2/19/16

“If you feel down and you write that down, most of the time it is going to be a country song.” ~Billy Joe Shaver, songwriter

I keep Billy Joe Shaven's advice in my inbox. I like to look at it when I'm feeling stressed or tired or uninspired, or some combination of those. I like to remember how good it feels to purge whatever I'm feeling into music, even if it is with songs I can never remember on a guitar I can barely play for an audience that, despite their attentive ears, doesn't have much feedback to offer (because they are felines).

Every time I tell myself that *this* is the weekend I'll revisit some songs or *this* is the weekend I'll post a new video, it becomes so much easier to do anything but stay home and practice -- meeting up with friends, running, shopping, laundry, pretty much anything is preferable to indulging in my own creativity when, as much as I enjoy the feeling of playing music, it altogether feels like a selfish pursuit. But then I remember this quote, and all the others about how music can save souls and change lives and uplift the darkest of spirits. And then I think that yeah, maybe it is worthwhile to practice a little, even if it's for 10 minutes, or for 30 minutes, even if it's the same old songs I've always loved to play, or even if it's whatever nonsense I need to say.

10/16/15

"I’m not confident about a lot of other aspects of my life, but I know how to write a song."
-Taylor Swift to Chuck Klosterman, GQ October 2015

Yes, she really fucking does. I love most of them. Heard Tim McGraw on the radio today, even. So pretty! This is worth reading, as a story of an artist, who is also the most famous there is right now, more or less.

9/4/15

"If everyone’s built the same,
Then how come building’s so fucking hard for you?
It’s something we’re all born into.
Nothing’s left up to grey.
It’s black or white and sometimes black and blue.
It’s something we’re all born into.
Whoa.
Now I know what’s in a name; not just my father’s.
Three-fifths a man makes half of me.
Why should I bother?
Merchants of misery stacking the deck.
Fuck your John Waynes.
Fuck your God complex.
I’ve got everything in front of me, but can’t reach far enough
To reach these fever dreams they call American.
I am the ghetto’s chosen one.
The privileged bastard son.

They’re getting their anchors.
They’re gathering rope.
You’re pushing to Heaven all alone.

They’re getting their anchors.
They’re gathering rope.

You’re pushing to Heaven all alone."

~Stained Glass Ceiling

The Wonder Years, No Closer to Heaven

You know that feeling when you hear something really great, and you love it and you obsess over it, and it is brilliant, inspirational perfection, and then you feel like shit about yourself because everything you produce looks futile your glazed, tired eyes?

Thanks, Dan Campbell! 

No, seriously, "No Closer To Heaven" is all I wanted it to be - obvious evolution in the band and Campbell alike. We hear a ton of guitars and wild rhythm change-ups and excellent, excellent hooks, wrapped up in the sad fighting light of reality.

I loved "Cigarettes and Saints" pretty hard these past few days. Now my favorite song changes with every listen.  I've stopped and said "Wow" so many times, whether it's the chorus of "You in January," that brilliant tambourine in "Patsy Cline," or the final drum rolls in "Palm Reader." Not to mention, as an album formula, the structure is laid out so well - the mid-section heavy slow jam  ("Cigarettes") like The Greatest Generation did, and hey, they don't ~quite~ end on an epic track to spare predictability. Smart smart smart - but not at all ineffective, because now I just have to go back and listen to it again.

The final verses in "Stained Glass Ceiling" are some of the best TWY lyrics Campbell has produced. If they don't break your heart, you're not paying attention.

What a profound rock band The Wonder Years have become. I am so proud to have loved them for this long , as silly as that sounds - but from the moment I heard "Washington Square Park" the summer I came home after college and I knew I'd find the sound I liked in a lyrical aesthetic I loved. They've only grown in maturity and worldview technical prowess, and I look forward to peeling back every layer of this one. I think I'm going to hold onto it for awhile, as you should with the ones that impress you so much at the outset. The more you listen, the more you learn.

9/11/14

"I had a dream I was being dissected by all of my friends, and I was so scared of the scalpel. Anytime it was raised to make another incision, I would start crying and screaming even though I knew I wouldn't feel it. Everyone would verbally try to soothe me, and I kept screaming for someone to touch me so I knew I was still alive, but it's like they weren't sure either. The next thing I remember, I was standing outside in some field, and I felt perfectly fine. Then I sat down, and suddenly it was like the sutures ripped, and all my organs fell out." 8-11-05

(I have no place else to put that, so there it is. I wrote those words years ago, and yet, I remember that dream crystal clear.)

