2020, Los Angeles, CA
I have this incessant desire to reflect to the world how terribly you treat artists. I get away with whining about it better in lyric. In lyric I can say, “Fuck all of you. You are terrible,” but if I do it poetically, people will tell me there’s “hope” within the misery and resentment.
I finally figured out that the “hope” you hear is the poetry itself. See, the poetry in the lyric is my will to find a beautiful way to tell you that you’re terrible. Same as every story. If the protagonist kills himself at the end, at least the writer had the will to make the journey beautiful enough for you to read the whole book. If you haven’t gathered that this is a metaphor for life, you’re not only terrible, you’re also stupid. You’re stupid and terrible, but I’m grateful you have the will to find beauty in your stupid, terrible journey. If you don’t have a sense of humor and you’re stupid and terrible, I’m surprised you made it this far.
I tell myself stories of my present in past tense in order to find humor in the present. Irony and pity. Everything’s better with humor. Cynicism is hilarious coupled with misery and resentment. “Death is a cosmic joke,” Sadhguru once said, “If you get the joke.” I turned that around to say, “Life is a cosmic joke, and death is the punchline.” I gave that line to the devil in a faux film script within a script within a script.
At an audio gig in Nashville, one of my coworkers once tried to make a joke and then he said, “I have a unique sense of humor.” I quickly responded, “That just means you’re not funny.” No one laughed. I laughed a lot. I left that job very confused. Then I moved to LA.
If I told myself the story of a lunatic eternally battling the disparate polarities of existential meaning and meaninglessness who could never find peace within or without being beaten, eaten alive, kicked in or kicked out, arrested for noise or bombarded by noise, the story could only be told pathetically and desperately or beautifully and hilariously.
I once had an old schizophrenic neighbor who never left his apartment. He often called the cops on me for making music. He once said to me, “You probably have auditory hallucinations like my girlfriend,” as if it were generous piece of advice. He didn’t realize I wore headphones when I recorded my vocals, so he assumed I was hearing imagined accompaniment in my head. I later found out his girlfriend with auditory hallucinations wasn’t real. She was his imagined accompaniment.
The studio is my favorite instrument. In a way, it’s my only instrument. On the run from the bedbug-infested meth lab where I lived in LBC in 2018, friends in Ojai said, “Why don’t you just set up a keyboard and use headphones?” But if you’ve heard my music, it’s hard to imagine it giving anyone any “hope” on a Casio keyboard in a trailer. Recording takes time. And experimentation. For me, recording music is often intertwined with writing music. Sometimes a song is just a guitar song or just a piano song, but often I hear complex arrangements that require multitracking. I can imagine a lot in my head, but manifesting that imagined accompaniment to tape is a process. It requires a studio.
I write these words to the sound of pink noise at a hundred decibels to mask the noise that surrounds me. I sacrifice my ears for a bit of hope. It’s a metaphor for life, stupid. It’s the beach in a thunderstorm under a waterfall. Or a loud rehearsal space in Van Nuys. It’s a beautiful and hilarious irony or it’s a shithole in a hotbed of apathy. Pink noise only works if you have good speakers to drown out the aggressive subwoofing behind every wall. Novice music engineers blast low frequencies to mask their inept mediocrity.
This is my story. My Home. My journey. Pink Noise. For all that “hope” you hear, I’m paid in stimulus money and food stamps with an occasional fifty bucks from streaming revenue and an even less occasional thousand bucks for a tv placement. It’s enough to choose between making more “hope” and sacrificing all of life’s comforts or having my own bed and bathroom and kitchen at the price of “hope.” When a moment of silence arises here, I must decide which is more important, “hope” or sleep.
No bedbugs here. No cops. Nobody banging the door down. No crazy roommates turning off my electricity. And I haven’t lost any body parts here. This is the best I’ve ever lived. Truly the best it’s ever been. Still I can’t help but hope for something more.
“Irony and pity,” somebody says in Sun Also Rises. I wrote a song once called Irony and Pity when I was a teenager at MTSU. It was mostly noise. I remember playing it for my neighbor Jesse who said, “Are you sure it’s not ‘Irony and Pithy’?” Now I wonder if I missed the joke. Did he have a unique sense of humor?
Maybe the beauty is between the lines. Maybe I avoid telling my story in long form because it is pathetic and desperate. Or maybe I just haven’t gotten the joke yet.