I wouldn’t raise my hand. The teacher would call on someone else and I would berate myself (in my head) for not speaking out with what I knew to be true. How did I expect people to listen to me when I didn’t say anything? How could I make them know I knew?
In the song I make it known that I know you know — you, the one who is mute and can’t speak up. “Don’t you know I know?” is saying that you don’t have to say it. I know what you mean and what you feel without your having to express it. I wished someone would do/be that for me.
I think I made my music because it was a way to communicate. I had very little interaction with people in my everyday life when I wasn’t working. I’m still the same, only now I don’t worry about it so much. Now I know that talking is, more often than not, a waste of everyone’s time. I go whole days without actually speaking to a real live person, in person. I used to think I was pathologically closed-off, reticent, and reserved, but now I think that the world would maybe be a better place if more people kept their mouths shut like I do. If more people learned to make themselves invisible and if more people could disappear into the background. If none of us had the need to make ourselves known. If we knew ourselves. If only we could all know.
This song — especially the bridge — is trying so hard to be hopeful. It wants to be happy. But it doesn’t know how, yet. But it has tons of faith. It’s trying to believe that I/we am/are not as alone as I/we think I/we am/are and that I/we am/are stronger than I/we thought I/we was/were. It’s about not giving up; about picking yourself up from a low place and keeping going because what’s unknown, up ahead, could be great, and better than where we are now.
In the bridge, Todd, the drummer, thought that he was hitting the cymbal on the one and the three, but his counting was screwed up in his head and he was accidentally and unknowingly hitting on the two and the four, making a syncopated beat, until the full drums came back in. Todd’s mistake sounded cool to me. I liked it and didn’t ask him to re-do it; to do it “right.” It was a case of: Sometimes wrong is right.
Spaceman 3 played a big part in the lives of the Blake Babies, when we were together. The album “The Perfect Prescription” was the soundtrack to many a long late-night highway drive to and from somewhere or other on tour(s).The music — in particular the eight-minute “Transparent Radiation” — had a wonderfully hypnotic effect on all of us in the van and it united us in silent awed blissed-out listening fun. The trippy, pretty/fuzzy, neo-psychedelice space-rock kind of blew our collective mind. It was like a fantastic drug — a mellow- and happy-making one, simultaneously soothing and uplifting like a quiet, slow-motion fireworks display or like a multi-colored Northern Lights. It was the perfect late-night interstate van cruising music. “The Perfect Prescription” was the perfect prescription.
To actively love an album together with other people is something that I really miss.
With the Blake Babies I felt I was part of something, but when writing “Backseat” I was on my own. There was literally no one around to take the wheel. I was feeling no love from, basically, anyone/anywhere. I probably blamed myself.
On “The Perfect Prescription” there was a song called “Walking With Jesus.” (I say “was” and not “is” because I never listen to the album anymore and in fact I lost my copy years ago — I don’t know what happened to it. It disappeared, along with my mojo. [Don’t worry — I’ll have my mojo back in time for my September concert tour. I can feel it coming back around, finally. I think I’ll re-buy “The Perfect Prescription”, too.]) “Sleeping with Jesus” was my way of conjuring the sense memory of falling asleep to the Spacemen’s comforting sounds, sounds which were kind of like a blanket, warming and inviting and enveloping the listener — me — in the backseat of the moving van in the Blake Babies days. And remembering how terrific and peaceful it was. Great music, great friends, all together on a mission to have fun and to be our best and to change the world and to win the hearts of strangers and of everyone out there.
With the words “sleeping with Jesus” I certainly never meant to imply that anything improper was ever going on in my head between me and the Son of God. “Jesus” was simply a symbol of love and empathy — the love and empathy I wanted/needed/craved — and of one particularly righteous soundtrack to falling happily asleep, back when the world was my oyster.
