If you haven't heard this album all I can say to you is: Go. Buy. This. Album. Right. Now. Seriously guys, It's my O.K. Computer for this decade. (when I was a freshman at Guilford I made the mistake of dating a guy who graduated the year before and lived off campus who was also a huge music nerd. Maybe even worse than Jeff, my current paramour. Anyway, he hated Radiohead, and despite my (many) declarations that O.K. Computer would change music and was even more important, in a way, than Nevermind, he scoffed and blew me off.) How are you Doug Grigsby? Okay, last I heard he was accepted at Breadloaf, a very prestigious writer's workshop but whatever, he was still wrong) A long story about Ys, Jeff and I were driving to his parent's house in Egypt (read North North Raleigh) the day after we heard Joanna perform in Greensboro, where I bought the album (I wanted to buy a copy there so she would get the majority of the profit seeing as how I didn't get an advanced copy from her label, Drag City). So we put it on for the 30 minute drive to Egypt and I heard the album rendition of "Sawdust and Diamonds", the most amazingly naked and vulnerable song about the love and poetry and history and imagery about dedication and memory and desire I have, in my entire life, ever heard. It made me weep. Seriously. Not because I was sad or PMSing or upset, but because, the way weddings and graduations and births and deaths make you cry, it struck a chord so deep I didn't know what else to do. In moments of unbearable beauty, and in moments of unbearable pain we all do the same thing in different ways: we grieve. Hearing this song, I longed for closeness with my mother, and I missed my best and dearest friends, I ached for sex and drunkenness and the voices of lovers past (though, not, I can say, Doug Grigsby), I wanted to see the faces of my children, I wanted to run toward a future I could not see and believe that it would be awake and ready and willing to receive me. This song alone made me want to believe in God in a way I haven't been willing to reexamine since I read Killing the Buddha. (future post, I swear.) So, needless to say, I felt powerfully about this album. What was great, and what I haven't experienced in a long time, was that he took me seriously, Shaun did. Jeff and I have fabulous conversations about music nearly on a nearly daily basis, but whenever we get worked up about music it always devolves (or evolves, I'm sure he would say) into sex. No surprise, really, as sex and music have always been tangled inextricably from one another for me. It was amazing to have a conversation about music where someone really listened and didn't threaten to maul me. Not that I'm complaining, exactly, it's just I miss friends, you know, the people you don't have sex with after conversations like this, and I miss having these conversations you have, you know, those, that make you want to drink all night and light fireworks and dream of something bigger than yourselves.
So, I talked about Ys and I told him one of the things that made me crazy about the concert was to be forced to listen to music that was all about this one woman's passion, about being raw and open and kind of nuts and outside the box, and still sit in these wooden seats meant for assemblies in high school and not be allowed to run to the front of the stage and cry and tear my hair out and sweat next to strangers' bodies. Because I am a big believer that when you listen to live music, half the experience is standing next to fans who are just as crazy/ dedicated/ obsessed as you are and getting the desperation and essence of that crowd all over you as you stand and watch and gape at the performers who change your life. I mean, how lucky are we?
So, anyway, he promised to go home and listen to Ys which he downloaded months ago but hasn't listened to, tonight and remember that it came with my highest and most deranged recommendation. I think I've written about this before, about how when you love something and you want the people you love to love it also and in the end they don't like it or don't even bother to try it hurts you so deeply, b/c it seems like a rejection of a part of you. When I hear that people don't like Ys b/c they think it's "too cerebral" or "indulgent" I want to break something that means something to them. There is a guy who I have become friends with in the last few months, he is the Music Editor for The Independent here in Raleigh, and he speaks about Joanna Newsom in the most concise and clear terms. He told me that the reason he loves her, and the reason he loves Ys and why he chose it for his top album of 2006 (as I did) is b/c he can believe everything she says. B/c when she sings it is true. Not only do I agree with him, but I think he has hit upon what is "wrong" with music today: there is nothing wrong with it, per say, I just don't believe it.
So, tonight, what I got to do was talk to someone who buys into the power of music to change you and talk about albums that we believe.
This conversation really was two sided, I swear. We talked about the new Menomena album Friend or Foe and how neither of us have been able to remove it from our CD players/ cars/ iPods for the last two months. We talked about Radiohead and Arcade Fire too. In relation to that whole frustration at my inability to emote at the Joanna Newsom show I al
so told him about the Rachels' Sea and the Bells (and not to make all things come full circle but I first heard this album at Doug Grigsby's apartment the night he told me he could never love me because he was 1) slightly schizophrenic, 2) much older than me and thus wiser in the ways of relationships and love 3) incapable. Super fun!) and how at the Rachels' show a year or more after the whole Doug Grigsby affair, I cried and cried in the front row and the violinist of the collective came up to me after the show, as I was trying to get my shit together to drive home to Raleigh alone from the show in Chapel Hill, that he had never had a fan react the way I did, and I told him that this album ( The Sea and the Bells), only slightly embarrassed, was the soundtrack to all that was wrong in my life and the soundtrack to all that was righteous and beautiful in the world. I wish I had been able to embarrass myself at Joanna Newsom's show, but instead I was forced to sit in a chair, like a captured animal/ high schooler, vibrating with emotion, desperate to run to the front of the auditorium and feel the humidity of another person's breath on my neck, smell their heavy breath and feel hands reaching out, as mine would. And that's the thing, about music that moves you, I mean, is that inevitably you either feel clued in or incredibly left out, as I did that night seeing the Rachels. That was the album I made love to a man that would never love me. That was the album that taught me about loss and what it would mean to gain all in the same swoop.
