music

In Palm Springs, California, we inherited a sad, little tree. It came with our rental and it was more like a stick with branches, but it was stuck in the ground and didn’t seem quite dead yet, so we called it a “tree.” After a few months of cremating sun and no rain, a wrinkly little fruit appeared on our sad stick. Colorless and shapeless, the fruit continued to grow into a slightly bigger wrinkly, colorless blob. Which, on careful inspection, revealed itself to be a pomegranate. This seemed magic to us. Pomegranates are…well, fancy. Our stick was not.

One boring afternoon, we decided to pick the pomegranate. Figured it was just gonna fall off anyway. And ruby red jewels that taste better than jelly beans could only help us be less bored, right? So we hacked the pomegranate off it’s sad, little Giving Tree and then chopped the fruit in half. Inside were not ruby red jewels, but clear baubles. Cubic zirconium pomegranate seeds. We were bummed. Then we tasted them. They were better than better than jelly beans. In fact, they were better than just about anything.

We looked it up. White pomegranate is a thing. A good thing.

We felt we’d wronged the little stick and swore never to be so shallow again. In fact, we planted some of the magnificent seeds nearby, in the hope that another Giving Stick might make a future renter’s afternoon less boring with white pomegranate seeds and a lesson in small.

Clark’s Nutcracker is a grayish bird that is capable of planting entire forests. It can stash 30,000 seeds in one season; a huge surplus that, if not eaten by something else, will eventually germinate and grow into trees. This bird, like your children and your flowers and your kindnesses, is not wealthy or famous or attention-seeking and yet it sure seems more important than a lot of the crap we humans pay attention to. We’re ephemeral, brief moments of will. “Us too shall pass.” We have no time to waste.

Love,
Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Clark’s Nutcarcker is here. Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

A couple of guys spilled off their motorcycle in front of us and died instantly, under a full moon. That desert moon that still shines on LA through the light noise.  It actually seemed extra dark right then, even with the neon and the streetlights glaring and that crazy moon. The men crumpled to the ground and then froze in two homunculus heaps as their motorcycle spun away and crashed on its own against the sidewalk.

When we saw that the cops were gonna leave the men lying there, we realized they were no longer men, but bodies. All us traffic people who were still alive took a minute to feel sad and then we drove on. Our car was headed for the real desert, the unspoiled one, the one that gets so freakishly dark, you can’t see your own feet. Sparks and sparklers and stars light up the stuff that really matters there.

And when the sun appears, it opens everything up to squinting eyeballs. No secrets in the daytime desert. You cook and blister in its expansiveness and freeze in its contracted shadows. This is rising to an occasion, though, so it doesn’t hurt.

Keep driving. Cross the bottom of the country and watch the landscape green up and wet itself down. Rain seeps through everything in the American south, whether it’s raining or not. Just the memory of past rain soaks the trees, whose branches hang heavy and drip mystery moisture. Sparks and sparklers light up the day here.

And rising to this landscape’s occasion means clean dreaming, swearing off parody, soaking in wicked memories that drip off the branches like so much forgotten rain.

Love,

Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Cherry Candy/Dripping Trees is here. Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

Ugly couches’re like ugly dogs: they’re everywhere and they have a certain quirky charm. Maybe you’d prefer a pretty dog or a clean, lovely couch…you don’t know; it hasn’t come up. You feel lucky to rest your head on something – in a dressing room, an apartment, a hotel lobby. You tame squalor by allowing it to suit you.

Musicians know that, like tamed dogs, a tamed couch will follow you around. “I coulda sworn I saw that couch in Milwaukee,” I think, staring down at a stained hunting scene stretched over a seat cushion in Denver. And then again in Santa Fe. This particular couch followed me all the way to Nottingham, England. I squinted at it suspiciously. So it can swim, I thought, placing my backpack strategically over an ancient, gray wad of gum.

