Microphones In 2020

The true state of all things
I keep on not dying, the sun keeps on rising
I remember my life as if it's just some dreams that I don't trust
Burning off, layered thick
A cargo that I haul
Wounds and loves unresolved
I wake up with the sun in my eyes
The present moment tries
But now I'm back where I was when I was twenty
Crashing through salal alone and mumbling
One moment thinking I'm wise
And in the next one I writhe
Trying to re-remind myself of something learned then forgotten
Countless sunrises burying the things
I'd figured out the day before
Like that I probably won't find shelter
In the arms of any other person
Though I will try
Again, I'll deny
The blanketing sky
The thing I just realised
For probably the millionth time
That walking with my knees trembling
Is the true state of all things

The true state of all things is a waterfall
With no bottom crashing end
And no ledge to plummet off
Full of debris and flowers, never not falling
And in it we swim and fall
Sometimes beside
Often apart
It's just chaos heaving
I wake up with the sun in my eyes
Beneath present moment skies
Squinting and wondering how I got here
Going through the contents of my backpack
Shaking out the dust to bring some empty space back
Filling a long merch table with artifacts
Looking back to see if I could draw a map
That leads to now

I remember where I was

When I was twenty, or seventeen, or twenty-three
The disinterested sun would still rise every morning
Same as now
Dawn was loud
I took my breakfast to the couch on the porch of the punk house
Coffee and low tide smell and my life stretching out
Spending hours each morning reading poems and staring off
And then snapping back to urgency, I did my dishes
And then I would sprint
To the studio again
Spend all day and night digging in
Distorted bass, spliced tape
Singing lines like: "There's no end"
And "I won't look for you in my room"
About my friends

I would drive out to the ocean and not tell anybody
I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in a dollar theatre in Aberdeen
It was a rainy matinée, 2001, Sunday, March 18th
And in the parking lot afterward
For a few minutes in the rain
I stood glowing with ideas
Of what I might try to convey with this music
At that moment, my mind flashing like a blade
A twenty-two-year-old in flip-flops
Running around in an empty mall parking lot
Lost in a martial arts fantasy
It looks ridiculous now
But the truth is that alone there
Something was formed
The way they held themselves upright with tea in the opening scenes
A warm formality, spines straight and feet planted wide
Untipoverable like the bamboo'd undulating hills
Walking slowly, making eye contact and gliding
The sound of empty wind when they sword fought weightless in the bamboo
With a purity of heart that transcends gravity
Leaping off the mountain into ambiguity
Falling slow
As the end credits rolled
I decided I would try to make music that contained this deeper peace
Buried underneath distorted bass
Fog imbued with light and emptiness
I kept on driving out to the ocean
It was raining so hard, I was wet wool caked with sand
I watched the dunes migrate slowly

Lost mind in the tall grass
And slowly the sound
Of roaring waves returned
I rose
I returned to my station wagon with a wet face
Extravagant solitude invigorates
I drove back to Olympia clear-headed
Temporarily
And went back into the studio to resume whatever this thing is
This spooling out repetitive decades long song string
This river coursing through my life
These wild swipes at meaning
And now I circle back to look into the spring

When I was seventeen
It was 1995
I put the name "Microphones" on the tapes I would make late at night after work at the record store
I was already by then a couple years deep into this weird pursuit
Playing drums, copying lyrics out to hang them in my room
Until I started making my own embarrassing early tries
At this thing that sings at night above the house
Branches in the wind
Bending wordlessly
I wanted to capture it on tape

At first, I called my recordings a different name
I called it "The Microphones" on the third cassette I made
Because I loved recording and the equipment seemed to be living
And it sang to me like static interference
From the small AM radio station down the street
Night in Anacortes in the mid-90s, oil tankers rumbling
I stayed late recording every night
Then I drove back to my parents house
My headlights through the trees along Heart Lake Road
Winding down the dark slope

Beneath Mount Erie
I was already who I am

A bottle of India ink, masking tape
Julie Doiron, Tori Amos, Cranberries, Sinéad O'Connor
Eric's Trip, Red House Painters, Sonic Youth, This Mortal Coil
Kurt Cobain had died
I had my driver's license and a girlfriend
And we'd cling to each other and dream that anything's permanent
Even back then
The beast of uninvited change
Insisted itself in
And look here, it still hangs
But when I was young (Young)
I'd go driving in the rain

I saw Stereolab in Bellingham and they played one chord for fifteen minutes
Something in me shifted
I brought back home belief I could create eternity
Leaning the guitar up on the amp, taping down organ keys
Feeding back forever distorted waves of cymbals oceany
Slowly starting to try the move the words beyond
Mere melancholy
Into something that rings
True and old and useful hopefully
But when I was seventeen, I sang
In the moment, hurt romantically
Grasping in the dark

Like: "Shadows of the moon..."
"On the back of the car seat..."
"Where she sat once"

It's not that bad, but I know I wanted to go deeper beneath pain
Beneath the human

Is it because my parents barely had any money
And preferred to leave the baby in the garden
That I grew up to blur the boundary
Between myself and the actual churning dirt of this place?
That it feels normal to me to speak with the voice of weather
To build and move into a mirage
Made of songs cascading down a rock face in a homemade myth?

