You can listen to me read this post on Soundcloud or Youtube, or as Bliss and Drumming wherever you get your podcasts.
The Stars Turn Me On song “BellLike” is on the album Goldrush from 2012. It was written with Justin Caucutt, who plays guitar on the recording. Judah Collins plays bass, and Jim Bove plays drums on this one.
When I wrote this song, it was during a period in which I was reflecting on the past. I had been in San Francisco for about 10 years and was sort of making sense, and trying to make peace, with the different iterations of Clem. I’m happy I don’t spend much time doing that anymore, even if while writing the blog posts for these re-released songs it might seem to the reader I am stuck there again. I’ve released a lot of my past from causing me too much angst, thankfully.
For many years, I wasn’t very nice to those younger selves in the remembering. Now, I appreciate those incarnations, even though I’ll probably always wish that some things had been different.
The lyrics for BellLike speak to my early adult life, when I was choosing to live a pretty chaotic existence. I’ve always been drawn to folks who are unconventional in thought and lifestyle. I’m an oddball. I dig the oddballs. Big influences in my high school life were what I experienced in literature, Bukowski and Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. Folks I am drawn to are not interested in “respectable” lives and often court self-destruction in different ways. I think I really like these outliers because as someone who can “pass” as normal very easily, when I am with people like this, I feel connected to a part of myself that feels most true. The part that, when I had day jobs in law firms and investment banks, had to fight the urge to stand on my chair and yell, “this is bullshit!” nearly every day.
When I look back at those I was fraternizing with in my 20s, I realize the enduring quality that I am most drawn to in a person, then and now, is the ability to relate a great story. I am attracted to the bar flies, the troublemakers, the lost ones who will probably never find their place, or who have given up looking. Having those tendencies in a rather muted way, I ended up in some pretty interesting situations and gathered many colorful stories both lived and told.
In recent years, in conversations with folks who get impressions from the un-seen parts of our reality, a very consistent thing that I’m told is how protected I am by light beings, or angels, or ancestors, or general positive energies, however you dice it. I was told recently, you could have really suffered and encountered very dark situations in your early life, but you were always completely protected.
I can see I had a sense of that, which gave me license to happily gallivant through the world with barely a care or sense of danger. I came close to some pretty dark situations that I seemed to float through. For a few years when looking back I had a lot of judgment about myself then, seeing that I had so little awareness of the terrible things that happen. What a little idiot, I would think. It’s not to say there weren’t dark times or struggle, but in the light of what could have happened considering the situations I put myself in and the company I was keeping, I was remarkably unscathed, sometimes through sheer ignorance.
I have come to believe that in a life, if you have parents who care deeply about your well-being, you’ve won the lottery. You are the 1%. When it comes to making your way in the world, no amount of money or education can beat the experience of having been well-loved and cared for. It gives people a sense of their inner resources and colors the lens through which they see the world. This is probably one of the foundations for most of my political beliefs, to believe we should offer each parent the safety and resources to give that kind of attention and care to their children, the care that becomes so difficult when danger and scarcity warp our days.
Anyway, I wrote this song thinking about that young girl who saw what she was afraid of and felt free to dive into it. My first trip overseas was with $800 and a one-way ticket, a guidebook of Portugal and no knowledge beyond that book. “I’m going to just put myself into the world and see how the world cares for me,” I think I might have said out loud. I made decisions in the moment. I met people who changed my trajectory and I just went with it. I was so poor that someone on a train in Switzerland saw the joy I was taking in a hard roll I’d scored and ended up dropping two bags of groceries in my compartment before the train took off. The world did take care of me, in remarkable ways.
That line in the song BellLike about sticking my head in the ground, I have been considering that. I think what I meant is that at that time, I was in a survival mindset. I took everything as it came, getting wrapped up in the momentary dramas of existing and getting pulled into the dramas other people were creating. I took life as it was dealt. I thought I had agency, but now I question that. It’s hard for me to remember too much of what I was thinking or how I was making the decisions I was making. I do have a sense of just burrowing deeper and deeper into the unfamiliar, the moment, and all things outside of what I knew. It’s like I never looked up to see if there was another way to understand my place in the world, wrapped up in the gutter, forgetting to look at the stars.
