Apologies for the dead silence this past week…its been crazy. Living in a 30 year old trailer has its challenges, as we’ve been discovering. I was envisioning a relaxed, care-free lifestyle – lazily meandering down the highways and byways (what are those anyway?) of this crazy, beautiful country. Needless to say, it’s been a kind of rude awakening. It’s neither relaxing nor care-free…and we have a closer relationship with our sewage than I ever cared to imagine.
There’s a patch of rotten wood, a few pipe leaks and no power inverter (which means boondocking would be tough). Oh yes, and Elie’s allergic to the trailer. I’ve suddenly become aware of just how many things can go terribly wrong when you’re carrying your house on your back at 65 miles an hour. Who knew this would all be so complicated?
So after our show today in Norfolk, VA we’re driving to Winston-Salem, NC to bring our trailer to an Airstream repair place. We’ve got four shows in North Carolina and then on October 10th we head to Knoxville…so hopefully the trailer will be fixed by that time (at minimal cost!) Until then, we’ll be homeless in North Carolina.
All in all, I can’t say yet whether I like this new lifestyle or not. I don’t regret it, which is a good sign. But I’m trying to withhold judgement for another few weeks. We’re still adjusting.
On the upside, we got to spend some time in Richmond, VA, which is a place I would actually consider moving to. It’s a really nice city; small enough and green enough to not feel overwhelming, but with tons of culture and arts. Of course my main criteria for loving a place mostly depends on how vegan-friendly they are and how good the coffee is…and Richmond went above and beyond. We played a show at a coffee shop called Globehopper- BEST COFFEE EVER! I mean subtle, perfectly roasted, perfectly brewed, PERFECTION! The only down side is that I had managed to lower my coffee expectations to the point that any old Starbucks could be, not good, but at least semi-palatable…well Globehopper has ruined all that. The owner, Kimmy, is super nice and gave us these massive vegan chocolate cookie-concoctions stuffed full of peanut butter. Oh Richmond, how I love you. If you’re ever in the area, do yourself a favor and get a cappuccino at Globehopper and thank me later.
After shows in Charlottesville and Williamsburg, we’re now chilling at a Starbucks (damn you, Globehopper!) in Norfolk, awaiting our show tonight.
Then we’ve got to high tail it back to our campsite, dump (really not fun), and start driving to North Carolina. We’ll probably spend our first night in a Walmart parking lot tonight – is it weird that I’m kind of excited about that?
Fourteen days to go until we’ll be living full time in a trailer!!! So I wanted to take this time to write down our mission statement of sorts, to explain why we’re taking this drastic action (besides the obvious “because its awesome” reason) and what we hope to get out of it.
Short version: Life is far too short to spend it doing anything other than what you love to do.
Long version:
We’ve been living in and around New York City for four and a half years now, and I’ve been here the majority of my life. Maybe it’s just that we’ve been stationary for so long, but those four and a half years have all kind of blended into a big mushy ball…they really just flew by in a blur of relative same-ness, and I’d like the rest of my years on earth to be punctuated by more diversity and memorable experiences.
Now New York City might appear to be a really happening place in which to be an artist, and maybe it is for some…but not for me. It’s taken me awhile to admit that I’m more of a tree/grass/river/mountain person than a concrete/traffic/rat person. Living in the city, I would literally go outside my apartment building for a walk, get to the end of the block and turn back around (I swear concrete leeches energy from me), so I ended up spending most of my free time holed up inside my apartment. I find that the city tends to make me ultra self conscious… maybe its all the people. People, people everywhere. I do enjoy dipping my toes into the human pond, but on the whole I prefer a little more species diversity. The city makes me feel like I’m living in a large insect colony of some kind (I’m not talking about the cockroaches) – like there’s a whole forest out there and I’m hanging out in the termite mound.
Then there’s the whole having to work a day job to pay your rent thing, it seems like it would make more sense to pursue an artistic career in a less expensive city. The one and only underpriced thing in NYC is talent; no where else in the western world can you find such talented people willing to work for so little, if anything at all. If I were a public policy maker I would come up with some kind of program to make life a little easier for artists here, and I would do it quickly before they all leave for greener pastures…because without artists New York City would just be a concrete wasteland full of hipsters, tourist attractions and Broadway adaptations of Disney movies.
