Volume III: "Sideways Kiss"

People have changed over the last decade.  Of course they always do, always have and will, but this time it's discernible to me and you, which is what makes it relevant.  The changes feel urgent - the downward gazes, the blue glow, the painful fingers, the waning confidence, the lack of immunity, the dullness in the eyes, the chemical haze.

Their attention has been funneled into another dimension, one so carefully and corporately fabricated as to reel you in instantly once its hook is in you.  The violence of the digital age is apparent in things like video games whose purpose is to simulate the mass murder of prostitutes, soldiers, and other innocents.  It is just as evident, however, in the eyes of the forlorn, those lost with and without technology in the palms of their hands.  For if you succumb to the age of re-connection and let your previous lives fade with the beauty of the analogue, then you will find yourself just as alienated as those with paper novels in their hands and dirt under their fingernails.  They can't get in touch with anybody in person, and you can't tear your eyes off of a tiny space between your hands.

Are you in this world, or are you in your mind alone?

Can you be touched, or loved?


Do you exist?

Volume III: "Into The Cold Quiet"

It is so difficult to play in the quiet.  Silence - languid, natural, holy - is broken only by other natural forces, or human interference.  When you are on the unnatural side of the fence, things get weird, and stay that way.  We played loudly and extensively without much consideration for our surroundings for many years, and we have the albums and muscles to show for it.  In the long shadow of summer, we are now paying back our former neighbours - or are they paying us back?  We recorded our first album in a cabin and the silence in the woods was like warm clay in our white-noise-damaged ears.  Sitting on our rooftop between takes on a cold still lake, I felt a tragic post-modern pain in my ear drums.  Silence.  We went back and recorded another album there a year later, had some more natural realizations, and then forged ahead at drilling ourselves to write, record, be inspired, and make art that nobody sees.  During those few weeks alone in the forest, depriving ourselves of sleep to adhere to self-imposed deadlines, our music overpowering us, I began to discover what I am meant to be.  Years later, by the sea, I discovered where I am meant to be.  Wherever I am.

I ran off into obscurity when I was 18 and have spent the last decade meandering my way out.  I figured I was an artistic expeditionary.  That's why I skipped out on my formal education to spend hours alone pouring over old literature in university libraries and writing verses that have never seen the crack of dawn.  That's why people of this sort don't keep many friends.  That's why we struggle to find the right medium for our message.   When there is more than one message, we risk drowning in media and must struggle to keep our heads above water so that we can go on learning and giving.  We go through bouts of socialization and never really connect with anybody closely.  We give and they take, and it's rarely measured or balanced.   Since I've found the pathway out of adversity I am following it, but like the silence above the trees it almost hurts.  It is too pure.  Too simple.  I rest assured with the knowledge that in the great scheme of things I know very little, but it's tough when I've got such a strong feeling tugging on my heart.  It says, 'trust yourself,' and I take its advice.  Today is another day, the same as yesterday and different from tomorrow.

The future is the only thing in front of us.

Volume III: "Put Your Face In It"

We took off down the road - literally and figuratively - and hours later saw a pick-up truck with a teetering toy horse on back of its otherwise unexceptional silver body.  The mist, and the grey, and the haunted rocking of that toy horse forth and back warded away all other ghosts while it alone left us transfixed.   I took some video of it and took stock of life as a pony.  The delirium of the faded daylight and the master key wore on our minds.  Talking blues.  Jesus Christ in his grave.  The yellow snippets of ground beneath our feet through a hole in the bottom of the car.  And we drove on.

Existentially speaking, I am rightly aware of my status in this universe as I am unaware, knowing that any awareness arising from certitude cannot be true awareness.  Or so I am told.  We trust that those above us have the knowledge and tenacity to solve all our problems while we wonder if they even exist?  Wondering aloud in the car, I recall asking "Where are we going?  Are we headed straight or are we headed up?  Are we making the whole trip together?"  What whole trip?  With nothing to speak of you are without pride, and its opposite.  You notice something in their eyes as you gaze, when they lock with yours.  You notice these moments.  These are transfers of electricity, and not always mundane - they can in fact be quite heavenly.  I am no better a judge than you are.  I just do.  

We arrived at our first show, a concert in a loving sense, a warm heaving log cabin packed to the brim with friends and familiars, and a lot of heart.  Things were soft and welcoming, a haven from the cold blue dejection of solo sets in empty campus bars, where Ryan shook as he played his songs knowing he would forever do better.  I sat and I watched and listened and jumped up for a song or two, to sing or play organ or glockenspiel or drums.  But not really.  I was a shell, a pretend artist whose real self had not yet climbed out of the hole in its head.   I played, but without a clue.  In hindsight I can see that the impetus was pure passion and I have no regrets, but at the time I felt like a grizzled underdog rather than an eager young musician.  I was an old hag doing it for reasons relating to past lives.   Ryan took a real step back - several, in fact - from the glory of a well-oiled music scene and audiences of hundreds back down to scratch.  His confidence just grew and my own dissolved ever so gradually, but when you feed off of each other it's difficult to stay too far apart.  I had always been a supporter of music and continued to back things up, but something was missing.  So we chose a band name and I chose to commit myself to something greater than hundreds of unseen poems and stories.  If not something greater, then something more challenging to access.  It's like a taxidermy raccoon - adorable at turns but vaguely unholy.  I sit and stroke its fur, and wonder.  Wait.   Sure I've been angry, but we so has everybody else!  It ain't healthy but it is human code.

