writing

We moved to Portland, Oregon a couple days ago, having found a landlady who didn’t object to children or dogs (don’t landlords know that cats shit inside the house?) and so far this place seems very cool. You’d think I’d know it a little better after playing about a bazillion shows here over the years, but all I’d ever seen here were rock clubs, the Bijou (my favorite ever breakfast place) and friends’ apartments.

My amazing brother, David, lives here, though, and he put us up for a few days, showing us the good parks, the good pizza and the best place to buy blueberries in the middle of the night. Coffee is a non-issue; like most people in the Pacific Northwest, Portlanders are coffee nazis and have made sure that the espresso here Does Not Suck, anywhere you go.

That settled, we raced out to the ocean. If I can find water and snakes in a place, I know it’s a Good Place, and I found water: big, nice, green water with salt in it and waves what hurt you when they want to. Really beautiful.

Snakes are another story. I have been hiking through woods for days now, looking for anything…a western garter would be fine (I’ve only ever held the eastern kind) but I haven’t seen anything. And if I don’t find a snake soon, I’m afraid I won’t be able to stay here. I’ll keep looking, though, ’cause I like it here. Maybe they’re sleeping.

In the meantime, a familiar melancholy has settled over the household. It’s the opposite of nostalgia: the loneliness you feel when you have no memories in or attachment to a place. It blows — but it fades.

This time it’s particularly difficult, though, because my oldest son, Dylan, is now 19 — as old as I was when I had him — and living in Providence, Rhode Island, the city where he was born. As many of you know, I lost him as a toddler; his father took him away from me when I left him for Billy. I guess he was trying to kill me by taking away my reason for living. It almost worked. I left Rhode Island, heartbroken, and spent the next fifteen years moving restlessly back and forth across the country.

I always knew this would have a happy ending. It was so awful, so wrong, so dangerous for laws to work in favor of someone trying to separate a child from his mother, it had to have a happy ending; I would go home, I would get the baby back. Anything else would be a tragedy.

One of the saddest things Billy ever said was, “Not in this lifetime”, referring to an unfulfilled dream. And listening to my new record recently, I realized that the songs that aren’t about the furiously passionate & passionately furious (yet strangely comforting) Billy O’Connell — are about going home and getting the baby back.

But the baby grew up. I missed it. Now I know firsthand that there are tragedies. Tragedies that are not sweetly sad and facing heavenward, but ugly, hellish messes that should never have been. I don’t go home, I don’t get the baby back.

Not in this lifetime.

Love,
Kristin

The beautiful and brilliant Trina Shoemaker has finished mixing my record, the equally beautiful and brilliant Steve Rizzo having joined her down in Nashville for the last few days. They had never met before, but got along famously by both accounts. They have a lot in common: beauty, brilliance, engineering skills, lots of hair.

The mixing session began with a phone call between Trina and myself. We talked a bit about production approach and what to ask of these mixes, but mostly we talked about speakers, babies, trucks and bumping into stuff which we both do a lot. She had just dropped a two by four on her toe and I had shut the trunk of the car on my head (Trina: “How do you even do that?” Me: “I don’t remember”).

Truth be told, when it comes to the nuts and bolts of a mix, we barely have to say anything to each other; I know how she thinks, she knows how I play. When you hear these songs, I’m sure you’ll hear that, too. You’ll also hear Rizzo’s beautiful room and recording technique. Great musicians like Dave Narcizo and the McCarricks seem to pull everyone up to their level. We don’t want to leave a single beat or note uncelebrated.

Soon, our beloved Joe Gastwirt will master the record (Joe: “By now it’s not work, it’s family”) which is now tentatively titled, “Learn to Sing Like a Star” after a piece of spam we got recently (Billy: “Why don’t you learn to do that?” Me: “I don’t remember.”). I am absolutely in love with this project. I don’t think I’ve ever cared what anybody else thought of a record, but I’m so happy to be in love with this one.

So, the mixes done, yesterday we moved out of our house (Cleveland does rock, as it turns out; I don’t care what anybody says) and today we’re in a Comfort Inn somewhere in Iowa. Nice. It’s all worth it, though, when you come across a note like this on the bedstand:

Love,
Kristin

p.s. Billy totally is a fairy king, too.

As many of you know, my husband, Billy, is one of my best (Read: only) friends. We do everything together. I am actually afraid to leave the house without him (he’s big and he talks out loud; two things the outside world seems to demand). So when he’s not around, I’m generally inside.

Last week, Billy went to Portland, OR and left me, the children, the dogs and the TV alone. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time with the TV. As if that magic box owed me anything after all the gifts it has given me…here is what I learned:

I had limited myself to only four Motel Movie Genres, when in fact, there are hundreds. You take them like medicine; some are aspirin, some are morphine, some are Band-Aid® brand adhesive bandages and some just make you go, “What the hell?”.

Here are some more horizon-expanding MMG’s, based on the self-prescribed medicine I took this week:

Looks Don’t Count – A smart, kind, ugly man must prove that he is worthy of dating cheerleader-models. He does this by being an excellent human being and standing next to a sharp looking but transparently evil man by whom a cheerleader-model is initially fooled. Then the evil guy trips himself up by being extra evil, making the hero guy look extra good. Luckily, it’s not difficult for the hero to be an excellent human being because he is smart and kind. It does not occur to him to date smart, kind, ugly women, however, because they are invisible.

Ebony and Ivory – The plot is that people who have different color skin are also different on the inside. The plot is also that they are the same on the inside.