This is my favorite song I listened to today. It came into my head this morning, after waking up at 6:30 a.m. when the sky was still dark blue for the first time this season. That, and the chill in the air, says to me it's changed for good. Until next summer, anyway.

So this morning, I put this song on, from an old album from a previous life that resonates perhaps truer than before but has not lost its pretty quality. Now, I am not a Matt Nathanson apologist. Rather, I genuinely think he's a great songwriter and performer. He sets lyrics very well, he writes satisfying progressions and melodies. I love the simple piano in this song, the effortless ascension and suspension that holds and wavers and fades. And I love the desperate questions. What is it about songs about New York that are just somehow sadder than the rest? And what is it about the impending loss of intimacy that makes seeing the world outside go on about its business feel so much more empty? Why does it feel like the seasons are changing? Probably because they are.



"Somewhere in between
The beginning and the end
September took the tourist
And settled in for good

You could hear the trains again
Brooklyn girls in scarves
Summer left and no one said a word.
We'd open your window,
Stay in your bed,
All day 'til the street lights came on

So what happened to bulletproof weeks in your arms?
What happened to feeling cheap radio songs?
What happened to thinking the world was flat,
What happened to that?

Up on 59th street,
Right before the rain,
Lovers catching taxis going downtown.

I'm talking to what's left of you
Watching what I say
Counting all the freckles on your perfect face

You open your window,
And I stay on your bed,
Just hoping that right words will come.

So what happened to bullet proof weeks in your arms,
What happened to feeling cheap radio songs,
What happened to thinking the world was flat,
What happened to that

So what happened to bullet proof weeks in your arms
What happened to feeling cheap radio songs
What happened to thinking the world was flat
What happened to that?

 It's all gone,
Love, it's all wrong.

So what happened to bullet proof weeks in your arms
What happened to feeling cheap radio songs
What happened to thinking the world was flat
What happened, what happened to that?"
~Bulletproof Weeks
Matt Nathanson, Some Mad Hope

12/3/13

When I first learned to express myself,  it was through dance. I'd already learned to speak English, by this point, but I hadn't learned to communicate -- I was the kind of kid who certainly didn't say anything at all, if it wasn't nice to say. So learning dance was a new language, one that was all my own.

I spent a solid five years spending five days a week dancing, dropping my study when I went off to college. But I never dropped the interest. My classes, at the brand new, 10-student Western New York Ballet, focused on ballet, both classical and contemporary. By those standards, I was passable at best, occasionally placing in local competitions if I had a good day and an unusually low amount of anxiety. I had naturally good feet and extension, but my control never caught up. My thin, lithe arms failed to fit the right angles. My body never listened the way I wanted it to. For me, the real benefits came in classes, where discipline and artistry were the gods, the church basement floors and portable barres were the alters, and the prayers came in the form of the blood, sweat and tears poured into getting it better, getting it right, getting it as close to perfect as mere mortals could possibly come.

This was all around 10 years ago, and 10 years later, my former teacher is taking students to perform at Lincoln Center in front of international stars. She is one of my favorite people in the world, and I am proud to call her a close a friend, knowing she's the kind of person who would never give up on her dream, just might die without her dream.

For awhile, I thought dance was my dream. My bedroom walls were covered in posters and calendars and magazine pictures of the ballerinas I idolized. For awhile, I thought I could still make a go at a performing career, even though I'd never make it into a ballet company barely pulling off a clean triple pirouette.  I thought I could cover it up with singing and acting skills and make a shot for Broadway. But by that point, I knew how many proteges were out there, I knew how cutthroat the industry could be to half-bred talents like me, and most everyone told me I was smart and would do well in college.

Nowadays, dancing alone feels equal parts freeing and awkward. It's tough for me to feel the strain in my muscles, to know my tendons would rather snap than stretch. My legs don't listen like they used to; instead of rising seemingly effortlessly to my ears, they stop short, barely reaching 90 degrees, it seems. But at the same time, everything in me is so much more aware, spatially and internally. Every inch of a stretch feels magnificent until it doesn't, then it feels like hard work well done. My feet roll through every position, much to the thrill of every bone, my eyes follow my hands the way they were trained to.

