good morning ~

(click the foggy river / link to listen)

My Big Breaklike a mystic radio tuned to his ghost

I’ve been really into making sounds that are all crinkly lately - - this one’s all heavily processed prophet clone

we’re getting close to the ben and john album finally being out - - 8 days if we’re being precise, but don’t worry I will remind you. However…you can actually hear it a couple of days early…we’re doing a first listen situation on Bandcamp on March 25, a whole album stream, plus we’ll be taking questions in the chat - - RSVP here, graphic below:

In the winter of 2009 I was unsure of whether or not I wanted to write any kind of scholarly thesis. I went to kooky Wesleyan, I could have probably farted around in a lime green tutu as my senior recital and received relatively high marks as long as it was done with gusto, why go through a process that appeared to be mostly self-flagellation and bragging about how much time you spent in the carrels? Though I could get a two semester course release and, if my research involved a performance, I'd only need to write 50 pages or so to qualify for honors - that wasn't so bad. But really the problem was - what topic or person could be worth 9 months of my undivided attention?

At the time I knew a little bit about Arthur Russell and had already fallen in love with his guitar songs after my junior year girlfriend played me "Love is Overtaking Me" on tinny laptop speakers. My interest in his whole thing grew when I found a copy of the more dance-oriented "World of Arthur Russell" compilation in the radio station's prodigious CD collection - like many records I pulled from those shelves, it totally blew my mind, how was this the same guy? I walked my attention through the space between those two albums, clumsily grabbing at books about dance music and low bitrate videos I found on Ubuweb along the way.

I listened to primarily Arthur Russell music for the next many months and never grew tired of it - so many flavors of Arthur to choose from, music you could cry to, music you could dance to, things that were totally oblique or devastatingly direct and poignant. I felt like a mystic radio tuned to his ghost - his voice, so echoed and spectral on recording recorded so close as to feel like it was inside my skull. Dreams about things I read about him, kept talking about him at parties. I tuned my guitar in fifths like a cello. I went to an academic conference where they screened that great documentary about him and there were not one but two members of Dirty Projectors in attendance. I wrote what is probably not that important of a scholarly paper loosely inspired by the structure of "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" (UGH, INSUFFERABLE!). And near the end of my time in Connecticut I marshaled a bunch of effort and a gaggle of buddies into putting on what I remember as a pretty spectacular show, 11 people on stage improvising something along the lines of "Go Bang." Those of you familiar with perhaps my whole thing will not be surprised to learn that it was loud and joyfully chaotic. One particularly vivid memory: Alex Tatusian took the train in from NYU to go absolutely apeshit on a pair of borrowed timbales. Anthony Braxton was in the audience, later he told me he loved it.

Many, many years later I found myself suddenly in a wonderfully reminiscent situation (it shouldn't have been sudden, really - we had been planning it for months, the event had long been in my calendar, but I've been so overclocked this year that just about everything feels sudden to me). For the first time in a really long time, I sang some Arthur Russell songs to a warmly gathered group of people. But this time there was also the beautiful addition of getting to hear a bunch of other people cover his songs, too. And we raised a substantial chunk of change for an organization helping people meaningfully resist ICE in our community, too.

The night started with a screening of the Wild Combination documentary, a movie on this viewing that broke my heart far more profoundly than I remembered it doing when I first saw it over fifteen years ago. He was forty years old when he died, awash in music until the end, cut down way too young by a disease that we collectively as a society initially failed in response to. I'm much closer to forty now than when I was 22. By now I know the crags and valleys of life's lows much more intimately, I know all too well the disorienting grief of losing an inspiring friend. I also know how imperfect we all are, how flawed and frustrating and capricious our feelings can be. And I know how rare and beautiful kindness and grace can be and that movie does a good job of letting his family chosen and otherwise describe their gentleness towards him. In the kaleidoscope of those collective tears the joy of the music refracted out, shining brightly.

Then a bunch of us starting singing his songs. His music is not all that easy to cover, by the way, and when I picked up my guitar to remember those interpretations from two decades ago I was really glad to have had that 9-month thesis head start. His voice does weird stuff, hovering on unexpected intervals and jumping up, his chords are slippery, the world of his delay pedals impossible to duplicate. But everyone did tremendous work and the room felt crowded and sweet. Two hours of covers from across his catalog and it hardly felt like we scratched the surface - how deep and how vibrant of an artist do you have to be for this to be the case?

I'm having trouble relaxing into things lately - too many responsibilities on my plate, too many yearns at once (I imagine a hundred fishing poles left out overnight, trying to catch the catfish of desire). When I pulled into the parking lot I was trying to calm myself down, was trying to remember that we were about to do something special. And right then Max pulled up and handed me a bag of special oranges he brought all the way from Florida. The records he played sounded good to me, deeper than most music has lately. And the next day my feet ached from dancing.

But what about you? What’s the warmest moment of communal embrace you’ve felt lately? Does everything feel sudden to you? Does life just get harder and harder because you realize more and more what’s at stake? How precious it all is?