I recently did a short tour of Michigan's upper peninsula with my long term musical companion and dear friend Kelly Jean Caldwell. Kelly grew up in and around the strange wilderness until she moved downstate in her early 20's. After a show in Marquette we drove to the incredibly small town of Cooks and stayed with her 88 year old grandmother. Looking around the house, like a lot of Grandparents' houses, the decoration was pretty much a shrine to the family and the Grandkids. Old photos of kids now grown and relatives now passed on, keepsakes and memories of all kinds. Our friend Thommy came with us and was asking about who drew the scribbled drawing which was hanging on the wall in the room where I slept. "That was my cousin.." (i forget what Kelly said his name was) "he was a motorcycle fanatic and he actually died in a motorcycle wreck when he was 21. Of course I understand it a lot better now than I did as a kid. When it happened I was too young to piece together that he was at a party and took some girl he met there for a drunken ride on his bike, then hit a pothole and flew off the bike directly into a tree. He died instantly." There was a strange stillness, and Thommy asked, sincerely astounded "Did you ever actually look at this drawing before? He drew this? This is a drawing of a man and woman on a motorcycle, both screaming and an arrow pointing towards a tree. There's a bird in the sky saying 'Tee Hee'." He was right. As if to mock the grizzly speeding death that Kelly's cousin predicted for himself years in advance in the form of a shitty doodle, the bird was most definitely "Tee Hee"ing miles above the impending wreckage. I wondered why this was the drawing hung in honor of the dead, and yeah, why had no one ever realized it told the whole story up front before it happened? Had they? My dreams were blank and my sleep fitful and strange in that room. The next night I stumbled over some kind of growling animal in the dark as we were walking back from the lake under black skies. The U.P. is weird.
Here is a new song me and Ryan have been working out recently. I know it's been a while since there's been much new activity or content on this blog, but it's not even a period of dormancy as much as just a new kind of time. There is still more coming.
Lyrics:
Soft as the light from the inside
Where houses die
Pain in your side
Covered in night
Keep it on ice
Tell them back home
Tell them you're gone
Sweethearts collide from the inside.
Swimsuit is hitting the road for their first tour tomorrow, bright and early. It looks like it's gonna be a radical few shows, so if you're in the area, please come check us out.
