You can listen to me read this post on Soundcloud or Youtube, or as Bliss and Drumming wherever you get your podcasts.
The Beaux Cheveux album Ro Sham Bo came out in 2018, and while it’s not a re-release, while I’m speaking about previously released material, I think it’s worth mentioning. I really love this record. Guitarist Adrian Conner and I wrote the songs together, and the writing process was fun and effortless.
Basically, I created ten drum tracks. We sat at my kitchen table, and I would hit play, and Adrian, a master of improvisation, played to the drum tracks until she felt she’d said enough. Then, I took the guitar parts and picked out verses and choruses and other parts and arranged them and wrote lyrics. Then she took those instantaneous melodic ideas and honed them into real parts. Then we recorded the songs with Rob Preston and made this little jewel of album.
I’m picking “Holiday of Love” as a song to speak about because it’s one of my favorites. It feels breezy and I love a breezy song. The lyrics are about the dichotomy of life, how we can be having a lovely time of it all the while knowing that somewhere close by the experience for another might be so dark.
In the song, I’m just a hitchhiker, leaving the ending of something, and moving through life open to unexpected moments with no real destination in mind. Along the way, an unexpected true love, and being loved truly, happens to appear. I was writing about leaving New York, and setting out on an indefinite tour, not expecting to find the lasting happiness that I’m living now. I am constantly between the ease of my life and the difficulties for so many, trying to make sense of these two realities existing at the same time. I subscribe to the idea that if anyone anywhere is in suffering, this will always shade my own happiness. I struggle to understand my privilege.
I just played some shows on the East Coast with Zepparella. It was hot in the way that is the most challenging for me, that 90-degree mugginess that makes me want to give up. Two of the shows were outside, and that was brutal, and one was inside, and that was just as brutal. I seem to not be able to get a handle on proper hydration when I can feel sweat beading and leaping from every pore as I do something exertive like playing drums. Try as I might, it all just kicks my ass. The week before, I got heat stroke at a show in Southern California after the air conditioning in the van went out and we had to drive through the desert with the windows open and the furnace air in my face for hours. My body just lost it, literally, after one of the shows and I just couldn’t stop throwing up. I played well, that’s what mattered. But the aftermath sucked.
This weekend, there were a series of difficulties along with the heat. Ridiculous construction woke the band on our first morning at 7am after getting to the airport hotel around 2am. The first night, equipment issues caused a ton of stress. After the show I drove three hours to discover our hotel reservation had been given away in an oversold hotel. There was a ton of traffic all weekend, New York to Maine and back, while trying to manage the heat and the general inconveniences. These are the fun parts of being a band in the summertime.
I really am not a complainer, and I’m not complaining here. Just sort of listing the trials and tribulations in a wry sort of way. I look at the ridiculousness of my life sometimes with a detached bemusement. I come home from tours with bruises all over my body, usually from loading, sometimes from drum bites. Drumming I’ll be able to do forever, but the gear loading and the wrangling of merchandise and all the dumb things I do from the moment I get to the show to the moment I finally get into the hotel room is constant heavy lifting, and who knows how long I’ll be able to keep doing all that . I don’t have much time even for hanging with friends who show up, or really doing anything other than work, nonstop. It suits me certainly, and I choose it, but at this point if it weren’t for the joy I feel in playing my instrument, I think I could see it as a punishment I inflict on myself.
People ask how long I’ll play drums and the answer to that is that I would be okay breathing my last breath behind the kit, but for how long I will be inflicting this kind of overwork on myself, I’m not sure. I guess I started out working that hard in the band BOTTOM. We prided ourselves on being a self-sustained capsule of three that did everything. We got so loading the van was so second nature that sometimes I forgot it had happened, we were so organized in every movement to get the gear in there. We were playing heavy music in a genre where there weren’t many women, so I guess we felt we had to work like that. It was a kind of feeling of proving that we could work as hard as anyone. That’s a common thing among women in traditionally male industries, that they feel they must work much harder to prove themselves. I guess I never got over that feeling, even though it’s not as valid today.
This last weekend, I also loaded extra difficulty on myself for some reason. In the hotel room, to wind down while I was washing my hair and organizing for the next day and doing all the wind-down stuff, I was watching news sources and got on a loop of watching ICE assaults, protesters outside the concentration camps and hearing the statistics of sexual assaults and the abuse of children, and then on to the rash of lynchings that are happening in the US at the moment. At three in the morning, watching the cruelty and the helplessness became so suffocating that it felt like a panic attack. I don’t know why I chose to inflict this on myself, but I couldn’t look away.
I remember when I first read about the German holocaust as a young person thinking, why didn’t citizens rush these places, how could they let these things happen? I would imagine the way I would have taken a stand and done something to protest, to stop it. I remember thinking that something like that couldn’t happen again, that no one, after seeing that horror, would ever fall into those actions again. And here I am, living my life, while horrific human debasement is happening maybe right down the street from where I’m playing a rock show, or that maybe I’m playing for people who think that these things are the right course of action.