Even deeper back into the mist
When I was twelve or thirteen
On a family trip, we hiked down a steep bluff to an ocean beach in whipping rain
My little brother's clothes got wet from playing in the winter waves
My parents made a fire of smokey driftwood and we huddled in
And took his wet clothes off and held him naked above the flames
Smelling like smoke and salt on the drive home
Surely this experience explains something about whoever it was that sang all these songs

When you're younger, every single things vibrates with significance
Gazing at the details in the artwork of a 7-inch
Devouring every word in a zine
There was barely internet
Meaning gets attributed wherever appetite bestows a thing
With resonating glowing ringing out through a life
What from these times do I carry with me still?
The things I survive return repeatedly
And I find again that I am a newborn every time

When I wake alone in the dark
Again, I swim
Out into the lake of the heart
And in

Mm...

When I got back to Olympia from the ocean
I woke up early before dawn to start recording
The things I wanted to communicate had to do
With finding out how to break out from seeing
Only the inside of reflected ocean on the sky

It was early 2001 and I was almost twenty-three
I'd finished recording The Glow Pt. 2
And I was either always on tour or setting up a tour
Always running, voracious, thirsty
I'd go out to the lake with friends
Swim out to the middle and dive as far as I could
Down to where the water gets cold, with open eyes
We'd go up on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon
My friends and I just trying to blow each others' minds
Just lying there gazing, young and ridiculous
And we meant it, our eyes watering
The moon without abstraction
Then became a floating ball of a rock in outer space
Not a sticker or a light or a hole through black paper
We were making food and records and paintings
And walking around beneath a real infinity
I felt my size

That brief dissipating shock of looking into outer space
And seeing, for just a second, the bottomless distance pressed against my face
My little mind trying to write it down, zooming out
A faint yelp lost in a thunderstorm
Sufficiently small, thinking on the geologic scale
Making the voice of mountains

Reaching beyond my old concerns
From when I was seventeen in 1995
All the layers of life
Glint in my flashing eye
Simultaneously
And at any moment we could die
And so with urgency
I keep a candle by my side
And watch it disappear and glow
At the same time

The weather moves across the land and doesn't have a reason
This rippling uncertainty beneath our bones
Is still
The true state of all things

It was at a truck stop in northern Italy
I was on tour playing drums and always wandering off alone
Squinting into the setting sun
My notebook filling
I was touring, living on an alternate plane within
But set apart from this life
Where people wake and work and don't self-uproot each day
Instead we passed through the towns like criminals
I was so gladly included in this rare world
This moving cult of groundlessness
Roomless, moving, awake
Across that parking lot, recognition of the same

Another touring American band
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
All dressed in matching track suits and sunglasses
Grizzled and silly
A kind of Italian tour costume
Blending in, but not really
And their playfulness with persona
Liberated me with permeability
I thought, "Who is it even that sings
And who comes to life
Between the ears of the hearers in the rooms at night
And how can we all get deep?"

The packaging distracts from the nourishment it wraps
Fixation on the singer's face or on the band's name
Keeps us groveling and blind at the edge of a sea
Unsubmerged in the singing waterfall
Looking for a door into The Mansion
Taking this weird art project out into public

Indulging in cultivated ambiguity
About participants' identities
Letting misperceptions hang
Because nothing's really true
With this imagined collective called "The Microphones"
I wrote about climbing up and dying
And then flying off as vultures
And a universe beyond
Innocent of the real air of death
That awaited down the path

At the very end of 2002, I took the Microphones name and crumpled it up
And burned it in a cave on the frozen edge of northern Norway
I made a boundary between two eras of my life
A feeble gesture at making chaos seem organized
The roaring river carves on, laughing at my efforts
While the idea of something called "Mount Eerie" engulfed me
And time
Refuses to stop

Many, many years later
I heard "Freezing Moon" by Mayhem
And these words jumped out:
"The cemetery lights up again"
"Eternity opens"
And I say:
"Nothing stays the same
No one knows anything
Someone else lives in the house I used to live in
And soon it will be torn down or burn"
And who would even want to live in a prolonged stagnation?
I am older now and I no longer feel the same way
That I did even five seconds ago
Watch me thrash around
And try to gracefully allow the past to hang
Like: "No big deal"

Bands that break up and then reunite for money can do whatever they want
But it makes me glad that I am only this one contrary grump, impossible to reunite
Live
The present moment burns

I will never stop singing this song
It goes on forever
I started when I was a kid and I still want to hold it lightly
This luxurious privilege to sit around
Frowning and wondering what it means
Playing with words
And trying to prove that names mean nothing

A finger
Pointed at the moon
Mistaken
For something shining and true

I never used to think I'd still be sitting here at forty-one
Trying to breathe calmly through the waves
But nothing's really changed in this effort that never ends

When I took my shirt off in the yard
I meant it, and it's still off
I'm still standing in the weather
Looking for meaning in the giant meaningless
Days of love and loss repeatedly waterfalling down

And the sun
Relentlessly rises still

It seems like I'll never not lose wisdom
Constantly relearning all the basics
Never recognizing any faces
Crawling out from under living layers
Squinting in the light of the earth bathing
Shaking off the weight of expectations
Plus all this nostalgia is embarrassing
So I walk into an unknown room
Without a name

So what if I label this song "Microphones in 2020"?
I hope the absurdity that permeates everything joyfully
Rushes out and floods the room like water from the ceiling
Undermining all of our delicate stabilities
Admitting that each moment is a new collapsing building
Nothing is true
But this trembling, laughing in the wind

Anyway, every song I've ever sung is about the same thing:
Standing on the ground looking around, basically
And if there have to be words, they could just be:
"Now only"
And
"There's no end"