In my mind I was trying to make something that would fit – sonically (except for my voice [and words], which would never fit) – onto the first Pretenders album. I’m pretty obviously paying homage in BTF’s intro, with its 7/8 time and the “oh”s.
The verses are in 7, the choruses are in 4, and the bridges are in 6, and it all kind of works without feeling awkward or intellectual.
And do you like the whip in the choruses?
I am very fond of this song – which was recorded during the “How To Walk Away” sessions – but it didn’t seem to fit onto HTWA so I donated it to the Green Owl Records compilation to help the environment.
Back to freedom means back to before anyone knew who I was. Back to total anonymity.
Sometimes I wish I could put out a debut album now, today, at this age, in this age. To have no baggage. To be someone new. Or perceived as new.
Sometimes I wish my name was not associated with anything at all. Not with “alternative rock” or “women in rock” or “pop” or “indie pop” or “commercial failure” or waifdom or prickliness or “Spin The Bottle” or with the 1990’s.
Sometimes I wish I could start over with a completely clean slate. But I can’t. All I can do is go forward. I can’t go back and fix anything I may have done wrong. And I can’t control what people think of me nor can I control what my name conjures in their minds, even if various negative associations attached to my name may be based on things that are not and were never true.
Imagine being judged and sentenced because of a lie.
Imagine being hated and denigrated by strangers; by people who don’t know you and who’ve never met you.
All artists who make their art and image available publicly take the chance that bad things will happen, along with the good.
I would like to eventually disappear from any and all public and promotional activities for a substantial period of time. I need to just live and work without anyone watching and judging me and my work and my progress or regressions. I need to work hard with NO distractions and no one getting in my way and telling me what they think.
What is a “substantial” amount of time? I’m not sure but I think it means “long enough for people to forget about me” or “long enough so that if and when I ride back into town on my horse, people who never knew me won’t recognize me.”
I wish that I could grab arrows thrown at me and throw them back whence they came. To give the throwers a taste of their own medicine. It’s not only public; it’s private, too: I wish I could “take back bitter nights”; re-do some ugly moments in my personal life; harsh things I said which stung and maybe could not ever be forgiven/forgotten.
I have set myself up for constant criticism by unleashing my point of view onto the world over and over again; by putting out record albums and expressing opinions by answering interview questions honestly in moody moments. But still I have rights. I am not public property.
I have the right to become silent. I have the right to make mistakes. I have the right to be whoever I want to be. I have the right to be who I am. I have the right to struggle and for it not to be easy and to admit that it isn’t; to not pretend. I have the right to the pursuit of happiness. I have the right to do or to stop doing whatever it is I have been doing with my music for the past twenty years. I have the right to be eternally thankful and grateful for all the love that I have received but also to be tired and worn-out from all the criticism – fair and unfair – that has been hurled my way. I have the right to disappear after I release one more album in the fall.
I want to be invisible and anonymous for a while – maybe forever – and see how that feels. I want to stop talking (and thinking) about myself and answering the same boring questions over and over again and I want to stop selling myself when it seems so pointless; when no one (new) is buying; people stopped buying a long time ago.
I am preaching to the choir. Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE the choir, but they don’t need me to preach to them. They already know how perfect we all are, in our imperfection. They don’t need anyone to tell them where to find anything or how to react/feel; they look with their own eyes and think with their own minds.
It’s not fair that we have to keep defending ourselves for who we were when we were so young and so stupid and so confused and in so much pain and just trying to find our way in the world.
I think I want to be forgotten. I think that would be freedom.
“We’re not the sorts of people who believe in miracles so why did we?”
–my best friend
this week’s reading:
“The Sea, The Sea” by Iris Murdoch
“The Mill On The Floss” by George Eliot
“The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson
“The Rainbow Stories” by William T. Vollman
“Pensees” by Blaise Pascal
“The End Of Overeating” by David Kessler
“Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe
“The Savage Detectives’ by Roberto Bolano
“Moving To Maine” by Victoria Doudera
“Narrative Of The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”
“Critique Of Everyday Life” by Henri LeFebvre
“The Situation and The Story” by Vivian Gornick
“The Mind-Murders” by Janwillem van de Wetering
“On Being Certain” by Robert Burton
“Shot In The Heart” by Mikal Gilmore
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June 16th, 2009
7287pwkr
Unpublished chapter from When I Grow Up
In 1997 I was invited to take part in the first Lilith Fair music festival. My manager gave me the news: Sarah MacLachlan, the Canadian pop star, was organizing a multi-artist concert tour that would feature female singer-songwriters and female-fronted bands and which would travel around North America. It would be a rotating roster of acts – some of whom would stay on for just a few days, some for longer – except for Sarah, who would be the headliner through the whole tour. It would be like the popular Lollapalooza rock festival but less raucous. It was going to be called “Lilith Fair.” Did I want to do it?
I was skeptical. A music festival made up of, and for, women? Wouldn’t that be kind of, well, boring? Would there be any hard-rocking ladies on the Lilith Fair bill? Would there be any musical aggression and fire to spike the pulses of the people or would it be all sweet harmonies and flowers and incense and candles and gauzy dresses and angels and fairies and shimmering, polite, MacLachlan-like pop/folk? What would it say about me if I agreed to do it? Hadn’t I been trying, all my career, to avoid taking part in the “women in rock” trend?
A lot of women in the spotlight were taking their careers and art by the reins when I was coming up – writing their own songs, playing guitar – and “women in rock” had become a fairly common heading. I hated it when people lumped a bunch of us girls all together even when we had nothing much in common except for an ability to sing and play guitar (and to bear children).
Why weren’t there any “men in rock” articles? I suppose those writers meant well, but it seemed really sexist to me, and belittling. Branding us as “women in rock” took away each of our individual voices and achievements and innovations and audiences.
A typical one of these interview questions was: “So, Miss Hatfield, girls with guitars are really big right now. How does it feel to be a ‘woman in rock’?” How was I supposed to answer that? “It feels fantastic to be objectified and reduced to one tiny, disposable part of a passing fad.”?
After maybe the tenth time the “women in rock” question was lobbed my way, I thought to myself, “Are you kidding me? Again? Again with this question?” After the twentieth or so time, I was just dumbstruck. After the thirtieth time, I was ready to punch somebody in the face. I wanted to be seen as an individual; as me, as “Juliana Hatfield,” and critiqued based on my own unique talents and accomplishments.
So now, if I took part in a celebration of female artists, would I be sending a false message about my (nonexistent) special feeling of oneness with my “sisters”?
I agonized over whether or not to do Lilith fair for a day or two, and then I said yes. I was in no position to be turning down offers like this one. I was still conflicted about it, but, ultimately, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to play in front of thousands of people. The tour, which would be hitting large outdoor theaters in the summertime, would be a great chance to play in front of big crowds who maybe didn’t know I still existed, or who maybe had never heard me at all in the first place. I could try and win them all over.
I was flattered and grateful that Sarah MacLachlan, the mastermind of Lilith Fair, had even thought to invite me (especially since I no longer had any hits on the radio, and had no new album coming out). Sarah’s intentions with the festival were clearly benign. Sure, she had an album to promote, and the tour would bring her tons of attention, but her inclusion of people like me (solid, working musicians, yes, but not-so-hot-anymore properties) showed that the tour wasn’t just about bringing in tons of dough with the biggest, hottest, latest, most popular girls.
I was on the tour for ten days, on a leg that went down the eastern seaboard. Joan Osborne, Jewel, the Cardigans, Fiona Apple, Victoria Williams, Emmylou Harris, Susannah Hoffs (of the Bangles), the Indigo Girls, Paula Cole, Tracy Chapman, and Sarah, of course, all took part during my time there.
Sarah had her black labrador on tour with her and I had my yellow lab with me, and the two dogs became fast friends, chasing after frisbees and playfighting and rolling in the grass behind the stages and around the dressing room trailers. I watched the dogs cavorting contentedly together, as if they had known each other for years, and I wished that I too could bond during the tour with another of my kind like that, but I didn’t have such luck. Sarah was a welcoming and gracious hostess and almost everyone else on the tour with whom I interacted was friendly enough. Still, I never felt like I really belonged. I felt like an outsider. Even though it was true that I’d always felt different from other people, and it was par for the course for me to feel like the odd one out, being on this big multi-artist bill, amongst accomplished, world-famous, platinum-certified successes inflamed my insecurity.
