Dated September 2, 2007 2 or 3pm
Somewhere in the air between here and there
(to be read as if one were reading Dr. Seuss)
These Days we're lit by lightning
Thin lines of light
These days we're lit by lines of
Sharp white
Shock white
Ice hard cold white light
I wrote those lines about 18 years. We recorded it when we first formed Counting Crows but never really played it again. I still actually like that song. I never used it because I was kind of ripping off Peter Gabriel when I was singing it. Now that I think about it, I was sort of ripping off Rickie Lee Jones too. There's a line in "Traces of the Western Slopes" on Pirates where she sings "There's a thin thread of light that keeps you stranded…" That one's a little further off, although that was, and is, one of my favorite records and I definitely owned it then and had listened to it a million times when I wrote the words to "Lightning". And it just occurred to me: isn't there a line at the end of The Glass Menagerie about lightning? Jesus, was I ripping off Tennessee Williams too? I gotta look that up when I get home tonight. Anyway, those are the natural perils of being a young writer. You tend to write what you know is good because you already heard someone else do it. You don't realize it when you're just stating out, but I certainly knew it by the time we went to record "August and Everything After" so I never even considered "Lightning" or many of the other songs you've heard bootlegged in demo form over the years as candidates for the album.
Wow. I got really off topic there. I'm sitting on a plane from Minneapolis to Newark and I was thinking of those lines because we did a photoshoot last week and all through it I kept thinking how much my life in retrospect feels like the moments captured on all the Polaroids I kept looking at. It's just this series of flashes, isn't it? You wander around in the dark and then there's this flash and something gets caught in the light like a trap. Flash. A memory. Flash. A birthday. Flash. A series of chords on the piano. Flash. She laughs. Flash. A girl in a yellow hat. Flash. A sly smile at the door and a green dress. Flash. Something you should have kept.
There was this Australian band called The Apartments. I don't know how I heard of them. I probably read about them in Mojo or something. I don't know. Anyway they made this album called A Life Full of Farewells. It's always stuck with me. The first song is called "Things You'll Keep". The chorus is "The things you keep/Some things you were never meant to lose".
How do we make the same mistake over and over again? How come we never learn? God, the things people throw away in their life…as if everything was so replaceable. Why do I keep saying "We"? Obviously I mean "Me". When I think of all the things I let slip through my fingers over the years, precious things I should have held onto…I don't know. It just all seems so stupid.
Maybe that's just growing up. When you're young, you tell yourself things like "Well, if it didn't work out, it wasn't meant to be" as if that actually meant something just because it sounds like it does. I think you can say something like that so blithely because you expect to stumble onto something else just as wonderful just around the next bend in the road. But people are rare perfect unique things and just because everyone really does live a life full of farewells doesn't mean you shouldn't at least realize what it really means to say goodbye to something that meant everything. Just because you WILL survive and get over it doesn't mean you should let it go.
Anyway, I let something go the other day. I actually didn't have much choice in the matter by the time it actually happened. By that time, someone else was making the decisions. Perhaps I should say "I was let go", as if I just lost my job at that damn video store again.
Still, there were so many things I could have done better. I know, I know. Hindsight, right? But it's funny how most of the time it all really turns on the smallest mistakes. So often it's just these little moments where if you had just done one small thing differently, the world would be a different place. The breeze would smell like her hair and the sky would be the color of the dress she was wearing because the whole world always seemed to turn the color of the dress she was wearing.
Except it doesn't anymore. The sky is just blue. I'm in a cab on the way to my house from Newark Airport now and the sky over Manhattan is a perfect bright blue. I guess that's not so bad. Even after all that, it's still a lovely day and the sky is still a bright shade of blue. September is newborn so I guess summer is over and autumn is here. I tend to like the fall, especially here at home in New York. My summer was a kid's dream. I fell in love, the sky changed colors every day, we played shows on baseball fields, and, for the first time in a long time, it all seemed to come together. All this "new" somehow made the "old" make sense again.
There are prices you pay for the kind of dreams that came true for me. If you're not careful, you can just let it become "a life full of farewells". To a certain extent, no matter what you want to do, you've always gotta leave town and move on, just by the nature of the job, so you need to be careful to do the things you have to do to keep the things you're supposed to keep. And even then…even then, you make mistakes. And if only you'd done one, two, maybe three things differently…
But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe just knowing there were places you could have changed it is enough, at least for today. Because loss doesn't kill you the way despair does. If you know you could have done something better or something different, maybe you WILL do something different next time.
