5 Songs We Use Not to Talk. Pt. 2

#2 The Fragmented Sentence.

Built To Spill // You Are

"Everybody knows...

Everybody knows...

That you..."

It was early September of 2011, during my last full semester at Lee University, when the trees had just begun to malt -- shearing colors of gold and orange. The wind was perfect, as if the breeze was a tiny little boy who had happily gotten lost in an open air super market, dashing from side to side clustering my hair. It was perfect. I was happy, I was content and I was looking forward to the future. I wasn't day dreaming like any normal 23 year old dude at the time. Instead of thinking of ways to pull pranks on my friends, what kind of beer I wanted that evening or if it's to early to call my girlfriend to make out -- rather I was thinking about a career, my upcoming semester in England and if Target had any gnarly sweaters on sale. (or pea-coats! I love pea-coats!) But then my phone rang, it was father on the other line. He sounded pensive and serious, but this wasn't far from the norm so I said "Hey/What's Up" and he responded with "Poppy died...".

I attacked the phone receiver with a battalion of untrained soldiers equipped with the standard edition rifle tears. These are my tears, there are many like them, but these are mine. Each sentence was more whimpered than the last. My eyes had contracted a fever, and it wouldn't go away. That day, like my grandfather, I couldn't leave the same way I came. I needed my car and roads I had never seen before. My tongue was riding as fast at it could on the phone, but when silence is your best friend... it's not very fast at all. I don't know how many phrases I belted out on the phone, there are so many that one seems to use when dealing with death that it get's annoying fast. So I'm sure you might be able to relate to my list, contracted like a disease:

• How did it happen?
• But why? 
• I just saw him!
• I don't fucking believe...
• Is Mom alright!?
• I'm coming home right now.
• ...shit 
• What should I do?
• I... I ... Are you okay?

After I hung up the phone I thought about running, just running. To my car, I don't know, perhaps. Any direction will do. Motion, it seemed like a good idea, a much better idea than standing in the middle of a christian campus swearing like a sailor and craving a cigarette. If I just ran to my car, maybe I could... maybe I could... I don't know but maybe I could just fucking... do something, but what's the point, he's dead and it's not like we had a dinner reservation.
So I just walked.
I popped in my head phones and started slowly. My feet felt like fat slippers soaked in kerosine as I tromped to my vehicle. All the trees seemed so repugnant as if it's not a big deal to have an arm full of dead droppings. The hot sorority girls laughing on the corner looked fatter and I could feel the lack of depth permeate from their skulls, as if they were empty boxes of soggy light. God that walk sucked. It wasn't until I got into my car that it really hit me, I need to call my girlfriend.

She picked up the phone

"Hey! What's up?"

"My grandfather just died..."

"The one out in California?"

"Yeah... Poppy."

"Are you gonna be okay? Do you need to see me?"

"No, no... I'll be okay. I just needed to hear your voice..."

The conversation didn't last much longer than that because unlike my feet, my tongue couldn't put one foot in-front of the other. It was stuck in a suffocating pattern dryness, sealing it's self to the roof of my mouth.When I got to my parents house later that day it didn't get any better. I had no words, just... just a mouth full of pythons and a fist that needed to placed properly in a door. I kept on trying to comfort my Mother, but I couldn't say anything good. The next day passed and the funeral arrangements where being made. The family decided that my mother and my sisters would fly out to California to be at the small family gathering where they would spread his ashes in my grandmothers garden. The night I found out I wasn't going I cried like a child who had seen his blood for the first time. As We Were Promised Jetpacks would say, it was a far cry from all that was dead inside. I couldn't go because I had "exams", so I had to write a letter to give to my grandmother. My condolence letter. My hated for school spiked significantly that day.

My girlfriend at the time, who was much younger than me, tried her best at comforting me but it just wasn't working. She was lost in the torrent of choice-less words and my hot-n-cold comfort zone. I had no way of communicating. It was like I was deaf and trying to tell her that I was having a heart attack, it was useless. After the deluge of "I'm sorrys" and "is there anything I can do" I left her place. I went home to write that letter.

