10

I find myself surrounded by wrinkled, sad laundry and warm air and evening light. I am serenaded by Mark Kozelek's ACDC covers and the whirring hum of our new bronze toned vintage-looking oscillating fan. What is this time? What is the time? And where are you? Days and hours and minutes away, in a solemn room, in a neighboring country.

The Marry Mix/ Chronicles from the ER (on a Tuesday)

I've asked my cousin Brandon to play the music for the wedding. I've been going through my stacks of records trying to pick out songs...how can I narrow it down? Worse, how can I find some appropriate happy music, beautiful music that I love for the wedding? I've realized more and more as I've organized the last years worth of music lying at the foot of my bed just how dark my palate really is. Even the upbeat music tends to be about awful things, like a twist of Magnetic Fields or a ride on the roller coaster of an M. Ward record. M. Ward, with his dancey saloon songs so full of death and disappointment, afterthoughts and whimsically damaged dreams, always makes me happy.

I wish I could write Tiny Mix Tapes for some suggestions:

"Mark Kozelek couldn't play my wedding, the spring flowers made him cheerful."

*********************************************************************

Some guy just walked up to my desk with a baby and said "Hey! We just left the hospital and realized we took the wrong baby...so we thought we'd bring him back." He held out the baby and all of these thoughts started swirling through my head, my face froze and I stopped. "Nahhh Girl. Just kidding! Got you! Got you! Where's the food court?" His family walked up behind him as I slowly pointed the way and they all started laughing.

Wherein Sara Leah's music geekness rises to a new level...

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be singing. It seemed to be a sing-a-long type of moment. We were crowded in the center of the room. Crowded in the dark, circling John Vanderslice and his guitar, David and the bass drum, St. Vincent and her crystal clear harmonies. John pulled his arm up from his side and waved it in the air. Was it a sing-a-long? No one else was singing with them, but Will and I, but at that moment there could have been choirs behind us. The whole room was filled with sound. As John opened his mouth and wagged his blonde head, the whole world seemed to be singing along:

"You know that guy who
stole your girlfriend
away from you
in the summer
of '95
he's going to die

you know her name
sits in your brain
like a tumor
eyes still shine in your memory
she's going to die

well you can carry that grudge
or you can let it go
but as sure as I'm singing this song, you know
she's going to die, she's going to die

five'll get you ten so just let it go
that she and he and i will hear the final chord
just let it go, let it go, we're going to die"

-Nikki Oh Nikki, Life and Death of an American Four Tracker



The room was still. The lights were very low, casting an orange and golden glow upon the faces of my friends, standing just across the way. Rebecca stood, elevated on a bar stool, camera pulled up to her small serious face. Amber stood below her, hands clasped, eyes warm, smiling in my direction. This was it. A perfect moment.

I sat at the bar earlier, trying to tell Ben way I love John's music, telling what scattered history that I knew, what my nervous brain could remember. I kept saying the word perfect. Scott Solter's production, perfect. John's lyrics, perfect. I know that these statements are not true. The lyrics, the clicks and whirrs, the piano, the guitar...not perfect. They are odd and interesting, off putting and inviting at the same time. There is an earnestness in every measure that I can't shake off, that seems perfect when it hits my ear, like that moment when you slip into a warm bath and you sigh and smile. It's a good moment and to you, it is perfect because it's what you've longed for. I long for music that speaks to me. More than that, I long for music that makes me think, drives my day. I long for music that will make me tilt my head as I start my car, exhausted from a long day of work. I turn through the intersection, underneath the overpass and forget everything. I lose myself in his voice and what he has to say, every clear strum of the guitar. Every distorted chord transports...

John had walked quickly to me once he had found that I was there. We chatted about the music scene, the Bottletree, Chris Ward and Pattern is Movement, the SDRE/Mk Ultra show in St. Louis. He smiled so easily and spoke with an honest warmth. Why was I so nervous? I felt nauseous still and the meeting was already over. I knelt down by Hamric, who was sitting at a table on the patio, his green "Wes McDonald and the Fizz" t-shirt, his smirking, wonderful eyes. I told Jason Hamric and Brandon that maybe it was because as a listener, you build this image of, this meaning behind what you hear. This is the freedom that you are given, to create a persona, a history from which the stories and the songs are born. To finally meet the person behind all of this can be devastating or transcendent

I remember meeting Mark Kozelek a couple years ago at the Nick. I had seen him in Nashville the night before and had decided not to talk to him as he stood beside me quietly during Warren Gently's opening set. Having seen him on stage a few times in my life and knowing his cloudy and sometimes downright mean disposition, I did not want to actually talk to him, for fear that his stage persona would leak into his true self, a self that I so honestly wanted to be the yearning, sad hearted, quiet lover of his voice. In other words, I did not want him to punch me in the face for asking him about a particular song or album. When I finally got up the nerve to approach him at the Nick, after much pushing and prodding by my friends, he was genuinely...well...sweet. "Hi. Hey. I remember you. Pink scarf girl." It was a great moment.