The rules are so ingrained it feels like living in a memory, revisiting a skin I shed years ago as I step and fumble to see if I can still fit. But one part feels as amazing as it ever did, the part where my mind shuts off and my heart short-circuts to tell my limbs what to do. That's the part where dancing is your insides turned out. That's the part that kept me coming back day after day, class after class, no matter how much I failed before. Just chasing that moment of stillness inside, movement outside, silent thoughts and physical energy igniting every cell. Even now, dancing alone, when there are only so many steps I remember correctly and there's a million positions I'm probably destroying, I can feel the tension and release, the suspension and fall, the freeze and frenzy in every step illuminating and expressing the very feelings I don't have anyone around to share with. No one can take that from me, no matter how many years it's been since I called myself a dancer. It's a small comfort when I see professional dancers, young or seasoned, classical or contemporary. I know just what their feeling as they hit all the right moments and I am full of envy for what they get to feel, when all I get is my words and my bedroom and faulty, flailing ponche.

It would be nice to take a class, maybe someday. I wonder if I would look silly, my now-curvy body in a leotard and pink tights. I don't know how much of the steps I could recreate. But I do know I'd feel something.








(The video above is from "So You Think You Can Dance" Season 9, which aired last summer. I remember watching it live, alone in my central Pennsylvania apartment, and crying a little. I chose to attach it because I don't think you should choreograph to Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" unless you can induce chills, which choreographer Stacey Tookey most definitely does, and also because I very much enjoy Witney, the blonde female in the video. She's a ballroom dancer by trade -- and you can see it in her hands and arms sometimes, the way they don't turn slightly more out or in the way a ballerina's would -- yet she pulls of this contemporary with so much beauty, grace and pain that I think she understands exactly what you need to pull off performing to a song of this magnitude.)

9/28/12

Here is an album I have loved for a long time, since the first time I gave it a good listen. Must've been October, junior year of college. I remember driving from Syracuse to Canandaigua to stay a friend's cabin for the night where they were recording an album.

I got really lost on the dark roads in the valleys - this cabin was tucked in the hills around the lake, and I wasn't familiar with the terrain, the road names, or how prevalent deer running across country roads really are. Funny, that I learned to know those same roads pretty well just a couple years later.

But that night, that drive, got scary fast. I hate being lost and this was before I had a smartphone and its wonderful GPS navigation. Not that I would've had service anyway -- I remember trying to call my friends for help and failing to catch a signal. It was getting dark, I was already an hour late, and I was turning down road after road trying to find a main drag, when I was on this skinny stretch of pavement that turned to stone dust that turned to dirt straight into a bunch of trees.

I still remember how the leaves looked, headlights right up against the branches. It was terrifying, the solitude and the darkness. It was oddly beautiful, exhilarating.

But I had this album on, it was something I hadn't heard yet, and drives are good chance to get a full album listen in without distraction.  Not sure what to expect but feeling the need for something new, this was playing even before I started to wonder where I was. I found it awe-inspiring, it played away the anxiety and the tension in that moment of stress of human error, and somehow so much more.

So, in front of those trees, I didn't freak out (much), I didn't scream (well only once), and I took a seven-point-or-so-turn to backtrack up the dirt, up the stone dust and onto the pavement and county roads. Sure it was dark, and I didn't know where I was, but how could I not love what I was seeing, these lands stretched and molded under the bright, bright stars in the clearest navy skies you'll ever find.

Eventually I found cell service, directions, and a boy and a beer waiting for me at a cabin overlooking the heart of the lake and its western shore. Through it all I heard "Mending" two-and-a-half times through.

The atmosphere The New Frontiers bring is soothing and stilling, but the sentiment is a shade or two deeper than that. It speaks straight from the heart, without being filtered through the pretentious, ego-centric mind. So you get big thoughts and deep thoughts, but they're loving thoughts, telling the truth and surrendering to honesty. Not afraid to mention Jesus (See "Who Will Give Us Love?", a song that will truly mend your broken heart when the world's tragedy feels too much to hear anymore), but hardly preachy.

The softest harmonies you can imagine. Gentle acoustic,amplified on occasion, satisfying resolve. Reflective to the most upmost level, almost "Clarity"-like this album has become to me.

If I had to pick, "Mirrors" is probably my favorite track, because I love bells, and because it is ultimately moving, symphonic in the equal part layers of vocal and melody arrangements. The album is stunning, this song shows why.