I spent a lot of time with the dogs. I walked around the grounds of the venues, observing the behavior and look of the crowds. I chatted briefly, shyly, with the stage hands and road crews working to get each production on and off the stage smoothly and on time. I’d hang with the guys in my band, who were like brothers. (The big irony of this “female artists” tour was that there were a lot more men than women behind the scenes and even on stage; most of the backstage crew and the majority of the backing musicians in all the bands were men.)
I felt like I still had one foot in the sloppy, self-deprecating, untrained indie rock world, and I didn’t know how to extract myself, and in this clean, professional Lilith environment, it didn’t seem right for me to be like that. But, then again, on some days I wore my DIY credentials like a badge of honor, as if having no record company or tour support and no tour bus parked next to all the others – only a van – meant I had integrity. As if playing wrong notes on my guitar sometimes and forgetting lyrics once in a while, and getting my feet tangled up in my guitar cables, with no one dashing out on stage to unravel them for me, meant I hadn’t sold out. But I knew this stance was just a defense. Everything was relative. All around me were great singers who were naturally gifted and didn’t appear to have ever struggled much with recalcitrant vocal instruments like I had to, constantly. Joan Osborne’s voice, for example, was a fierce, strong, well-trained tiger. These women knew how to work a crowd and how to project and to own a stage – to feel at home onstage – center stage, front – like professionals born to do this. Next to them, I felt small and scuzzy and clumsy. My music didn’t have the broad, glossy, amiable mainstream appeal of most of the other women on the bill. (At least in my mind it didn’t.) And the fact that I had been assigned to play the smaller second stage reinforced this in my mind. (Acts were strategically staggered throughout the day and night so that when the big pedigree names [Emmylou, Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman] or ones with songs recently on the charts [Jewel, Fiona, Paula Cole, Cardigans] were playing on the big , main stage, they would not be competing for the audience’s attention with the smaller second stage shows [featuring people like me and Victoria Williams], located away from the main stage, elsewhere among the grounds. There was, in addition, usually, an even smaller third stage, for local acts in each town to showcase.
I had been doing this professionally for ten years now. Would I ever feel I deserved to be on the big stage? Would I ever have the chance again? I worried that all my past success seemed to have been built on nothing but hype generated by the press and my record labels. Hype, and luck.
My music was edgier than anything else on the tour. I wanted to represent rock on the tour because no one else seemed to be filling that necessary role. The guitars were a little gnarlier, my voice less supple than most of the others. My band and I even covered X’s “The Unheard Music,” about an underground band struggling for recognition.
Maybe the music industry had spat me out, but now Sarah had invited me back in. I should’ve been heartened and encouraged by being hand-picked for the tour. Sarah’s invitation meant that all the other stuff (album sales, chart positions, record company support) didn’t matter. It was me, my unpolished, unglamorous music, that mattered. My music had its own intrinsic value and it meant something to some people, if not to all the millions who had bought Jewel’s or Fiona’s recent hit albums. And that was why I had been invited. I tried to keep reminding myself of all this but some days, I just didn’t believe it. And I didn’t know where I fit in.
All the people out in the crowd were applauding generously after each of my performances so why couldn’t I relax and enjoy it? Why was I still not good enough, why were things still not right? Why did I insist on seeing myself as perpetually misunderstood and defective? Why couldn’t I just shut up and get on with it and do my job and entertain?
One night near the end of my Lilith Fair sojourn, there was a singalong on the big stage at the end of Sarah’s set. You know how on certain televised awards shows, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, there’s sometimes a big multi-celebrity jam session at the end? All the guitar players grab guitars and all the singers gather around all the available microphones, and the group, which is now the size of a small town, feels – or mangles – its way through an uplifting song that all of the musicians on stage are presumed to know or at least be familiar with – “I Shall Be Released,” say, or “The Weight’ by the Band. One singer will tackle one verse, another singer will gamely approach the mic for another verse, and everyone gets in on the choruses. Guitar players trade solos, and there’s the inevitable soulful singer wailing away melismatically, taking huge liberties with the song’s melody. As people on the stage become carried away with the emotion of the moment – all these talented people together, all at once, united, in front of tv cameras – and as the song progresses and the performance gains momentum, it becomes more and more of a big, cacophonous, motley mess of egos and costumes and sounds and words.
Toward the end of the song, there’s always two or three people oversinging too loudly, at the same time, trying to hog the microphone in paroxysms of unbridled glee, and there are multiple guitar players – pumped up almost to the point of hyperventilation by all the star power and talent in close proximity – trying to out-solo, out-jam, out-noodle each other in a frenzy of histrionic, orgasmic facial grimaces and gymnastic, high-speed fretboard runs.
All this indelicate, frenzied emoting makes me uneasy. I’m not confident or laid-back enough to get up there and take part with any sense of fun, or authority. It frightens me to think: If I am pushed to the mic for a verse, and I don’t know the words, what will I do? Sing “la la la”? If I can first learn the song well, in its entirety, in advance, and rehearse it, I am okay. But even then, the whole all-star spur-of-the-moment jam thing is kind of nerve-wracking, because you never know how the others on stage will interpret the song, or if someone will change the key into one that is out of your range, or what.
When Sarah invited everyone up on stage at the end of her set for the obligatory Kumbayah jamboree, I was, I think, the only one who stayed in her trailer. I just wasn’t feeling up to it. I have taken part in a few of these end-of-show clusterfucks, but almost always against my better judgment, and against my will.
Whenever anyone says to me, “We’re gonna get everyone together to do ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ at the end of the night. You should come up! Join us!” I make plans to disappear. I am usually gone from the premises before any communal musical love-fest happens. I try to decline quietly, respectfully, saying, “Ahh, nah, no thanks, I’d rather just watch,” but then I am invariably urged, “C’mon! It’ll be fun! You have to do it! Everyone’s doing it!” (It’s like middle school again, with the peer pressure) and I’m nudged and prodded until I have no choice but to duck out and away – far away – from the theater so no one will physically drag or push me onstage when the time comes.
Sometimes, rather than decline outright, eliciting vehement protestations from the person inviting me to take part, I say, ”Yeah, okay, count me in, for sure!” and then I take off anyway. I figure there will be so many other people up there on stage, jamming away, lost in the moment, that no one will miss me.
In 2006 I took part in a Bruce Springsteen tribute concert at Carnegie Hall. The proceeds were to benefit a children’s music education program. An eclectic bunch of people, including Patti Smith, Pete Yorn, Ronnie Spector, North Mississippi All-Stars, Odetta, Jesse Malin, and me (Jewel was billed but she never showed up), each played one Springsteen song of our choice. Bruce was there, hanging around backstage, mingling, watching the performances. At the end of the night, after the last scheduled act had finished, Springsteen walked from the wings out onto the stage, to the delight and surprise of the audience (Bruce hadn’t been announced as part of the program). After saying a few words of thanks, Springsteen led the house band into his “Rosalita” and motioned for everyone watching from the sidelines – all the musicians and singers who had performed – to come out and join him on the song. With much determined, insistent goading by everyone around me I was convinced to tag along onto the stage after all the other performers. I positioned myself behind a bunch of people, right in front of the drums, in mortal fear that one of my fellow musicians would grab me and push me in front of a microphone at the front of the stage, in full view of the audience, when I didn’t know the words to the song. (I loved Springsteen in theory, but his radio hits were really the only songs of his that I knew well enough to sing. I’d learned and practiced just one of these hits – “Cover Me” – for the concert.) As the singer from the Hold Steady went, basically, nuts, jumping up and down like a giddy kid while singing excitedly into the front mic he was sharing with Springsteen himself, I stood in back, hidden, and I clapped along in time to the song, like an idiot with nothing better to do but clap, grinning in spite of myself (I even laughed out loud a couple of times), because I was on stage with the Boss – the Boss! – and how many people ever will get to do that? I knew how the Hold Steady singer felt; he just had a different, more visibly enthused way of expressing his wonder and amazement at his circumstances in this precious, bizarre, fleeting (who will even remember the Hold Steady in five years? who remembers me?) and kind of wonderful moment than I did. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, probably, and so I did it, so I could say I’d done it: ”played” a song with Bruce Springsteen – uber mensch – or at least played a part – a miniscule and effectively useless part, inaudible and invisible to the audience, and to Bruce. But, still.
At Lilith Fair, no one pressured me into joining the all-star end-of-show singalong. I was issued a casual invitation, via one of the stage managers, to join Sarah on the main stage along with anyone else on the tour who wanted to participate.