I've been listening to John Vanderslice for ten years. His music has been a great part of my life soundtrack. I do not know him, but I know his climbing voice. His voice has been a friend to me. His music has gotten me through dark days and accompanied me on great adventures. When he walked up to me after his set and hugged me and thanked me for smiling and singing along...I thought to that moment, sitting at a table at the back of the room, when he had traveled from the stage to the organ by the bathrooms to sing a number. I sat at that table and smiled as he lifted his head and sang out. It was a perfect moment. Worth all of the nervousness, worth all of this quiet hope.

check out tour dates and news of John Vanderslice at www.johnvanderslice.com

Summer Dress

"summer dress makes you more beautiful than the rest
lovliest girl that i know, and the sweetest...."
- Mark Kozelek



When I think about Sunni, I always hear this song on the jukebox in my head. It's a sad tempo-ed little serenade, but the lyrics are beautiful and the guitar earthy and pretty, just like her.



Her head back and laughing, her slender arms gesturing, I looked up from the phone. Sunni was sitting in the armchair just to the right of me, her white peasant skirt wrapped wrapped around her long legs. Keelan stood by the sliding glass doors, one eyebrow cocked, grinning from ear to ear.



Today was their wedding day.

"summer dress separates you from the rest..."



Sunni & Amber

Les & Amber

It was the lovliest wedding reception I'd ever attended. When I arrived, I handed the groom a case of Amberbock. To the bride, I gave an embroidered linen handkerchief I'd found at the antique bazaar at Brookwood Mall. She loved it. Maid of honor (Amberoo) got a box of Tagalongs which were promptly consumed by all. Les Nuby stopped in soon after. We listened to music, looked at the pictures taken earlier in the day at the courthouse. We drank sparkling grape juice, played with the dogs. Keelan tried to master the wonderment of my camera phone. We couldn't stop laughing.





Congratulations, my lovely friends.

Revelation Big Sur

"and through the rhythm of the timeless season...."
-Mark Kozelek

My favorite flower is in bloom, the daffodil. Their yellow heads are leaning over the monkeygrass in my front lawn, a tired but bright morning greeting as I head out to my car.

When I was a child, my father would take me to a place, just outside Bluff City, called Sonneman's Cabin. It was a getaway for an attorney from my father's practice, two generations before his time. In my tiny blond head, it was like a dream. The two room structure was set in a field of green and yellow, daffodils as far as the eye could see. I would run off into the woods and come back, small fragile arms overflowing with butter colored blossoms and bluebells. We drove back there every year, to take pictures, just to catch a glimpse of this lovely vision of spring.

When I was old enough to drive, through high school, college, and ever after, I would find myself traveling the winding back road to the cabin, after school, on the weekends, late at night. The clear moonlit sky would cast an eerie glow on those golden heads, wavering in the night air. I'd sit in my car and listen to Mark Kozelek, America, Glen Phillips, weaving together ghost stories through each turn of the guitar, brought from the dark corners of the barn across the way, midnight tales of love and death and eternal longing. I never asked my father of Sonneman. I never was told a truth about this small place. I was afraid of it, that my father's plain sense would knock my sensibilities off of the face of the landscape. "He just had a green thumb," would be his answer. And all of those stories I had written, all of those songs in my head of devoted tribute to a lost love and glorifying the paths that she once walked would wither into such a short sentence.

It's been five years since last I drove down that road. 500 miles away, I can still see it, clear and quiet. Maybe I'll ask a friend from home to search it out, as soon as the Midwest winter thaws. Darren, I know how you love driving those back roads. Are you up for the task?

It's a rainy day here in Birmingham. A dark day. The cars are flying by on the overpass by my window, their headlights a waterfall of light.

Mister Murray Lightburn: I still don't love you. I gave you another chance on the drive in to work this morning. My heart never turned your direction. It stayed curving through traffic, from lane to lane, and then on into the morning.

Maybe someday.

Around and Around

In the midst of the 25,000 times that the power went out this evening in Pelham because of the terrible weather, I found myself dancing with Blake and Kristie in their living room on a dark, rather dead end street in Southside, Adam Sears and Daniel beautifully and lopsidedly wagging their head on the couch while watching Krull...

I thought to my little self, I love this moment (which I conveyed on a misfired text message) and I wish that David were here to enjoy this.

I drove home, listening to a mix of Red House Painters songs that another lovely friend named David had given me long ago. As I pulled out onto the Valleydale exit, a streak of lightning hit near the La Quinta Inn and I found myself in darkness and a heavy rainfall. Not a great combination. The road was dark and I kept seeing sparks fly from random business signs as the lights flickered on and off in the distance. I made it home and shall now go to bed,

Around and around
(John Denver)

Time as I've known it, it doesn't take much time to pass by me.
Minutes into days, turn into months, turn into years, they hurry by me.
Still I love to see the sun go down, and the world go around.