The Jungle – You are in the Big City and it gets dark there at night and there’s garbage everywhere and nobody cares and someone is chasing you (or you are chasing them, I’m not sure) and you run on the dirty sidewalk and you bump into a mean guy who yells “Hey! Watch where you’re goin’!” and there are scary punks, with bright red hair and piercings leaning on fire hydrants who snarl at you and then you run into the street and cabs swerve to avoid you and the cab drivers either shake their fists at you (Rated PG) or flip you off (Rated R) and then there’s a homeless guy ranting and you run down an alley, and you have two guns (one for each hand) and you fire them both at the same time and you miss practically everything you aim at. Whew!

The Lady Jungle – It is always daytime unless it is the sparkling twilight lit by Christmas lights and streetlamps. You have an apartment that is soft and feminine, like you, and your doorman has a name, as does everyone in the city because you know them all and they care about you and your love life. You go to The Office and The Gym and The Bar and you have Girlfriends who know more about your personal life than you do and talk about it constantly. You fall in love but it’s confusing because of the amount of money the guy has (either a little or a lot) but then it’s great anyway and then it’s not and then it is again. Whew!

Love,
Kristin

I’m having trouble watching TV these days. Which is a bummer, ’cause ordinarily I love TV. I think it’s an eloquent and effective medium, a basically good guy, and like every non-Commie, I adore it. It’s gotten me through some tough times. Even its shameless advertising is adorable. So blatant, it’s almost guileless (“Hey, old people! Buy THIS!”).

The problem is, real life is so…full right now, television is boring us. We can’t find any shows that are more dramatic than our lives and all the sitting and talking they do is making us tense. Our reality is overflowing with agony and ecstasy and nothing in between. So craving either reflection or escape, we’re finding only stillness and clever conversation. And not all that clever, either.

As it turns out, life’s a bitch and that bitch is sitting on the couch between us, holding the remote control.

So after trying to watch a nature special on man-eating piranhas which turned out to be (I swear to you) about a man who cooks and eats piranhas, I decided to alter my viewing tactics. Given that my taste in film runs fairly “frat boy” anyway, I am now on the Motel Movie Diet. You’ve probably ignored hundreds of these in your lifetime, but motel movies are like airplane movies with more varied themes. There is absolutely nothing asked of you in the viewing of these films and you have no chance at all of relating to any of the characters or anything that happens to them. Talk about escape!

Here are some of my favorite motel movie genres:

1. Running Down Shiny Hallways – An hour and a half of smooth hairdos, cool sounding footsteps and sweaty typing at computers…sometimes these movies are political, sometimes they’re sciency, but the plot is usually lost on me because it involves intrigue and a secret machine and also I fall asleep

2. Women Together – Women have to hang out together because men are dumb…the women drink and they talk about feelings and hip size and penises…the plot often references the breaking of rules I know nothing about and nothing EVER happens

3. Men Together – Men have to hang out together because women are dumb and they talk about feelings and hip size and penises…the men admit that they are also dumb, but in a more attractive, golden retriever-like way…they drink, too, but then things actually happen to them

4. When Stuff Explodes – These are the best ones (they’re good airplane movies, too, except for all the plane crashes)…the plot is that there is a man and a lady and they’re spies/government officials/military personnel…the man has no respect for the lady because he thinks she’s hot and the lady has no respect for the man because she also thinks she’s hot…then she cries because she’s stressed out and he uses his muscles to break something and then jumps off of something high and and then she thinks hard and does something smart and also jumps off of something high but he catches her and Stuff Explodes!!!

Brilliant…and much cheaper than therapy.

Love,
Kristin

Our third day in New Orleans and — oddly enough — all our friends just so happen to be here. Even the ones who stayed away from the city after Katrina are back right now, checking in with neighbors and still trying to repair damage. And as sad as it feels here — as strange as it is to see the once lush trees uprooted or salted to death and the yards full of garbage and waterlogged mattresses, this is still a beautiful place.

I have had three “safe houses” in my life; the kind of place you know you can run to whenever any really bad shit goes down or when you find yourself just needing a place to hide. I lost two of these in the last six months and I was sure I had lost the third in the hurricane, but here I am, typing in the kitchen of one of the most loving households I’ve ever been accepted into. Neighbors canoed past this house after the storm, but amazingly, it sustained no water damage.

So a few days ago, we carried in drinking water and flowers, kept our hosts up until about 3 a.m. talking, and then holed up in the back bedroom where we last slept a year ago. The next afternoon, we were given “the devastation tour”. It went from bad, to worse, to “horror movie”. We all knew New Orleans would flood someday, just like we know LA is waiting for the Big One, but the impact of 20 feet of rushing water on trees, cars, houses and the bodies inside…I don’t know…I’m speechless. This storm happened six months ago and some areas look like they were hit yesterday. We went through three bottles of wine when we got home.

In the French Quarter today, it seemed almost normal, except for the lighter than usual, meandering Mardi Gras crowds. We used to know those sidewalks by heart, every crack. Music memories played in my head — ghosts of all the songs from the records I recorded here; University, Limbo and Sky Motel. Not entirely unpleasant, if a little bittersweet.

Billy texted Bernie and Dave Narcizo to tell them we were here since they share so many New Orleans memories with us and Dave wrote back immediately, writing only “Will it recover?”. Billy typed back, “Everyone seems to hope so, but nobody seems to know”.

We took these pictures with our phones but they don’t even come close.

Love,
Kristin