Concrete Kiss (click to download)

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. - J.D. Salinger

***

This song came at the end of a long, purposeful battle of wills against myself - it was bloody, and hard-fought, and at times I was absolutely positive I was going to lose, but I did this, and I fought the good fight, and a song that began as a half-cooked idea and a melody became something more, something I’m proud of.

At this point, I should let you know how long this took me.  I began writing this song in February of last year, as a defense mechanism, of sorts, against a crisis I saw opening up and blossoming next to me, as one of my closest friends went through a personal hell that I can’t pretend to understand or empathize with.  At the time, writing about what was happening was painful to me;  I felt like I was on a recon mission, trying desperately to salvage some sort of meaning or beauty out of an utterly meaningless, ugly situation.

I was dealing with emotional rawness, and the prospect of trying to add melody and semblance of order to this rawness was scary, and I gave up, because at the end of the day it’s a lot easier to write about fictional characters.  You don’t worry about fictional characters;  you don’t lose sleep thinking about what they’re experiencing.

***

What happened between February of 2008 and December of 2009?  Did something change?

I’m not sure.  I know that God is still good, that His mercy speaks my language and the language of others, even others who have trespassed against the people I love.  I’ve seen extreme, unexpected joy invade, and it’s been unrelenting;  it’s also been conspicuously absent at times, and there have been dark places, dark thoughts that I’m not proud of.

I’m just a bystander in all this; I can’t take you on a tour of what this is like on the inside.    But I know what the last year and a half has been like from this vantage, and if this song can communicate just a bit of this, then I’m proud of it.

***

The story of the song, so to speak, is an analogy.  It’s the story of someone you love disappearing, and resurfacing as something else, something unrecognizable.  It’s an inventory of the things you’d feel, the whisper-y hurt of recognition and the knowledge of what the past does to us, how history sticks to us and makes us do and feel things we don’t understand.

It’s the story of what happens when the people closest to us change, mutate into something different.  It’s a full recognition of how we can not control what effects us, what shakes us, what makes us cry or laugh or remember.  We are powerless over memory’s pull, and this is what makes us strong.

***

Half a mile out of town
We both went underground
But only I came up

And I dug for days and days
Called you out by name
But that was not enough

I kneeled down in the sand
My head in my hands
And your blood in my veins

While I whispered to the sea
You surfaced next to me
But you didn’t look the same

Hey, I miss
Your concrete lips, your concrete kiss
Hey, I miss you now

Here’s a picture that I drew
Of the moon, the stars, and you
It’s my final testament

To the things I understand
Are now slipping through my hands
And what they represent

Oh, I hope this finds you well
I hope you’re finding hell
As welcoming as promised

Me, I got this brand-new fear
That I’m turning insincere
But at least I made you honest

***

The future won’t be the future forever; we have to believe that, we have to persevere and be assured that the future is coming, and the future will be now, and that this horrible present will be the past, and its draw on us will become weaker and weaker as the years peel over.  If that’s what keeps us going, then so be it; a tacit understanding that we will be healed of time and its fury.

To Be Alone With You (click to download)

This is a cover of a Sufjan Stevens song.  We recorded it as a small token of our gratitude to our friends for spreading the Northern District word.  Be blessed, and trust always.

maybe the price we pay for having it all “figured out”

is the knowledge that action is not only expected, but demanded

the knowledge that we, now full with that apple we plucked from the Tree

have got to find some fig leaves around here somewhere, because

there are just some parts of us that we are not

going to be putting on display

***

We were cold; and then we weren’t.  We were hurt; and then we weren’t.  We were rudderless, thoroughly lacking in direction and navigation; and then something, something unexplained and heretofore unseen, snapped into calibration inside us, snapped into place so defiantly that we felt it in our teeth.

We were useless, incapable of love, unknowing of where our destiny sprung forth from, and then, all of a sudden something, something so beautiful and deadly, click-k-k-k-k-k-k-ed and it made sense, our surroundings made sense, our world made sense.

It was the sudden burst of bright, the unpredicted flash of Technicolor, the unbelievably warm barrage of grace that had previously gone unheralded, but was now so big and so absolute that we shivered when it touched us, we felt it go through us like a surge of heat, and we could only shake like spent wires.

***

It was a night I spent in Long Island, after I ate unbelievable pasta, but before I called you from a pay phone outside of Chevy’s, it was this night in particular but really, it was a series of nights, each one jumping out from the one before it, like Russian nesting dolls - let me start over.  It was a vague collection of nights, a collection of nights that we both agreed was necessary to me “figuring it all out”, which is a term I am loathe to explain and now even more loathe to comprehend.