Also, New Yorkers are a jaded bunch on the whole…its not our fault, it’s just that there is SO much happening everywhere, all the time, that you really start to tune it all out…that goes for everything; art, music, people you pass in the street.
When we went on tour, we would feel so free, happy and inspired. The thought of returning to the city would leave us both with this heavy, uncomfortable feeling. It was tangible; as soon as we’d enter New Jersey our moods would take a turn for the worse (insert New Jersey joke). I think most people would agree that when the thought of returning home makes you bitchy, depressed and anxious, its a pretty clear indication that you’re not in the right place!
We’d talked about the idea of living some sort of mobile existence, but never very seriously . Then during one of our annual camping trips in Montauk, these two gorgeous airstreams pulled up to the spot next to ours, and we spent the night gazing longingly at them. I think that’s when the seed was planted. We love travelling, we feel most alive when we’re exploring new places, and we hate feeling weighed down with belongings, jobs, rent, etc. so I’m really surprised that it took us this long to go the nomadic route.
We started to realize that we didn’t want to “pursue” a career anymore…we didn’t want to spend our day-to- day lives working jobs that didn’t satisfy us, in the hopes that one day we’d “make it” and be able to make a living off of our music. So, what? So, we cut our expenses as much as possible, make touring as economic as possible, and play as much as we can…basically, like the best slogan in the world says, we JUST DO IT! I have no idea whether this will be a viable solution (not that there’s really anything to solve), or where it will take us…but I do know that at the very least it will be an adventure – and it feels like a life style which is far more in alignment with who we are and what we want our lives to look like!
Well the glorious day has finally arrived – we are the proud owners of a 1975, 24 foot Airstream Argosy!
We’ve been telling people for over a year now that we’re going to be leaving our apartment to live full-time in an Airstream trailer – and I think eventually they started doubting that it would ever happen. Well, it’s happening. It took a little longer than expected, but its happening.
Finding a habitable, cheap, vintage Airstream is not an easy task – especially since I became infatuated with the Argosy variety (the white ones, for the non-Airstream enthusiasts out there) which are even harder to find. I literally spent hours every day checking craigslist, ebay, and a bunch of other places in search of an Argosy. Anyone out there looking for an Airstream, be warned: they go fast! You’ve got to pounce on them.
We saw an ad for a great looking Argosy in Zanesville, Ohio – and an hour later we were on our way. Lucky for us, the owner was super nice and agreed not to sell it until we’d had a look (it’s a 10 hour drive from New York).
Well, needless to say, the Argosy was perfect. We’d seen a couple other Airstreams before this one and they just don’t compare! The owner had spent a huge amount of time and great care renovating it, while preserving the original, vintage details. It’s gorgeous; in FAR better condition than I could have hoped for with our budget. I almost don’t want to put any of our stuff in it because it’s so clean and perfect right now!
The riff is entirely Elie’s creation, I just came up with the melody and lyrics for this one. In true slacker fashion, all I did with this song was list objects I had lying around…one of my laziest songs 😉
The song was definitely inspired by frequent moving. Anyone who’s ever moved knows how overwhelming and indescribably frustrating it can be to take stock of all the THINGS you own…and to have to unearth them from their dusty corners, put them all in little boxes and then take them out of little boxes and find new corners for them to collect dust in -UGH! I’m actually getting annoyed just thinking about it.
So, the inspiration:
In the summer of 2006 we moved from England to Mount Vernon, NY; then in January 2007 we made the short trip from Mount Vernon to Pelham (to my parent’s basement, to be precise, which flooded every time it rained and was home to many gigantic basement bugs), then from Pelham to Macau in July 2007 (by then our things were dusty AND moldy), and Macau to NYC in March 2008. So by the time I wrote the song, we were well acquainted with everything we owned…and even though we threw out a lot of stuff every time we moved, we still managed to accumulate more.
Now, I love cleanliness but I don’t love cleaning…and while I really do HATE getting dirt stuck to my feet when I walk around the house, I suppose I don’t hate it enough to sweep the floor on a regular basis. I’m also not big on putting things away. Clean clothes stay in the laundry bag, I pour them out on the bed every morning to find what I’m looking for, and then stuff them back in the bag at night rather than taking the time to fold them and place them in drawers. But anyway, every now and then I get really frustrated with all the clutter and hair balls everywhere and I go into a cleaning frenzy and throw out a bunch of stuff.
