390“Split Ends” - Ben Weaver
It’s beginning to seem we’ve elapsed some significant, unnoticed hour. That there is no mirth left in this fall. It’s all cold harvest and bucked-up sensibility, all cleaning up the fields and putting down the yards. All the colors that will be have been and the rest of the leaves will fall from green straight to gone.
We are entering quiet days. Between the spoils of autumn and the snow.
The snow can get you by, no doubt. Once it all comes down and the city tucks and settles into itself and grows plum under the street lamps and the insulation of a laden night sky. Once we are in miniature again, risen and anchored by the weight of winter. Once the next adventure arrives, we will be ok.
But these days. They are purgatorial and slow growth. Too mild to be dangerous, too cold and old for the rush of ellipses or dashes. This midseason is all perfunctory graphite periods and no brackets. No subtext, all subtext. And “the longing could sink a ship.” We need something to hold on to, you see. Something better than everything that has grown slim and spare as black branches and the frosted gardens, decomposing in the cold. We need something to sustain us through the void, while we abide this inbetwixt.
I’ve been waiting for October 19th like a crop.
And now it’s here and I can tell you to do yourself a favor: To go buy Ben Weaver’s sparse, beautiful new album Mirepoix and Smoke and drive around listening to it for the next four, five, six weeks until the snow comes, until something sweeter than all of this falls and saves us.
Some people do good and some people are good. Ben is both.
Someone from the Utne Reader wrote a review about Ben and compared him to Greg Brown and Tom Waits, then said he’s like that “spooky old guy who lives in a trailer but tells amazing stories.” And there is a creel full of ghosts in this album and on that stage when Ben drawls these hymns and his compatriot plucks at a bass taller than she is, so maybe that writer was on to something.
The other day Ben said that he is leery of translations, but wrote and told me he trusted Charles Wright to get Eugenio Montale just about right because he is a poet too. And I wonder how many people I know care about words enough to consider the integrity of whoever will describe them to us.
Ben is a good man and a kind friend with no pretensions in a world lousy with them and it just so happens that he also makes music that carries you around the city like freight tracks, past all the old scenery and the hidden beaches in the tangle down at the river’s edge and the broken warehouses and shared gardens for four families or five. Indirect but not lost. Indirect, but still headed home.
It just so happens that you might need this album more than Ben needs to sell it.
I hope you find it like I have found it. That it keeps you through these days too.
172“Lovely to See You” - The Moody Blues
When I was a kid, my parents had this album amongst a sprawling horizontal stack of dusty wonders. Abandoned in their transformation from Denver hippies to guilty Midwestern role models. I’d pull it out, set it on the player so tenderly, living in fear of my father’s terse warnings of the Immense Fragility of the needle. The DIAMOND needle, for crying out loud, Erica. Then I’d lie down very still on the carpet next to giant speakers, eyes closed, for the first track - the trippy space oddessy-ish “In the Beginning.” Half giddy, half terrified waiting for this “Rod, Todd, This is God” voice to bellow out at me from the dark.
After it was over, after I’d made it through that encounter, the album bloomed bizarrely into “Lovely to See You” and I was reborn. Galloping and shimmying around the living room just as enthusiastic and half as coordinated as I am today. Stubbing my toes and bashing my shins and loving the very guts out of this song.
Ba da da da da da da da…. It remains foot moving to say the least.
“Raining in Baltimore” - Counting Crows80
I think we both know you’re going to mock me for this one.
But seriously, take off your snob hat for five minutes and just listen to this one again. It’s surprisingly earnest and so sweetly quiet and…restless. It’s just terrific.
Once I had a high school boyfriend named Rob, who wore a long black skirt and Cure t-shirts and combat boots. He had crazy, kinky black hair that fell around his face in this effortless wave of cool and I was nuts for him. Well, for the idea of him…and the way he quoted Thoreau and Morrissey in letters. I met him at summer camp and he lived three hours away. The last time we spoke, in the fall, I think, we were arguing over the phone…and I remember lying on my back, twisting that old rubber yellow cord of the phone and he said, after a enormous sigh, “Look, Molly….”
As my name is not in fact Molly, I hung up in fit of indignation. I think he wrote a letter after that, but by then my friend Amanda had already told me he HAD in fact been flirting with a girl named Molly who worked at the roller rink and knew all the best indie bands. That’s hard to top, people.
My mom bought me a used bass guitar and a crackly old amp and encouraged me to turn my anger into art. I think I learned to play “Little Brown Jug”. Which is not very rock and roll.
But dumb old Rob did put this song on a mix tape for me once and so he is good for that. Also, it was kind of fun kissing a guy in a skirt.
