When this year kicked off almost twelve months ago, I thought it would be rather laid back. I intended to work less, take more leisure, and dive into personal projects. Instead, I worked tirelessly on back-to-back events for the first third of the year, lugged all of my gear to eight music festivals, and entertained an endless stream of favors, investing hardly — if any — time into my own personal projects! Rather than relaxing, I hustled.
The year was one of great suffering and joy, death and life, sickness and health, division and unity. Never in my life has the world been so polarized, so connected and distanced. Through the thick fog of uncertainty, of terror, of absurdity, of life changed forever, these words came to me.
When I first listened to As Long As, I was sitting in the band’s living room in Fishtown, Philadelphia. “We have a new song,” Dan said as he fired up his sound system and queued the track. “Still needs to be mastered, but you’ll get the idea,” he added. I had never heard anything like it—the tones were so rich and deep, every layer was crisp and present, yet masterfully weaved into the ultimate mix. It was as though I was standing in the recording studio, my head against the kick drum, my eyes on the bass strings, Maria singing directly into my ears. “Have you planned a music video?” I asked.
I was interviewed by Suite Spot—a creative production company I’ve been working with since 2016—about what I believe contributes most to the production value of any given project. I said, “Production value begins with the way you treat people on set.” I would revise that to include the way you treat people in the office during pre-production and in the edit suite during post. At the end of the day, it’s the ambitious drive we get from positive reinforcement that improves the quality of our work.
We drive out to the factory in Clarke's car. His radio's busted and the needle is jammed between stations. So the four of us—Clarke, Jones, Wayker and I—just listen the fuzzy tones criss-crossing over the radio waves. Every now and then a voice comes through the garbled static. With different throats the voice calls out, Dow Jones and I-76 and Chlorox and here and there bits of unrecognizable speech. These artifacts become words in my visual cortex—whole arrays of words. I don't hear them but I see them reflected in a dim light across the inner wall of my head…
I found these poems in 2021. 9 years later, they enchant me with a sense of another life, another way of seeing the world. There was something very magical about college, especially in a poetry department in Philadelphia. My variously inclined professors were as ostensibly pretentious as necessary and set a spiritual regard for it deep in my heart.
