February Light

February Light

Last weekend we headed up north to shoot the video for "Lucky."  It's gonna be on the new record, which we're gearing up to put out soon.  Here are some photos from the shoot.  More to come!

Poem Day.

chorus

“Still we’re often told, ‘seek and ye shall find.’”

                        - Ira Gershwin

Music was born in me

In a place you would never imagine

In a synagogue in Detroit, Michigan

A cement triangle hanging out onto the service drive

That ran next to Telegraph Road

Lines of stained glass running up its middle

In velvet heels on the marble lobby floor

Winter wind sticking under the skin of black tights

In the waxy smell of my aunt and cousin’s lipstick

As we’d kiss silent hellos

While I stepped past them in our pew to get to my seat:

There is where music began.

It was there

In the same prayers with the same tune year after year

My father harmonizing in his clear tenor.

Synagogue is not like church

There is no choir swaying and clapping

Moving to the music

The singers are hidden behind a façade

Their voices are piped out into the air

So they come from nowhere

From the core

The voice of the creation of God

And my father and his brother sang along

In their matching navy blue sport coats

Faces buried in the prayer book

Despite knowing it by heart a lifetime ago.

When I got old enough I sang as well          

Tried to match my dad’s harmonies

Pronounced the s’s instead of the t’s, like all the old guys did

An ancient way to speak a time worn language

I listened to the way my father repeated the English after the rabbi in a monotone, emotionless voice

And I copied him

Extolled the beauty of God like I was dictating a legal letter

When I was twelve

I learned the mournful tune of my Torah portion

For my bat mitzvah

I practiced until I had it memorized

And on the day

I was perfect

Not a single note or pronunciation incorrect

Not a single crack of the throat

My little girls’ voice was a bell ringing out into the sanctuary

The Rabbi told my parents

That in all his years of doing bar and bat mitzvahs

I was the best he’d ever heard

My father was unbearably proud

I thought it was because perfection was important to him

I know now

It’s because that was the last time

I did exactly what he wanted me to

The last time I actually wanted to do it

In the years to come we would crash up against each other

I became quick to shriek and swear

Quick to slam my bedroom door as hard as possible

Against his acid tone

More and more like him

Until he was astounded by me

Until we had no idea how to live in the same house.

It would be years before we’d find common ground

I had moved to California

I had no synagogue

But I wrote songs

He’d send me old sheet music, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin

Thick manila envelopes travelling across ten states to get to me

Speaking to me in the only common language

We knew

Still no words to explain

That the Mahzor and my notebook serve the same purpose

That the prayers I learned at six years old

Are carved so hard into my memory that I sing them

When I am alone cooking dinner

That all of it,

Torah portions and screams and slammed doors

The Viper Room at midnight on a Tuesday and my upright piano in my first apartment

The words of a rabbi and “Someone to Watch Over Me”

The piles of sheet music in his den

and the cds stacked against my teenage bedroom wall

All of it is just

Us

Singing

Color War

Color War

At the end of camp

Our counselors bussed us out

To a field by the highway

To play capture the flag

We painted our faces our team color

My cheeks and nose bloody with red paint

Running unrestricted through knee-high grass

Ankles ravaged by mosquitos

Handkerchiefs tied over our foreheads

We screamed hoarsely at each other

Whispered business-like our strategies

Words hot on each other’s necks

It seemed like endless dusk

The sun never beat down on us

The first splash of fireflies lit up the grass

Looking around I saw nothing

But field and wood and children

They had set us down in another world

And we would readily have disappeared there

Never gone home to our families

Left hollows in the beds of our rooms

Our happiness

unrivaled

We sang our team song

After we secured the last flag

Our roughened feet stomping

on the metal bleachers

Deep into night

In the morning

We wandered out from the woods

Into a patch of yellow flowers and dusty ground

Scuffed our shoes across railroad ties

Our bus looked like an alien aircraft to me

Huffing smoke out of its exhaust

I ran my hand down my dirt-streaked arm

The skin and muscle, the bone

Was all still there

I could not believe it

I never went back to camp after that first summer

In the hard polishing of adulthood

I have rubbed off most of that magic

That golden tinge of almost crossing a line

Only occasionally

A memory will rage up inside of me

Push its fists up through my heart

Like a skinny kid leaping
into the air

Taste of What You Love

Taste of What You Love

While I wait to start mixing the new record, the only thing that seems to make me feel better about the pause in working is writing more songs.  So here's a very demo-y demo of a new song I'm working on.  Click the pretty red title above and lemme know what you think. xo.


