Chapter One: Sing Your Thoughts

The whole point of it is, the music is bigger than you. It’s almost elemental in the coy and quixotic way, like Spring fever…but it’s also almost fanatical…or merely impulsive…or as serious as insanity. It’s influence is alive in these performer's eyes, whether their gazing out from the stage or whether their veiled by drawn eyelids; it's influence is given air and radiated through their belted voices and it's given force by the blistered fingers and stick snapping grip of the snare slamming wrist flick…

The whole point of it is, I don’t understand, really, what music does to you…or to me…but more particularly to you, because, unlike me, I’m guessing you actually write it, play it, read it, record it…make it.

The point of it continues to be that I was, am and will continue to be…affected (afflicted? infatuated? fascinated?) with finding out, in what nuanced ways, music molds you…alters you…helps you…

If I could bundle everything I’ve done in the last five years…every word written, every late night interview, every streetlamp-less dark back alley driven down to reach the next dusty flat with my ever-willing/battery-sapping recorder; every ruminating interview tended to with my weary, blue, darting eyes and crackling inquisitions, if I could bundle all the clips, all the copy, the blurbs, the blog posts…

...and heave it forth off from some monstrous dump truck’s roaring hydraulic bed…as some kind of further fertilizer? Or to surge it forth like liquid nutrient from a freshly cracked well’s wall to water the strange cement suffocated creative soils of this town?

I’d do it…

I’d feel it only necessary…fitting…the only way to match what happened last night. And I mean that…the maddening part of trying to describe this is that all the various creative types in this town with their uniquely erupting hearts (through sound) and delicately (and distinctively) assembled auditory chronicles already “meant the world to me,” so to speak… so to just say that the sweeping gesture of last night “meant the world…” blah blah blah…to me…would pale in what I would actually want to say.

And I never really had anything to say… until someone else sang something… and that …set me off!

So you… either you’re like me and you’re just genuinely turned on, or, ‘set off’ by what is, invariably “going on” …around here, thus you feel drawn to these shows. Or you’re a musician and you are a part of it on a deeper level, like a sparked synapse traveling across the veins (stages) of our scene’s body… either way, take heart!

Take heart. Because the cynics will always shoot down (or discount) “scenes,” belittling-and-whittling it down to “people just wanting to feel like they’re a part of something”

What they’d be grossly overlooking, criminally neglecting, blindly skirting, is that… with “what’s going on” around here, now… with us, is that, yes, we’re a part of something.”

The point of it is, to find out what that something is, and what it’s universal impact could be…

Take heart. Because we might not change the world. But someone went home from last night and wrote a song… Someone woke up with a hangover, and, even when they got themselves stone-cold sober by mid-afternoon today, torched back into normalcy by black coffee, they still remembered one, two, or five moments from last night and grinned with the glee of some kind of high.

An insanity. An elemental sort of thing—spring fever!

Beachwood Sparks – “Sing Your Thoughts” exerts

“I wish thoughts would come in music / Words I have…have failed me so far…”

“’What did I hear?’” / It only took listening to listen / Words interfere and cause confusion, frustration / But don’t cry / It’s too loud”

“Sing your thoughts…in music.”