When my book came out, I started speaking on a lot of podcasts, seeing these conversations as a kind of online book tour. That continues, but now I limit the scheduling to one day a month, a day in which I speak to 10-12 hosts. For a couple of months now, many of the shows are based in Nigeria. I don’t know how I got on this track. It seems like maybe there is a school in Nigeria that is teaching podcasting, and somehow my name has circulated around. I have really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, they are mostly audio only, but sometimes I get a glimpse of the hosts. This is one reason I love technology. 9AM in San Francisco and I’m speaking to someone in Africa, casually chatting about my life as if it somehow matters all the way around the world.
In our conversations, I sort of zoom out and look at my story as they might be hearing it, and from that view my life seems so inconsequential that I am probably mostly incoherent. How did I come to start playing drums in rock bands at 27 years old? they ask. I get dizzy with the differences and similarities in both our lives.
I know I am speaking as someone who was free in a way I don’t know that many are in this world. My family put no pressure on me to behave in any sort of way. If I didn’t choose to care about fitting in, my society could really give a crap about what I was doing. I could cavort with people living outside the law in various ways and no one even looked at me with suspicion.
When people speak about privilege, I know it doesn’t depend solely on wealth or status or skin color or beauty, although all those things play into it. I knew how to make people feel that I was supposed to be wherever I was, because that’s how my parents helped me to feel. That attitude, and the color of my skin, and my middling decent looks, and the way I might seem as if I have money or come from money even when I am at my poorest, even the choice to be poor, this was so much privilege.
This runs through my head when I’m speaking to the kind and earnest people on the other side of the world who, and this is an assumption, might never have experienced that kind of freedom. I’m sure there are many incredible ways they experience their world and freedoms that that are completely foreign to me, and they probably feel compassion for me that I will never know those things. We’re both right. But all I know is mine, and I try to acknowledge it as I speak.
I read an article a few days ago about Nigeria that just happened to be in the New Yorker. About a paragraph in I remembered, oh God, Boko Haram is there, the group that has kidnapped at least 1,400 schoolchildren, and conscripted thousands of young boys into forced labor and as soldiers. Kidnapping in Nigeria is rampant, beginning first as a political action, and now taken over by gangs of criminals who have kidnapped over a thousand people this year.
One of the podcast hosts I spoke with in Nigeria had a young daughter. When I said something about my parents telling me I could be anything I wanted, to find what I loved to do and just try my best to be really good at it, the host’s voice lit up and said that from now on that’s what she wanted to tell her daughter. In that moment, I didn’t realize that her motherhood journey has the weight of all this other terrifying stuff hanging on it. I once again felt so ignorant.
I look at the young adult I was. I was so influenced by writers, male writers, who had a vein of nihilism and a rejection of their culture. I see how at times I acted from that energy like I was trying on a possible future. I hope instead of living through times like that, the host’s daughter finds the thing she is most passionate about and is able to follow that passion to where she most dreams of going. I would do anything to give her all the privilege that, when confronted with regret, I can say I wasted.
The thing that moved me forward, out of that time and toward other possibilities, was writing. Even in the midst of all the drama and chaos and grittiness, I was always stepped back in a way, observing that world, but never completely in it. I was always narrating the story I was living as it was lived, and I think this is what carried me through the other side. I could court with the darkness but never dance with it, because I was always pulling myself off the dance floor to write about it. I see that’s what saved me, and how I developed a life more true to the entirety of my authentic self, rather than getting stuck in a detour going nowhere. I see how lucky I was to have that passion.
The name of this song is BellLike, which was the title of Justin’s guitar riff on the recording that kicked off the writing of this song. I kept the name, not really understanding how it related to the song. I just liked the way it sounded. Now I see it is perfect. The note that was struck in me early on carries through to now, and it has been the constant. It rings like one of the singing bowls I collected on my travels, whose sound I love to follow all the way down.