so told him about the Rachels' Sea and the Bells (and not to make all things come full circle but I first heard this album at Doug Grigsby's apartment the night he told me he could never love me because he was 1) slightly schizophrenic, 2) much older than me and thus wiser in the ways of relationships and love 3) incapable. Super fun!) and how at the Rachels' show a year or more after the whole Doug Grigsby affair, I cried and cried in the front row and the violinist of the collective came up to me after the show, as I was trying to get my shit together to drive home to Raleigh alone from the show in Chapel Hill, that he had never had a fan react the way I did, and I told him that this album ( The Sea and the Bells), only slightly embarrassed, was the soundtrack to all that was wrong in my life and the soundtrack to all that was righteous and beautiful in the world. I wish I had been able to embarrass myself at Joanna Newsom's show, but instead I was forced to sit in a chair, like a captured animal/ high schooler, vibrating with emotion, desperate to run to the front of the auditorium and feel the humidity of another person's breath on my neck, smell their heavy breath and feel hands reaching out, as mine would. And that's the thing, about music that moves you, I mean, is that inevitably you either feel clued in or incredibly left out, as I did that night seeing the Rachels. That was the album I made love to a man that would never love me. That was the album that taught me about loss and what it would mean to gain all in the same swoop. I don't often write about music here, as it sort of subsumes my waking life. But I wanted to share with you all the good and bad that this conversation dredged up for me. Probably b/c I have been thinking about all of you often recently, and b/c I wish you all were here to talk about this stuff with. I wish it had been you, tonight. I wish.
So here are the lyrics to "Sawdust and Diamonds" by Joanna Newsom.
From the top of the flight
Of the wide, white stairs
Through the rest of my life
Do you wait for me there?
There's a bell in my ears
There's a wide white roar
Drop a bell down the stairs
Hear it fall forevermore
Drop a bell off of the dock Blot it out in the sea
Drowning mute as a rock; Sounding mutiny
There's a light in the wings
Hits this system of strings
From the side while they swing; See the wires, the wires, the wires
And the articulation In our elbows and knees
Makes us buckle as we couple in endless increase
As the audience admires
And the little white dove
Made with love, made with love: Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers
Swings a low sickle arc From its perch in the dark
Settle down Settle down my desire
And the moment I slept I was swept up in a terrible tremor
Though no longer bereft, how I shook and I couldn't remember
Then the furthermost shake drove a murdering stake in And cleft me right down through my center
And I shouldn't say so, but I know that it was then, or never
Push me back into a tree Bind my buttons with salt
Fill my long ears with bees
Praying: please, please, please, Love, you ought not! No you ought not!
Then the system of strings tugs on the tip of my wings (cut from cardboard and old magazines) Makes me warble and rise like a sparrow
And in the place where I stood, there is a circle of wood
A cord or two, which you chop and you stack in your barrow
It is terribly good to carry water and chop wood
Streaked with soot, heavy booted and wild-eyed;
As I crash through the rafters And the ropes and pulleys trail after
And the holiest belfry burns sky-high
Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision
While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue you make your first incision
And in a moment of almost-unbearable vision
Doubled over with the hunger of lions
'Hold me close', cooed the dove Who was stuffed, now, with sawdust and diamonds
I wanted to say: why the long face?
Sparrow, perch and play songs of long face
Burro, buck and bray songs of long face!
Sing: I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay
Just to lift your long face
And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave Your precious longface
And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate - why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil - why the long face?
In the trough of the waves Which are pawing like dogs
Pitch we, pale-faced and grave, As I write in my log
Then I hear a noise from the hull
Seven days out to sea
And it is the damnable bell!
And it tolls - well, I believe, that it tolls - for me!
It tolls for me!
Though my wrists and my waist seemed so easy to break
Still, my dear, I would have walked you to the very edge of the water
And they will recognise all the lines of your face
In the face of the daughter of the daughter of my daughter
Darling, we will be fine, but what was yours and mine
Appears to be a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes
But if it's all just the same, then will you say my name: Say my name in the morning, so I know when the wave breaks?
I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight
No, I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright
So: enough of this terror We deserve to know light
And grow evermore lighter and lighter
You would have seen me through But I could not undo that desire
From the top of the flight
Of the wide, white stairs
Through the rest of my life
Do you wait for me there?
ning to records with Mike, on his bed with the blue bedspread while dusk fell on Northern New York in late summer and the fireflies collected at the end of the street. It was all so beautiful we thought it would last forever and also knew it could vanish immediately. Ashing cigarettes into a Pepsi can, while night took over day, waiting for cover so we could lay on the 18th hole at the country club down the street and drink warm Budweiser in a can on the wet green grass and dream of the next day, of something better than that moment, knowing it didn’t exist. I’ll admit that for the first six days I was there I was in love with him. How could I not be? He was and still is one of the most beautiful men I know, dark and angular and all hip bones and 