811Old Crow Medicine Show, “Wagon Wheel”
This is one of my favorite songs.
In high school, when I was NOT a huge dork despite what my sister claims quite publicly on her Tumblr, my friends and I would ride in the back of trucks, always with systems, always with lifts, always with 30” tires, always listening to stuff like this. We would squeal and hold on for dear life after we all decided to take a break from video games— the girls watching, the boys playing (we were far, far too patient for these boys who never kissed us anyway, who always ended up asking younger girls to prom and sitting next to us on porch swings with our love letters in their hands and staring out at the clouds with nothing constructive or generous to offer us back)— and we would sing, yell, really, this song, which was maybe one of the best songs we had ever heard, and something we could all agree on as we slid through the mud of abandoned properties and empty fields, spinning and screaming and squeezing each others palms excitedly when we yelled, JOHNSON CITY, TENNESSEE! because that was where we would go camping every summer, with me the least likely of tagalongs, each of the girls’ best friend but sometimes the boys’ worst enemy, always squeaking to “Wait up!” while we hiked and crawled around in caves, my feet dragging like the cliche that I was, arguing with them, with my liberal politics (there is maybe no pretension so thrilling as that of a 17-year-old) and unabashed talk of tampons and boobs and how far away to college I’d go and how I was still in love with someone in Louisiana and isn’t James Joyce the best writer EVER and I am totally going to set aside the center spread of the next issue of our school paper about this one funny thing that happened to me (what has changed? nothing!) and IF I DIE IN RALEIGH AT LEAST I WILL DIE FREE.
One of those friends got married recently— in fact all of those friends are married now, who am I kidding?— and she played this at her reception and we held hands in a circle just the way we would have at a school dance back then and we screamed the words and we were older this time but “caught a trucker out of Philly / had a nice long toke,” still gave us all a thrill and we laughed and I cried and oh, this song!
220“Fake Empire” – The National
Stay out super late tonight
picking apples, making pies
put a little something in our lemonade and take it with us* * * * *
In practice, the idea of coupling again remains unfathomable. I can be happy and a realist, right?; I can be tired of the hopeful search.
Simply, from here, I see no proof of variables that solve the equation. And I am exhausted by the pursuit of it all – by small talk and dates and early confessions and thirty years of catch up and the months of experimental gymnastics that will determine whether I Can Love You and You Can Love Me. Whether this could last; Could harden into stone.
But in theory…I’ll admit that the theory of it all working beautifully is a delightful place to stroll. And so I start to dream.
Will you be very scruffy? Will you be most yourself in flannels that smell like sawdust and cloves? Will you wear serious boots and a stocking cap and no concern over whether it musses your hair?
Maybe you will drive an old Wagoneer and we will park it on the beach or in a field and lean back on the tailgate collecting stars far from this Gatsby of a city. Or maybe you will have an old barn car – a dusty ’68 Nova, unrestored and ballsy and we will sit in the backseat – big as a bathtub – and watch movies at the drive in. Maybe you’ll have a car you don’t think about. A car that isn’t a statement; That sounds really good. Or a bike. That you’ll ride behind me in the dark, in the morning to the farmers market.
I think about your favorite authors – who you’ll be aghast that I have not read. Who you’ll drag me to Magers & Quinn to buy immediately. I think about your go-to songs – the mix you’d make for long drives and shitty days and to dance to in the house. Because I think you’ll have character and depth but you would not take yourself too seriously. I think you’d have a dog and maybe a garden. I think you’d let me cut your hair; Sometimes, I can already feel the heat of your scalp under my fingertips and the weight of your head leaning back, heavy against my chest.
You’ll have been through your own wars and you’ll have sat wounded in the mire and learned from them for a long enough spell. You’ll have made mistakes, and you’ll have bad habits; Still, you’ll be a better man than you know. Maybe you’ll have a roundtable of men you make time for every week – the guys who knew you before you talked to girls. You’ll have work or art you care about, something you want to leave in the world. You’ll challenge me and when I ask, you’ll give advice that I have to think about for a long time and which eventually will shape me. You’ll have a faith –quiet and more important to you than I ever will be.
You’ll teach me something great – how to make ceviche or tie flies. Your laugh will be easy, hard, real. Maybe you’ll love to walk as far as I do. Maybe we’ll wander through this city like a lifetime, across its arches and spans until we collapse into an unsigned pub. Until our coffee grows cold. Until we reach Timbuktu and Shangri-La.
Maybe we’ll come home and lie on top of the quilt, in our jeans and sweaters in the dark, and talk in low voices until we sleep. Maybe you and I will never run out of things we want the other to know.