Was it because there were women in charge that no one insisted upon my participation that night? Was it that woman are more sensitive, more respectful and accepting of others’ demurrals? Is it that only a woman can understand another woman’s need go off by herself? Can only a woman really understand that No means No?
I watched the all-star jam from out in the crowd, near the back of the outdoor pavilion’s outer lawn, unrecognized, with all the regular people, like a regular person. It made me kind of sad that I wasn’t up there, having fun, singing with the other girls.
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May 21st, 2009
7287pwkr
In this song I was literally addressing “yesterday”: “Yesterday, where you are can you see I’m alone…?” etc. I was missing being a child and that’s what I was trying to express. I was talking to my childhood, wondering if it missed me, too.
My childhood maybe wasn’t as superhappyperfect as some but I had some laughs and I am so nostalgic for the 1970’s that I grew up in, if only because that was when I was a child. Aren’t we all somewhat nostalgic for the era of our emotional innocence? It’s why I am so giddy about revisiting “Charlie’s Angels” season 1 on DVD right now – it brings me back there.
I dressed up as a “gypsy” to go out trick-or-treating one Halloween. There are photos to prove it. I have a colorful silk scarf (my Mom’s) wrapped around my head and I am holding a crystal ball.
“I miss you…I’m grieving…” my childhood, and making jack-o-lanterns, and slumber parties, and doing cartwheels in the yard, and so on.
But also of course the missing of a person – or people, through the years – plays into it as well. “Am I ever on your mind?” Don’t we all ask this of ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, in our heads? Have we been completely forgotten (by our former loved ones)?
I’m not only grieving a long-gone childhood, and a long-gone decade, and a long-gone unselfconsciousness, but I am grieving lots of people – people who came in and then went out of my life. I think a particular newly-ex ex-boyfriend was on my mind when I wrote the song. I was surely feeling that kind of pain; the pain of loss (the kind of pain that makes me glorify my childhood and everything about that time, as a way to escape the present).
But it started out as a song sung to the seventies or to the me of the seventies – halter-top and denim floppy hat and all. My favorite era of all the eras I’ve lived through.
Kristy McNichol, clogs, bellbottoms, macramé, ferns, record players, health food, shag haircuts and carpets, VW bugs, Evil Knievel, Bruce Lee, the ERA, ELO, Carl Yastrzemski, Nadia Comaneci/Olga Korbut, rollerskating in roller rinks, “Space:1999,” Little River Band, Steve Miller Band, “Free Man In Paris,” Jill Clayburgh, Vince Van Patten, Dennis Cole, Jan-Michael Vincent…I could go on and on and on…
this week’s reading:
“A Frolic Of His Own” by William Gaddis
“Culture Of Narcissism” by Christopher Lasch
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April 24th, 2009
7287pwkr
Women are mysterious. There are layers and layers. This means they have an edge. I generally hate to generalize, but I have found that men are generally not that hard to figure out. You know – when he’s just not that into you, he’s just not that into you, and it’s pretty obvious. But when a woman seems as if she’s just not that into you, she might be into you. Really into you.
I wrote another whole song about this conundrum (simplicity of man, complexity of woman): “I Want To Want You” from my “Bed” album.
Mystery can be a kind of freedom. When you keep something just for yourself, part of you feels safe. Safety is freedom.
In this song I am privately defending myself from a bad review, to protect and prop up my fragile sense of self-worth. I am disputing the bad review and asserting my faux-superiority by accusing the reviewer of lacking insight and understanding. I’m calling him a simpleton; a philistine, kind of like this: “If you disparage what you don’t understand, you are only embarrassing yourself and exposing your lack of sensitivity; and if you wished to hurt me with your harsh or dismissive words, you failed because I couldn’t care less what you think of me because you are a dummy.” Or so I say/said. Everything does hurt, if only for a second. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have to defend myself. And I wouldn’t have had to write this song.
The song says: “You think you know so much about women? You think you know me? You think you know my sister? Well, we are only giving you tiny little pieces of pieces of us. And then we are taking it all back, rolling it up like a carpet and pulling it in.
“I am withholding so much; withholding the best stuff (‘the light within’), because you wouldn’t fully appreciate it; you have not proven yourself worthy of the life inside of me.” Why waste it? Why throw pearls at swine?
“And furthermore I don’t have to tell the truth if I don’t feel like it. Why should I give my self and my truth away if that self and that truth are only going to be abused and misheard and misinterpreted and ridiculed?
“I can tell within seconds of meeting or talking on the phone to an interviewer if he or she ‘gets’ it. If not, I’ll try to give short polite answers. Or if he’s rude or really idiotic or both then I’ll be curt and try to get the question-answering over with quickly. A girl has to protect herself.
“Maybe they think they are getting a scoop (‘it’s a private show’) but really they get the same thing everybody else is getting (‘everybody stares’). So I have the edge. And they cannot hurt me.”
I have to do this; to think these thoughts, and to write these songs, and to isolate myself and remind myself what a smartypants and a genius I am. Otherwise I have a tendency to be easily swayed by others’ negative opinions of “me” (my music; my image). And then I get really confused and sometimes I fall apart for a while and then I have to put myself back together again.
Oh I wish it were true that I had foresight and control. The truth is that I sometimes make an ass of myself and flail away and fail to express myself clearly and also give too much away to the wrong people.
I am a mystery even to myself sometimes so I cannot always explain everything I say and write and think and do.
It bothers me when people assume things about people they don’t know.
It bothers me when I assume things about people I don’t know.
I don’t talk about the mechanics and the theory or my songs much because to me that stuff is like talking about math. And I never liked math. Thinking about music theory makes a certain math-hating part of my brain hurt.
this week’s reading:
“Against the Machine: How the Web is Reshaping Culture and Commerce – and Why It Matters” by Lee Siegel
“Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature” by Donna J. Haraway
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April 17th, 2009
7287pwkr
Unpublished chapter from When I Grow Up
The van came to get me in the early afternoon. We were planning on covering about five hundred miles and making a good dent in the drive to Cleveland, the site of our next gig on the following night.
I said, “Hello, everyone,” as I threw my bag in the back and then, addressing Tim, asked, “Can I drive? I feel like driving.”
Tim said, “Sure,” and relinquished the driver’s seat.
As soon as we got on the Massachusetts Turnpike I announced, jubilantly, “We’re on tour!”
It’s a tradition; getting on the Pike west means you have officially hit the road, and this momentous occasion must be acknowledged with the traditional celebratory pronouncement.
We cruised for a few hours and then we entered into some traffic in Connecticut; traffic so bad that I had the van in “park” when we weren’t inching forward. Tim rolled down his window and asked the driver of the 18-wheeler on our right if he had any idea what the problem was. The trucker answered, “Car fire five miles up ahead.”
It took us about two hours to travel those five miles, at which point all traffic was rerouted off the highway at an exit, taking us around the blocked-off accident site and then right back up onto the highway at the next on-ramp. And then, finally, we were able to speed back up again.
When we reached the sign for ‘Scranton’ the sky was getting dark. Freda wondered sleepily as she stirred from a nap, “What state are we in?”
I answered, “Pennsylvania.”
We stopped to eat dinner at “Marvelous Muggs,” a few miles past Scranton. It was one of those all-purpose American restaurants that sits next to a hotel — a Comfort Inn, in this case — just off the highway. ”Muggs” was a person, apparently; his mustachioed cartoon face adorned the sign out front. And, we soon learned, all the drinks came in glass mugs. The “mug” was the unifying theme — the hook — the place used to distinguish itself from all the other indistinguishable roadside restaurants.
Freda ordered a gardenburger and the waitress told her, “I have to warn you — that’s a veggie burger, you know.” Freda smiled sweetly and said, ”Oh, yes, I know. Thanks.”
While we were waiting for our food (Heidi — pierogies, Brian — tuna and cottage cheese salad plate, Tim — chicken something [fingers? wings? tenders?] smothered in cheese and sitting in a taco shell “bowl”), Tim observed a woman customer at an adjacent table take a packet of sugar, open it, and pour half of it in her coffee and pour the other half out onto the carpeted floor, deliberately. Tim described these events to us as they unfolded, marveling in disbelief at the woman’s choice of place in which to discard the unused sugar when almost any other place (on the table, in the ashtray, maybe in an empty mug, even left in the packet) would have made more sense.