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July 22nd, 2008
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Living with urges that are hard to tame is like living with a lion, I think, when I think about all of the dangerous, self-destructive impulses we humans sometimes have. The urge to drink, drug, smoke, eat too much, whatever — is, for some people, a big, fierce, scary, roaring, potentially deadly animal force, and they live with this and they try to tread delicately around it and to not piss it off or wake it when it’s sleeping. But they always know, in the back of their minds, that it is always there — that this lion, when stirred to life, when hungry, when angry or out for blood, is a terrifying and powerful force, much more powerful than willpower.
That’s what my self-destructive unconscious urges have felt like, to me. They have been so strong and undeniably present, when they were raging, that I couldn’t subdue them. Well, I could fight, but I chose not to a lot of the time, because I was afraid of being overpowered. I chose to surrender, and lay down in a position of submission.
At this point I have enough evidence and experience to know that my self-destructive urges will always be with me, part of me. We will struggle for the rest of our lives. Tell a sober alcoholic that he is home free, that his problem is solved, once and for all; that since he has quit drinking he will never have the urge to drink again, and he won’t have to go regularly to meetings for support. IT’S REALLY REALLY HARD TO TAME A LION. And even when it is “tamed,” like a circus lion, there’s always the possibility that it will rebel and, like, bite the head off its trainer.
Part of evolving past youth — for me — has been realizing that people, for the most part, don’t really change. We are who we are. This is really depressing, looked at from a certain angle. But from another, it is a kind of power or strength. Because it’s the Truth, and the truth is power and strength, and it can help enable us to stop pounding on doors that will never open. So we can save that wasted energy (pounding on doors that won’t open) and use it more productively.
I have learned to live with my lion. I now know how not to piss her off. How to de-escalate the situation when she starts to growl. How to walk away, slowly and carefully. I have learned to respect her. I never ever ignore her. I listen and learn.
The lioness at rest is a beautiful creature; what I want to be. Strong, graceful, unafraid, satisfied, self-contained, self-sufficient, unsentimental, badass. To be able to use the power and energy and to not be hurt by it is the trick, the conundrum, the problem that I haven’t fully figured out.
I guess it’s good to be afraid — to tread lightly around our shadows, and to acknowledge the potential deadly force inside of us if we are to handle it smartly. As much as you try to suppress it or ignore it or fight it, it will come back and get you again and again. Until you make friends with it. Don’t pretend it’s not there.
Everyone has a dark side. I have found that it is often the people who are outwardly the sweetest and friendliest and most accommodating and agreeable who have the darkest dark sides. (I love the title of Aimee Mann’s new album.) That’s why I am wary of superduper-nice, bubbly people and why I am more comfortable around those who come across as a little cranky or prickly — these people don’t seem to be hiding anything. If you are always actively putting on a public smile I might assume you are overcompensating for something — for an inner frown, perhaps? Often a rough exterior shields a good, caring, sensitive, easily wounded heart.
And, so, if anyone calls me a bitch, I take it as a compliment.
“Rip me to shreds…” That’s my lion doing her thing (tearing me up, making me do bad things against my will. [It’s her will, not mine. She has obliterated my willpower.]) I think that the “spit it out all over the world” means that all of this comes out in songs. In recurring themes: self-hatred, shame, guilt.
“There’s a moment in every day just before it’s too late.” It’s that moment when you haven’t yet given in (to the seeming inevitability of your urges) — when all the hope and promise of the new day still seem real. When you still believe your last cigarette was the last cigarette you will ever smoke. The moment before the alcoholic has had his first drink of the day — just before he gets in his car to go to the liquor store (maybe it’s 10:45 p.m., and the packy closes at 11), just before he buys the bottle, (it’s still not too late), just before he opens it (still not too late), before he pours the drink, before the first sip. When the drink could still — still! — be poured down the sink; and the bottle, too. An almost infinite series of moments in which you can put on the brakes and not do the thing you know is wrong/bad, the thing you know will hurt you. Moments in which you can turn it around, at least this once, this one time; at least for one day. Moments in which “I sit on my hands” so I can’t grab for the bad stuff.
