good morning ~

(click the link / graveyard sunset to listen)

My Big Breaklasso all my friends together and then have them throw me into the sun

today’s track is all sampler and logic processing, the good ones come together quickly

as I mention below, yesterday was the ten year anniversary of Bowl of Plums. feels like kind of a lot of you have been around since back then which of all the reflections is the one that hits me the hardest! if you REALLY want to get into the Plums archeology/nostalgia you can read this Tumblr post which was kinda the inspo for today’s writing. also this newsletter really just is the continuation of livejournal / tumblr, isn’t it?

also - - this Saturday is the rain rescheduled great (big) pond event hosted by StretchMetal. ambient music on a farm around a pond, that’s literally it and it literally is going to rock. you can get all the necessary info right here but just keep in mind that we might push the timing up a bit to avoid some potential evening rain, just fyi

In Pittsburgh last weekend and I found myself in one of my own song lyrics. We had just finished a particularly satisfying meal of vegan Polish food and my belly full of braised cabbage and a press pot of wild foraged tea sat satisfyingly and just on the edge of comfortably in my stomach, gently anchoring me to the Earth. Seemed like it was gonna be a particularly good gradient sunset on the second longest day of the year, so we walked through the graveyard up and down hills looking for a vantage point. Something like six dozen deer emerged from the deeper forests and munched grass, eyeing us but unafraid. Groundhogs seemed to lounge comfortably on the cool flat of exposed graves. In the distance there was the call of wild turkeys - real snow white type shit, felt like a squirrel was gonna come buckle my shoe. We kept not being able to find the sun itself but then our friend realized that the last time he watched the sunset there it was winter and there weren't 1,000 luscious old trees in the prime of their leafy bloom, the verdant abundance was preventing us from watching the orchestral majesty of the skies, a pretty good problem to have actually. But the sky did not disappoint and started roiling with thunder and lightning in the unthreatening distance, an almost slapstick gap between flash and crack. We turned back towards the entrance gate, quietly hoping we weren't locked in. Then the fireflies started popping on, off, on. Hundreds of them. I remembered the song where I sing "fireflies circle the graveyard" and wondered if somehow I hadn't been describing or kind of like, uh, manifesting this exact moment, sweet friends and hand-holding wife at dusk, major joie de vivre, the simple gift of a bar night ahead of us. Whatever fireflies and whatever graveyard I thought I was singing about before, I can firmly say that that lyric is now about that thing we experienced last Saturday night.

The song is called "Getting Out" and it comes from the album Bowl of Plums, a project which amazingly just yesterday hit its ten year anniversary. Ten years! Can you even imagine. Really different world back then. Feels like its release coincided with the general switch to an algorithmic feed on various social media websites. I remember watching the Brexit vote happen in real time - refreshing webpages - and wondering how it might affect my plans to tour Europe that summer, then everyone I met that summer asked me if I thought Trump was going to get elected or not. I had then never yet used or heard the phrase vertical video but I had puffed on a juul or two.

Back then I wanted more than anything for love to come barreling out of the sky and just fuck my shit up. I yearned for transformation, for the redeeming power of affection to lift me up. Not unlike, I now realize, the most basic themes of, like, any Disney movie. I wanted the old upright piano of love to break free of its pulley rope and crush my corpus, wanted birds to circle my crosseyed skull, my teeth to become the keys and play a romantic melody. Bowl of Plums is largely about that yearning, about trying to grab ahold and not let go of a feeling of safety and security briefly experienced in tiny sparking moments of human interaction, about proving to the world that I was worthy of the love I so visibly yearned for. I wanted to lasso all my friends together and then have them throw me into the sun, these are the cowboy tunes I was whistling.

I did not realize then - of course I did not realize! - how at the root of all this yearning for the transubstantiation of my flesh was a deeper and more pure tendency towards self annihilation. Because ultimately I begged for love to come and make it so I wasn't really around anymore, at least no longer in the body and mind I was driving around in those days. The funny thing is that the person 26-year-old-me fell in love with during those mega days of writing songs and yearning did indeed barrel out of the sky and fuck my shit up, although obviously that was really different than I imagined it being. The transformation was not so much instant so much as it was, like, years of therapy and support groups, much more of a years-long DIY thing, more of a "be the dramatic alteration you wish to see in the world" type situation. The real transformation and love we experienced was the self-worth we chiseled out along the way.

Looking back through the vinyl edition, the liner notes, etc. I also see that this album yearned for another transformation - I really felt like this was going to be the one that changed everything for me, would make my name well known enough to comfortably do music full time (that's the dream of making it now, just barely getting to do it). Everyone involved swung super hard, but I can totally understand ten years later why other people were able to capitalize on the twangy sensitive thing much more readily than we were. It's a messy, chaotic, and not particularly easy listening record that I only fantasized of as AM radio ready.

Anyway, back to the fireflies in Pittsburgh. I stood there thinking to myself, oh wow they really do love to circle the graveyard, I fucking nailed it on that lyric. And as I reflect on that surreal moment I realize that everything about my life did extremely much change after that record came out. Metaphorically and literally the house I was living in fell apart and it was a long climb out of the graveyard, but ten years later I am thunderously alive and swimming deeper in love than ever before. So not just a record from ten years ago, then, but a frightfully powerful magic, too.

But what about you? What’s the anniversary you’re acknowledging today? What were you yearning for ten years ago? In some perverse genie magic way have your yearns come true?