"Mending" was the only album The New Frontiers ever released. I wonder if it was because they knew they couldn't top it. I would like to hear more, maybe, but I don't need to.

This album kept me from losing it one night, and it has a miraculous ability to do so ever since. Without even noticing, I hear a song come up on a playlist, and I relax and smile; it makes my eyes fill with tears that don't spill over and my heart feels a little lighter and I remember peace.



"This is the house where you were born,
These rooms seem smaller than before.
Turned 22 when were you found,
Shattered and broken on the ground.

They will rob you blind
They will take your peace of mind

And you'll want to run away from here.I know you can't escape from all of your fears,
I made my peace with the world and all that it brings,
Holding my own.

We saw a spark within your eyes,
Your face reflected in the light,
We are all angels in the sky,
We are all mirrors in disguise.

We will lift you up,
We will place you on your feet,
We will pick you up,
We will never let you go.

When you want to run away from here,
I found you can't escape from all of your fears.
I've made my peace with the world and all that it brings,
Holding my own."

~Mirrors
The New Frontiers, Mending

8/21/12

How many days pass you by before you notice nothing is changing?

What a poignant song this is. You almost instantly begin to feel the need to escape...but it makes the point, clearly, dramatically, that it is not simply about living in a broken system.

It's about what you do with it.


"six billion backs against the wall 
now do we walk or run?
this puzzle's falling into place.
once more around the sun,
remember when you were a kid?
those days were all so long.
but if we don't do this,
somebody else will.

three billion backs against the wall,
A prayer for everyone.
we saw the changing at the sea,
but not a thing was done.
remember when you could rely?
those days are all but gone 

and if we don't do this
somebody else will
if we don't do this
somebody else will
somebody else will
one billion backs against the wall
at least our feet were dry
I was an honor to myself,
this storm would pass me by
remembering the things I did,
I knew I would survive

but if we don't do this
somebody else will.
if we don't do this.
somebody else will,
somebody else will.

one billion backs against the wall,
now do we walk or run?
one thousand backs against the wall,
now do we walk or run?

one hundred backs against the wall
now do we walk or run?
it's just your back against the wall,
now do you walk or run?
remember when you were a kid?
those days are all but gone.
if we don't do this,
nobody else will.
if we don't do this,
nobody else will,
nobody else will."

~The Sea Change 

Turin Brakes

Many blame the government. But is that really fair? What makes them so special to get the credit, or the blame? More than I ever, I see so much wrong in the way people, people of society, treat each other and talk about each other. You're either someone's enemy or their pawn, or trying to make them one of yours. There seems little in between, especially from those who talk a big game about change while spouting "You're wrong, so I'm right," fallacies. They are wading through toxic swamp water, saying if you drink near them, you're safe.

Elsewhere, the ego pervades: "Listen to me, look at me, love me," they cry online, "make it easy for me!"  And "Wouldn't I be so much happier," they wonder surrounded by family, "if I had more stuff?"  

Since when did getting attention become the only way to self-satisfy? And since when did it become such a fucking chore to care even a little bit for the rest of society? Don't tell me it's not related. I have seen the results of living irresponsibly, and no, it's not pretty, but I don't think it would be so bad if we knew how to treat each other as equals, if we let go of some of the judgement.The blinders we've managed to secure so tightly on our self-obsessed skulls consequentially constricted the blood flow to our hearts and our heads.

In our society, I can't help but see what I see as obvious:

The less you treat people like humans, the more like animals they're going to become, and then I don't think your numbers will mean shit. 

8/18/12

For the first time in seven years, no one will be at the hill to light a candle.

This is very sad to me, but we knew this day would come. We talked about it, wondering how long we'd all be close enough - regionally and emotionally - to get together, commemorate, cry, wonder. But, seven years of that, and here it is.



"There we stand about to fly/Peeking down over land/Parachute behind/What was that moment for which we lived?/Without a parachute, about to dive?" ~Parachute - Guster, Parachute

We started the tradition shortly after Lizzie's funeral, which felt formal and social and unbelievably sad. I don't remember crying during the church service; I do remember eating a turkey sandwich in the vestibule that tasted like cardboard, the first bites of real food I'd had in days. I remember the lines of people, classmates and community members, wrapping around the church, and wondering why some of these people were here and giving me hugs, and then I remember Tim grabbing me by the shoulders with tears in his eyes when it was clear that neither of us was processing what was going on around us.

