myspace...

Hey. I have a myspace, and just uploaded a new track called 6 Years. Check it out: myspace.com/heresailor

Green and Gold

A new song. Forgive the roughness... I put down some voice-over vocals.

Sacred Memories with My Sister

I'm seven or so, and already an aspiring artist. I sit in my sister's room, while the pencil in my hand makes careful and deft movements. Occasionally I glance at her, seated at her desk, beneath her True Love Waits poster. Hunched over her own pad of drawing paper, dressed in a jumper made by our grandma, she oozes awkwardness. But not to a boy wearing a heather gray sweatshirt with a duck painted on it. While she specializes in drawing trees and human faces, my forte is in the realm of lifelike animals. Mainly the Teenage Mutant variety.

I'm fifteen. I'm in my sister's room again. Her stereo is much better than mine, and holds 5 discs to my 3. We sit, talk about our dating lives (rather, ambitions), and devour music. We've come a long way since 4Him, Lisa Bevill, and Benji Bear and Squittle Squirrel. With downcast eyes, we bob our heads as we breathe deeply the notes, the melodies. We don't simply listen. We ingest and digest. We gnaw and worry and work out their meanings. Billy Corgan, Chris Cornell, and Stephen Jenkins never had a team of more honest, more devout critics. It was edgy and honest, and holy. Later that year, I stole a peek my sister's diary and found out that she swears.

I'm twenty-five. My wife and I sit across the table from her. Our conversation is nearly as dense as the cigarette smoke above our heads, and our solutions to our convoluted lives as cloudy as the beer in our cups. Husbandless, directionless, virtually godless, my sister tears her heart out of her chest and squeezes, spilling and spraying all of us. We argue, we sip, we laugh, we share, and we stare at the table. Never was there more beauty in the breakdown.

New Song

Just a verse, but I like it:

When the sun disappeared
I was gripped with the certain fear
That my shadow was gone for good
With no light to project
Where our soles used to connect
On the cracked concrete where I stood
That's when the clouds
Began to metastasize these doubts

Rest in Peace, Mix-tapes

Living in the dawn of the digital era has its merits.

I love the ease by which music can be accessed. I love the power it places in the hands of the artist. I like the fact that an entire music library can be contained in a portable device smaller than a fist. It's exciting; it's convenient; it's revolutionary.

But it's tragic.

Why? Because a huge source of joy from my adolescence has now become obsolete, and thus future generations may never understand its deep fulfillment. Goodbye, mix-tape/mix-cd. (Note: while the cd is a form of digital music, the development and creation involved resembles a more primitive form... a form rendered obsolete by the triumphal entry of the iPod).

I remember sitting for hours on end, composing the perfect mix. Whether the theme was in honor of a genre, a season, or an emotion, the songs were chosen with irreproachable savvy. New favorites meet timeless classics; tracks placed in order either by gut feeling or according to a strict imaginary manual; playlist checked and double-checked just in case any of my friends held a spontaneous "best mix of the year" pageant. Ultimately, the power was mine, and I was prepared to live with the consequences: occasional criticism, regret of wrongful additions, lament of wrongful omissions, etc.

Nothing made a better gift. A mix-tape/mix-cd says, "listen to what I love." It says, "I think you might like this." It says, "I love you enough to share this with you."

Making playlists on a computer or an mp3 player is simply incomparable. It's noncommittal. It's impersonal. You can't gift it. It's too temporary.

I'm not a traditionalist normally, but I will actively resist letting go of this artform. Would you join me? I'll make you a mix if you'll make me one.

Footprints

Here's a song I wrote today:

Freedom, oh freedom
Our nation’s broken anthem
Charging on, to chase a silhouette
College, houses, prescriptions
Government-sponsored addictions
Deepening the drowning pool of debt

We sold the farm to find
A little piece of mind
But left behind a wasteland in our haste
Supposedly believers
We’re takers and we’re leavers
Took all we could, left the world in waste

Freedom, oh freedom
If we would truly find some
We’d liberate ourselves from all the lies
We’d take it on our shoulders
To not wait ‘til we’re older
To fix the fractured fence that we despise

Admit you were what you weren’t
Reverse the swirling current
Count currency a calculated sorrow
Commit to a simple story
Taking what you need only
Leaving tiny footprints fit to follow

Goodbye, Summer

The summer came to and end. It always does. While I welcome fall with its colors and sweatshirts and soups, I have to admit that it's difficult bidding fond farewell to conversations on a warm night, driving with my windows down, and awkward sweating. Maybe most difficult is the shelving of my "summer songs." I simply cannot listen to these songs with the same fervor as when I'm comfortably wearing a tank top, sitting on my porch, sipping Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy. Here are some of the songs evoking this feeling:

Motorcycle Drive By - Third Eye Blind
Is there a better opening line than:

It's summertime and the wind is blowing outside
In Lower Chelsea and I don't know what I'm doing in this city
The sun is always in my eyes...

There's something fundamentally brilliant when a lyricist chooses to ignore both conventional rhyme schemes and the concept of a chorus. Instead, Jenkins gives us:

I've never been so alone
And I've never been so alive

June on the West Coast - Bright Eyes
Anyone who knows me knows that Connor Oberst is my favorite poet of all time, and this is by far my favorite song of his. Again, no chorus, but instead the brief vignettes of a summer spent in various places with various people. He manages to give us not just a vivid description of his location and host but also of his dreams and fears, his deep desires and insecurities:

And the truth is I've been dreaming of a tired, tranquil place
Where the weather won't get trapped inside my bones
And if all these years of searching find one sympathetic face
Then it's there I'll plant these seeds and make my home

All with four chords. Less is more, I suppose.

The General Specific - Band of Horses
While the lyrics are a blend of random ideas which span December to July, the melodies have a clear summer vibe. The vocal harmonies immediately bring the listener to a coastal city's downtown, where you can smell the ocean but can't see it, and although no one has spoken a word, the shop doors propped open and the smiling sun seem to say "Welcome home."

In time I'd find a little way to your heart
Down to the general store for nothing specific
Gonna wash my bones in the Atlantic shore
Only for you and me

Kids - MGMT
I know very little of this band/group, but what I know I love. Formally called "the Management," this Brooklyn group now goes by the abbreviated "MGMT." This song, in my opinion, is their underrated masterpiece. The poppy, electronic chorus entrances and the simple lyric entices one to get on their bike and just ride.

Control yourself
Take only what you need from it
A family of trees
Wanted to be haunted

My personal conservation theme song. Personally, I can't ride my bike when listening, because my incessant clapping only leads to an inevitable crash.

M79 - Vampire Weekend
The happy-go-lucky song of the summer. Also one of my favorite bands right now. Whenever "Whoa, oh" can be the primary lyric to any chorus, I've been wooed. My favorite line of the song has to be: "Coronation rickshaw grab."

There are so many more summer songs, but these are my top five. Check 'em out, and offer a final kiss to the summer breeze.