And I want you to know that I called you that night, and it was six different nights all finding a voice inside of me, and I had no control over that voice, but I knew all the same what that voice was going to say: “I want to come home. I need to come home.”

***

There’s some Scripture I need to quote here, and it’s from 1 Corinthians, but wait, don’t stop me yet, it’s not the one you’re thinking of, it’s not the one that gets cross-stitched onto pillows and incanted at wedding ceremonies.  This verse has nothing to do with love.

And, yet, it has everything to do with Love.

“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has ever conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.”

It was chicken-scratched on the inside cover of my sister’s bible, and I was sitting cross-legged in a park next to an abandoned swing-set and I was trying to read by the light of cars passing by, and it took several minutes, but I understood.  I read and I understood and it hit me with the force of an unplanned punch:

There is no figuring it out.

There is no point where the future becomes known to us.  It’s never clear.  The future is a shifting concept: we amble into it clumsily, and the second our toes scrape the edge of it, it becomes the present, and we’re struck with a whole new set of mysteries.  That’s the beauty of life, right there, wrapped up with a bow: you have one job in all of this, and that is to love, and to love fiercely.

***

I’d swim across Lake Michigan
I’d sell my shoes
I’d give my body to be back again
In the rest of the room
To be alone with you
To be alone with you
To be alone with you
To be alone with you

You gave your body to the lonely
They took your clothes
You gave up a wife and a family
You gave your goals
To be alone with me
To be alone with me
To be alone with me
You went up on a tree

***

So there, 3,000 miles away from warmth and familiarity and home-cooked meals and forgiveness, it clicked for me.  It swung into such a focus that I was giddy, and then solemn, and then I was buying a plane ticket home, and crying happily into a plastic restroom sink on the South end of JFK airport.

That was six years ago.  This morning, someone told me that they were waiting to do something because they hadn’t “figured out life yet”.  I chuckled, and stopped, and stared into my coffee for an uncomfortable time, because when we are presented with our past selves, we must be careful not to upset them.

***

Today, let’s love God.  Let’s cast aside worry and anxiety and five-year plans and ten-year plans and the entire concept of “figuring it all out” and “getting back on track”, let’s just accept that there is no “track”, at least not one that we can be conscious of, and let’s just love God.  Let’s quit squinting our eyes to see, and cupping our ears to hear, and racking our imaginations to plot out our futures;  let’s take God at his word and love Him.

***

For those just joining the party here at Sky Fidelity/Northern District Central, we are preparing our debut self-titled e.p.  It should be in your hands by the end of the year.  We’re just going to put it out and get right back to work, because worrying about sales and if we’re hitting the right market seems so five years ago.  We sincerely hope you enjoy our music, and that you tell your friends, but above all else, we hope that our music fits inside you.  We’re not sure precisely what that means, but we’re working on it.

We Don’t Need Our Arms Anymore (click to download)

“The point of a story can penetrate far deeper than the point of any bullet.” - Lawrence Nault

***

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love telling stories.  I’ll retell plots of entire movies, describe my day to wide-eyed near-strangers over hissing cups of coffee, and reenact entire random conversations for those unfortunate enough to get stuck in conversations with me.

This is how I’ve always been.  Trying to change that now would be like trying to learn to write left-handed - it would run concurrent to my nature.

***

I have a collection of personal stories that I will recount for anyone, whether they ask or not.  These stories have evolved and mutated over the years, and the details have grown legs and began walking around.  There’s the story of how I almost ruined a wedding because of how unprepared I was to give a speech.  The story of when I saw two near-nude, fully-drunk men at a midnight showing of “The Goonies” in Santa Cruz. (They were a drum-guitar duo, and they were screaming loudly about “the real [expletive] Goonies.”)  The story of when me and my friend spent nearly an hour carefully and precisely dismantling/disparaging my roommate’s girlfriend in (loud) conversation, only to find that my roommate was laying in bed, quietly listening.

(I told that one to Adrian the other day, and he laughed.  I don’t feel nearly as bad about that one as I used to.)

There’s also the story about driving all day to Palm Springs with an engagement ring in my pocket, trying to control my breathing and preparing to trip headlong into adulthood.  The story of finding a 12 year-old boy in the middle of a field, unconscious and blue-lipped. (He’s OK.)  The story of watching as an entire community slowly got their hearts broken by one person, and how it felt to stand there, helpless, and watch the lame stay lame and the blind grope for the doorway.