But it’s so hard to not give in. There’s such relief in giving in. In saying, “Fuck it.” And tossing back the drink. You stop fighting because not fighting is easier in the short term than fighting. You give in because it hurts not to. (Even though the giving in ends up hurting you as much as, if not more than, the not giving in would have.) Maybe you have even fought it off before — you know you can fight, because you have, before — even for an extended period of time but it was SO hard and you just don’t think you are up for that kind of struggle today, or every day, all day. “Just give the gaddamn lion what she wants, for Chrissakes, and get her off my back, for a little while,” you think. (I guess “monkey” would be a more apt metaphor here.)
Lately I’m not so convinced that surrendering is such a bad idea. Is fighting something every day really any way to live? Is that peace? Don’t we aspire to live in peace? Is fighting peace?
I’ve been contemplating the idea of “giving up.” I’m looking at it as an option, in various areas of my life. I’ve never considered it until now. I guess it’s part of growing older and more worn-out and tireder of all of life’s constant battles. I sometimes see people who have obviously given up and now, for the first time in my life, I understand. I finally understand, for example, people who knowingly let themselves get fat after years of being fit and trim through regular exercise and conscious healthy eating. I imagine there is a sweet freedom in just not caring anymore. In holding up the white flag, in putting down your gun/sword/shield/guitar/pen/barbell.
You’ve heard the expression to “drop the ball”? Record companies are often accused of “dropping the ball” on a band, or an album, by refusing to promote it, or to continue to put money into it. What if I, as my own (Ye Olde) record company, decide to drop the ball on myself? Just something to think about.
When I think of giving up I feel a certain anticipatory sense of relief, a delicious, blissful, warm numbness. Like when you sit down in front of the TV with the pint (or half gallon) of ice cream and you pull off the top and you stick the spoon in for the first of many many heavenly bites before you have started to feel sick and pathetic. You are allowing yourself to indulge. You aren’t going to stop yourself. You have decided, “Screw it. Screw everything. I’m going for it. Whole hog.” Once you’ve made that decision/crossed that line/flipped that switch, you can’t not do it. That’s what it feels like. You can’t not. (“can’t hold on/gotta let go”) You have allowed your brain to temporarily settle in a place in which you refuse to care about the consequences and repercussions, for those blissful ten or twenty or thirty or however many minutes that pass by while you are in the act of bingeing/tasting and chewing and swallowing. It feels like freedom, this letting go of the reins (another animal metaphor), like when you’ve gone to score crack or meth and then when the pipe is held up to your lips and then when you light it, with absolutely no doubt that this is the right thing to do; that it is the thing you have to do.
But it’s a trick. We want freedom, but we don’t know how to get it. So we take whatever little momentary screwed-up faux-freedoms we can find. Which is kind of another way of saying that we are shackled and out of control, at the same time, somehow.
“Make me wild. Let me melt.” I just want to be free (like a beautiful strong lion in Africa), but I don’t know how.
The teen binge eater sneaks downstairs late at night, when the rest of the family is sleeping, and scarfs the pint of ice cream or the bag of cookies — “douses the flames” burning inside of her (making her anxious and unable to sleep and desperate for sweet food) — but is she dousing it with water or lighter fluid/alcohol? Maybe what she thinks of as putting out the fire is actually feeding the fire.
When I wrote the song I had been having lots of dreams about being inside a house or home and realizing, after a while, that the house was in or on either the ocean or a raging river, or the house itself was sometimes a ship — it became clear to me that what I had up ’til then thought was a house — a building — was actually a boat. And water was getting in. Leaking in.
I won’t bore you with my dream analysis.
When I get some words scrambled up and say ”Fuck” in the second verse, it’s me actually messing up the lyrics and their phrasing — tripping over myself and so getting frustrated and saying “fuck”, for real, in the studio, at the mike. I kept it in because this authentic frustrated “fuck” fit right in, thematically. “FUCK” said it as well or better than any of my carefully crafted lyrics did.
And the people who say “Just say no”? Anyone who says that has never known a lion. You can’t just tell a lion “no.” It’s not that simple.
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July 14th, 2008
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