It seems that, for a while now, the color white has been trying to take over the (human) world. White walls, open space floor plans, buddhism, yoga, kale smoothie detoxes… when will the reign of white ever end?
At the time I wrote this song I was completely swept up into the color white, trying to wear, eat, and decorate with it exclusively. White can be refreshing and protective, but geez, it can also be such a cold color, disconnecting you from everything warm and earthy.
One of my dearest wishes, at the time I wrote this song, was to be illiterate. If only I could have a clean and unconditioned mind, I felt there were so many things I could do and know… the sky would be the limit for me.
Books written by humans seemed like a distraction to me- a way of constraining my mind within a narrow bandwidth of information- when the whole world that surrounded me, with all its colors, shapes, and fragrances, was a page of a book written in the language of the angels (which I called Angelese). Angelese is a language of symbols and the senses, the notion that everything we perceive around us is deeply meaningful and that our hearts are naturally capable of discerning this meaning.
Because people lie all the time, and constantly distort the truth. But in the book of angels, the truth will always be written out, clear as day. As the pedophile walks down the street, there will be a sign, an impression somewhere, that tells you who he is.
When I wrote this song, I was scared all the time. A feeling of absolute terror and doom was a constant in my life. If I was taking a shower, I would feel like a psycho was just about to pull back the shower curtain. If I was walking outside, I would feel like a car was just about to screech to a halt and force me inside at gunpoint.
Because of that, I suppose, I tried to surround myself by things that were as non-threatening as possible. Everything in my apartment had to be pale pink (or white when that wasn’t possible). Pictures of unicorns had to fill every wall (preferably baby unicorns being protected by their mothers). I only read children’s books and rarely ate anything other than dessert. I would spazz out and begin to cry if James mentioned anything remotely dangerous or violent from the news or world events.
Smells would especially freak me out. I couldn’t tolerate the smell of any savory food. And perhaps due to living in such a smell bubble, my sense of smell started to get more and more sensitive. Soon, I could tell what James was thinking about through subtle “smell puffs” he would release. Cupcake or baked good puffs meant he wanted to spend time with me, and the faintest puff of meat and tomatoes meant he was thinking about work, with garlic and onions being added if he was angry at his boss.
This song has its roots in a dream I had as kid, in which a boy dressed in rags would run through a never-ending cityscape of ruins. I knew it was Russia because the ground was soft brown/tan and the sky was robin’s egg blue and endless. That is always how I imagine Russia- an endless expanse of light brown earth under an endless light blue sky. No plants, no water, just earth and air. Download MP3: Little Russian Boy
I wrote this song in Santa Fe, but it is still following a “rule” I established for myself at some point in Nashville, which is that every song must have the phrase “making love” somewhere in the chorus. Why did I establish this as a rule? I don’t know- it just gave me tickley feelings inside…
The phrase “making love” reminds me of something that in high school we used to call a Jinx-99. A Jinx-99 is a man with oiled hair, a thick mustache, and a tank top who gives you red roses and chocolate body oil on Valentine’s Day. He is just too much man, like having to eat a whole stick of butter with no bread. The phrase “making love” reminds me of that, too sticky & sincere to bear, which is what made it irresistible.
So, anyway, I wrote this song in Santa Fe, where, as I’ve mentioned, I lived in a weekly motel off the side of a highway, a very isolated and unenriched location. Before this, I had lived in Nashville, where I had a car and was constantly going here and there. Now I did not have a car and was stuck in the middle of nowhere. All day long, while my husband worked, I sat in a tiny motel room. It may be hard to understand the effect this has on a person’s mind unless you have experienced it yourself.
Although I had rarely watched tv before, I now spent countless hours being tortured and brainwashed by Country Music Television. It made me nauseous, but I couldn’t turn it off. Eventually, I had to return the television to the front office.
In a desperate effort to not die from lack of stimulation, I began prank calling people everyday as part of my morning routine- 11 people first thing every day before breakfast. I covered all my clothes in rhinestones, sequins, and other reflective surfaces (one of the lies they told on Country Music Television was that you could never be depressed while wearing rhinestones). I hoped that wearing these clothes beneath the bright desert sun would somehow energize me. I started wearing feathered headdresses, hoping that they would draw more energy from the air into my brain. And sometimes, I would walk alongside the highway carrying a red ball so large I could barely hold it, hoping it would draw attention from the people driving by, hoping their psychic energy would somehow keep me from going insane. But it was too late- I already was.
Insane people are like corpses, though, they point to a mystery- what happened to this person, who did it? Generally people do not murder themselves, and generally they do not drive themselves insane.