I, too, was stunned by this vulgar display and said, “What a pig,” but almost instantly I felt ashamed at my willingness to lay such a grand and sweeping moral judgment so quickly upon a total stranger, and tried to backpedal.
“But maybe,” I suggested to Tim, “she was using the sugar to illustrate a point in the conversation she’s having with her dinner companion. Or maybe she used to work here at Marvelous Muggs and maybe her supervisor used to hit on her and pinch her ass and make lewd comments while she was trying to work, in which case, well, Right on, lady, pour more sugar on the floor.”
After settling up, we got back in the van at about ten p.m. for the three-hour drive to our booked destination: a Ramada in DuBois, PA.
I put on the Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music and after that we listened to Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. All of it, every sound, was perfect. I was — we were — in the blissful realm where nothing that wasn’t right there mattered.
It felt good to be on the road. Just driving. Moving through space at a safe, steady speed with a friend beside me and three others resting peacefully with their own thoughts in the back. There’s nothing at stake during these suspended moments, traveling; the only thing necessary was for us to get where we are going, and that was easily done. There was also the comforting realization that I’d made it through a whole day without doing or saying anything really stupid or bad-tempered. I mean, I did call that lady who dumped her sugar on the floor at Marvelous Muggs’ a pig, but she didn’t hear me. And I didn’t mean it.
I was content for the first time in a long time. This is why I go on the road. For this feeling.
As I drove, I thought, “Why am I comfortable only when I’m en-route? Why is it only in the opening between a starting point and a destination that I am at ease? It never fails: My restlessness and fear and longing fly out the window as soon as I hit the gas. I literally leave my troubles behind.”
But not really, because each fresh road kill — each flattened squirrel, each mangled raccoon, each mosquito that slams into the windowshield — is a warning telling me that every path leads, ultimately, to the same end. Every burning car wreck that we pass by reminds me of what I thought I had forgotten: We’re all gonna die and there’s not much time to make things right.
But right then, in the van, all I knew was: the white broken line and the music and the night air rushing past and the purring engine and the never-ending darkness in the distance. The unknown, out there, was the possible. I was getting there and the miles were something tangible that I had accomplished. And everything was alright.
We pulled off at a rest area at about midnight. All of us were pretty delirious at that point, having been in the van since two o’clock that afternoon. Inside, there was a display case holding brochures advertising Pennsylvania tourist attractions. One was something called the “White Birch” tourist camp. I found a pen and pulled one of the brochures out of its slot and altered it so that it read “White Bitch.” Someone had to do it.
I showed the others (“Hey, look, you guys — look what I did”), nearly falling over in a fit of giggles. Everyone else was as punchy as I was, and they all laughed, too.
I put the brochure back in its slot, hoping that someone would come upon it later and smile. And then we got back in the van.
About an hour later, we reached our destination. A sign in the lobby read: “Free” Coffee. I wondered what that meant, exactly.
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April 6th, 2009
7287pwkr
Years ago, when I first heard that versions of my unreleased album “God’s Foot” were popping up in cyberspace, I was angry and frustrated. I had never put together a definitive version of the song sequencing and song mixes and even song choices. I never had to because my record label at the time decided not to release the album. So I left all the mixes and songs and the sequence – all of these important elements of the album – unresolved. So when people started acquiring tracks from the sessions and putting them in random orders and calling them “God’s Foot,” it offended me because I thought that the song choices and the sequencing and all of that stuff should have been my choice. I, as the creator and father/mother and intellectual property owner of the album, have the right and the duty to present the finished package as I envision it. It should be in my control. I AM THE DECIDER. Aren’t I? Oh how I hate to feel that my work is out of my control and in the hands of people who have not yet proven that they can be trusted. This is not to say that none of you can be trusted, but just that seeing my songs presented as “God’s Foot” in a random order, including songs which I did not intend, in the end, for people to hear made me feel kind of powerless and scared. “Losing Your Looks,” for example, was on at least one of these Internet versions of the album. I had come to believe this song was annoying and stupid and mean and too judgmental. I had decided to leave it off the finished album, if and when the album was ever released by Atlantic or anyone else. But there it was for all the world to acquire and hear, via the Internet.
An album that is made to be an album – a series of songs with an arc and a flow – and not a bunch of random songs or singles or “hits” or featured tracks – is called an album because it is presented to the world in a certain sequence. And it matters SO MUCH in what order the songs are presented. If the songs are switched around, it can make a good album a not so good album; something might be “off.” Some kind of je ne sais quoi might be lacking. A great sequence, along with good mix choices, can turn an alright bunch of songs into a whole cohesive listening experience.
But the Internet version(s) of “God’s Foot” were chopped up and haphazardly thrown together, Burroughs-style (and I never liked Burroughs). And it made me sad, etc.
So. That was my beef.
But as the years have passed my anger has faded. I know that the people who found the “God’s Foot” songs (and outtakes) only wanted to hear the music – they had no other way but to download them, since the record was never released (in CD or digital or any format) and since I cannot release it (I don’t own the masters). And I guess I am glad that people know the songs and enjoy them.
So I think I have to amend my stance from the “Perfection” blog, or at least clarify: I still think that widespread illegal downloading – widespread, I said (not just the odd penniless poor kid who can’t afford even to shell out fifteen or whatever bucks for the songs) – of albums can have a deleterious effect on the work; on the artist’s ability to produce music and to sustain a music-making and music-sharing lifestyle (-sharing in the original/old-fashioned sense that the musical artist creates songs and then brings them out into the world – shares them with the world, in the form of recording or live performances).
BUT…if a rich and greedy (record) corporation holds music hostage for no good reason – music that was created in order to be heard/shared; music that was subsidized BY the corporation for them to distribute to all those who wanted to hear it and potentially enjoy it…that creates a question: SHOULD you go ahead and take it (if you don’t mind suffering whatever future consequences may befall you, like if the corporation decides to sue you for illegally downloading the music they own but won’t distribute)?
I think a good general rule – in life; not just in music – is: do unto others, etc… try to put yourself in the Other’s shoes…don’t steal from those who can’t afford to be stolen from. I don’t advocate/endorse/condone theft of any kind, though, and I’m not a communist. I’m just saying that if you make the choice to steal something, think about who you are stealing from and why and how and what are the possible consequences and how your taking may affect the taken-from.
I went through a kleptomaniac phase when I was a tween. I think that a lot of girls go through a shoplifting phase. It’s a way for them to bond. My friends and I would go to the mall, or to local stores – convenience stores, drugstores, boutiques – and take stuff. Little stuff, usually. Cheap earrings, eye shadows, lipsticks (even though I didn’t wear makeup I would steal it, because it was fun, I guess, to think of myself wearing eye shadow and lipstick someday).
Then we got braver and started to steal bigger things. My friend Tori and I were at Bradlees in Kingston one afternoon (Bradlees was kind of like an early version of Target or Wal-Mart) and just looking around, looking for stuff to steal. I grabbed a twelve-pack of colored magic markers and put them in my bag. Then Tori and I moseyed down the perfume aisle. I wasn’t into perfume but Tori was and for some reason she asked me to nab a bottle for her. (Maybe her bag was already full of hot stuff.) “Will you take this for me?” she asked. It was a cylindrical blue and black container of Rive Gauche, about six inches tall. I said “Sure” and after looking casually around to make sure no one was watching me, I put the Rive Gauche in my bag.
A bit later, as Tori and I were walking out the automatic doors toward the parking lot, a big man in grey poly-blend slacks and an off-white (kind of yellow, actually; like the color of armpit sweat stains on a white tee shirt) button-down oxford, with a black mustache, came up beside us and said to me “Can I check in your bag, please?”
I was busted. In the store there were hidden cameras and mirrors that I didn’t know about, and people looking for thieves like me, from a back room. The man – the Bradlees security guy – looked in my bag and pulled out the pens and the perfume.
I have no memory of what, if anything, Tori had stolen, or if any of it was discovered by the security guy.
He led us back into the store and through the wide aisles to a series of back rooms, fluorescently lit with pale yellow linoleum floors. I was scared. He sat Tori and me down and tried to scare us, said we could get police records for stealing. Threatened us with permanent criminal rap sheets. Gave us a scolding, a “what do you girls think you’re doing ruining your futures like this?” Then he noted and documented each item I had attempted to take from the store. He looked at the perfume – held it out at arm’s length and kind of squinted at it skeptically – and said, “What is this stuff, ‘Rive Gauche’?” He said the name like this: “rivvy goochy.” I said “It’s perfume” and thought what an ignorant boor he was for not knowing how to pronounce the French. “Reeve Gohsh” was how you were supposed to say it, I knew from my French classes. (Even way back then I was already a self-righteous twit.)