The love in that room, that very first show, outweighed all cold dead animals combined.  The comments of encouragement left me stunned.  I am good at the things I am most compelled to do?   How did I hit such a stroke of luck, to be washed down a clear bright stream of inspiration?  And why do I question it so?   After that first Oh Bijou show, and a few more, after few really solid drummers in town said I played some cool rhythms (though I didn't believe them and thought that I had just given the most terrible performance and I felt inadequate as a drummer, as a girl), after my friends whose ceaseless words of real urgency - YOU SHOULD DO IT - kept me going for several years, we became something.  An entity that existed in a dimension just askew of our current one.  After we recorded a bit more, and Ryan continued mastering local bands' outputs, and I continued meandering through the metaphysical, we met a lot of people.  Hundreds and hundreds of really cool people, musicians, (tattoo) artists, bar owners, stylists, shop owners, photographers, doctors, community activists, civil servants, street people, and so many hippies in the finest sense.  Our first show onstage together may have several been years before, 2004, I think, at the Rivoli, again to a full room.  My fear and my utter lack of appreciation of the beauty of a warm heaving room full of bodies haunts me still, and karmic penance is most certainly being paid.  At night (and some days) I witness a vortex of shows past, from the perspective of an audience member and a performer alike, Ryan's shows with Jim Guthrie, Wintersleep, The Constantines, the Arcade Fire, and By Divine Right.  Myself with Pere Ubu, and Rockets Red Glare, and as a spectator (whether onstage and stupefied looking out or on the floor and awestricken looking up) at too many shows to count.  The life in those smiling faces in the crowd, the applause, the silence, the growing mutual respect.  The packed, breathing rooms.  Living breathing rooms. The undue inadequacy we felt, the way that our fear overrode our love, or vice versa (I still cannot figure out which).   The bizarre life form in which our music together took shape.  As the years have ticked on and our inspiration increased exponentially I have channelled something that leads me straight down those yellow lines on a road that exists only in my mind.  I know where I am headed - as much as anybody can - and I recall it fondly.  There are warm reassurances and writhing screaming bodies in ecstasy waiting for me there, in the past, in a bathtub filled with endless cups of coffee.

Let them turn you down

Let them switch you around

For a better view

Let them turn off the sound

Let the hot lights burn down

Onto a stage in front of no crowd

This song is for you.

Volume III: "New Blood"

It has been a long time since I attempted to articulate anything of importance in any mass medium, but every time I do it fires back karmically so I might as well.  There is nothing but truth and light in me most of the time.  Expelling your demons through the written word, song, dance, film, conversation, insinuation or stimulation is always going to backfire somehow.  You can't throw a hat at a horse without him bucking back out of the way and kicking dust up in your face.  

Two years ago I was in the throes of self-realization.  The labour pains of real artistic expression.  My earliest outputs as a child were little songs, much like any other little child's songs; dark, melodic, innocent.  Once my brother and I had a tape recorder the ditties multiplied, tiny Dylan and Ginsberg collaborations in children's voices.   Born 10 days apart, we sang, the songs slipping like mercury into the abyss of stolen memories, tapes in the trash, inspiration brushed under the rug for the first time.  Two years ago I was riding high on the ecstasy of mastering a physical feat and a mental one - performing on drums.  I wanted to be a drummer since I first heard Keith Moon on my father's car tape deck when I was 8.  I wanted to be a man but didn't know it yet.   A woman doing a man's work is often called a man.  The question is, what really is a man's work?  There are genetic and cosmic answers to that one that I will not delve into at this time.  I took two decades just to begin looking for those answers.  

I heard this drumming and continued listening but never spoke of it again until high school.  I had some nice creative friends who encouraged me and somehow I got derailed onto acoustic guitar, a drum for the fingers and the soul.  During my finest summer of punk rock excess - maybe it was 10 years ago - as I coasted on separation anxiety and psychedelic candy and far too much beer, I spoke of it again.  This time, it had an effect.  I had friends in bands and I was an avid supporter of real artists, especially the ones I met personally; I could not turn my back on them.  They were for me alone to bolster, as I saw their struggles as clearly as their gains.  As clearly as my favourite drummers' sinewy movements translated into beautiful music, I saw my favourite songwriters' pain, deep and often successfully buried beneath years of empty promises.  I knew that pain, all twisted up in my heart.  It mirrored and mingled with my own.  They gave me chances and encouragement, the likes of which I had never foreseen.  I was used to working against the grain, pushing everybody's fur the wrong way and combing my hair upside-down.   My hunger for art became so strong during that decade that I left everything and everyone I knew behind to search for what I knew I was missing - everything and everyone I knew and loved.