Taste of What You Love

I was at my sister's house today, we sat out in the yard
Watched her little boy play
She said "This love will break my heart.
How could I ever have thought I knew, knew about life or death?"

Sometimes a taste of what you love is all you're gonna get
Sometimes it just ain't happened yet

I keep a notebook in my shirt
I like to carry it around
I fill it up with all my words
When I can't check out and I can't calm down
They published my poem in the paper
When I was still full of young breath

Sometimes a taste of what you love is all you're gonna get
Sometimes it just ain't happened yet

Sometimes it feels like the whole of my heart is buried in this town
Everyone else went and got a fresh start
And I just went home, lookin' down.

I'm gonna skip my shift tonight
I'm gonna pack what I can't pawn
Leave a rose by my sister's porch light
By the time she finds it, I'll be gone
Cause I just don't know enough, enough about life or death

Sometimes a taste of what you love is all you're gonna get
Sometimes it just ain't happened yet.

Wide Awake

Wide Awake


Hi Kiddums!
Happy Summer to you.
Click above for a cover of the glorious Katy Perry song, "Wide Awake."  I recorded it in my piano room at home, so it is a very demo-ish demo.  But enjoy it anyway, in all its pop glory.


xo
A

Red Hill

In the dim light of Red Hill restaurant

I scratch the bug bites on my ankles

My skin indented from all the worrying I’ve done to them

I say to my brother, Isn’t it strange?

How things just don’t happen the way you think they’re going to?

And he laughs behind the candle in the mason jar

He laughs behind his glasses

Yes, dude, he says

Believe me, I know just what you mean

We aren’t old

We are young

And yet it feels like time is running out

I was supposed to be Fiona Apple by now

Wasn’t I?

He was supposed to be a famous director

But really

We are just ourselves

Roughed up a bit

Lazy patches of pain floating around us

From all the shit that’s gone down

since we moved to this desert of a city

Our father

who still works at 77,

who still goes to the office every day

Taught us to push and fight

To make something of ourselves

And the truth is we might

But there’s just as good of a chance that we won’t

So I pay my half of the check

With money I made teaching piano lessons

He slides the rest of his beer down his throat

Standing up and pulling his hoodie around his shoulders

We wander out to his car in the parking lot

To a soundtrack of cars and the sun hissing out of the sky

And the most likely outcome

Is that we will have moments of joy amid long stretches of monotony

Like everyone else

And it won’t be what we hoped

But somehow it will turn out to be exactly

what we needed

"What This Looks Like"

It's 11pm on a Tuesday and my throat is breaking.


Someone is taking a scissors to the inside of my throat.  I am onstage at a bar in Hollywood and I am standing behind my keyboard and people are ordering drinks and shouting flirty things at each other and having meaningful conversations and I'm singing but I'm sick and things are coming out hoarse and rough.  Luckily it's 11pm at a bar on a Tuesday, and the people who are watching don't care that my voice isn't 100% clear as a bell, they're just here to hear music and have fun and bob their heads to my drummer.  But I am having a hidden meltdown, wanting to lay down and go to sleep on the stage, wanting to drink ginger tea on my couch, pushing to keep going because my real self loves this more than anything, but my sick self is throwing daggers at me, some of which include "no one cares about you singing up here," and "you don't connect with audiences," and "you're too old for this shit."  And I don't know.  I don't know who I'm supposed to be up here anymore.  


It's terrifying.  I play my set, I kick my whisky glass over halfway through and curse at myself, I get off the stage and hack up half my lungs and then smile and chat with people and give some hugs and feel generally like a giant impostor.  And then a girl comes up to me, and grabs my arm and says "What is your name?"  And I tell her and she says, "I loved your songs.  I am going to look you up when I get home."  


All it takes is one of these to make all the other stuff seem ridiculous.  


I watched this video the other day for the first time, and it blew me away.  I hope you guys will watch it, if you ever wonder how artists are going to continue making music when they are no longer getting paid for it the way they used to.  Or should I say why they are going to continue.  The film is by Levi Weaver, a lovely person and great artist.  Thank you, friend.  You've said it all.