Shortly after, a group of us brought candles to the hill where we'd spent many summer nights, the one at my elementary school down the street from my house, and the one I'd walked to from my grandmother's for years on end. It became the de facto central spot of Tim, Liz, Dan and I for sneaking out, meeting up and making out. We'd call out meet ups "snizzling," why exactly, I do not remember, but it worked. "Hey, what time do you want to snizzle?" That was the best summer. You could see the whole school from the top of the hill, the baseball diamond and the soccer field, and the trees obscured extending suburbia. It felt peaceful, private, ours.



"But right now/Everything is turning blue/And right now/The sun is trying to kill the moon/And right now/I wish I could follow you/To the shores/Of freedom/Where no one lives" ~Honey and the Moon - Joseph Arthur, Redemption's Son

One year later, we sat at the hill again, feeling lost, missing a limb. The hospital felt lightyears away though it had only been a week or so...the timeline was as fuzzy then as it is for me today. We lit candles, talked, cried and laughed then sat in silence, played Guster on our iPods, and let the candles burn as we walked away.

I think of her all the time. Less now, then I used to maybe, and that is a shameful reality, but the thoughts come on with the same wistful intensity. But the heart-heavying truth that someone so beautiful could die at 16...that means more to me now than it did then. One of the last phone calls we had was about how excited we were for college, how we wanted senior year to hurry up and leave so we could go somewhere new. She was thinking about going to school for art, or maybe English, possibly at this one private school near Albany. I wanted to go to Boston or New York, somewhere glamorous. We'd definitely go shopping together for dorm room furnishings, though, and we'd totally visit on the weekends. I remember Liz used to say that, when she decided to start drinking alcohol, she'd never want a screwdriver, because liquor would taint the purity of her beloved orange juice. Somewhat ironically, I am drinking a mimosa as I write this, thinking maybe she would've come around.

She was better than me, better than most, in so many ways.

Finding out about what happened was surreal, fate and my worst nightmares converged. I was sitting on my couch in the plant-filled, window-paneled Florida room with Tim's older brother, feeling flirty and happy and thrilled he wanted to hang out with me. His dad called and I instantly knew something was wrong. His hands started shaking and  then he told me what happened. We rushed to the hospital, and I kept saying "Maybe it's not that bad, maybe she'll be OK." I remember him saying something about possible brain damage.

I remember the first night at the hospital, sitting in a chair outside her room, my friends scattered around. A nurse gave me one of those flimsy hospital blankets and told me usually, they don't let this many people in the ICU overnight, but they'd make an exception. I half-slept, hearing gray words and seeing whispered feelings of the nurses and Liz's family, "Can you believe they're all staying?," "This is so sad," "Do they think she'll wake up?"

Seeing Liz's dad Mike was the hardest. You could tell he was trying to be strong, but a man can only take so much loss and this was his only little girl. I remember how he'd gather us all for updates after such-and-such test or scan. They had to wait for her brain swelling to go down some before they'd know how bad the damage was and if she could wake up, something like that. The medical version of what was happening to my friend was beyond me, at that point, I just wanted to know if she'd ever be her again.



"I've gotta bust you outta here somehow/I've never seen your heart this tired/I've never seen your spirit held down/I know that you say/This is what you get/For being a bad child/But I know this will be your reward/In just a little while/In just a little while/It's testing the strong ones/Scarring the beautiful ones/It's holding the loved ones/One last time" ~ Testing the Strong Ones - Copeland, Beneath Medicine Tree

She was so small in that hospital bed, she was a tiny girl as it was. But a spunky tiny, you noticed Lizzie in a room. Her arrival at Eastridge was not uncontroversial. Who was this adorable girl with the short hair and Snapples and why was she befriending all our crushes? We became friends when I found out she liked Brand New, and we were pretty inseparable from that point on, the beginning of a social circle that exists, on some level, to this day. Here, in the hospital, the looming monitors and tubes in her mouth made Lizzie seem so small, and weak, contrary to everything I knew her to be. Her eyes were shut, but clearly swollen with fluid. Her dark curly pixie cut was matted back against her bandaged skull, her toes were polished.

We made playlists, full of Elliott Smith and Guster and Jimmy Eat World, songs we knew she'd love. We drew pictures, so many of my friends are amazingly talented artists. We bought journals to circulate, making sure they had the right looks to them ("Circles, not squares"), and wrote our feelings out, messages to Lizzie and God. We sat next to her bed and held her hand, I remember telling the nurse when I saw blood coming out of her left ear. I remember her telling me that can happen in situations like this, don't worry, and all I could think was how fucking unbelievable this was.

