Past
It must have been 6 or 7 years ago I recorded these few songs and gave them as an album to a few family members for Christmas. My side project was called the Fuck Politics. Two of these songs were on a Morals album. Here, there is a lot of hiss, but I actually like these recordings quite a bit, considering. It’s very literary, I’ll try to disassemble my pretension for you a bit.
1) The Gossamer Thread You Fling
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I was in love with Megan for a long time. We met when we worked the same bullshit job in the town where I grew up and where she moved when she got sick of her bullshit parents. We never kissed, but we shared a few moments of magic: phosphorescent algae tracing our footsteps behind us on the beach at two am, an empty mountain lodge with fire still roaring, glow worms on Mount Tabor.
I drove up to see her in the Vagina Monologues at PCC Sylvania and wrote this song about it.
A while ago, almost a year, I sent her the album and told her the song was about her. It’s funny because it’s not really a love song at all. Just a song about a thing that happened and she happened to be involved.
The title is from Whitman — “A Noiseless Patient Spider” — and actually relates to the subject of the song, unlike most of my pretentious literary titles.
2) The Pastures of Heaven
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This one, for example.
3) One Year In Every Ten
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I envisioned this song as a letter from my self to myself, almost a resolution or call to arms, telling myself to live the life I want to and stop being a turd. I’m still not sure what a lot of it really means, and I get really embarrassed about the “fountains of immortality” bit, but I like it.
Ironically, the title is from a Sylvia Plath poem about suicide.
4) Man Versus Machine
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It’s “I Hear America Singing” set to music.
5) I Pour the Cream
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I wrote this song about the time a girl flew me to Spain to make me fall in love with her and then ran off to Vienna to see the opening of her Austrian boyfriend’s opera, leaving me alone with no Spanish to speak and no idea of where I wanted to go. I ended up in a little town called Antequerra. We met back up in Madrid and careened across the city in a mad two day dash and fucked awkwardly in a too-small bed before our planes whisked us out of each-other’s lives pretty much for good.
The title is a reference to one of my favorite poems ever, “Vacation” by William Stafford:
One scene as I bow to pour her coffee: —
Three Indians in the scouring drouth
huddle at a grave scooped in the gravel,
lean to the wind as our train goes by.
Someone is gone.
There is dust on everything in Nevada.
I pour the cream.