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The song “Slow Glow” is from my first album, “Conversation with Francis Bakin” in 2008. I recorded a new vocal and remixed the song for “The Collection” in 2014. This song was written with my dear buddy Gretchen Menn on guitar.
I think the way most of these songs happened is that I created the drum beat and vocal and a skeletal progression, and then Gretchen laid down a bunch of guitar tracks on top. Then I sort of arranged the parts to create the final version. I remember this song being particularly fun because she was indulging me in creating real soundscape stuff, and when I layered some of the tracks they fit together in such an interesting way. I love this song for its sonic landscape. The drums were a drumbeat I created and then I played along with that electronic track and sort of melted them into each other.
The lyrics started with a phrase I heard, “what am I going to do with the other 23 hours in the day?” I don’t know what it was referring to, but I love the idea of something so captivating yet fleeting that it makes everything else in your day seem colorless. I was thinking of those passionate dalliances in which the world falls away and it is only the two of you, wrapped in the exquisite timelessness of love and passion. How painful it is when the world intrudes to bring us back into all the other stuff of life, responsibilities and tasks that seem two-dimensional and pointless.
In a way, I might have tried to set my life up to live in those gorgeous moments all the time. I can’t be the only one who longs to spend their days in that creative, vibrating and passionate energy of when responsibilities were few, and the future non-existent. As I put myself in that energy, I see how I have always resisted being a real grown-up. I just don’t care about optimizing myself or succeeding or owning or winning.
I remember those gorgeous squalid little apartments, in which the bed was the main piece of furniture, and there was a running soundtrack sparking impassioned conversation, a smoke-filled atmosphere, books stacked, notebooks frayed, occasional snacks and drinks brought from the kitchen on old tin trays, and the feel of endless time to be wrapped in delight, together. My apartment now replicates those spaces perfectly, not so squalid but just as laid out for dreaminess.
Sometimes, I call the longing for those kinds of moments an intrinsic laziness, but I mean lazy in the best way, without judgment, lazy like being happy to just be. The life of a musician is suited to a schedule in which I can make these times possible, probably more than in most professions, but I still need to be a grown-up a lot more often than I want to.
I’m sitting alone in a hotel room as I write this, waiting for the rear axles of the van to be repaired. The car broke down on the way to our show on Saturday night, and I just poured out a bunch of money for towing and cabs and hotels and repair, and I wait here while some nice people make it road-worthy again. This afternoon is far from the one I sing about in the song, but still, it could be worse.
When things like this happen, my overriding feeling is of constant gratitude. I’m grateful there was traffic and I was only going about 50 miles an hour when the car lurched forward and the drive train snapped, so that everyone was safe. I’m grateful I could pull right into a wide shoulder safely. Grateful that when AAA was useless, I found someone who would tow me to the venue, and that I had the money for the ridiculous fee they charged me. Grateful that we were playing at the Kirkland Performance Center, where the staff was incredibly accommodating, even putting a tarp on the leaky van roof as it started to rain. Grateful we made it on time, had a good show, and the nice production manager could drive the band to their airport hotel for their flights the next morning. Grateful the venue could store all of my equipment while the van gets fixed. Grateful I don’t have anything pressing I need to get back for. And grateful for so many other gifts of this experience I can’t count.
I’m enough of a believer in the other side of things that I wonder what this detour is protecting me from. There is no use in dwelling on doom scenarios that could have possibly caused this trip to be catastrophic. If it is money that is the only real calamity of the whole deal, so be it.
It was raining on Sunday, yesterday. I was in a hotel down the street from the venue, and lazed around, caught up on the phone with a couple of people I love. In the late afternoon I walked out to get some food, and walked to the pretty waterfront in Kirkland, WA. I was thinking how I almost feel like a ghost walking around a strange place, with no relation to anything or anyone, and yet how happy and comfortable I am to observe other people’s lives in that way, the consummate outsider. In upscale Kirkland, there were fancy stores and nice apartments, but I had no real desire rise up for any of it. I was happy I had the money to eat where I wanted.
Across the street from the restaurant where I picked up food was a store named CLEMENTINE, and I looked in the window and felt that maybe there was something giving me some kind of message. If there was, I didn’t get it. An art gallery was open next door, and I wandered in and didn’t see much that was my taste. There were two people who were very excitedly discussing a large beige painting that was the only one like it in a gallery of vibrantly colored artwork. I thought that was funny.
Otherwise, non-eventful, and dreamlike, my evening walk. Then today, another tow truck ride, a grimy auto shop, the surprise that the vehicle might be fixed today, which is another gift, and a Holiday Inn hotel room that let me in early and is bathing me in the cold grey light of the Washington State sky through the cheap window shade.
Slow Glow is about that deep longing for passion, for vibrancy, for love and lust and passion and humor and days lost in true connection. The lyrics beg for the feeling to never leave, for the longing for those days to never leave, for that connection and desire to always burn somewhere in us. I look out into the world, and I wonder if one of our many problems is that many people have never had these kinds of moments, this kind of exquisite opening of heart and creative overflow.
Maybe people have their versions that don’t look anything like mine. I hope so. I sure get very grumpy when I have to straighten up and get back into the world of “reality” and set those feelings aside, get pulled out of my reveries to get back to the business of living. Maybe that’s why the world looks so unhappy. Why shouldn’t we be unhappy, when what’s called living feels like biding our time until the light comes on again.
