Category Archives: Music

This used to be one of the biggest party nights of the year. It kicked off the holiday season, and we always spent it in our friend Bob’s apartment overlooking Washington Park, where his gregarious collection of friends and relatives provided a happy and convivial atmosphere for good times to come. For many years, this was our tradition, and when Bob moved I begged and pleaded for him to keep it going, which he did for a bit, but eventually he got out of the party game – a trendsetter for the dying tradition. 

At first I missed them – the parties, and the people, and the chance to reconvene just as the most wonderful time of the year was getting started. It was a tradition that had become comfortable, that allowed for a brief bit of drinking and debauchery to varying degrees, which we would then feed and quell the next day at Thanksgiving dinner. 

After a few years, however, I understood Bob’s giving up the party ghost. It was a lot, and I can’t imagine being saddled with the clean-up following a party on a day like Thanksgiving. Tonight, I remember those days, and I celebrate the traditions we have now.

For instance, today I made the traditional candied yams, as well as this new pumpkin tres leches cake, and a couple of dips for appetizers. Andy made a last-minute supermarket run, and then we were both in for the night by 8 PM. We watched a bit of the ‘A Christmas Story’ and now I find myself writing this good-night post in the attic while the light of a few candles flickers cozily nearby.

Twenty years ago, we’d just be arriving at the party at such an hour, the chill of the evening only partly kept at bay by whatever fanciful coat I found to display. Now I’ve traded in my velvet jacket for a sleeveless sweatshirt and shorts, and it’s a trade-off that feels surprisingly good. 

For all you revelers still carrying the torch, party on friends – be safe, be yourself, and be sure to enjoy every moment. 

Before we dive into the maelstrom of the holidays, let’s have this moment of calm – and let’s see if we can return to it whenever the season threatens to overwhelm. The music of Phillip Glass often provides a mesmerizing opportunity in meditation, his notes flowing like water, spilling over one another in gorgeous wave upon wave, rushing and then slowing the way a stream does depending on rain and snow melt. It is music for contemplation, music with which to pause and breathe. 

Once tomorrow arrives, there is no turning back – it will be the high holiday season, and the rush of that rollercoaster to Christmas will bring us down that first steep track with a whoosh. The chain reaction of holiday magic will be set into motion, and there will be scant few moments in which to find true peace and comfort. That seems the antithesis of how this season came into being, and so I will strive to find a way to honor its humble and more meaningful origins. It begins with a post like this, and a quiet morning with just a little piano music to ease into the day. 

The holiday season slowly unfurls in this lovely piece entitled ‘Autumn Leaves’ by the brilliant Vince Guaraldi, who wrote the classic themes to the Peanuts holiday features. This selection is a lovely entry into the season, transitioning from autumn’s splendor into hints of the holidays to come. In our haste to hurry into all things Christmas, we sometimes forget that there’s a full month of autumn still to celebrated. 

There are also moments of quiet beauty, as found in these rose hips, that shouldn’t be discounted in all the bombast and hoopla that is currently building – little bits of nature showing off when the world has written her off. Such gems are there to be found if one adjusts expectations.

While I will always love the blooms of a rose, and the fragrance that often accompanies them, I also appreciate the rose hips when they ripen into such glory. It’s a forgotten stage of the rose’s life-cycle, and as we move toward winter it’s wise to celebrate such simple joys. When the snow arrives there will be enough time to conjure and create the artificial means of getting through the winter. For now, I slow down to listen to the music of autumn, the wind and the rustle of the leaves… 

While this post will not draw the cat-eye sharp enough to kill a man, the writer Michael Cunningham once remarked that writers are assassins, and I’ve always held that notion in my head when writing things out here. More harm can come from the unmitigated telling of truths than the judicious pruning and careful curating that certain sensitive artists might employ. For a messy personal blog like this one, largely unread on a mass, and even a private, scale, I don’t need to be as careful.  This has mostly been for my own creative exorcisms than anything grander, and all the little in-joking between me, myself and I is an indulgent whim, one that sees me through the average autumn evening. Sometimes there’s a song that goes along with it, as in this new one from Taylor Swift’s latest ‘Midnights’ album – a rather marvelous collection of moody songs conjured from the midnight hour. 