They told us she opened the door and jumped out. But I still don't know what happened in that car. I think maybe she just wanted to get out. I think she reached her breaking point. I think she didn't want to die.

Crisis friendships formed, even one between Tim and Liz's new boyfriend Greg who went to a different school. They'd met at Alexandria Bay -- Lizzie loved the water, and the long drive there, too, so she could read and write and think. Dan and I began talking again, whatever we were fighting about instantly became irrelevant when faced with the loss of this mutual cornerstone to our existence. Liz had so many friends, some we'd never met from her past school and from the bay, and we shared our stories and memories to pass the time. We kept talismans close -- the friendship bracelets she made, the notes, the decorated song lyrics, the mix CDs. Everything that was her favorite became a lifeline.




"When I was younger and thought of myself/I never dreamed I'd become like this/A snap of your fingers/An end to the argument/Anything for you, love" ~Ramona - Guster, Keep it Together


Six days in the hospital, living like this, going home to shower and fake sleep and going right back. My parents asked me if I wanted to sleep at home one night. No, I told them. No, because if this is the last time I get to see her, I need to be there. Where else would I be?

I remember not knowing what to say most of the time. I remember crying lots, then being unable to cry. I remember throwing up in hospital bathrooms. I remember us dragging a couch from one lounge into the other so we'd have more room to hang out. I remember laughter feeling awkward but necessary, as we distracted ourselves between updates.

That Saturday, doctors told Mike what was happening. She wouldn't be able to breathe on her own. She had limited brain activity. Nothing else we can do, doctors said. At least, this is how I remember it. All I knew was that my friend was going to die. This wonderful girl I'd spent so much time with, shared so much with, was not going to make it.

They brought in some therapist to talk to us. We sat in a big circle in a conference room. No one really had anything to say. Dan and I made jokes about each other, feigning normalcy in the face of something so horrible. We were such kids, who thought we'd knew it all and felt it all, only to realize none of us can ever know anything for certain.

I said goodbye to Liz that night, holding her tiny, tiny hand in both of mine and saying "I'll see you someday." I didn't want to go home, so I called a couple trusted girlfriends to pick me up and drive me to the pier. The water was so, so stormy, and the sky was thick with black clouds, stars invisible. The world was menacing and awful and I screamed and screamed and screamed, mostly nonsense but a lot of "whys." I think we went to the diner after, and I ordered black coffee.



"So what would you think of me now?/So lucky, so strong, so proud?" ~Hear You Me - Jimmy Eat World, Bleed American

Senior year started shortly thereafter, and I was a shell of who I was the year before. I left campus when I wasn't supposed to, smoked cigarettes outside the courtyard window. I became very ill in October, stayed home for a month with mono and slept through most of it. Back at school, none of us wanted to be there, but we made the most of it, I think. We didn't talk about her much -- Tim least of all -- and we pretended we were into what we were doing. I re-started the school newspaper to help pass time, taught extra hours at the dance studio on the weekends. Every now and then one of us would reach out to one another to cry, to remember her, or to pontificate on the meaning of life and death. We knew none of us would ever be the same, but we were stronger. We were prepared. Nothing would ever hurt this much again, we knew.

The following summer, before we left for college, we still lit candles at the hill even though it wasn't the exact anniversary. We were going our separate ways, but we'd be back, we told each other. We'd always be back. Through the years the attendance has varied depending on who is in town. I've missed two of these events myself, though I made sure to call and find out when it was, made sure they'd remember me there, too. Mostly, lately,  we talk about how fast life seems to be changing, how we're growing up. And we've talked about how our memories of her still live somewhere in the back of our minds, but it's harder to see her than it was the year before.

I cling to the details I have, of her gorgeous brown eyes and tiny hands, the shirts she always wore and the purse she often slung across her shoulder. The way she'd rub your nose when you were sad, and it was weird, but it helped calm you down and made you smile. How she volunteered at summer Bible camps. The incredible sculptures she could make out of clay, ceramics, Snapple caps, whatever you gave her to transform. The amazing things she could do with Sharpies. The way we made fun of our pre-calc teacher in class and pretended we didn't care but always tried to ace the tests. Her poetry. The times she talked me off the ledge. The depth of the darkness she had herself and tried to hide, and the strength she'd always seem to find.