Still, I can not keep any surfaces in my house clear. If there’s a surface, there’s something on it. I put things in their respective places every now and then, or try to make neat little piles…but it doesn’t last long – and it seems like such a useless endeavor. Keeping things clean and clear is a never ending battle which I’m just not up to fighting.
I don’t think it matters how much space I have – if there was more space I would probably just find more things to fill it with. I’ve noticed that no matter the size of our living area, the amount of clutter tends to remain the same – it’s some kind of universal law. We’re not hoarders or anything, we probably own far fewer “things” than most Americans in our general demographic – but other people seem to have picked up grown-up habits, and organizational skills somewhere along the way which we never bothered to learn. But again, I don’t really care enough to make the trip to “The Container Store”…and even if I did I would then have to utilize these containers in some kind of organized fashion, and remember to put all these things back in their correct container after taking them out – SEE? It’s all so tiresome!!! So many things to think about, SO MANY THINGS!!!
In conclusion, it’s really nice to have stuff, but lugging it around and being invested in the ownership and preservation of this stuff can be more of a pain in the ass than it’s really worth.
We’re going to be moving again pretty soon – into a MUCH smaller space (a 24 foot trailer to be exact) so I’m curious to see what that transition will be like. I’m pretty optimistic since there will be far less space to have to clean 🙂
[wpaudio url=”https://www.thewhisperingtree.com/_album/02. Las Vegas.mp3″ dl=’0′ text=’Las Vegas’]
As the title suggests, this song was inspired by the week or so I spent in Vegas in the summer of 2007.
Elie and I were sent over there to learn how to pretend to be Italian while rowing a gondola and singing cheesy Italian songs like “o Sole Mio,” or worse, cheesy Italian-American songs, like “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.”
So already, this was a pretty surreal experience.
Add to that the fact that the gondolier training took place from about 10pm to 4am.
So Elie and I would spend the days wondering around the desert in search of food. We didn’t have a car and it’s FAR too hot to walk for more than three minutes, so we would take the bus. Here’s a tip if you want to really get a feel for a place: take public transportation – there’s no easier way to experience the essence of a city, in my opinion.
So, if I had to describe Vegas in a few words, these are the ones that would come to mind:
LONELY. DESOLATE. FORGOTTEN.
Now maybe I missed something – but Vegas seems to just be Casinos, strip malls with chains or Chinese food, and housing developments.
There’s a very specific light in Vegas at a certain time of the evening – and walking those broad, empty streets, waiting by a bus stop with shattered glass on the ground, was very evocative for some reason.
Being approached by meth heads trying to sell us their food stamps every time we went to the store also added to the charm 😉
I apologize if I’ve offended any Vegas lovers, I realize that everyone has their own experience of everything, but that was mine.
The first two verses came to me suddenly and I started singing on top of a chord progression I had previously used in one of the embarrassing early songs I wrote (which no one will EVER hear). As often happens, I got stuck and had no idea where to go so Elie came up with the progression for the B section. I didn’t actually finish the song until we returned from China, seven or eight months later. I think I have a slight phobia of finishing songs – so they hang around open ended and full of possibility until I have some sort of motivation to “finalize” them.
The piano solo in the middle was originally just a place holder for a guitar solo – and to this day it’s the only time I’ve attempted a piano solo…hence the reason I play the same exact solo at every show 😉
I came across some lyrics which didn’t make the cut and I had completely forgotten about:
“Las Vegas, where’s your soul? They built a city upon your dusty bones, but I can feel you when the sun sets low over your city of gold.”
Reminds me of this feeling of ruin I experienced being there – and a feeling of the city being completely out of place.
Las Vegas seemed to me to have inherited the desolate, ghostly, quiet feeling of the desert despite the fact that its a massive, garish city – as if the city is just an illusion which could disappear at any second; a tiny, inconsequential moment in time. Like everyone there is alone in the middle of the desert, both figuratively and literally…but they’ve got an obscene and unsustainable amount of water being funneled in, and air conditioning, so they forget – but they are in the desert, alone.
That’s what Las Vegas awakened in me, anyway – and I think the song captures that vibe. Come to think of it, I must have seen some kind of sad, lonely beauty in the city in order for it to have inspired me.
We just released our new video for Go Call the Captain, so I’ll talk a little about the inspiration/process behind the song.