I dug through my iPod while it was on shuffle, pecking the skip button and getting pissed after every track. Sometimes I think I torture my self for no good reason and love it.
I would scream at it,
"No. I don't want to listen to Damien Rice right now you twat!"
"What! No! Frighten Rabbit and Copeland are OUT of the question!"
I was secretly hoping it would jump to Guernica by Brand New because I wasn't going to pick it my self. That song always upset me, and I wanted to be the distorted hum of one sad and lonely alcoholic. And if the fate of the shuffle wouldn't pick Brand New then my second wish was that it would land on Pedro The Lion's "Suspect Fled The Scene". I just knew from the the bottom of my heart that if I picked those songs on my own that I'd be inflicting a ridiculous amount of pain on my heart, so I was hoping fate would do it for me. When your as sad as wordless poet, you don't argue fates cruel and provocative hug, you just accept it with a pinch of poison. But then shuffle did it again, it saved my soul. It landed on the one song that I usually associate with the moment when the prettiest girl smile, the whole "cat's got my tongue" thing, where she's just to beautiful to look at. The sliver rectangular angel started to play "You Are" by Built To Spill.

 The fragmented sentence, an iota of tangibility, the mouthful of crumbs that came dribbling out of my face and my figures began to scoop them up like puzzle pieces. I played the song over and over and over and over and over and over. I sent it to my friends, my girlfriend and anyone that would listen. I felt like a seventh grader trying to tell his parents that he got shoved in a locker at school yesterday. I wanted to shout the guitar patterns, break windows to the drum beats and steep in the memory of my grandfather while the guitar solo painted every memory I had with him. This hot sense of odd pleasure drove me to room for hours.

There are only five words in the entire song. "Everybody/knows/that/you/are" but the way it is sang invokes an irresistible amount of feelings. Doug Martsch, the lead singer goes in rounds as if he knows, this is all he's got and this is all he can say and it's the only way he can tell you, so it's odd, but it's perfect.

It's perfect.   

And it was perfect.

Here's a small portion of the letter that I wrote: "...throughout my childhood Poppy played a key roll in my developing years. I couldn't think of a memory that encompassed what he truly meant to me. Poppy was much more than a memory to me. He was a legacy of ideals. Ideals that started me down the pathe of being an artist, an artist that encapsulates mystery in truth and love through nobility. Poppy was an artist and now so am I. He gave me the inspiration to play each key with fervor and integrity. Each string to be strummed with an intimate passion and an ear to always listen closely to my heart... Poppys brush strokes have painted the most beautiful foreground and now it is my duty as his grandson to take up the brush and make something beautiful for the world to see and for the world to feel..."

The fragmented sentence is one of the most powerful songs we can express to an individual. It's the moment when words aren't enough, we've lost the ability to even define our selves and the situation, so we let our most powerful form of express take control -- for me, the music. As a young man I find my self in phases in my life where I am left with nothing but the music, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Whether it's the death of a close relative, the lowness from exiting a relationship or the metaphorical Triton in the road, because let's be real, these days it's no longer a fork, and we are left with invisible character defining art. In these phases our internal soul cries out to others in ways that we can not express. We might even feel guilty or angry because there's an unfulfilled tension that is created deep within our psyche, but there's a way out. Don't say it, just play it.

Now when ever I hear this song I think of two things. The first is that sometimes in life the best way to tell someone that you love them is through art. The second thing is this: your art will inspire, cultivate and move people in ways that you never knew and perhaps will never know. I never told my grandfather that I started playing music because of him. I never told my grandfather that he taught me to look for beauty in all things. But I told him I loved him and I'm sure that rolls over into heaven. 

What's your fragmented sentence?

 

5 Songs We Use Not to Talk. Pt. 1.

#1 The Daywalker

Shout Out Louds // Very Loud.

“But I wanna change, change the way we always have

And to make different plans and try not to make this sad…”

As I teetered into my room, cane in one hand, cup of coffee in the other, I turned on the light and just stood there for a moment. Whether if it was due to the medication or just because I naturally stop to dwell, I froze and non-verbally judged my room. There were pants, socks, cards, candy wrappers, record sleeves and just random shit… everywhere. It’s one thing to lose your zen in a place that is your own, but it’s another to lose it when you are forced to move back into your parents’ house. Yeah, this was my old room and I moved back there due to medical reasons.