Throughout it all I have written, pen on paper, and have maintained and distilled every word I've ever expressed in ink.  During school, I was 'the writer' in the 99th percentile.  The alto who could always sing on pitch.  My teachers never let me down - only vice versa - and I have nothing but deep gratitude for their insight, the look in their eyes when they told me I was special, and I believed them.  In my youth it was their stimulation combined with my family life that made me who I am - a quiet, haunted person who loves, and loves to write and sing and play instruments.  By the time my rock'n'roll lifestyle came into being I was awash in notebooks full of rhythmically perfect poetry without much worldly insight.  I was on the cusp of something but hadn't matured enough yet to let it out in front of an audience.  I had the opportunities and the friendships to support it, but I couldn't get up onstage - it was the ultimate anxiety.  School was left behind in favour of a post-secondary study of faith in art.  Not until I met and vowed to partner with the most artistically advanced and spiritually talented person I had met did I find my way into the conduit.  Together we created, my words finding their homes in someone else's music, and my manual dexterity lending itself to something important, greater than me.

Two years ago I began to hear my own voice - literally and figuratively - for the first time.  I would sit alone for weeks or months on end, singing, writing, playing guitar, and hearing every little bit of myself.  Astonishing myself and feeling that child-like awe that is so elusive to adults, and so wondrous.  Yes, I had begun to master the rhythm of performance in front of an audience, but this was different.  Singular.  My partnership became both stronger and intentionally less central to my universe.  My connection to some great force of energy, unseen and given many names,  intensified.   I had become a songwriter.  It was a mostly logical advancement, but by no means anti-climactic.  It was huge.  This was that energy I felt when I heard that music in the car as a child, that driving blues, that darkness masked in so much light, that light comprised of real pure truth.  Just guttural sounds swirling about in a beauteous way, anchored by poetry of the heart.  My life became a series of rhythms that - to this day - I still cannot fully predict or control.  Some of them are universal, too powerful to argue with, and strong enough to sweep you up and carry you away if you open your mind wide.  

Volume II: "Dream Weaving"

why did dex quit smoking weed?  was his proclivity toward astral realization so great that it outweighed his lead foot in samsara?  a heavy buddy holly-clad foot that, when nude, floated up from florida like a feather.  where the sun shines and ages.  did those premonitory dreams trigger such gut-rippling discoveries as a costume-clad sea monster splashing about like a baby bear, leaping off of black rocks and bringing everyone joy?  there is really nothing so bad about joy that can't be remedied by more joy.

the innocence inside that sea-bear costume brought my feral dream spirit to mind finally, after so many years of longing and trying not to want.  perhaps dex was wearing a costume, too, and perhaps now he's taken it off.

the sea-bear has visited me on a few occasions, rare evenings that have brought about my own mild projections and potent memories of other dimensions.  tufts of reddish fur are no match for fiery war scenes and other things i'm not inclined to dream about, so i leave it to him while i sit here seeing sun spots.

maybe the heat got to him - the steady burn that i feel down below.  an exuberant spirit bear brought me the visionary knowledge i needed to feel love - to feel his love.  to give.  i rode determined into the east on horse-back and dismounted only when i reached the shore.

no visions of oil sands or eerie basements or desert battles.  no fire, no icy fingers and voices.  just innocent eyes and purply-red fur.  just a little more love to go around.  who am i to tell him that he should stay away from those pills?  we all have vices.

the fewer, the better. 

Volume II: "Little Bit"

forgive what you get because you won't be able to get anything more.  let live those you love and there won't be a lick of space left inside your heart.  it'll fill up and spill onto your shoes, and instead of jumping out of the way you will let it sink in.  let their blood mix with yours and let it reclaim its place in you, long-lost and heart-felt.

Volume II: "Plan Accordingly"

there are limitless paths to enlightenment

and they all meet up somewhere either in the beginning

or the end, an infinite loop

it is better to get better than to give up.

is it better to be wiser than to give up?

like a cat staring down another

transfixed forever or until it is too late

to look in another direction

and another another

they start repeating and then you recognize

that you are spinning and all that has passed 

will pass again

we are light transporting rhythms and shapes

holy sounds to one another

while we climb a corkscrew staircase

that winds up where it started somehow

have i see you before?

i can feel that i have.

have i felt this before?

i can tell you i have.

black on my fingers from your strings

but you just lean there against a wall

innocent and beyond reproach

and too true

skipping verses across like stones

but leaning your head in to catch the drops

you try to show us all by not trying at all

it opens, it offends

it is bleak and hopeful at once

and no matter how many times we must

wind past each other and that steel pole

or that invisible meeting place

i will know every time could be the last

and plan accordingly.