I started this song in the fall of 2008. Elie and I had been watching a lot of documentaries like Food, Inc. and The Future of Food. This was also right around the time of the financial crisis, and about eight months after returning to NYC from China…by which time we’d spent all our money and had to start working for the man again.
Needless to say, it became more and more apparent to me that the people in “power” are out of their fucking minds.
These people are like feral animals. They’re in survival mode. I mean, they must have such a crazy, fucked-up, scary, ass-backwards view of the world in order to do the things they do. They must believe that it’s necessary and/or okay to cause harm to large amounts of people in order to survive and flourish (survival of the fittest!). Or they’re in denial. Or they are just sociopaths.
They are the worst of the worst, really. Because they harm people for money, like assassins.
Yet they are not shamed, they are not outcasts – in fact they are usually respected and revered. They are the people your parents would like you to become. They’re the kind of “successful” and “upwardly mobile” folks that people try to associate with and emulate, instead of avoiding at all costs.
Where’s the online database listing these criminals? Where are the laws protecting us from them? The registries designed to alert the neighbors that there are dangerous people nearby? There are none….and they make the laws.
People shake their hands, people are honored to meet them, pull out their chairs and take photos with them.
It’s like people’s ability to reason evaporates in the presence of money – why do most people feel more comfortable with people who cause suffering on a global scale than they do with some homeless guy on the subway? The homeless guy might smell, but is probably not dangerous, and I’m pretty sure he’s never made a decision which caused a hunger epidemic, or done anything on par with releasing tons of untreated hog excrement into the environment every day without repercussion. We should feel more comfortable with the homeless guy, but we don’t…
Anyway, here are a few of the people I was referring to when I wrote the song:
Monsanto – and anyone who has ever done anything to further their agenda.
Smithfield Foods, in particular Joseph Luter III – I know most of you probably support these sociopaths every time you fry up your morning bacon, but in your defense you probably aren’t aware of what you are doing…now would be as good a time as any to find out.
Goldman Sachs – “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” – Matt Taibbi. Yup, that about sums it up.
I could keep going, but focusing on these severely disconnected people makes me feel severely disconnected…and depressed – so I will stop there. But those are some of the people who’s behavior inspired Go Call the Captain.
I lied, one more – the Pharmaceutical Industry – okay, done now.
So that gives you a pretty good idea of where my focus was when the inspiration hit – now for the good part:
I was working at a maritime law firm, digesting a deposition for a case in which someone was injured on board a ship.
In the transcript, after the incident occurred a crewman yelled “Go Call the Captain.”
The simplicity of that phrase and the certainty with which this crewman called upon the chain of command, superimposed upon my heightened awareness of the injustices of the world hit me suddenly. The first verse and melody popped in to my head:
“Go call the captain and hold tight the rail, this ship is sinking and we need some help, someone please save us from these wicked men, who rule the world, rule the world, rule the world.”
This was by far the best thing that has ever happened to me while at work. I didn’t know it was possible to be inspired inside a cubicle, and was under the impression that my spirit checked out every time I entered the building, so you can imagine my surprise.
“Land of illusion and sleight of hand, land of delusion and suffering, false prophets, liars and thieves rule the world.”
I had been listening to Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations a lot during this period of time (I mean A LOT, it was a really long ride from Inwood to the financial district and the A train takes FOREVER, if it’s running at all, so I had some quality time with that album) and had originally imagined some kind of grand, Muse-ish rock opera crescendo for the song.
Elie came up with the backing vocals and the chords for the verse based on the melody I was singing, and then I think we wrote the B section chord progression together. Then we just played around with it and let it unfold.
The B section lyrics were pretty painless, but I had a hard time coming up with the lyrics for the third verse, and I settled for something which I still don’t think is very good – lazy writing on my part 🙂
“Their lips are moving, tongues smooth as knives, well versed in confusion, subversion and lies, guided by nothing but greed and pride, they rule the world.”
Yeah, I feel like the first half of that verse is slightly awkward, oh well.
For the final verse I wanted to touch upon the fact that we aren’t powerless. That we may have temporarily handed our power over to someone else, but that we are perfectly capable of reclaiming it and creating any kind of world we desire – which is really what I meant when I said “we can rule the world.” I didn’t mean “rule” as in wield power or control over others, I meant being in control of our own lives and the creation of our own realities…if that makes sense. Yes, I’m a big Abraham-Hicks fan.
So that’s basically it, my big “holy shit this world is fucking bonkers” song.
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