I think only me and Prince know what it feels like to write a bunch of sexual-sounding songs and then become a Jehovah’s Witness (or marry one in my case). The horrors & humiliations of suddenly seeing yourself through the eyes of a librarian. Oh well. The fact is, that fire used to be my favorite element, and fire always makes things come out sounding a little sexual, regardless of how scholarly your intent is.
I wrote this song in Nashville… moving to Nashville after living in L.A. was something of a culture shock. In L.A. I didn’t have a car or even know how to tune my own guitar- asking strangers for rides or tunings wasn’t a big deal, because after all, we’re all one, man! I could even walk around wearing antennae on my head, and although it did make me stick out a little, it didn’t create a division- people would just ask why I was wearing antennae on my head and then proceed to share their own alien abduction stories. But in Nashville everything was colder, heavier, more serious. Conformity was the chief value, for people and music, and anything different was cast in a dark and sketchy light. To conform was to be clean, intelligent, wholesome, loving.
And conformity begins with clothes, which is why I had trouble right off the bat. For reasons I can’t remember, I was determined to wear only white clothes (in addition to eating only white foods and living in an all-white apartment). But especially on a limited budge, white clothes were not always easy to come by, and I sometimes ended up wearing things that were definitely white, but not altogether clothes- like Christmas decorations and tablecloths, for example.
Why didn’t I just try to make life easy on myself by fitting in?
In the movie Brooklyn’s Finest, a Brooklyn cop goes on a killing spree in order afford a safer home for his family. I can totally relate to his feelings, and yet, I kept wanting to yell at him, “Move to Indiana! Why don’t you just move to Indiana!! Don’t you realize there is cheaper housing there?!?”
Why does Brooklyn even exist- why doesn’t everyone just move to Indiana? What is the upside to Brooklyn? As far as I can tell, there isn’t more stuff to do, there isn’t greater earning potential… so, what gives?
At any rate, this is another song I wrote while struggling to keep my head above water in the belly of that concrete monster. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the hardest things to deal with was feeling deprived of all the things that make life feel happy and comfortable, like friends, nature, a happy home, a slice of pizza that hasn’t been held in a stranger’s dirty hands. My mind would spin around and around trying to think of ways I could bring this lost pastoral energy back into my life (Because somehow, just as in Brooklyn’s Finest, the idea that I could simply leave never seemed to enter my mind.)
At one point, I was convinced that the color orange was the answer. I saw Brooklyn as basically being the Kingdom of Gray, and thought orange might be the color that could cut through the thick dullness that gray represented, and bring in the energy of the Harvest, that time when all your efforts are rewarded and all the seeds you have planted come to fruition.
So, not having much money to spend on the color orange, I bought a basketball, a pair of orange high top shoes (the only orange shoes I could find for $9), plus some orange tissue paper and candles. I taped the orange paper to my wall and lit the orange candles beneath it. But when I opened my door, the paper caught fire and flew across the room like a giant orange monster, landing on the floor where I stomped it out (and then extinguished the wall). I decided to put the orange candles on my kitchen table instead, and let them burn through the night so I could wake up and enjoy my harvest in the morning. Instead, I was woken by a strange sound that turned out to be the entire surface of my kitchen table burning. The spirits of the harvest at work!
When I lived in Santa Fe, a man asked me out for a drink. He was a slime ball and I was married, so I knew it was a bad idea. And YET, my (horrible) philosophy was to say yes to everything lest I accidentally miss a golden opportunity in disguise. How could I be certain he wasn’t really a magical unicorn planning on teaching me the secrets of the universe?
Still, I had been around the block enough to recognize a predatorial man when I saw one, and I knew I should take some action to protect myself. Being a practical person, I decided the best protection would be to fill my apartment (a weekly motel suite) to the brim with giant pink pyramids topped with bunny rabbits. I figured he would walk in, see all these pyramids topped with rabbits, and then… well, I just figured he wouldn’t mess with me after that.
So I spent the next week walking to a nearby lumberyard to buy bricks, which I carried home, painted pink, covered with iridescent silver stars, and then stacked into pyramids. I ended up making seven pyramids (in a very small motel room), each one topped with a candle, a crystal, and a rabbit figurine. It took the whole week and all my money.
When the big day arrived, the man didn’t even show up. I wasn’t surprised, actually, since standing people up is a hallmark of this particular breed of predators. They forget an engagement, the jilted party calls them (angrily) to remind them, they apologize and ask to make it up to you, and then the two people meet again, with the predator on slightly higher footing. My disappointment (after all this work!) was equal to my relief, and all in all I took it as a sign that the rabbit pyramids had protected me, just as I’d hoped.
Later, while living in Brooklyn, I saw a movie this man had made which described his romantic philosophy of cutting people’s pride in order to seem more desirable to them. A very low down approach to life, but still, probably better than saying yes to everything.
