52 Weeks of Music - Swamp Ophelia by the Indigo Girls

This has been a very long couple of weeks, so suffice it to say I am behind on the music project.

Since I have been in a foul mood, I decided to go back to the basics of my music. That is, the Indigo Girls. Swamp Ophelia was the first encounter I had with the Indigo Girls. A friend in college had this on cassette and I freaked out. It was so much more than the crappy pop music of autumn 1995, and much more compelling to me than anything I had ever heard before. It was right when I was coming out, so this album got me through lots.

My favorite track on this album is "Language or the Kiss." It was definitely my life, or rather, the quandary I was faced with at the time.

There was a table set for six and five were there.
I stood outside and kept my eyes upon that empty chair.

I was in a family of six and I feared most that my coming out would alienate me from my family, like in the song.

Over the years, the Indigo Girls poetry spoke to me in many other ways. I moved out on my own, then moved back home with my parents. Then finally at 24, I bought my own home and finally branched out for good, no longer the stunted sapling trapped in an suburban soil, but a thriving young tree. Forgive the purple prose, but it always makes me misty talking about the Indigo Girls.

The rest of the Swamp Ophelia is full of amazing songs about love, triumph, loss, mourning, and the strength of love and friendships. I am at a loss for words to describe it better. But I hope I've piqued your curiosity enough to check it out for yourself.

To give you some more inspiration, check out the "Power of Two" video from the Indigo Girls VEVO channel on YouTube. It's a great song.

Swamp Ophelia on Wikipedia


Album link on iTunes

Charlie's Angels Aware

I loved singing and performing. I always have. I took singing lessons, I was in children's choir at church, performed in school plays and talent shows; I loved being in front of people. I think in some ways I've been very much a drama queen, hell, I've even thought about being a drag queen, but that moment has thankfully passed.

When I was a very young child, I would take the wooden spoon out of the drawer in the kitchen and pretend it was my microphone. The fireplace hearth was my stage. My parents are particularly fond of a song I made up about wanting to get a kiss from a jungle woman. Though I don't remember it myself very well, I guess it's probably a factual account, but I'm just old enough that we didn't have a camcorder yet to verify such an event. I guess in retrospect it would have made a much better story if I actually sang "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix.

In kindergarten, I put together a band called the Hot Buns. I think this was actually a name of a band from an episode of the TV show "Gimmie a Break" so I don't really think I should have been credited for my originality. The punchline was later that year, my buns really were hot after a paddling. The Christian school I went to used a name on the board -> checkmark by name -> aggregation of checkmarks = paddling system of punishment. It was probably not a big deal. I talked a lot. I was very chatty along with my annoying precociousness.

When I grew up a little, my parents put me in Children's Choir at church. It was much better than listening to the pastor's 45 minute prayers or impossibly intellectual sermons, so I was okay with being there. Although I often wanted to stay home so I could watch reruns of Charlie's Angels.

I remember Pat, the lady in charge of the choir was very enthusiastic about teaching us music. But we never learned anything useful. She taught us the words using a gigantic poster sized easel with a mix of words and rebuses. It was all handwritten and must have taken weeks, but at the time, I despised the pictogram learning process, but it helped me learn with both sides of my brain, an incredible gift. For all the benefits of cross-brain learning, we were never taught how to read music. It was all learned by ear. Later I took piano lessons and learned music, but until I was 9 I didn't know middle c from my middle finger.

But the absolute best aspects of Children's Choir were putting on costumes and doing choreography. Once, our church did Angels Aware, a cornball musical about how God was going to come and save the earth. I will forever remember all of the Ten Commandments in order, as long as someone gives me enough time to sing them out in my head. With the sparkly gold Christmas garland halos, the dry ice cloud effects, and the choreography, I was quite literally in a form of prepubescent gay heaven. Too bad my brother and one of my sisters were also there.

It was around the time I was growing out of my family's K-Tel Dumb Ditties album and transitioning to popular music and 60s tunes my sister was into. I was also into Christian pop for a while, but I got over that when I turned 15 or 16.

As I grew up more and more, my taste in music evolved into what can only be described
as the quintessential gay boy trying to fit into the world around him. My favorite song until I was 15 was "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship. It came on the radio once in fifth grade. I was typically staying in from recess and helping the teacher clean the chalkboards with another student named Gabe. I started to dance and lip sync and Gabe just started laughing. I was unapologetic about my enthusiasm. The teacher was out of the room, and I probably wasn't supposed to be listening to a secular radio station anyway, so I just didn't care. Now I've realized that what I really loved was that the sexes of the singing voices were so indeterminate. Grace Slick's voice to an eleven year old may as well have been that of another man. Can you imagine the enthralling power this had on my sexually confused brain?

In high school, I got bolder. I was an avid fan of the B-52s, the notoriously gay party band from the Athens, Georgia music underground that billed itself as the "World's Greatest Party Band." To me, they were. I bought every CD I could get my hands on. Almost every Taco Bell paycheck went to a B-52s CD in one of those clunky, anachronistic CD long boxes.

The B-52s made me lose my young queer mind. I would dance and groove and sing along anywhere I heard their music. At the time I was puzzled why more of their songs didn't make it on the radio, but going back through their albums today, I realize, that they aren't that great. Fred Schneider, the lead singer can't carry a tune. He's got a kind of gravelly voice that makes me think of Suzanne Pleshette or Bea Arthur. Plus, their music was kind of subversive. It was positively dripping with lots of sexual innuendo. They have a song titled "Dirty Back Road." Incidentally, I didn't put that together with gay sex until a few weeks ago when I saw the CD case in my rack. I like to think I was progressive, but I was more naive than even I had imagined.