The filthy couch that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, of course. Not true of the bottomless coffee cup you try to fill up the next morning. Not with coffee necessarily. You’re hoping that the big waitress in the sky’ll deem you worthy enough to pour a hunk o’ liquid love into your fragile, china cup. Which she often does. However this fragile china, like I said, is bottomless. You may have tamed a gum-encrusted seat cushion, but it is unlikely you will ever tame the draining vessel that is your heart. It is voracious. “How many sugars you want with that?” she asks, refilling your empty cup. “How many you got??” you ask her, panicking.

She does her best to keep you full of sweetness, because the waitress is good at her job when you can catch her eye. So you begin to feel a little stronger, a little less panicky. Skating along on this temporary lift of enough, you begin to notice the fragile china hearts gripped by white knuckles all around you. My god, they’re everywhere! Then you remember the packets of sugar you carry around in your pockets with other people’s names on them and count them, hoping you have enough to ease their pain. You do, of course. This love, the kind that fills draining, fragile vessels, is, of course, bottomless.

Love,

Kristin

This month’s Throwing Muses demo, Curtains / Triangle Quantico is here. Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

I had a seizure one night, when I was a teenager, on the front step of Store 24 on Thayer Street in Providence. I was talking to my friend Mark and drinking a Coke, watching cars drive by, and then I was looking up at Mark’s face in the glaring fluorescent light and Thayer Street was sideways. “What happened?” he asked me. I didn’t say anything, ’cause I didn’t know exactly and ’cause I was busy feeling the sticky fluid on my face and in my hair. I hoped that I’d cracked my head on the cement step and that the sticky fluid was nice, dramatic blood, but my Coke can was empty and Mark wasn’t looking at me as if I was covered in blood, so I figured I’d not only embarrassed myself by having a seizure in public but also poured an entire can of soda on my own face. Swell.

“Lazy Eye” thinks this is a pertinent moment. It then goes on to describe ways in which our brains spend time in other places and the embarrassing frustrations that can cause us. Another eye in another place, out of this world, can set off our balance and poke little holes in the beautiful masks we wear in public. We make these masks out of psychological glitter and glue, ’cause we think we can fool people, or maybe we got our feelings hurt one too many times, and a thoughtfully constructed persona starts to seem important. They’ll think I’m so cool! But friends, lovers and well-wishers whose hearts are not made of stone always seem to be around when our weirdnesses shine through the eye holes like so much bright light.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.

Swollen is Marilyn Munster; the last “normal” Throwing Muses song. This is, of course, just a demo, but you can tell she wears trim blouses and pumps, smiles politely and probably only eats animals that don’t have two heads. It appears, though, that when Swollen left the building, she left the door open. Her sweet shuffle and actual chorus (of all things) was followed immediately by songs made of fractured instrumentals, unattached bridges and free-floating verses who tap dance for a minute then run away, only to reappear in a different outfit, a different song, later on in the program.

It is not un-beautiful to be in pieces, as long as those pieces are fully realized, so I’m happy to let these strangenesses be as they are. But after living in this fractured world lately, hearing Swollen again was like a gentle lady sitting down next to me on a park bench, Frisbees whipping by. I like Throwing Muses Frisbees, but the gentle ladies are comforting, especially after taking a bunch of Frisbees to the face.

I want to thank you Strange Angels again for allowing both the ladies and the Frisbees a chance to come to fruition in the studio. The NPR-ish model we emulate is a valuable one. Sure, forty bucks is a lot to pay for a coffee mug, but if you want no corporate involvement in your radio, then you pay the forty bucks and take or leave the mug. I’m thrilled to be sending you the new CD that we made together, I love it when you visit me in the studio or take me up on my offer of free admission to shows, but I find that, for the most part, you all are interested only in having the music continue. I will always write new songs, but without the ability to fund recording sessions, you probably wouldn’t hear them. Thank you for wanting to hear them.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support my work by becoming a subscriber is here.