Stuff that I have written.
When I named the company Areae
I picked a name you can barely say.
And in truth it was no surprise
When others started saying Areae…
But even then it seemed to me
That most would call it AreaE.
But really… who cares? Odds are
You’ve typed it and read it so far.
Or typoed it, at any rate. 🙂
I.
The Road
The jungle breathes
with its own rhythms
for its own reasons.
The road is a knife cut
parting the jungle
and no use can claim it
from its source.
Ghosts jabber among the thick-veined leaves
Panthers dream of standing over campfires
Jowls sag over flames and sparks
This road is a gullet
into some animal too vast
to comprehend.
His grandfather told him, when he was a child,
How he used to bait bees with sugar and steal
Their honey, licking it from smeared fingers
While they strung a line of yellow dots to his trap.
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A really long time ago now I wrote a song that was sort of about the Rapture. Specifically, it was a song that wondered, what if the Rapture happened, and because the world generally sucked, almost nobody actually got taken up? I decided to write a song about the one town that was actually good enough to get saved. I wanted the lyric to have an urban legend feel — like, how did anyone ever hear this even happened if the whole town vanished? (That’s why it comes from “a friend of a friend.”) And what if it was aliens, instead — how do we know it was really the Rapture, and not something else? The song was an acoustic piece, lots of floaty suspended chords and fingerpicking, very mellow vibe.
Another really long time ago, but not as long — maybe eight or nine years — we had a spare bedroom where Todd McKimmey & I would do recording. And one of the tunes that Todd decided that we should record was this one. Naturally, Todd being Todd, he wanted to put drums and electric guitars on it. I think it was one of the first times I ever played to a drum machine, actually (which means I wasn’t very good at it!).
Well, I found that recording lurking on my hard drive this morning. Alas, Todd was unable to scare up a choir for the chorus, so there’s a point where there’s nothing but clapping and the voice. That’s him on bass and electric, plus the drum machine programming of course.
We went on to do some rather odd and interesting co-writes, usually with him supplying the heavy rock & me doing lyrics and melody. I have those lurking on my hard drive too.
I get this question all the time. Since I just got my latest statement, I figured I’d tell you.
