It was so cold.

I was raised in the Catholic church, went to catechism, got my first communion, and left as soon as I fucking could. It was never for me, and this was reinforced by my grandmother’s funeral. We should have been celebrating her life, and were it not for my cousins singing and playing live in the church, the whole dour affair would have been even more inappropriate than it was, what with the creepy guest priest pimping his own sister’s death much earlier in the year by handing out little prayer cards with her AND his face on it, along with prayer cards celebrating his own anniversary as a priest. Good for you, you insensitive prick.

That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the art created in the name of the big-C Church. Two places in particular I liked. One was a tiny roadside chapel in the boonies of Ohio with three statues in front of a beautiful stained glass window. Inside, the hundred of candles in front of the statues meant it was always warm inside, no matter what time of year it was. When you went behind the building in the winter, the light flickered like a kaleidoscope on the snow. Once, out of sheer desperation, I tried saying a novena there that others had been leaving, and got a note ostensibly left by the caretaker to stop leaving the photocopies of the novena specified. God hates chain letters, too.

The other was a big scary church in the boonies of Pennsylvania, on a hill glowering over a cemetery. There was a soot-stained bridge that led to the hills across from it, and next to the road under the bridge there was a tiny little shrine to the BVM, encased in plexiglass. Worship, but don’t worship too close. Why trust a god who doesn’t trust you?

Instead, I prefer to watch the world’s increasingly poisonous daily devotions to a god they’ve masochistically twisted into something awful from a great distance.

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That's when the signs all change.

I didn’t know at the time that the song was about me. I was alone in a gross, sticky-carpeted apartment in Akron when I wrote it. A friend was moving, so that was what I drew from.

A few years later, I’d bail out on my entire life and move to Michigan. A few months after that, I ended up making a lonely, beautiful drive out to San Jose. We went to Half Moon Bay to see the cliffs and the beach, and suddenly, there I was, in my own fucking song.

The things we do for love are wild.

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I vaguely remember snow

Half of the songs on LMAI ended up forming an inside joke. If you’re from Poland, OH, USA and you ever got in a car with me while we lived there, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The only thing missing is a reference to King’s.

The other half is a chronicle of what brought me out here. One part travels east, one part travels west. One ends on a beach, the other ends in the quarry. Think of it as an album with an alternate ending I was lucky to avoid.

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You light me up

The night time
is the right time

I’ve been submerged in new sounds for the first time in a long time thanks to my friends… there is music out there that gets me exciting and makes me feel relevant and irrelevant, all swirling around behind my eyes as Mean and Impressive seeps forth.

Art scheme is killer, fucking killer shit. Pile of Ashes and Hurricanes have been done for a while. Mojave Phone Booth materialized. Interesting interstitials. Points West and Mary of the Overpass were waiting in the wings.

Logic is a fucking beast, and the learning process is vivisection, but so begins part three of the PLS journey.

“Do you bleed?” – Pilot Abilene, Southland Tales

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