Sometime when I was about 15, I saw the movie Heathers for the first of what would prove to be an innumerable number of times. The movie was vividly absurdist and surreal, but funny as all hell. At the end, Sly and the Family Stone covered Que Sera Sera, and did an amazing job. It became my all-time favorite song. To this day it retains that title, in spite of 17 years of music inundating me from all conceivable media. The song was so utterly perfect because it sounded like an utter mess. In the slick world of the late 80s and early 90s music, the blues, funk and rhythm fused in my brain to turn me into a musical adult.

About the time I discovered Sly and the Family Stone, I stopped listening to Christian pop. I loathed the concept of it, for one thing. Even now, perhaps especially now I don't think it is in any way beneficial to anyone to package the message of gospel in mass-market crap music.

I went away to college and started listening to college type music. I got into Ben Folds Five, the Indigo Girls, Cake, Guster and Jimmy Buffett, just about everything. I got into dance music a little bit also, being that I did start going to gay bars and getting my dance groove on for real.

Now I feel sometimes that I have lost that musical feeling. In a world dominated by personalized access to music, I feel that we need more people willing to go out there and perform music, rather than just consume it. I think I would like to learn how to play an instrument. I only ever learned how to play the snare drum. The piano didn't really stick for some reason. I think playing music, as well as singing and dancing connect us to something larger than ourselves. I think this larger art is something the world needs more of.

Maybe I can gather up the Kindergarten gang and reform the Hot Buns. The band name carries a lot more irony now than it did in 1983. I imagine that our first number one hit will be a cover of the B-52s classic "Dirty Back Road."

Can't You Just Hear the Bee Gees?

Yesterday was spring cleaning day and I came across a cache of old photos. As though you couldn't tell from the earlier posts, I am somewhere on the continuum between nostalgic and horrified.

This is by far my favorite picture from my childhood.

This is me at my most glamourous, without even trying. I am messing around on stage after my brother's Noah's Ark play at school. It's 1981, and by the looks of my polyester vest, I am not willing to admit that disco is in fact dead.

I know that it is egotistical for me to say this, but I am a cute little kid. I'm five and I'm lanky and blonde. The eight-ounce eyeglasses won't come for another two years, and I am thrilled that I am the center of attention. Today, I am twenty plus years older and wiser, but I like to picture this person as my vibrant inner child.

Going through these photos is a solemn reminder that all history is imperfect.

I am also reminded of the antithesis to this picture. There are hundreds more photos that help me paint a much more vivid look at my past, but they will remain hidden in shoe boxes and stored in electronic memory. I may trot out one here and there to provide a more complete picture of my mad existence.

There were times that my childhood wasn't so fabulous, the depression, the rage, all quietly suppressed for years, because I was afraid to be who I was and who I am.

As more Kodak and polaroids come to light, I have come to the realization that I can't change the past. I can only hope to do better in the future. So I raise a glass to my inner child. You make me feel like dancin'.

Another of my bad hair photos

File this under my preppy-gone-mad phase.

Clean House

I was cleaning yesterday and came across several old photos. This one is particularly hilarious to me.

I really did have that hair for over a year. Nothing made my family happier than when I cut it. Still, I miss those days when I was a dirty hippy.

yesterday's home

[author's note: sorry for not keeping up with the whole "paragraph per day" goal. I've been really tired.]

I was surrounded by butter cream colored walls and mounds of my sister's school supplies. There was truly nothing left of myself in my parents' house.

We moved here when I was nine, far out from the city, nine tenths of a mile north of Dupont Road, the country highway that wound its way through the sleepy hamlets of Cedarville and Leo. There was a small subdivision near us, and a country gas station that probably looked the same as it did in the 1930s.

Our home was on a sizeable spread of acreage with a shock of pine trees separating our main home area from the flood plain of the creek that had no name, but was major enough to be a direct tributary of the Saint Joseph River.

My parents had the house custom built. It was designed to resemble our old home in the Brookside Park subdivision, but this time with a front-facing attached garage, and larger, more spacious bedrooms and living areas.

The home had many improvements, such as a screened-in porch, and two decks that added plenty of outdoor living space. The biggest improvement was an in-ground swimming pool. I used to love swimming in it. I was typically the first person in the pool every year, no matter if the weather was 60 degrees outside, I was in the frigid water as soon as I got home from school.

But that was all years ago. Twenty one years had passed since we moved into the house. I had since moved out, moved back in, and moved out again. This time, I was in my bedroom looking for something, but I don't remember what it was. I was house sitting for my parents while they were on vacation in Tennessee. I barely swim there anymore.

"Butter cream walls," I thought to myself. "They do not go with the burnt sienna carpet." I never would have picked this color.

I live in the same city as my parents, but I'm deep within the limits of the city, in an historic neighborhood that has tall trees that triumph over early twentieth century houses. My own home is over a hundred years old.

I call it my home because to me, it really is. I've been living here for six years now, and though I've put thousands of dollars into it, it has kind of a hold over me, and I can't quite bring myself to leave it. The modest mortgage also helps. I can't rent a two-bedroom apartment for what I'm paying for the 1,400 square foot three-bedroom house.

I make the thirteen plus mile trip to my parents' house every week or two to catch up with the rest of the family and to check to see if it ever feels like home. It never does. I think it's because of the butter cream walls.