Then the man in the slacks called my parents. I started crying. Tori was a pretty tough girl and had no respect for or fear of authority; Tori was a punk rocker. She played it cool the whole time we were in that room; she seemed completely unrepentant and even pissed off that her time was being wasted by this mustached fool.
I don’t remember what happened to Tori later – if her Mom came and got her or what.
My dad gave me the silent treatment all the way home and when we got there, my mom came out of the house with an expression of such shock and disappointment that I could hardly bear it. I was so ashamed. I’d been caught stealing. How mortifying. How stupid. “What a horrible kid I am,” I thought. My parents’ whole concept of me looked to have been altered, downgraded, shattered, in an instant; the instant they’d learned I had done what I had done. Up ‘til then they’d thought I was a good smart kid but here I was caught doing bad kid stuff. Stupid. So stupid. Not only was I a bad person but I was an idiot.
My parents laid the guilt on hard. “We expected better from you” type-of-thing. The sorrow and disappointment on my parents’ faces cut to my core; it hurt me and shamed me and taught me more than any punishment could have and I never stole again.
So…”Remember November” – when I try and listen to it as an objective listener might listen, it seems like the singer is singing about a one-night stand; like restorative and much-needed sex with a stranger, standing up, in an alley. Doesn’t it?
But I wouldn’t know anything about anything like that. The song is really about something much more innocent.
My brother wrote the chords and progressions of the song and he also supplied me with the title. Then I came up with a melody and next, for subject matter, I thought back to a recent tour I had done in Scandinavia, that past November. I remembered a brief encounter I had had with a Swede. It was after one of my shows, and all it was a handshake and a few words (him: “your music means a lot to me, it helped me a lot through some hard stuff” … me: “thanks, man. I’m glad it helped you.”) and then a handshake followed by a small hug initiated by me.
A connection was made, in that instant. Or was felt; it already existed, and was waiting to be discovered. The moment had a power, an energy. I thought maybe the two of us – me and the Swede – had known each other in another life.
Do you sometimes feel as if you know a person at the very first encounter? Even if you have nothing much to talk about? Or nowhere to go from there? And no desire, really, to even go anywhere, or to have any more contact with the person, ever. Almost as if there is nowhere TO go. (Like you already know each other already.)
There are nice little moments. They happen like dreams. They come and then they go and it’s okay and it is the way it should be. Evanescence is sublime.
I told you that the two of us shook hands, and that I then hugged him. I shouldn’t have gone that extra step. It was awkward. (I didn’t put this feeling into the song because I didn’t want to take away from the song’s dreamy and hard-won positivity.) I wanted to make some tangible expression of the gratitude and inner pain I knew we both felt, but that was unnecessary because the connection was not a physical one and did not want to be expressed this way. And so the hug felt extraneous. And I regretted it. With the hug I’d almost shattered whatever it was that drew him to me in the first place. Like our common bond was a still flat beautiful silent pond on a windless summer day. And the hug sent a big ripple through it, disturbing the perfect calm.
I took a brief, seemingly unremarkable moment in time and made a whole life out of it – in a song. Is that cheating or faking? I don’t think so; I think that songs can illuminate the parts of life that are otherwise hidden, quiet, inexpressible, in the dark, and unremarkable, in the light. Even what IS unimportant can be MADE important, in art.
The handshake was enough. It said it all, no more, no less. And that’s what I meant by “a touch said everything we couldn’t say” and “your hands were filled with electricity” (I could have been 100% true to the facts and said “your hand…” (singular [handshake]) “…was filled with electricity” but somehow that didn’t sound quite right to me.
In the studio, recording the song, I immediately changed the words in the second verse to “your pants were filled with electricity” and this made it difficult to get a good take as I was laughing so hard each time I came to that line.
I am laughing again, now. I crack myself up.
A journalist in Boston likened the song to a “prom theme.” I like that.
this week’s reading:
“The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements” by Eric Hoffer
“Against Happiness” by Eric Wilson
“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert
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March 28th, 2009
7287pwkr
Once in a while I go and revisit some beloved music from the era of my childhood (1970’s) and I get re-obsessed. For a couple of weeks when I happened to be working on writing my “In Exile Deo” album it was ELO (Electric Light Orchestra, for those of you unfamiliar with the band). I was blissing out to their greatest hits CD and for a few days “Mr. Blue Sky” was really blowing wind so hard up my skirt. I had the song on repeat; I was on a “Mr. Blue Sky” binge. I loved the relentless downbeat groove and I wanted some for myself and “Get In Line” was what I came up with.
I still go crazy whenever I listen to this song (the ELO song, not my song). It makes me so happy. If I ever get married I want this song played at my wedding.
I love that the guitar solo comes in early – in the middle of the song. So cool. So refreshing. I love the strings’ perfect and uncheesy rock usage. I love the impeccable and uncanny arrangement and all of the sounds. I love the one-two-three-four slams on the…what is that, the bell of the ride cymbal? Or a gong?
On my song I tuned the main guitar to an open D chord: D A D F# A D. (I almost always play my solos in normal EADGBE tuning. This makes it hard to translate many of my recorded leads in a live setting. I dream of owning a double-necked guitar someday just so that I can play, in concert, the unconventionally-tuned songs’ rhythm parts on the bottom neck, but then also play their conventionally-tuned solo parts – by switching to the 2nd neck.) It’s fun to write in this open tuning sometimes. It frees me up when I’m at a loss for ideas in standard tuning. And I can make it sound Stonesy or pretty or sad or triumphant or lazy or any combination of all of the above. But I’m not sure “Get In Line” has any of these qualities. “Get In Line” is something else. It doesn’t sound like it is played in open tuning. And doesn’t sound like any other of my songs that are played in open D tuning – Because We Love You, On Your Mind, The Easy Way Out, The Prettiest Girl, etc.
Damon Richardson played the drums, wonderfully. I met him when I toured with Hayden a long time ago – Damon was Hayden’s drummer at the time. After that tour, I knew I wanted to use Damon in the studio. He first recorded with me for some of the “Beautiful Creature” sessions – that’s him on “Somebody Is Waiting For Me,” and then I used him (“used” sounds so crass) later on some of my never-officially-released stuff like “Trickbaby” and “Break My Heart.” And then most of “In Exile Deo.”
Josh Lattanzi played bass on “In Exile.” And sang some (“Singing In The Shower,” “Some Rainy Sunday”). He is a mellow and talented sweetheart who used to live in Boston. He has played with Ben Kweller, later versions of the Lemonheads, and, more recently, Albert from the Strokes.
When I listen to the chorus of “Get In Line” I always think of a scene in the film version of Hubert Selby’s “Last Exit To Brooklyn”: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character is (if I remember it right; I saw the movie a long time ago and memory is not always 100% true or correct) lying on a dirty discarded mattress outdoors at night in the city and she is allowing a train of men to have their way with her. It’s a tragic heartbreaking scene of self-allowed annihilation. I was not thinking of this scene when I wrote the chorus nor did I mean for the lyrics here to be taken so literally (“get in line get in line get in line I’m giving myself away”) but for some reason, as soon as the song was recorded, my mind went to that scene every time the chorus came around.
Right before the guitar solo at the end, I sort of throat-shriek a short “OW!” It sounds spontaneous and fun, right? It wasn’t, really. This full-energy yelp was totally calculated and was incredibly difficult for me to pull off. I had to practice it and do it a bunch of times, one after the other, to get it to sound and feel right. I would listen back after each take and assess if the last go-round was or was not good enough. It took a while. Maybe an hour, just to get that animal “OW!” utterance to sound spontaneous. Normally my physically aggressive side (singing is very physical; this “OW!” was especially physical, and used the force of my whole body, and hurt in the throat) is repressed, except in rare, extreme circumstances when I am pushed and pushed until I explode. So since nobody was making me angry or driving me crazy at the time, I had to draw this sound kind of unnaturally out of myself. It was like self-guided primal scream therapy, in short bursts. Over and over again I shrieked. I needed to express aggression and gut-busting frustration and a breaking-free. And joy, too, maybe. Because making music is for me a joyful undertaking.