She would've been amazing. She would've graduated, gone on to school, gotten rid of so much that was bringing her down. She would've been the coolest indie chick on campus. Her talents as an artist, a writer, a thinker, would've become even more obvious. They would've gotten her far. She would've been brilliant. She already was.



"Heaven's not a place that you go when you die/It's that moment in life when you actually feel alive/so live for the moment/And take this advice live by every word/Love is just a hoax so forget everything that you've heard/And live for the moment now" ~The Tide - The Spill Canvas, Sunsets and Car Crashes

Seven years. When you're 17 you don't know what it feels like to look back yet, you're too busy focused on the present. High school is a bubble, these people are your world and the future is so far away. But now? On this side of perspective? If you told me that I am who I am, that I've done what I've done, I never would've dreamed life could be like this. But then again, at 17 I didn't have much of an idea of what it was to be out in the world... I wonder if I would've made different choices if Liz hadn't died.

Sometimes I think that her death gave us all a better shot at this life, in some cruel backwards way. We were talented but tortured and I wonder if the reality we were faced with at such an impressionable age gave us a perspective that no matter how hard life became, you'd be able to find your way out of it. Those were some of the darkest days, that week and the months thereafter, I've ever felt...by comparison, depression became a selfish endeavor and I think of all this when I begin to feel sorry for myself, when goddammit I am still alive aren't I? I've made it this far, right? No point in giving up now.

Your identity shapeshifts after loss, you adapt to a new world minus this person who previously helped define it...but being able to remember her with others is a gift. Her 16, nearly 17, years on this earth were a gift, and we were lucky enough to receive it, blessed enough to learn from her. In the years since Liz's death I've been so grateful to still be able to hold onto others who felt the same. Seven years and I still love them, respect them, wish them all the best in the world. I think this might be the start, though, of paths truly diverging. Where to, exactly, I don't know, but I do know we're not together lighting candles at the hill this weekend. That says enough...but I know, I have to know, that they wish we were all together as much as I do.



"You say go slow/But something's right behind me/Can run away for so long/It will not stop/I will come down, oh no/Let me find way/I'll take you the edge/Go across that window/And I'll carry you there/Oh when nothing goes right/Oh when days don't come to night/Oh when all I see is the error of my own enemy" ~Window - Guster, Parachute

"Will I still laugh with you 
Or has the damage been done 
I knew it couldn't last forever 
But why'd it have to end so soon
Of course I will still see you 
It just won't ever be the same 
Nothing really matters now that 
Forever has an end"
~Liz Williams
1988-2005

3/24/12

You should really read this article from The Quietus by Taylor Parkes about Abbey Road studios. It's based of a talk from two historians, addressing the changes between recording of the 60s, and the recording of now, and how much gets lost on a laptop....



I love hearing "the room," in a recording, I love a rich sould full of natural unevenness, undiluted by too many mics, or too much equilibrium. I love sounds made louder and fuller from more instruments, not a knob. I read this story, and I want to be in a studio; I want to see it and learn it and feel it again.

To sum up:

“And Studio Two has something that modern recording studios can't offer,” adds Kevin. “Because in the early days the technology wasn't sophisticated enough to alter or enhance the sound after the fact, so you had to make sure the source material was as good as it could be. So they laboured over making the rooms as sonically pleasing as they could be, and that room is unique – everything sounds good in it.”

As for the article, it's a wonderful story, clear-eyed and detailed. Here's what The Beatles did, here's what Floyd did, here's how the engineers worked. Turns out, the studio wasn't top-of-the-line at its heyday, a style that aided, if not defined, its favor among artists. You're transported right there, in front of the four-track recorders and ordinary wall cupboards and gawky Britishisms highlighting the way. The story is deeply inspired, the way it should be, the way so many stories aren't.



I remember when I felt I could write about people and places and things that way. It's been some time. I start to fear, have I lost it? The ability altogether? Or just the inspiration? Last night, I considered this, while talking to old friends -- "At least then I'd have something to fucking write about again" -- I was half-joking, but in that way where the truth pulls the shades up from your eyes in an instant and all you see is what you've been missing.

"Once there was a way
To get back homeward
Once there was a way
To get back
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby"
~Golden Slumbers
The Beatles, Abbey Road