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Back Home

Here in the winter I return to the center, the eye of the storm from which I was born.

It’s Christmas Eve-Eve and I’m borrowing my Mimi’s car, the sky is a little leaky and a strange color and I’m driving to some old haunts. I feel that overwhelming heaviness that is at once sweet and painful that comes when I’m back in my hometown, especially in the wintertime, especially when I’m alone. I pop out the CD in Mimi’s car and there’s a banana on it. It’s my band’s album. It strikes me that I’ve never listened to it in a car, or maybe I have but I’ve certainly never listened to it in a car alone. There’s a difference.

I play it. I rediscover it. Though I’ve lived with these songs for so long it feels like I’m listening to someone else. They feel like they come from another part of me, especially out of the context of the city, driving down roads I’ve travelled hundreds of times. I pay special attention to Back Home.

Back Home was written largely by Adrian while I was away in Seattle two years ago. He sent me a recording of it while I was gone, I came back and wrote some more lyrics for it, we strung it together then forgot about it for a year, then after much prompting from Regina and I it was resurrected.

Driving down the familiar highways and backroads and landmarks, I get the unnerving feeling it was written to be sung back to me right then and there, in the version in which it exists on our record, a live and breathing call from a tall far-away hallway, raw and unfiltered, the echoes bouncing like rocks falling in the valley between two blue ridge mountains.

After we made the record I obsessed over getting the word out, I made a display of holding it above my head like Rafiki in the damn Lion King so the whole animal kingdom could witness: “LOOK! Look at the thing I made!” but I didn’t really consume my own product. I didn’t listen to the record much. It felt too close. But on this day I press repeat again and again on Back Home, as if I hadn’t heard it a million times, as if there were a secret message to be uncoded to me through the sound of my own voice. I found myself fishing out memories that I didn’t even know were at the back of my brain. I found myself aching at the way the sun was hitting the dew on the windshield the way it did the first time I rode home half-hungover and elated and electric the morning after my first house party, found my eyes searching along the roads for familiar cars, though mostly everyone I knew here doesn’t live here anymore, and I’m shit at cars anyway so I doubt I’d recognize a familiar one if I saw it.

Late that night I am at a neighborhood bar, not the usual one because it was too crowded (IMAGINE!) and I am sitting with childhood friends at a bar. They are siblings and I am between their ages. The elder is married and has lost none of her childhood shine, she is like a human glass of champagne, all bubbles and sparkles and I feel so far and close to her at once. The younger is living a west coast mirror of my life, starting a band and cannonballing himself into the artist experience. The bar becomes busier and I am surrounded by other ghosts of high school past– those who left and ventured out into the wild blue yonder as well as those who stuck around, content to dig their roots deep into the Carolina blue.

The wild thing about this era of young adults is we all sort of know each other on a surface level thanks to our online alter egos, but I was still shocked to hear that they knew of Bandits, and so touched when they said they’d heard the record. I would never have dreamed that these folks would care about what I made or that I’d be able to talk with them so freely– in high school I was that weird brand of an introvert who wanted to be seen, a sort of self-manufactured outsider. I think I operated under the flawed assumption that I (and my small circle of comrades, my fellow misfit toys) dreamed more wildly or had more hunger to escape than my jock or popular peers. I know now how ridiculous that is. Almost everyone yearned to get out, in one way or another. Some of us did. Some of us didn’t. There’s no real right or wrong answer to how to do any of this, escape and transformation can happen right where you’re planted, but most of us need to switch up our backdrops a bit to get there. At any rate, we are all Home For The Holidays,™ and we small-town expats all find ourselves breathing similar sentiments into the simplest terms we can muster: “it’s strange to be back”.

Now it is December 27th and I am back in my Brooklyn apartment, back to an altogether different kind of ache. This is home, there is home. I found so much beauty and peace in this brief pilgrimage down south, but that moment in the car keeps whispering through these most recent memories of family warmth and best friend reunions; that private reckoning between my past and present life. Back Home, like some Ghost Of Christmas Past, emerged from its time capsule and transformed from a song about missing a lover to a song about return, about landing softly in the place that created you and taking stock of what’s gone and what’s been left behind. I’m grateful for this ghost, I think a good haunting can teach me a thing or two.

 

 

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Out of the Dark

Well, hello again.