***

As songwriters, we are to do more than collect fancy words and bundle them together with melody.  We are to establish narrative, and tell the story.  Is there a time when you felt useless, a time when you felt afraid, a time when you saw someone crumble next to you?  Tell the story.

One of the many valuable things I learned about songwriting from my friend Cameron is the virtue in being intentional.  For the first ten years of my songwriting career, I would sit down with paper and pen and a guitar, and try and will words on to the page, through the sheer force of vocabulary and memory.  It wasn’t until I began co-writing with Cameron that I learned to do things on purpose. Figure out the story you want to tell, and then tell it.

***

This song is a demo from the second, largely-unrecorded record from my old band, the Fair Saints.  After I had written the story (based on a short, uneventful conversation I had with a 65 year-old receptionist as I was waiting in line for the ATM), the five of us sat in a church library and created this.

What I remember about this particular night is how miserable I felt, how the process of recording had already drained life out of me, how I couldn’t wait to go home and go to sleep.  For this song, we played it all together, meaning (almost) no overdubs, meaning someone kept messing up, and that someone was me, from what I can recall.  This take was recorded sometime between 11:30 and 1 in the morning.

Jeremy Taylor played drums.  Chris Pedro played bass.  Jonathan Meek played glockenspiel and shaker.  Mike Mittelstedt played guitar and recorded it.  I sat in a chair and tried my best to not fall apart.

***

Joan in advertising
Is so antagonizing
She just wants to see you crack
And you’re beholden to
The young whores in the steno pool
And they just smile behind your back

Ah, you hear those flash bulbs pop
Your memory’s a train your bones alone can’t hope to stop
It just goes on…just goes on:

We don’t need our arms anymore
They don’t belong anymore
We don’t need our arms anymore

Bring me the head of Julie
She made you feel so foolish
She pointed out your stocking run
And oh, the strength it takes
To wait until your coffee breaks
To lose it all and curse the setting sun

Ah, you hear those flash bulbs pop
Your memory’s a train your bones alone can’t hope to stop
It just goes on…just goes on:

We don’t need our arms anymore
They don’t belong anymore
We don’t need our arms anymore

Ah, you hear those flash bulbs pop
Our lives are hurricanes our bones alone could never stop
They just roll on…just roll on

I don’t need my arms anymore
I’m not writing songs anymore
I don’t need my arms anymore
They don’t belong anymore

***

I love songwriters who can tell a story.  Some of my favorite song/stories are “This Year” by the Mountain Goats;  “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” by Sufjan Stevens;  “The Temptations of Adam” by Josh Ritter;  “King of the Jailhouse” by Aimee Mann;  and “Right in the Head” by M. Ward.  Give a listen to any of these, and see what I mean - these are living, breathing narratives;  they draw us in to a world unlike ours.

The Protestant (Click to Download)

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. - 1 Corinthians 13:11

***

I didn’t want to grow up, but I had to.

That’s the case with everyone, or at least everyone I know - we were all plunged, feet-first, into this sort-of pretend adulthood that trembled and glowed with artificiality.  We learned which drinks we liked and which drinks we were supposed to like, we learned how to balance checkbooks and how to tie down furniture while moving it across town.

But it wasn’t enough to make us adults; it made us pretenders.  We might’ve had suits and ties, but we didn’t look right in them.  For all of us, it took specific things to nudge us towards true, unbridled experience.

For our Narrator, what it takes is one winter night in an unfamiliar city with a woman who he thinks he knows.  Up to this point, he’s mimicked the steps beautifully; he’s paid for a hotel room, successfully navigated room service fees, and has managed to not turn into a total wreck in front of his companion.

But she either says or does something (what it is, it’s not clear, and not horribly important), and when she leaves to check the score of the previous night’s Braves game, he finds himself falling apart.

***

Oh, it was a four star night
At a two star hotel
And we toasted the new year
And prayed that hell wouldn’t swallow us whole

And you sketched me the outline
Of a complicated dream
And then left for the lobby
Looking for coffee and news on the home team

And I sat upright
In the bed and cried
And resolved to myself to turn into
A better man
By the time you got back

And you left your key on the dresser
So I sat still and listened for you
And I felt myself gasping and choking
It was morning and something was new

And I left CNN on the TV
And I picked up our plates and our trays
And I straightened the sheets and the pillows
And Ikneeled there and silently prayed

We ate breakfast and we said goodbye
And Phoenix shone like a dirty jewel
As I watched from my seat in the sky

***

I wrote this song last December. The minute details of a hotel room tryst ruined by sudden knowledge of impending adulthood sounded like something I wanted to explore, and I wanted it to be epistolic: a written remembrance of the exact moment our Narrator realized he was a child acting like a man, addressed to the woman who elbowed him into this particular crisis.

