| 26 january 2013
crystal never hurts |
the 12th step
The music was co-written in 2001 with Bill Kollar, a brilliant New York-area engineer and producer, who coaxed out the glorious rhythm guitar verse progression and overall tempo.
…I hear noises outside my door.
They’re the kinds of noises you can’t always ignore.
Drunken lovers stumblin’ to their floor.
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like these chords
this one’s for lovers forced to live apart b/c of distance and/or time. not sad, tho. it’s in that moment when one knows the other’s coming home.
we’re stronger than this day – that’s all I know all along
and your distant night flight voice – is just the prettiest songyou left this life for the myth – you’ve been gone a while
fall into a trance with me – travel the starswe’re like chords that ache to play
and open doors on sunny days
we’re like these chordswe’re the keepers of the truth – we never tired of the world
and now you’re coming back to me – with everything that you’ve learnedgot the sun on your back – heading east racing clouds
fall into a trance with me – under night flight starswe’re like chords that ache to play
and open doors on sunny days
they’re all I got, when you’re far away
we’re like these chordswe’re like chords when you’re far away
and open doors on sunny days
they’re all I got and they ache to play
but we’re like these chords
we’re like these chords
i must have love
This track materialized one night after a friend of mine off-handed challenged, “Westy, I bet you can’t write something unabashedly happy.”
:^D
…(downtune guitar 1/2 step, play in open C form. B=C, F#=G, E=F)
B Bsus4 B Bsus4
Walk down the street, it’s easy to see
B Bsus4 F# E
All those lonely people looking at me
B E
With envy in their eyes.
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Chapter 1: Customs Playboy
LENINGRAD, 10 MARCH 1985, 10:38A
The hidden pack for the drop bunched beneath my long johns. The Aeroflot flight had been freezing, the pack’s stainless steel hardware sucked body heat, and the threadbare cotton blankets emblazoned with Vladimir Lenin’s image given out by the polyester’ed flight crew were useless.
As we landed, I switched out a New Order mixtape in my Walkman FM-1 for one that Camilla had given me the night before in Helsinki.…
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Chapter 2: Bees In The Bar
LENINGRAD, USSR. 10 MARCH 1985
Part of me was still in Helsinki (or “CamillaLand” as I called it now), and even the rickety Aeroflot flight to Leningrad and my Russian Customs scare didn’t cloud my floating. We arrived at our foreigners-only hotel, The Pribaltiskaya, a fashion-forward troupe of Patagonia and North Face jackets, a bit before 4pm Russian Standard Time.…
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#lightwalkers
Late one late December day in the late ’00s, on a new-mooned new-years evenight in the Mexican-not-Mayan Riviera, a small vacation coven gathered under soft starlight, poolside on a bluff overlooking an inking Pacific Ocean. As the group’s just-like-grandma’s cake started to kick in, Orion turned away from Earth for a few moments and a twinge of lawlessness neuroscaped through them one by one, in a cascade.…
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