I was partly inspired by the wonderfulness of Patti Smith yelling “LENNY!” (right before Lenny Kaye comes in with his singing) in “Rock and Roll Nigger.” This is such a beautiful rock and roll moment. That one “LENNY!” sums up everything that I wish I was and am not but still could be.
PJ Harvey, too, has had recorded moments like this; moments of unbridled raw vocalized power that seem go to or come from the sexed and sexless and genderless primal core of her, and of me, and of all of us.
When I sing “everybody sing/my feeling for you endures like cancer”, I had hopes that large crowds of people would sing along with me there. I would sing “Everybody sing!” and then the large, sweaty, undulating, totally psyched audience would answer back, at the top of their lungs, “My feeling for you endures like cancer!!!” YEAH! In a perfect world it would have been a call-and-response thing. How funny would that have been?
I knew that most everybody would know what I was talking about: the lingering, cloying, painful emotional attachment to a former love.
In this song I am trying so hard to give up, like Tralala in “Last Exit To Brooklyn”; I am trying to knock the rainbow down to keep myself from climbing it (and looking for the pot of gold that I most likely won’t find), etc., so I won’t get hurt again, but I just can’t stop hoping. I can’t. My heart won’t die.
this week’s reading:
“Sailing Alone Around the World” by Joshua Slocum
“Merle’s Door” by Ted Kerasote
“Heartbreak: The Political Memoir Of A Feminist Militant” by Andrea Dworkin
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March 14th, 2009
7287pwkr
First can I just say that I have been talking to my computer way more than is healthy lately? I just patted it and said in a gentle solicitous voice,”Oh, you’re tired, aren’t you? I’ll put you to sleep soon.”
I anthropomorphize my computer. My computer is mad at me right now. He really wants me to turn him off and leave him alone. It’s four in the morning and I’ve been banging on his keys all night. Can you blame him? He’s just a little laptop and gets tired sometimes.
I was a sucker for the cool rock boy archetype – the modern puer aeturnus. (I go on about this at length in the “Cool Rock Boys” chapter of my book, if anyone is interested in more of an explanation of my history in relation to this type. This song in particular was inspired by “James” and by my delusional sort of obsession with him and his persona – musical and otherwise.) I’m embarrassed to admit that I was so able to be lured into the trap, semi-unconsciously. I say “semi” because part of me always knew it when I was walking into trouble, and let it happen. The other part of me always wanted to believe in a new kind of wonderful and hoped for the best. Either way it was exciting for a little while, in a walking-a-tightrope kind of way.
I guess I don’t really DO relationships, compared to most people, so that means I’ve gotten into a few tangles that I knew were doomed – romantically doomed – and thereby from the very beginning of each, I was safe from actually having to actively try and sustain something I don’t believe in in the first place – something I have no talent for or real intrinsic interest or belief in.
Coupling is not an instinct or a need for me. It is something out of the ordinary. It feels unnatural. Am I a freak of nature? An alien? Don’t laugh; it could be true. Being a girlfriend throws me off balance and makes me very anxious and can be harmful to my health. Some people tell me, “You just haven’t found the right guy yet,” but I really don’t think that’s the problem. I haven’t found anyone because I am not and have never been looking for anyone.
“Significant” others have gotten in the way of my work. And in the way of clarity. If my work was raising children or being a good wife, that would be one thing (or two). But it’s not.
Solitude is rejuvenating. Going back home, alone, to my apartment after a day or night out or at the end of a tour or an event or performance, or after some time with one of my very few past boyfriends, is like being hooked up to oxygen after I’ve been depleted of air. It’s like guzzling water when I’ve been dying of thirst. It’s not that I don’t ever enjoy performing or spending time with certain people, but these things drain me of something. Something essential.
JP Sartre said (or wrote), “Hell is other people.” I understand where he is coming from but I feel more like this: Other people are like kryptonite to me. They take my power away. Especially the ones I fall in love with. Romantic love is my kryptonite. I’m not happy about it, but that’s the way it is.
I so wish I could feel safe amongst my fellow bipeds.
I am a different person when I am alone. I am me. Really me. No one but me will ever know this person. No one will ever know me. No one.
Have you ever heard of anyone who is content to be alone? I wish for that. I’m not there yet. It is unfortunately true that no man is an island. And with my music, where would I be without the audience, without all of your ears? My writing is deeply fulfilling, as is recording myself, but then the music needs to be heard and enjoyed and I need to know that it has been heard and enjoyed or else it feels like the circle has not been fully drawn. I’ve said this before and now I’ll say it again: I consider this – needing to know my music is appreciated and even loved – a character flaw.
But sometimes I feel that my life alone is so perfect and wonderful and ideal and utopian and sometimes I love my life, and by extension myself, so much that I can’t tolerate any sort of intrusion or visit by anyone into my perfect world; in my music world, even positive criticism can irritate when the work is misunderstood or not fully and properly consumed and digested and appreciated.
I lie in my bed at night and I think, “God, I fucking love my bed. It’s the most comfortable bed in the whole world. And I LOVE my flannel sheets and I love being warm in my bed on a cold snowy night and I love sleeping and I love dreaming and I love my hammer and my baseball bat and I loved what I ate for dinner and I loved Betty and I loved that guy and God how lucky I am/was to have had them for a short time in my life – they were like gravy on top of everything or like the most delectable icing on the life-cake and who the hell am I to ask for anything sweet to last forever, anyway? forever is unrealistic and fantastical – and I love the music I am working on and I love my face and my hair and my legs, arms, stomach, feet, hands, fingernails, eyelashes, moles, various white spots where I picked off scabs and ate them as a child, etc. – and all of my ideas and I love my apartment and I love my neighborhood and my street and… listen to how unbelievably, beautifully quiet it is here at night!… and I loved the book I just finished reading (“The Executioner’s Song” – the fastest 1000-plus pages I’ve ever torn through) and I love the books I am reading now (the collected stories of Amy Hempel and also “The Fat Man in History” by Peter Carey) and I love that I can go to bed whenever I want and I love that I can get out of bed whenever I want and I love that I don’t have to say “Good morning” to anybody – that I don’t have to speak at all first thing in the morning, when I am usually in no mood for words – and that I don’t have to worry about morning breath and I love love love that I have no major health problems and I love getting older because with the passing of the years comes wisdom and better use of the shorter amount of time and I love that I am not worried or scared about getting older and I love that I still manage to bring in enough money to live without having a day job that I don’t love (thank you, people, for that) and I love that some people care a lot about what I do and I love that kind of new-ish Oasis song about the shock of the lightning and…and…and….etc.etc.etc.” Endless loves, I have.
My life on the perfect days has an order – all things falling fabulously into the exactly right places – and then it invariably falls into disorder. Order and disorder – opposites – are what I am constantly trying to balance. I am a pendulum. Is this cyclothymia? That’s such a nice, grown-up, professional, non-psychobabbly word for it. That was what my dad the medical doctor called it. And he was a brilliant man so I’ll take his sword for it. I mean his word for it.
When the days do not seem perfect I can let myself be led astray and/or hurt. Once in a while I get bored of order and calm – I get restless – or I get lonely (when I remember I am human) and I let myself get beaten down a little, but it’s sort of a game to me, like jumping in the boxing ring with someone a whole weight class or two above me. Just because it’s a game doesn’t mean that it doesn’t really hurt. It does. I bear the scars. And I still love each and every one of my sparring partners (I still love my enemy) who were fighting because we were both in the ring voluntarily at the same time and so none of them can be blamed for all of my (metaphorical) black eyes and busted lips and concussions and contusions and broken bones and brain damage.
The wounds and bruises continue to live somewhere inside of me, hidden, for a long time – years and years, sometimes – until some trigger (like a song or the face or voice or place of the past loved one) brings it to life and makes me wince. And then eventually the pain goes away and neither the songs nor the faces nor the run-ins with the old sparring partners have any more power to slay me all over again.
When time has passed I look back on the whole thing as if I, and the other, are/were separate from the me that lives today. Just as I look back on “My Sister” and “Spin The Bottle” and I think, “What was that? Who is that tense, kind of goofy, sad, angry, bitchy, standoffish, confused person singing in that weirdly chirpy, little-girl voice? What a freak.” Another world, other people, all strangers.
Every time I have been a girlfriend I have been pretending to be a girlfriend. It’s a role that has never come the least bit naturally to me. I try to hold on and to maintain the character, but it breaks down so easily.