Or the time after that.
Maybe that's enough, since you still come home to a blue sky and a fall full of possibilities.
I'm sorry I didn't write more this summer. Aside from all the other stuff, there was also the matter of finishing and putting together all the materials for these TWO albums we have coming out this year. I have good friends who are journalists who've been around Counting Crows since the beginning. They're better writers and much better qualified and normally one of them would have written the liner notes for the "August…" Deluxe Edition but they both had books of their own coming out this fall so I ended up having to write everything myself.
Ugh.
Actually, it was very cool to get a chance to re-visit all that craziness from the perspective of all this time that's passed since then. It really gave me a different view of it all. It was a lot of work though, on top of all the other shit.
Anyway. With my life being so full, I never even got around to writing an issue of
Down The Rabbit Hole Magazine this summer and I didn't seem to have an urge to write many diary entries so I didn't. I hope the few voicemails I left got ya by.
What am I talking about? A lot of you came out to see us this summer. That was probably a lot better than a voicemail.
It felt good to play this summer. It felt like we were reborn. We dug up so many old songs and ripped the shit out of them, we played long sets, we played the new songs with passion and we decided early on to play things before we really knew how to play them. We'd run them once or twice in soundcheck and then play them that night at the show. When you don't know for sure what you're supposed to play you have to REALLY play music. You can't just stand around and play a part you've played a thousand times before. You have to go out their with your bandmates and play music. It's a tightrope and you have to walk it.
Spend a summer on a tightrope sometime. That is all the right jazz.
I missed the first Cal game of the season last night. I saw the first half on TV but I had to go onstage at halftime so I missed the second half. I was worried it would be a crap show because I thought I was going to be distracted (look, I love my Golden Bears but I don't want to suck on stage for ANY reason). It was a good show though.
I had a really nice interview with Jon Bream of the Minneapolis Star Tribune the other day and, in his review of the show, he said he thought parts of it were a bit self-indulgent. He was probably right. He seemed like he got me in the interview and he seemed like he got the show in his review. It might have been a little indulgent. I definitely went off on some tangents in places. It didn't suck though (and, just so you don't misunderstand, he didn't say it did). It was real and emotional and I felt really good about it because I mostly just want it to be real and emotional and sometimes you have to wander around to find something real. It DOES, however, mean all of YOU are sometimes stuck trying to follow me around while I wander which, while maddening at times, is (hopefully) at least never boring. I actually liked the review. He appreciated the cool parts of the concerts and was certainly within his rights (as are all of you) to be a bit impatient with me looking around for whatever the hell I'm looking around for when I'm spending all that time during some endless version of one of our songs looking around for something. Still, that's a Counting Crows show. Whatever else you may say about it, it is definitely happening right there in front of you and not back in some rehearsal space where we practiced what we were going to play for you ahead of time so that we could get it right and do it the same way every time. No doubt, THAT theory of how to approach a concert comes with its pluses and minuses. You already know what they are.
Anyway, we have three days off before Toledo so a lot of us decided to go home today. I've got a lot of hotel rooms in my future for the next few years and, at least for now while I'm still getting used to being alone in them again, I've had enough of them for now. So I went home too and the cab is just about to pull up in front of my place. The sky is still blue, I got to spend the summer in love, this should be a pretty fucking exciting year, and, in the end, home is still home and home is still here.
Oh yeah, and Cal kicked the shit out of Tennessee last night (said with all due respect to the Vols and their fans, since they were all really nice and cool when we were in Knoxville last year and they were busy kicking the shit out of us) and that means, even if I couldn't be there, that all is still right with the world (for a little added bonus, fucla put their boot so far up stanfurd's ass yesterday that the rest of them probably went with it, likely resulting in the first of many personal colonoscopies for the oh-so-deserving cardinal and an up-close-and-personal view of where we're going to put our boot when we play them for the bruins).
I am, as ever, a sore winner.
See you soon, often, and for a very long time to come.
ad
ps. Speaking of Tennessee:
---for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura---and so goodbye….
T.W. The Glass Menagerie, 1944