Summer went away, still the yearning stays
I play it cool with the best of them
I wait patiently, he’s gonna notice me
It’s okay, we’re the best of friends
Anyway

From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes
I waited ages to see you there
I searched the party of better bodies
Just to learn that you never cared

You’re on your own, kid
You always have been

Lately I’ve been feeling that a little more – not in an abandoned way, more in a philosophical sense, made in midnight moments of contemplation and analysis – things that have traditionally proved problematic, so much so that I if I was able to scrounge up any remaining wisdom I should put all of it from my mind. Whenever I would get lost in this sort of overthinking and overanalysis during those difficult college years, the only way out was to ignore it for a few days, to allow the mundane actions of daily living to take over the tumultuous meanderings of the mind. There may be something to embracing the willful ignorance of the benign, some magic in knowing not to disturb the muck of the heart. 

From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes
I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this
I hosted parties and starved my body
Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss
The jokes weren’t funny, I took the money
My friends from home don’t know what to say
I looked around in a blood-soaked gown
And I saw something they can’t take away
‘Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned
Everything you lose is a step you take
So make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it
You’ve got no reason to be afraid

Now and then it’s good to be reminded that we are all, sooner or later, on our own. For someone rather accustomed to solitude, it’s no more than a friendly reminder. For others, it’s more troublesome, and the more we rely on others, the more dangerous it can prove to be. Yet the most dangerous thing may be to read into things too much. Whenever I find myself losing the way, when it feels like the world is gas-lighting me, I pause and step back. From myself, from the world, from the people who have populated and haunted my past. Rarely does anything good come of it, and this feeling is one of ickiness, a feeling without resolution, a feeling that has no possibility of resolution, and because of that the point of being so icky does not exist. I wish it did. Without purpose, messiness is just messy. If I’m going to get my hands dirty, I want a garden to show for it. 

You’re on your own, kid
Yeah, you can face this
You’re on your own, kid
You always have been.

Created by Benjamin Franklin, the glass armonica was said to cause madness in certain listeners. I’ve always been entranced by the scientific magic at work here – the tones of a glass created by rubbing one’s wet finger around the rim – varying by size and amount of water in each glass. In Franklin’s version, he simply used different sizes of glass, stacking them beside each other to offer different notes. This ‘glass armonica’ created a spellbinding sound, and composers began writing for it, until stories circulated that the music made by the armonica was causing madness and melancholia. 

Listen for yourself, but don’t blame me if you slip into another state…

Somewhere in memory I am swaying to this song, not quite in a solitary dance, and something more than a sorrowful trance. Alone in Boston, treading barefoot on the dim, not-quite-lit amber floorboards of my home-away-from-home, a memory within a memory forms as I recall the early days of living there by myself in the sparse unfurnished space, back before there was even a chair on which to sit. A single lamp glows warmly near the door, while the windows let in the peeping streetlights. 

I was a quick wet boy
Diving too deep for coins
All of your street light eyes
Wide on my plastic toys

Then when the cops closed the fair
I cut my long baby hair
Stole me a dog eared map
And called for you everywhere

Somewhere, lost in the realm of that hazy land where deleted blog posts go, there is another piece written for this song, something I wrote many years ago while searching and seeking and never finding some other flightless bird. The warm hues of that Boston night fade and dissolve into gray, growing colder and distant, as my gentle swaying slows, so much that the rising and falling of my chest is the only movement in the place. This song plays on the little stereo, filling the air with its melancholy melody. 

Have I found you?
Flightless bird, jealous, weeping
Or lost you?
American mouth
Big bill looming

It is November again, like it was November before, like the memory of this song carries from one November into another, and then repeating, another year, another song, and still the same melody, sad and strange and sweet, and the same swaying, dance-like trance, still held by the spell, still held under the water. Wet as a boy in the rain, uncaring and laughing through his tears. 

Now I’m a fat house cat
Cursing my sore blunt tongue
Watching the warm poison rats
Curl through the wide fence cracks

Pissing on magazine photos
Those fishing lures thrown in the cold and clean
Blood of Christ mountain stream

I remember a night not far from November, when I had just started living at the condo, when it got dark so early and no one was quite used to it, in those dismal first afternoons after we turned the clocks back. There were dry, brown leaves beneath my feet as I neared Braddock Park – they made the only sound on such a still windless night, and there was just the one pair of feet shuffling along. As I approached the row of brownstones, I looked up at the windows that belonged to me. Dark and empty, they kept their eyes sadly closed, not bothering to blink or wink a greeting from some beloved or loving person within, and suddenly I froze mid-step. For one terrifying moment, I couldn’t face walking into the place alone, and that little survival mechanism that has always kicked in during the free-fall into despair signaled to me to back away from there, somehow knowing that if I entered at that particular time of vulnerability I might not survive. And so I listened, turning around and heading back to Copley Square, back to people and light and warmth. Even if they were strangers, it would be better than being completely alone. And after an hour or so, the impossibility of it – the impossibility of being lonely – faded and fell away, and I returned, unbothered by the darkness and emptiness, once again ok with all of it. 