Dreams full of promises, hopes for the future, I've had many
Dreams I can't remember now, hopes that I've forgotten, faded memories.
Still I love to see the sun go down, and the world go around.

And I love to see the morning as it steals across the sky.
And I love to remember, and I love to wonder why.
And I hope that I'm around, so I can be there when I die, when I'm gone.

I hope that you will think of me in moments when you're happy, and you're smiling.
And that the thought will comfort you on cold and cloudy days, if you are crying.
And that you'll love to see the sun go down, and the world go around, and around and around.

-covered by Mark Kozelek, Rock'n'Roll Singer

Fraggle Rock

Under smoke screen of a Bailey's Pub late night drinking session with Kristie and Daniel, sitting quietly by Adam's side, we listened to song after song roll off the satellite radio. It felt like someone was scavenging through my high school cd collection, now long hidden in a deep dark corner of my bedroom closet. At least that's the way I felt....Smashing Pumpkins, Beck, Butthole Surfers, Nirvana, Pearl Jam...

It brought out this starry eyed girl, all of these little memories, sitting in sophomore art class and listening to the LA's on "Bring Your Own Music Day" as the other kids grumbled about how they wanted to listen to Randy Travis. I thought of my first Lollapalooza, the bonfires we danced around at the frenzied end of a long, extremely exhausting day as Billy Corgan screeched and swallowed us whole into his own oblivion. Singing the lyrics to Beck's Loser in my high school bathroom, thinking I was alone, and giggles and a "you're weird", falling out of the mouth of the mighty Margie Sefton as she slammed open the end stall door. She laughed at the befuddled look on my face and told me it was true...

I was weird. I guess I still am. Sitting around with friends and discussing the beginnings and ending of our many music loves, I realize that there is so much that I regret missing out on, growing up in such a hollow small prairie town. And there are so many things that I'm glad I never found out about until later, until I was ready to appreciate. Yes, I never had MTV. I'll never see those visions in my head when I hear a song that others see. I only see those moments, late night driving moments, art all nighters at Archer, somber nights sitting on the hood of my car and watching the strange lights in the distance coming from the direction of St. Elmo...what were those anyway... I've no idea. I dream alot in these thoughts, walking through these memories like a great hall of portraits, only they are guided by a song, telling me the importance of each grating and blissful brushstoke made by Mark Kozelek, Michael Stipe, Jason Falkner, Over the Rhine.

These dark and course rounds of song, a porthole, bringing me back to myself a few minutes later down the road. I'd just seen Kelly and Josh listening to Led Zeppelin, hovered around a blazing fire in a field somewhere. I'd just been told over the top of NIN's haunting heart wrenchers that Neil Skippers loved another girl more than me. I just danced through a crowd and into the arms of my friends as Sunny Day Real Estate took the stage and heads began to sway, as Ben Folds played his piano with his stool, as Mad Richard of the Verve writhed and flailed and yowled, and as I wiped the tired tears of a long day in New Orleans away from my eyes and stretched to the top of my toes to see Elliott Smith frown his way into my heart.

Would that I were you....

I'd think the same thing too...

I'm listening to Sun Kil Moon. Leaning back to peer through the partition to make sure that no patients have wandered through the door silently. A little paranoia, when I hear the door slam across the room, down the hall, but it's just Alicia, the lab tech. Nevermind.

Carry Me Ohio
I see Kristin the Canadian's tri-shaded pink converse resting on the dashboard of my car. I see the morning drive, returning from Nashville, just as the sky turns grey and it starts to rain. We decide to get off of the interstate. I turn down a road and see a sign for the Jack Daniels distillery in Tennessee. We drive and drive down this empty fourlaned highway for a really long time. I keep looking at the clock...I've already missed English class that morning...I can miss Mass Com too.
This trip was worth it. The Mark Kozelek show from the night before, dark stage and shadowed grimace, crazy guitar fingerings and beautiful low tired voice, echoing through the speakers of the stock stereo in my honda civic, pulling the grey day into our car with a smile.

I always liked rainy days. Growing up in Brownstown, during spring showers, I would run out sans shoes and socks to saunter through the puddles pooling up on the warm asphalt road. I miss that smell. Not like the rain here in the city. There was a greenness to it, the fresh and cool and clean of a muddley puddley day.

muddley puddley...

Kristin and I never did make it to the distillery. We drove and drove and once the rain started to come down a bit harder, it's almost as if it pounded the life out of our little side trip. Pulling back out onto the interstate a little while later, we looked at each other and smiled. It was enough, this moment was enough, there would be something somewhere else on down the road, maybe something more interesting.

Mark's guitar made the wheels turn in time...the rain drumming out the changes....