I explored and found myself enchanted by this idea.  Then, after approximately two weeks of obsession, promptly abandoned it.  You see, songwriters are fickle beasts.  We chase down our muses, wring them dry, and leave for something brighter, something louder, something new.

But what happens when songs fight their way back?  When they rise from the grave, hack their way through the underbrush of our haggard psyche, and present themselves as contenders?  Do we ignore them, or do we give in to them?  Does giving in to them make us weak, or does it simply mean that we are tuned into the heartbeat of what we create, of what we’ve forged from our footsteps?

Or does it simply mean that we’ve experienced wicked writer’s block, and that we’ve found ourselves deeply terrified, recently, that this “deep pool of songs” is drying up, that we’re losing touch with what makes us tick, that we are - gasp - out of ideas?

***

It might be a little bit of both.

***

(If, at one point during this recording, it sounds like Rachel and I are under attack by millions of tiny little paratroopers…

…it’s only because God brought the rain as we sat out on my back porch and recorded this song.)

Jesus Shall Reign (written by Isaac Watts; arr. by A. Wolfe/D. Walker) (click HERE to download)

A little context is needed, please.

***

I have found myself, on more than one occasion, thinking that thought. A little context is needed, please.

I’m in Tujunga, CA, and I’m desperately looking for a cup of coffee, and I find a tiny coffee shop located in between a meat market and an Irish bar, and I walk in, and I quickly see that I am one of two people in the coffee shop. The other is a teenage girl behind the counter, who is listening to her headphones and sobbing quietly to herself.  She takes my order without saying a word.  I walk out without saying a word.   A little context is needed, please.

I’m waiting at a taqueria for a friend, but my friend never comes, and I realize that it’s completely possible that I have the wrong day, and this is during a period of my life where I’m constantly forgetting important details, and I’m a little embarrassed, and I leave the taqueria without getting anything.  As I walk around the corner to retrieve my car, I pass a police officer and a (presumably) homeless gentleman. The homeless gentleman is protesting something, and I walk by just in time to hear him say, “you don’t get it, man.  I saw her break the window.  Why would I lie to you?”  A little context is needed, please.

I wake up depressed, and spend most of the day depressed, and find myself at an IHOP with a friend that night.  He’s telling me about the horrible, unforeseen life change that is being thrust upon him, and it’s genuinely painful to comprehend the hurt and loss he’s getting ready to embark on.  I leave the restaurant, and cry softly to myself, in my parked car, for a half-hour.  I get home and tell my wife that traffic was horrible, but she sees my red eyes.  A little context is needed, please.

***

We thirst for context, because it sharpens our perspective and, sometimes, narrows our focus, and we like feeling sharp and focused.  We like knowing the peripheral details attached to certain situations that we wander into - without those details, we’re rudderless, and we don’t understand, and we feel like we’re a foreigner in a strange land.

The wisest decision I ever made was to start to pay attention to context, to stop relying on my wit and instinct and to start asking questions. How does this make you feel?  Why do you think you’re scared of this?  What would you lose if you did this?

(there are days where I wish that people would demand some tough answers from me; those days are perfectly counter-balanced by the days where I wish everyone would get out of business and leave me alone)

***

I’d like you to hear this hymn.  It’s by Isaac Watts.  A few months ago, a dear friend, Andrew Wolfe, sat down with me and helped me rearrange it.  Almost immediately after, he left for Canada, and it’s hard for me to play this song without hearing his voice singing it.

Jesus shall reign wherever the sun
Does his successive journeys run
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore
’Til moons shall wax and wane no more

To Him shall endless prayer be made
And praises throng to crown His head
His Name like sweet perfume shall rise
With every morning sacrifice

Blessings abound wherever He reigns
The prisoner leaps to lose his chains
The weary find eternal rest
And all the sons of want are blessed

Let every creature rise and bring
Honors unrivaled to our King
Angels descend with songs again
And earth repeat the loud amen

Jesus shall reign…

***

May we be listening more and speaking less, may we search without ceasing and find satisfaction in the searching, may we be willing to look for context, even if it may lead to discomfort or suffering.  May we be people who hunt out secrets in each other, who demand and receive authenticity, even when it’s not convenient or easy to deal with.  May we not be people of one-word answers, and may we never be satisfied with the one-word answers of others.  May our obsession with numbers and statistics be completely and thoroughly ravaged by our need for substance and truth.