Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Old Songs Revisited

Autumn is a time when a dangerous emotion tends to sneak and coil into my musings: nostalgia, that old seductive euphemism for loss and regret. Maybe it's the quality of the slanting yellow light, the sudden chill in the air and the scent of woodsmoke in the evenings. Fall is such a wistful season.

Digging through boxes still left unpacked with Denny this past weekend, I discovered some very embarrassing early attempts at song-craft, visions of teenaged cliched angst too awful and humiliating to be reprinted here. Tonight though, on a break from recording new material for my full-time project, I found myself playing some other songs of a more recent vintage, folk songs I had written for prior bands, and myself, at the turn of this last decade. Many of them are admittedly just as awful as the fifth-grade radio-metal imitations, and in hindsight I find myself very glad to be expressing myself instead through instrumental music, poetry, and photography/film these days.

Five years is a long time, and though I'm still young, I find my singing voice (which I've never cared for in the least) has changed quite a bit since these songs were written. Gone is much of the Oberstian whining, replaced with a hoarse, huskier tone. I suppose this reflects everything that has changed in the past five years of my life. These songs are lived-in in a way they weren't before, as fresh, painful gashes. And the lyrics are just too personal to share on an Internet blog, or anywhere.

When I moved to Raleigh in 2008, in the wake of an aborted college career and an emotionally turbulent relationship, I was adrift and an outsider. Looking back on the lyrics of these songs, they're confrontational and angry in a way that shocks and saddens me now. I didn't realize as a vitriolic, outspoken twenty-four year old that all that seething was masking some serious fear, a serious sense of isolation. These songs pine nakedly for a Boone that was even then vanishing, for a love that was never the right combination of personalities to last, for a youth that was as impermanent as late spring snowfall and just as tempestuous. These songs lash out at everyone around me at the time, at a new town that didn't feel like home and where I didn't feel accepted, and at my own mistakes. I didn't realize that I was the one cutting myself off, retreating on my own terms, withdrawing from the world.

Having found a partner and a love again, seeing more success than frustration at last with music, all that fear and rage seem very foreign to me. These are bitter, unpleasant songs, lyrics that poured out of me like automatic writing, that I didn't analyze for content at the time but which now speak pretty deeply to who I was circa 2008-2010. I simply hadn't remotely figured out who I was yet.

The process continues, of course.

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A final thought - something strange occurred to me driving back late to Burlington from elsewhere last night. This city shuts down quite dramatically at 5PM on weeknights; the traffic lights downtown turn to flashers and the streets empty as if by some wicked magic. I came to this conclusion:

Burlington is a part-time apocalypse.


ZC

Thursday, September 12, 2013

October Country

This is the time of year in Burlington when the days remain as hot as July's worst sweltering waves, but the nights are suddenly crisp and cool, a sort of first glimpse of the autumn lurking just over the edge of the calendar. At night in our upstairs bedroom with the windows open, the rich tang of burning fields carries on the gentlest breeze. A hint of woodsmoke and an imagined season of axes in blackened stumps and hot cider around campfires. Halloween is already lingering in the slanting yellow light, the darkening air of our patch of North Carolina.

Driving to Charlotte a couple of nights ago for a show, it occurred to me how vast and empty the highways in our state tend to be. None of the narrow serpentine curves and headlong traffic of the northern cities, just endless vistas of fields with the occasional neon sign sprouting on steel legs above a cluster of pines. Maybe it's that touch of sadness that creeps in with the coming fall, the lingering traces of bittersweet nostalgia in the atmosphere, but our interstates seemed to me lonely roads trailing off into the ether, a compass point reached and not returned from.