The fight or flight response was so knee-jerk in me that it almost seemed like a disease; like alcoholism or something like that. I would try not to give in to my impulse to flee, like an alcoholic tries to abstain from drinking. I’d try to practice being like all the other people wanting to/born to/biologically and evolutionally programmed to couple and cuddle and nest and cohabitate and procreate. (Have you heard my Juliana’s Pony song “Let’s Get Married”? Those are real honest fears. My terror of domesticity.) I would grit my teeth and try to stay, like a drinker tries not to drink.
They want something from me that I am not willing or able to give. They are let down and in the end, or by the time I can see the end, I am perfectly willing to let them down. Because when someone doesn’t believe in you, why should you care anymore? Why would you want to even try to give him/her what he/she wants if you aren’t what he/she wants, or what he/she thought he/she wanted, or what he/she thought you were before he/she really knew you? At some point there is no more argument and the answer is clear: goodbye. In the end it is his/her problem and no longer yours.
I am a woman but that doesn’t mean that I have an obligation to nurture or to mother or to try to become what I am not. If I wanted to take care of someone I would have tried to have or to acquire a child.
I am not cold or unfeeling or numb all of the time. I go back and forth. It’s complicated.
This is how I feel: “What will you take from me?/Nothing and everything.”
I am so fragile that I barely escaped with my life. (I almost starved to death. [I’m exaggerating but, still.]) But then again, in the end I am impervious, indestructible, so strong; eternally resilient. I held on to everything and I lost nothing and I gained so much (I don’t mean ”gained” literally – I only gained about five pounds while I was in there, but I did get back on track and since I was set free back in November I have gained about five more pounds for a total gain of ten [so far].) It’s all a matter of perspective. Though the treatment center felt like jail, I got – I’m still getting – a lot of material and insight out of it.
I – we – must say “Yes” to what is, to whatever IS. And not fight it. If what is is not right, it’s up to me to either fix it or to leave it. We are all resilient – you could be, too, if you’d just go off on your own and see what you are made of, with no distractions. If you don’t have people and work and homes to take care of, I mean. Go into the desert for forty days and forty nights. Now that I don’t have Betty I can do things like that, at the drop of a hat. I can just take off. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. No one will even know I have gone.
I don’t ask for much. All I really want, at the start of each day, is to read the morning paper (while the morning paper still exists – and it does, but just barely. The Boston Globe is, lately, a shadow of its former self and it just breaks my heart. The Internet coupled with the bad economy has practically destroyed the Globe. It used to be a great paper.) and I want to eat a healthy breakfast – maybe some oatmeal with sunflower seeds and a bit of maple syrup – and then I am happy. It’s so simple.
And then I want to create a masterpiece. No – many masterpieces. My work has just begun.
The other night I dreamed that my computer, and all the stuff saved in it, died with a strange “bleep blip blop” sound and then a final blackness on the screen. In the dream I thought then that I would write a note stating what I felt right then and the note would say: My computer died last night. I am liberated.
I was told by a wise older woman that conflict brings consciousness – like the snake in the garden of Eden brought awareness of sin (though I don’t believe in this sin. Eve especially didn’t sin. And I don’t believe I am a sinner. I make mistakes sometimes, that’s all. And it’s my responsibility to atone for them – on my own, through my words and actions.) If this is true then I am the most conscious/aware person there is.
I hate his guts/I love him so much, etc. I hate my job/I love my job. I am a miserable wretch/I’m the luckiest girl in the world. I’m ugly/I’m beautiful. I’m a cow/I’m a skeleton. “Am I in heaven or in hell?”
And she said: The feeling function is a rational function. So…in other words…trust your feelings. Listen to them. This sounded incredible to me; I always thought it was better to ignore or deny my feelings. I hated having feelings. I wanted them to go away and leave me alone. I wanted to be rational and to use my neocortex rather than be led astray by my limbic brain, which seemed like some kind of penis-in-the-skull or something, getting me into bad and dangerous situations that I would later regret. I aspired to clarity and reason but was rarely successful…UNTIL I started trusting my feelings. Kind of a paradox.
Your feelings are trying to tell you something. Maybe something like this: Get out early – escape, if you feel something is not right and is not fixable or he is not amenable to trying to fix it with you. Or lay down the law – your law – in plain terms. Don’t be afraid of losing him. If it feels wrong and unrightable, it’s BETTER to lose him.
Is anyone sick of me yet? I feel like I’m starting to repeat myself in these things.
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March 2nd, 2009
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Do you know what T.Rex’s problem is? The lyrics. I was listening to “Electric Warrior” just now to make sure I had my facts straight, in order to say what I’m about to say, and, well it’s so true what is generally accepted about Marc Bolan and his band: the lyrics are really just pretty silly and kind of seem like afterthoughts. But I love the sound and the guitars and the production. (Doesn’t everyone?)
I was listening in order to be sure I knew what song I’d ripped off in my solo at the end of “Don’t Let Me Down.” “Mambo Sun” is the one. At about 3:20 in my song I kind of borrow from “Mambo Sun”’s solo for about four seconds, at which point I go off and do my own spazzed-out attention-deficit-disorder thing.
And that is why I thanked T.Rex in the thank-you list on “In Exile Deo.”
This song of mine is a song about writing songs. About writing when uninspired and frustrated by being uninspired. “Looking for words at the end of the road under a rock” is what it sometimes feels like to be trying so hard and wanting so bad to make something brilliant and transcendent or even just cool, clever, catchy, whatever, when it seems to me like I’ve done and tried everything I can to pull out or tap into something great but still nothing worthwhile is manifesting. But I refuse to give up; I always want and need to push through the crap to the hidden well of badassness. “Hitting the wall/do it all night” is what I do. I work until the sun comes up, banging my metaphorical head against the wall over and over again, if I have to. I get to the end of a page I’ve manically scribbled on and doodled on and then I turn the paper over to the clean side and start again.
I’ve said before that I don’t believe in writer’s block. Writer’s block is just another word for “temporary lull in the flow.” One must keep going and keep going and not give in. Was it Winston Churchill who said “Never give in”? Those are words to live by, if you are a writer, of songs, or anything else.
The “you” in the song is my muse. I need her and I feel this need most intensely when I am spewing out garbage and having no good ideas and no luck tapping into the well of inspiration. You could also say that “muse” is another word for “God.” Because songwriting, to me, is like hanging out with God. When a good song comes forth and takes shape I always feel a strong sense of gratitude. A song comes to me and it comes from somewhere and I feel I am not fully responsible for this. And so I must give thanks and realize what a precious and kickass gift I have been given, over and over again. When I am in the process of forming a new song, and it is going well, and I know I am onto something good, it’s as if I have grown angel wings and I am flying, cruising, transcending everyday life’s problems and my own frailties and flaws and fragilities.
I like to think that people could interpret the song like this: the “you” in “don’t let me down/I need you now/when inspiration fades” is drugs or a particular drug. A songwriting friend of mine once told me that I should try taking speed when I am having trouble writing; that speed is great for writing. But I hate feeling speed-y. It scares me to feel my heart pumping. I don’t even drink coffee for this reason (the fear). I don’t need artificial stimulation. I can wait.
Someone recently said, about me, “she’s just a machine that has music coming out.” It was said pejoratively, like an accusation, as if to say that I had no time for or interest in anything or anyone else – no time for my fans. He also called me a “rockstar.” He was a stranger who was offended that I never responded to a nice myspace message that he had sent to my myspace mail.
The “rockstar” accusation stung – I mean, how dare anyone call me that? I’ve tried so hard in all I’ve done to be the opposite of a rockstar. I AM the opposite of a rockstar. I’ve never trashed a hotel room or demanded that the brown M&M’s be removed from any bowls of M&M’s in the dressing room and I’ve never slept with a groupie or overdosed or any of those other rockstar clichés, which are all true, by the way. I’ve known lots of musicians way more rockstar-like than me, who have trashed hotel rooms and slept with groupies and overdosed. Some of them were my friends. I do not judge. But, when applied to me, the “rockstar” characterization is way way way off the mark because I believe in humility and thrift and temperance/moderation and self-reliance (I drive my own van on my tours) and comfortable, non-flashy clothing and quiet. The list of drugs I’ve never tried is a long list. Here is a sampling of what I, unlike most rockstars and lots of real people (laypeople), have never sampled: heroin, cocaine, mushrooms, meth, acid, ecstasy, oxycontin, adderall, vicodin, glue, whip-its, horse tranquilizers.