A couple of weeks before, I read an article in Vanity Fair about the Sudan genocide that is happening right now, and it upset me so much that later that day when I saw a happy little dog in a sweater, I felt like the weight of duality was going to crack me in two. How can such things be happening in one place, and at the same time in the other, a happy little dog is so pampered that he’s wearing clothes?
So this weekend, as I was dealing with hotel rooms that are subpar, and people in music venues dropping the ball, and heat and hunger and uncomfortability and bruises and all the small annoyances in the day, at every turn a voice in my mind was like an ice pick reminding me about children getting pregnant in ICE facilities by rapists, and people being thrown to the ground and beaten when taking their children to school, and a beautiful young women being hanged so high up in a tree that they needed a fire truck to pull her down.
I write so often about the need for a positive mindset, that our lives depend on the filter through which we see the world. In my last blog post, I was talking about how much I see the God in every being, even the cruel ones, even the ones causing great harm. I have a number of practices, mantras and energy work and meditation that I use to keep calm and hopeful. I do believe that at the center of all being is the vibration of love. That this human experience is what, in a way, we’ve chosen to experience. I have a lot of thoughts about those things. I have a lot of beliefs around those things. I have a general sense within myself that what happens is somehow meant to be. After this weekend, I don’t know how well I am doing with any of that.
I often say that if I were to lose hope, I, with all the privileges and benefits possible in this world, if I were to lose hope then the world is really screwed. I’ve believed that it’s my job to remind the world of possibility. To see the God in all things and to reflect the light of this awareness on all things. I say, if they lose me, then everyone is lost.
Maybe it was fatigue. Maybe it’s a collective breaking point that I’m feeling. Maybe I am processing the grief of the collective and allowing the suffering to move through me to transform. Maybe I just really can’t deal with humid heat. But all weekend, I really questioned my ability to keep on with hope. It might not be the hard work or the constant debt or the other difficulties of a music career that makes me set it aside. I might just stop seeing the point of doing what I’m doing. Maybe my life is wasted unless I am putting myself between persecutor and persecuted.
I think of Gandhi’s Salt March, of the protestors advancing on the colonizers, not fighting, not resisting, but just overwhelming them with body after body willing to be beaten. My body can take a lot, I find. Maybe that’s what this physical training of a music career has been for.
I listen to “Holiday of Love” again, and I wonder whether it’s something I can relate to anymore. In the Salt March, they won that battle, but India certainly hasn’t won the larger battle, of learning to care for its people, learning how to eliminate the pain that greed inflicts on the land and the society and the lives of so many. Maybe there is no healing the world after all.
I guess that’s when hope is lost, to believe that no matter how many moments of bravery and waves of change, greed always takes over. Then we believe that the only option is to think only of oneself, to seclude oneself, to take everything for oneself, to become immune to anyone else’s need. That seems to be impossible for me to do, so my fate might be in a nameless sacrifice. I would rather that than the loss of empathetic feeling that I see in the people in power today.
I sit on this plane, flying to a beautiful home with every benefit for a happy life, a privileged life, and that choking feeling rises again as the dichotomy comes into view. I question whether I can keep on as usual, everything feels so heavy. The current focus of those in power seems to be to destroy all that is beautiful or sacred, to finally dissolve hope after all, the hope that we can find a way to live together, peacefully, harmoniously, that all get taken care of.
I thought it was enough to keep creating music and art in order to remind the world of the humanity that is worth fighting for. With so much suffering evident at every turn, I question whether I’ve just been fooling myself. I can’t help but feel my pursuits and my life trivial, even while I see that with that thought I am letting the wrong side win.
“Holiday of Love” is about those glorious afternoons throughout my life, entwined with a true love, the light in the room charmed and glittering, and that soft way I might pet the head of my beloved, my hand warm with the love in my heart, as we merge in a singular dream, a singular awareness, the light of eternity flowing through us.
Maybe the problem is that the people who are ordering and inflicting all this cruelty have never lived moments like that. They don’t know what it’s like to be in complete harmony with another, and how a whole universe of love can exist in an ordinary room, in a shared breath. Maybe their hatred is because they have a feeling that moments like that might exist for some, but not for them. Maybe they see beauty and sense there is an opening to grace in it that is not safe for them to witness. Maybe it’s their yearning and jealousy that imposes cruelty, an attack on those they see possessing such capability. Little do they know that they too are just as capable, just as connected to the light of the Divine that lives in such moments, and in all moments, and connects us all.
I guess my job is to continue to see the possibility of realization in them all. No matter how much of the world’s suffering I allow in, you can never take this knowing from me. You can never take those moments from me. You can never take the realization of that one vibration of love on which all reality sits away from me. I live in that light. I recognize it in all things. I know that it exists for all, no matter how the world demands we forsake it. I just can’t let go of the dream. I can’t let go of hope, not yet.
