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.