I’m practically a puritan.
But the other denunciation (“machine”) made me feel proud – not the effect the guy was going for, I’m sure; he meant to express his hurt and anger toward me for slighting him.
I am honored to be thought of as a music-making machine. That’s exactly what I want to be. I don’t do anything else as well as music-making. I am obviously not a good responder-to-myspace-messages, and I’m a terrible cook and a failure at being a girlfriend and I can’t surf (when I tried to learn, it was a disaster) and I am the worst verbal communicator in the history of spoken language. What is left for me to do? Music-making.
Honore de Balzac, the French writer, is one person I greatly admire, simply because he wrote about ninety books in his lifetime. NINETY! What a work ethic. What an inspiration.
This is from Balzac’s “Cousin Bette”:
“If an artist does not spring to his work as a soldier to the breach, if once within the crater he does not labor as a miner buried in the earth, if he contemplates his difficulties instead of conquering them one by one, the work remains unachieved, production becomes impossible, and the artist assists the suicide of his own talent…The solution of the problem can be found only through incessant and sustained work…True artists, true poets, generate and give birth today, tomorrow, ever. From this habit of labor results a ceaseless comprehension of difficulties which keep them in communion with the muse and her creative forces.”
Yes.
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February 12th, 2009
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Unpublished chapter from When I Grow Up
After my first semester at Berklee John and Freda and I moved in to a new place together along with their friend Seth who had just moved to Boston from Indiana to play bass in the Blake Babies. We rented a two-bedroom condo in a brownstone on Symphony Road just down the street from Symphony Hall, very close to the Berklee campus. (At the time, the great apartment-to-condominium conversion was taking over Boston.) We called our place the “condo pad.” John and Freda shared the big bedroom in the back, I took the small single room in the middle off the hallway, and Seth partitioned off a corner of the front living room with a bedsheet, threw a futon mattress in there, and made that his semi-private space. And for a while, an eighteen-year-old artist named Atom and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Mickey were crashing in the 12’ x 12’ basement storage room assigned to our unit. Seth, who never really warmed to Boston, moved back to Indiana within a year, and that was when our friend Evan moved in and took over Seth’s “room.” Evan also filled in on bass in the band until we could find a more permanent replacement. But we couldn’t find anyone who really fit in so I ended up teaching myself how to play bass and I became, by default, the Blake Babies’ bass player.
Evan had his own band, the Lemonheads, which had formed right around the time the Blakes had. The Blakes and the Lemonheads met at an early Lemonheads show at TT the Bear’s Place, in Cambridge, and we — the two bands — became fast friends. We came up together, playing the same clubs like TT’s and Greenstreet Station, out in Jamaica Plain, and the Rat (right down the street from Storyville, where Maggie had taken me to see the Del Fuegos open for the Violent Femmes), first on a Monday or a Tuesday night, near or at the bottom of the bill, then a Wednesday or a Thursday, which was better than a Monday or a Tuesday, and then opening for someone on a weekend night, and working our way up to headlining first on a weekday and then, finally, headlining on a Friday or Saturday — the big time.
There were always a lot of interesting people coming through the condo pad — John and Freda had a lot of friends. And when Evan started hanging around, well, Evan knew tons of people, too. Jesse, the Lemonheads’ bass player, who was going to Harvard, would bring his Harvard friends over to slum sometimes. All of them were smart, funny, engaging music lovers and took rock and roll, and pop, and indie rock — our genre — seriously. They spoke of Black Sabbath and Paula Abdul (who had a big hit — “Straight Up” — on the radio at the time) and Pavement as if they all really mattered, and would dissect a band’s pros and cons with an amazing verbal acuity. It was a refreshing change from the normal “Yeeah! These guys rawk! Wooo!” or “Those guys suck” which passed for thoughtful criticism where I was raised. I wanted to be taken seriously as an artiste, after all, and here these brainiacs were taking indie rock — my art form — seriously.
There were always assorted musicians, artists, students, socialists, bohemians, bisexuals dropping by — people I never would have met if John and Freda hadn’t knocked on my door that fateful night and pulled me out of my room. There were Bubbie and Bourbie, inseparable best friends; Swa-hey; TW; Dee and Dave, who worked with me at the health food store and who would eat handfuls of dry pressed oats out of the bulk bins to fill him up (he claimed the oats would expand in his stomach when he drank them down with water) when he was hungry and had no money to buy lunch.
Our new friend Gary, who later became the Blake Babies’ producer and quasi-(unofficial) manager/advisor, and then went on to be my manager for years and years, was often there. He was ten years older than us and a bit more worldly, an anarchist/former philosophy student/guitar player/songwriter/Renaissance Man, and had just opened a recording studio called Fort Apache in Roxbury, on the edge of the ghetto. (Gary would soon discover the Pixies. They recorded their first album, which Gary produced, at Fort Apache.)
One evening Evan came by the condo pad with his mother, Susan, and a man — Carl — Susan’s age, and a boy who looked to be about eleven years old. Carl’s son. Carl was a friend of Susan’s, in town for a visit, and they were just dropping in on their way to dinner to say hello; so Carl could meet some of her son’s rock and roll-playing friends, and so we could all meet Carl.
The Blake Babies had just put out our first album, Nicely, Nicely — recordings we had scraped together, piecemeal, at discounted graveyard shift studio sessions and sneaking in after hours to use the recording equipment at a friend’s workplace at the BF/VF (Boston Film/Video Foundation) on Boylston Street around the corner from Berklee. Nicely, Nicely was a very low-budget, low-fidelity group of nine songs. We’d done a pressing of one thousand copies, on vinyl only (This was in 1986, before CD’s became the music-playing technology of choice). Freda and I spent our free time, away from school and jobs, packing up albums one by one into oversized flat brown cardboard mailers. We’d schlep to the post office every few days and ship a stack of LPs out to college radio stations and fanzines across the country in hopes of some airplay and/or press coverage that might get us noticed and lead to some kind of a record deal with an independent label who could help us build up our fan base and give us a little money to work with on future albums. I also brought records to the local record buyer at Tower Records near Berklee, and to smaller local record stores like Newbury Comics and Looney Tunes, and dropped off a few copies at each place, to be sold on consignment. Freda and I were our own little distribution operation.
On the night that Carl and Evan’s mom came over, we had a bunch of boxes of shrink-wrapped Nicely, Nicely albums stacked up in the condo pad. Gary, who happened to be there at the condo pad that night, and who happened to be what some people might characterize as “radically progressive” politically, and very knowledgeable, seemed very interested in Carl.
Gary asked Carl where he was from.
Carl said that he lived in Washington, D.C.
Then Gary asked Carl what he did for a living.
Carl said that he was a journalist at the Washington Post.
Gary smiled and then it dawned on all of the rest of us simultaneously that this man, who had looked vaguely familiar, was CARL BERNSTEIN. Of Woodward and Bernstein. Evan’s mom’s friend was one of the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate break-in story which helped to bring about Richard Nixon’s resignation. The two guys who, literally, wrote the book about the scandal (All The President’s Men), and who were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the movie.
We all tried to stay cool and restrain ourselves from yelling out, “Holy Shit! You’re Carl Bernstein!” or “Oh my God!” and jumping up and down and hyperventilating but it was difficult because this man was a really important historical figure — kind of an American hero, who’d helped bring a dirty president down. And he was standing in our kitchen shooting the shit with us dirtbag indie rocker kids.
Before he left, Mr. Bernstein bought two copies of Nicely, Nicely (eight bucks each). We wanted to give them to him as a gift but he insisted, graciously, on paying. He removed the shrink wrap and had all of us Blake Babies sign both albums. He gave one to his son and left with the other one under his arm.
Nicely, Nicely might be a collector’s item, now. I heard that one of the original thousand was recently going for a hundred dollars on Ebay. If Carl Bernstein is ever desperate for a little cash, he could sell his copy.
I don’t remember exactly when or how the Blake Babies broke up. I just remember feeling that we had done all we could as a band. Like the sponge had been squeezed completely dry of all its liquid. I still loved John and Freda for saving me from nothingness and for all we had done together and for all the interesting and wonderful people (starting with the two of them) that they had brought into my life, but I wanted to do different things, with different musicians. I’d been married to the Blake Babies and now I needed to sow my wild oats and take a new lover or two or eight and see what else I could learn. I needed to move on.
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February 2nd, 2009
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