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The next song to talk about in this series of songs I’m re-releasing is “Wonderful U.” which was released as a single in 2010 and ended up on the album The Collection in 2014. The wonderful guitar parts were created by Jude Gold, and in his highly dexterous and imaginative way he added bounce and texture beyond expectation. I’m lucky I’ve gotten to lay a palette down for some great guitarists, and my dear Gretchen, being one of those connector people, has facilitated many of these meetings and creative mashups.
I have to say I don’t remember how this song was recorded. I know I recorded the drumbeats and melody and I think vocal as well. Did Jude and I spend time in the studio, or did he send me the tracks? See, this is when I look back at my years of marijuana use and see how much my ability to store memory was affected. So much of the creative aspect of shifting my reality with the substance was beneficial, but I do regret these lapses in memories.
Now, fully sober for a good three years, it’s funny how memories rise differently. So much is based in scent. I know that scent is a primary instigator of memory. I’m very tuned into this olfactory memory trigger system. I will be hit with a scent, and some deep evocation will rise in me, with memory of the light of a room, the atmosphere, and above all the feeling of a place, without any recollection of where in time or space this lived. It can be an overwhelming sensation, and it’s also a memory of a way I used to perceive my reality, so my memory is not just of time and space but of a way of being that is now lost to me.
I wonder if this is an aspect of aging that is so iridescent, so intangible, that it isn’t spoke of much. Does everyone experience this? It’s like I’m walking through the world, now and then passing through clouds of my past that overwhelm me for a moment but remain untouchable.
This experience feels different than another pastime of mine, which is to peek into the windows of apartments as I’m walking the streets of San Francisco and feel myself entering these rooms. I see a lamp burning in a window and suddenly, I can smell what the air in the room smells like, feel the atmosphere around me, and above all receive a deep sense of how it feels to be there. It feels like a little test of an extra sensory ability but probably is just a deepening into imagination.
It’s the writer in me who plays with this, who can put myself into other people in a display of extreme empathy. I can feel their truth, and often, their true heart. I’m lucky to move in some circles where this capability is commonplace. When I meet someone with this ability, we seem to immediately become instant friends, so I know it’s not that unusual.
Folks who were raised by someone unpredictable, or in unpredictable circumstances, can develop like this, I’ve heard. In early life, if you must pay close attention to your caregiver with a wary eye, trying to decipher subtle signs to stay safe, it’s often the case that the child develops an intense pattern recognition ability, and hyper-alertness to the emotional shifts of the people around them.
I adored my father, but when he raised me, he was a young man who was up and down and subject to swings of mood. In my life, I have come to see that early difficulty as a great benefit. It fostered in me the ability to show up in service to others, to express artistically, and to be focused of mind and intent. I’ve worked through some of the negative aspects of those early situations, like taking on other peoples’ stuff, which is a trap many empathetic people struggle with. When you feel someone’s pain, you want to fix it, and you end up accumulating a bunch of junk. Junk in the trunk.
Enough psychologizing. The song “Wonderful U.” is a playful lyrical and musical romp, a kind of stream of consciousness coming from an aspect of my personality that is always fun to inhabit: someone smitten with another, and smitten with themself.
Songwriting is real fun for me, and through the process, embodying characters I have played at different times in my life in the same way I can feel myself inside of other people’s experiences is great fun. For instance, I will always relate to the ridiculous passion and bravado reflected in this song. These aspects of myself were mostly released when I got free of drinking and smoking, but I know that Clem will always be in here somewhere.
I love the play on words of this song, the way it’s almost like a daydream, dripping with desire and love and play. The fact that Jude seemed to pick up on this playfulness and clicked right into the energy is testimony to how much levity can exist in a player who is so seriously gifted. I loved the fruits of this collaboration, even though I can’t really remember anything other than loving Jude’s playing and what he brought to an already kind of ruckus of a song. Gretchen says she remembers Jude sending me the guitar tracks and me cutting them up and arranging them into the song, but it could have been that he sent them to me and they just fit right in.
I made the new video for the song in my couple of days off last week between flights and shows, lying on the couch letting my body just relax from the tension that builds up in three days of travel and the various mini catastrophes that appear in the course of a tour. Here too is another kind of dreamy headspace, the one that manifests with fatigue.
This is a kind of netherworld in my mind, in which my capacity for focused attention is depleted, and doing something like creating a music video is like floating down a river in which part of me is relaxed and recovering and part of me gets to drift in a river of images and music and rhythm and story, and I get to revel in creative reverie.
When I am in this state, I am a puddle on the couch, under the sleeping bag I bought for my last 10-day meditation retreat which has become a security blanket of sorts. The old man comes in from his office from time to time, to kvetch about his non-stop work and all the snafus that happen when managing bands and tours. Sometimes he comes in and just wants to say hello, to clear his head, and sometimes when he wants me to accompany him to do something like grocery shop or laundry or anything else, I whine like a four-year old and stave off moving back into my body until the last possible moment.
I could live in these liminal spaces forever. I just read an article in the Atlantic about the pitfalls of meditation, and how we can get stuck in these places. I certainly have skirted doing so. I have seen what it would be like to drift infinitely in these daydream places with no guardrails. Maybe there’s always some fear I might one day slip and slide into these non-ordinary states of reality and just not want to come back. I sense maybe that has happened in some long-ago lifetime, because it feels familiar in a strange way, and may be why I have a sense it’s really not a good idea to stay there too long.
I’m lucky I have things like love and drums and writing and family and friends and responsibilities to pull me back. I like being on the brink though, drifting so far away that it hurts to come back.
It’s funny. I think I was always chasing these states when I was smoking so much pot, and now that that’s gone from my life, I go much deeper into the delicious spelunking through the caves of non-ordinary reality, calling up the past and obscure realities that drift through me like dreams. This is not a desire for annihilation, like the energy that drove me at different times in my life. This a full-bore, headlong rush into curiosity, without the fear that wanted obliteration.
The very wonderful thing I have found is that it wasn’t the substance at all that unlocked creativity for me. What is flowing now, without it, is this constant running stream that demands I create, and demands I share these internal spaces with anyone who will listen or read them. Thank you for doing that for me.