There are a few reasons why I let this blog fade into almost nothingness. The first I guess is that it’s completely within the spine of my personality to begin a new project or idea, be excited about it, and then abandon it. Another reason is that I’ve been an avid keeper of notebooks for almost 10 years, and when that itchy habit to write strikes it usually gets pinned down in a notebook and stays there. It’s not really as natural for me to use a computer. And another reason is that the world seems to be cracking wide open and spilling over with issues that are far greater and more important than whatever I could possibly have to say. Writer’s block by way of self-deprecation.

I lost my notebook. I usually go through about 2 a year, one filled by the summer and the other filled by the winter. But my winter notebook, my little silent confidant almost filled to the brim, has completely gone MIA. Maybe someone found it on the street and is trying to make heads or tails of it. Maybe it’s at a farm upstate somewhere with all the other little runaway notebooks. Maybe it’s a bed for a rat now.  In any case, I’m mourning the loss of whatever useful thoughts or insights I haphazardly scrawled in there, and I realized that my little corner of the internet has been atrophying, and what better time to jump back in?

It’s a weird time. Everything feels shifty and oozy and a little blurred. My barista friend Rachel observed that everything feels alive. I think she’s right. There are those stagnant times where everything feels stale and a little droopy and like nothing will ever change again ever. There are those bright and crackling thrilling times where you feel new and wild eyed each day and like you’re living the life that your childhood self would cry with joy to see. Then there’s times like these. These shifty grey swirly times where everything is sort of under the surface, and you’re following the trail of breadcrumbs into the forest and have no idea where they lead and the trees are whispering to you in their own language and you’re not sure what is benevolent and what is luring you to the edge of the cliff. Or if the breadcrumb path is just endless and may lead to Nowhere.

I told my best friend Taylor about the breadcrumbs. She says the breadcrumbs will lead to amazing things. I trust her for a million reasons, especially because she is a mom now and she’s always had a good intuition but something about motherhood just bumps her up to this goddess-level magic and it’s like a have a fairy godmother who is also my same age and makes poop jokes. I hope everyone has someone like that.

Anyway, the breadcrumbs have lead me many places this year. I’ve slept in more different beds than maybe any other year in my small but rapidly lengthening lifetime. I spent the better part of a month on a floor in New Orleans in January, most of the summer in upstate New York and its surrounding neighbors, much of the fall in homes throughout the southeast, and this coming spring I’ll be who knows where bouncing about Europe because we Bandits somehow convinced a competition that we were worthy to be flown to London to record a song that we miraculously cooked up quite literally in the kitchen right before the deadline.  In between I’ve worked on a handful of new musicals and plays, many of them with cello and tow and many  of them with well-written female roles and some of them even passing the Bechdel test. When I write things out this way it makes me feel OK.

But that’s not the whole picture.  It’s been a year of crippling doubt and inspiration that has come in fits and starts. It’s been a year of making ends meet by working 3 day jobs at a time and hearing the words “you look tired” more often than ever.  It’s been a year of folks asking if I’m still an actor, of promises  and plans fallen through, of painful memories resurfacing, of disappointment and questioning and far too much comparison with other people’s stories. Of feeling like I’m on the hamster wheel watching the dangling carrot dance just out of reach. Of waking in the middle of the night to sands of an hourglass hissing through the night, of knowing there will never be enough time. 

Both of these experiences twist around each other simultaneously like some weird gordian knot, the spaces in between occupying their own worlds, this knot of mine coming into contact with everyone else’s knots and getting tangled together and fraying apart and building new knots. What a tangled web, amiright?!

I shared a video from and old Intensive Arts piece with Adrian, a mask piece for my song “Shy”. He noted that my old songs had an innocence and an optimism and a cheeriness, and now my material tends to lean a bit more towards the darkness; and when they’re not dark they’re more tough. It’s funny how as artists we can clock our changes by the work we’ve created. I think it’s lucky too. That we can look at something that came out of us at 19, then look at something that came out of us in our 20’s and say “Oh shit. This is different.” or “Oh shit. This is still me.”

There’s a relatively new Bandits song that we hardly ever play because I’m afraid it’s too moody called The Corner of Dark and Light. I’m going to try and be less afraid of it. This thought may be a post for another day, but I think I’m coming to terms with the kind of art I want to make, and I don’t think it’s pretty or clean or polished.  That’s probably why I’m drawn to Stevie and Janis lately and am slowly amassing  and cherishing comparisons to these women in writing and performance style. They understand that marriage or rawness and skill, of feminine and masculine, heartbreak and power. Corner of dark and light.

Whatever the case, I’m back to the bloglands, and to whoever is peering into this virtual notebook, thanks for canoeing with me down this stream of consciousness. Beginning again is always messy, right?