Have I found you?
Flightless bird, brown hair bleeding
Or lost you?
American mouth
Big bill, stuck going down

Friday nights ring differently when you’re 47 years old. Gone are the days of excitement over television shows, or staying up past 9 PM. Today I want for no television, and going to bed at 9 pm would be a luxury I’m rarely afforded. Instead, I sit at the desk in the attic, light a few candles, and write out these words while seeking out music that will calm and quell the worrisome heart. This song starts out with promise, but it builds into something more powerful and driving, and I’m not sure it’s what I want or need. Still, a peaceful beginning counts for something, and on a day like this maybe it’s the only peace we’ll get. 

There is serenity in the attic, and now that the outside has slowly but decidedly turned slightly more inhospitable than it was in the summer months, focus returns to this calming space of our home. Here it will remain light and bright no matter how dark the winter may get. 

It’s barely past 6 pm as I write this and already it’s dark out. This will only come earlier after the clocks go back. An extra hour is always appreciated, but the return to so much darkness is not as welcome. That’s when the brightness of the attic becomes integral to mental health and emotional uplift. Last winter was made bearable, if not enjoyable, by embracing and cultivating the notion of hygge in this very space, and we will light candles and hunker down in coziness to bring comfort and warmth again. 

Following last year’s creamy-smooth hook-heavy aural confection of ‘Home for Halloween’, Dr. Joseph Abramo and I decided to go a little more raw and experimental for this year’s Halloween song. Entitled ‘Mr. Halloween Man‘ I wrote out the lyrics in the middle of a single night, taking into account where Joe and I were finding ourselves in the middle of our 40’s, which some say is the start of the most dangerous years of a man’s life. I left the rest of the musical magic (and the bulk of the work) to him. We’d never crafted a Halloween song in such a distant and disconnected format – usually we are collaborating in person to make sure the cadence of words flows with the music – but both of us were interested in how this would go, and the end result is a trip. 

He walks down the street unaware of the stares
A top hat he swings, the cape that he wears
He doesn’t succumb to the light of day
He doesn’t get down by the words they say

He sings his own song, the devil may care
Pretends it doesn’t matter, it makes its own wear
There’s the pitch and the howl of the great theremin
Filled with fire and noise, filled up with flare and din

Mister Halloween Man,
Hollowing man
Mister Halloween Man
Hollowing man…

Across jittery beats of tense and unresolved progression, the song moves in jagged and jilted fashion, unsure of where and when to stop, unsure how to navigate such new and chilly waters. It’s the perfect metaphor for the shifting sense of time perception, and what might come of the second half of our lives ~ ambivalence cloaked in some sick beats. Joe took the raw lyrics and refined them to fit in with his own vision, which is exactly what I hoped would happen, picking up where I left off, and incorporating his own mid-life experience into the song. 

A half-life of rage, a half-life of porridge
A heart overflowing and empty of storage
All regret at the point of no turning back
He takes one step ahead, a click and a clack

Mister Halloween Man,
Hollowing man
Mister Halloween Man
Hollowing man…

The words and sentiment were partly informed by this powerful quote by Colin Harrison – no stranger to conveying the crisis of the mid-life of a man: “Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he’d better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him -the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream.”

The original lyrics are as follows, so you’ll have to listen closely to Joe’s interpretation to hear his slant on it (which is, admittedly, better suited to the music and flow of the song). 

It’s the pills that we take just to keep us from flight
It’s the carving out of parts we’re not ready to lose
It’s when we face that there might not be a choice left to choose
It’s the rolling of time when we just want to be still
It’s the hill that we climb when what is left is the chill…
Of the hollowing man.
Mister Halloween Man
Oh the hollowing man
Mister Halloween Man

Halloween is supposed to be scary, but it’s a cakewalk compared to getting older and confronting where we find ourselves midway through life. Such a crux is often rife with conflict, internal and external, and finding the way through while making sensible and noble choices doesn’t get easier. There is also the terrifying recognition that our decisions now may not be easily reversed or rewound, the way such decisions might have been forgivable or forgettable in our youth. We don’t have as much time to turn it all around. That adds to the tension and worry at hand, giving an underlying darkness to this spooky time of the year. It’s all there in the music, especially the melancholic ending that ultimately resolves itself in a contemplative moment of beauty and grace. 

The age when it matters is the age when it won’t,
A life of can and do switched to can’t and don’t
He’s not what he was, just a hollowed out shell
He’s not what he is, but he never will tell

He’s Mister Halloween Man
He’s the hollowing man
He’s Mister Halloween Man
Just a hollowed out man.