The last time I lived there was about a year ago when I was in transition from one apartment to another. These transitions happened only a few times because once I was 18 I out like a candle. I never tried to stay longer than I had to either, their place just wasn’t where I wanted to be. Being at my parents was always an internal struggle, so whenever I vacated, I did it in a hurry and always left much behind. Transitions, they’re not my favorite card in the deck that life seems to give me often.

"My room’s a fucking mess…" I thought to myself.
I sighed and decided that something must be done. You ever get that wild hair up your ass, the one that says, "Gosh I should clean?” well I did. And the thing is, I rarely clean my room! It always self-implodes hours later, so I preemptively came up with a strike plan; I had to make another mess before I could start cleaning! My mind needed retrospective destruction, so I opened my closest and began to dig through one of the old boxes that I had left in there years ago.

I didn’t exactly know what I was searching for, but I knew there was something in this box that would satisfy. After digging through old hats, Star Wars posters and “How to Learn Japanese” cassette tapes I found it, my old CD wallet, a.k.a. the bible. Back in its heyday the wallet was bursting at the seams. CDs were double stacked on each-other, crammed into those clear cd slips and album art inserts cushioned the back like a stack of pillows. The variety ranged from the Japanese punk boy-bands like Mongol 500 and the Garlic Boys to deep and classic cuts like Johnny Cash’s vault collection and Live’s “Throwing Cooper”. But then I saw them, The Shout Out Louds. Enter the Daywalker…

When I listened to love songs back in 8th grade I was defined by butt-rock, such as Course of Natures “Supercalla”, America Hi-Fi’s “Flavor of the Week”, and even “Hero” from the Spider-Man soundtrack, written by Chad… Kroeger… (Oh, did I ever get saved). I was your “A-typical” 14 year old, with his mind pockmarked by my female colleague’s newest addition, breasts. And I thought breasts loved butt-rock, so my song with my first girlfriend was “Caught in the Sun” by Course of Nature… She broke up with me the day I got out of the hospital, so perhaps that wasn’t the wisest choice. But all that changed when I started to listen to bands like The Shout Louds, Wolf Parade and Green Day (RIP). My perspective on love songs changed, my relationships lasted longer and breasts became more metaphorical foreplay than attack and defend. Love songs, they don’t have to sound like… complete and utter butt-hurt-bull-shit. 

Derp...

I squatted on the floor and shoved the CD into my record player like it was a parrot and begged it to talkback. It came to life, but before it even had the chance to blink or even play the first song I mashed the next button to my favorite track, track two, “Very Loud”. As soon as the rolling drums hit, that’s when it happened, the sweet beast herself, nostalgia. In a constant hum of musical rubble and re-enhanced oblivion I remembered I wasn’t alone.

The static in the air shrank and I heard my friend Amy stir who had been sitting on my bed the whole time. She had been over to help me organize my room, rearrange it, beautify it, etc, but I was lost. As soon as I stepped into the unintentional need for reconnection I unknowingly brought her along with me. Like the good Dr., Amy had unknowingly stepped into my Tardis and was now experiencing a time shift that she couldn’t see or understand, teenage Me.

I tried to explain to her how I moved up and down the genre ladder like a drunk fireman. How the paradigm shift in music was like moving from dove soup to juicy couture and then back. The change affected my relationships, my driving, smoking, etc… but the fragmented rambling, it felt useless. So I just let the song play, over and over again. As it played I could feel her understand what I was trying to say and little by little my secret world, and she was day walking*, just like me. To use the daywalker is to slip into a world that is outside of our time but yet to still common in the present. We are listening to a jogging dream, a bookmark for a reserved seat in a museum, we are vampirically feeding during our nap time, we are not talking. But, just because we are using this song to “not talk” does not mean we are not communicating, in fact for some it may be the most significant moment of that day, week or month. The transformative language of this type of song will happen in movements, just as it did for me. At first I became lost and unaware of my surroundings. I discovered, relapsed into memory and then followed it to wherever it lead me. I honestly could have had this moment with other songs, and that doesn’t make the Shout Out Louds any less significant, but I had it with them and it was destiny. 

So what’s your daywalker? What song do you use not to talk about the past, but to feel it, experience and share it?

“But I wanna smell, smell the way you do

And to wear those clothes, the clothes your friends do

But I always choose another way

So this is why this love can't stay…”

- Shout Out Louds // Very Loud.