To be Something, to be Anything
by New Orleans Swim Team
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Digital Album
Immediate download of 21-track album in your choice of MP3 320, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire.
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Overture (Dreamer)
00:58
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To be Something
01:55
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Hide and Seek
01:54
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Manhattanhenge
02:16
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Calloused
02:52
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Plaster
02:51
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Prairie Winter
02:21
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Found
02:02
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Summer Tinted Brown
01:07
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Degrees
02:25
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Like Anchors
02:58
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Caught Between
03:06
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Stillness
03:43
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Your Holy Ghost
01:57
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Recursive
01:32
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To Justify
02:43
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Wanderlust
03:48
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To be Anything
02:43
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Whatever You Want to Be
06:34
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about
You grow up wanting to be something. You had an idea so brilliantly pure you needed to show it. But your hands and mouths are dirty. You can hardly expect to spill your world out onto a canvas. The paint is too thick, the words are too short, or everyone's ears are resonating in a pitch too far from your own. You withdraw. Your world will never be understood by anyone else but you. Is that bad? No, and it will never be. We all make sense of experience as we see it. We all understand in our own terms. These are simply my terms.
Every song on this album circles an event or set of thoughts that has encompassed the life of almost every individual one or multiple times in their lives. This is me making sense of it. Every 'you' can be replaced with an 'I', and every 'I' with a 'you'. Listen, and understand how we all will push our thoughts through whatever makes sense. Lectures, media, art, rambling, writing, or simply wishing the world was a better place. The something of who you are or want to be gets lost in the vague anything that our human hands and voices can show. This is that anything as I see it. Never expect someone else to define your life. This is a simple wish for you to find your own understandings, just as I tried to with mine.
I offer no answers, only questions.
"‘To be Something, to be Anything’ is a tale depicted in the most sensual way with a certain familiarity and yet, at times so distant that just as soon as you think you have tackled it you find yourself swallowing your words and throwing out all of those Listener comparisons, searching for something other than “beautiful” to describe it by. This is inspirational; an enjoyable and refreshing listen, one that I cannot recommend enough."
inb4track.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/new-orleans-swim-team-to-be-something-to-be-anything/
"Jacob's undying self-awareness in regards to what he'll never be in this world is the crooked and feeble backbone for his music. Fervently voicing the consequences of such acute awareness with the fearful words escaping his throat, and employing a slew of orchestral instruments to add simple, quirky musical backdrops to the effort, New Orleans Swim Team is born... ...he hasn't come here to wow listeners with a powerful voice and epic soundscapes. Instead, he puts words to paper out of necessity, soothing his troubled mind with the cathartic utterances found throughout TBS,TBA. Just like Jacob, I'm quite aware of all that I can but don't know. What I do know is that it isn't often that one lonely kid's struggles results in music this captivating, and that we should be damn grateful as listeners that Jacob has done so.
sputnikmusic.com/review/46297/New-Orleans-Swim-Team-To-be-Something%2C-to-be-Anything/
"You’ll see yourself in his words and your heart and his may even beat together for a moment."
thisnoiseismusic.tumblr.com
"One of the hallmarks of this album is its essence of being made solely for Jacob’s personal assessment. He puts up a mirror and confronts what it reveals, while any stranger can listen and see what he sees. To Be Something, To Be Anything is an example of a person severely affected by the vastly unknown brevity of time, space, and people. It haunts him, enlightens him, confuses, and consoles him while the music proves itself to be a superbly fitting trail for this near-hour-long human excursion."
ingamar.tumblr.com/post/12638449258/review-new-orleans-swim-team-to-be-something-to
Every song on this album circles an event or set of thoughts that has encompassed the life of almost every individual one or multiple times in their lives. This is me making sense of it. Every 'you' can be replaced with an 'I', and every 'I' with a 'you'. Listen, and understand how we all will push our thoughts through whatever makes sense. Lectures, media, art, rambling, writing, or simply wishing the world was a better place. The something of who you are or want to be gets lost in the vague anything that our human hands and voices can show. This is that anything as I see it. Never expect someone else to define your life. This is a simple wish for you to find your own understandings, just as I tried to with mine.
I offer no answers, only questions.
"‘To be Something, to be Anything’ is a tale depicted in the most sensual way with a certain familiarity and yet, at times so distant that just as soon as you think you have tackled it you find yourself swallowing your words and throwing out all of those Listener comparisons, searching for something other than “beautiful” to describe it by. This is inspirational; an enjoyable and refreshing listen, one that I cannot recommend enough."
inb4track.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/new-orleans-swim-team-to-be-something-to-be-anything/
"Jacob's undying self-awareness in regards to what he'll never be in this world is the crooked and feeble backbone for his music. Fervently voicing the consequences of such acute awareness with the fearful words escaping his throat, and employing a slew of orchestral instruments to add simple, quirky musical backdrops to the effort, New Orleans Swim Team is born... ...he hasn't come here to wow listeners with a powerful voice and epic soundscapes. Instead, he puts words to paper out of necessity, soothing his troubled mind with the cathartic utterances found throughout TBS,TBA. Just like Jacob, I'm quite aware of all that I can but don't know. What I do know is that it isn't often that one lonely kid's struggles results in music this captivating, and that we should be damn grateful as listeners that Jacob has done so.
sputnikmusic.com/review/46297/New-Orleans-Swim-Team-To-be-Something%2C-to-be-Anything/
"You’ll see yourself in his words and your heart and his may even beat together for a moment."
thisnoiseismusic.tumblr.com
"One of the hallmarks of this album is its essence of being made solely for Jacob’s personal assessment. He puts up a mirror and confronts what it reveals, while any stranger can listen and see what he sees. To Be Something, To Be Anything is an example of a person severely affected by the vastly unknown brevity of time, space, and people. It haunts him, enlightens him, confuses, and consoles him while the music proves itself to be a superbly fitting trail for this near-hour-long human excursion."
ingamar.tumblr.com/post/12638449258/review-new-orleans-swim-team-to-be-something-to
credits
released 07 October 2011
Kaitlynd Hiller - Flutes, backing vocals
Mitchell Chalifoux - Violins, Oboe
Amanda Warnock - Clarinet
Michael Clark - French Horn
Jacob Ulickij - All else
All songs written and composed by Jacob Ulickij, except violin in Track 11, improvised by Mitchell Chalifoux.
Kaitlynd Hiller - Flutes, backing vocals
Mitchell Chalifoux - Violins, Oboe
Amanda Warnock - Clarinet
Michael Clark - French Horn
Jacob Ulickij - All else
All songs written and composed by Jacob Ulickij, except violin in Track 11, improvised by Mitchell Chalifoux.
tags
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discography
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Oct 2011 -
May 2011
contact / help
For help with downloads, click here.
For all other inquiries, click here.
- Track Name: Overture (Dreamer)
- Instrumental.
- Track Name: You Were No Ground Level Limb
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This was the second time I'd seen you, it was about eight years later. You cut across in front of me carrying six bags off an elevator. I knew in that instant you were the same thing I saw when I was a kid, though amidst the pause and shock of awkward remembrance, I was caught off guard by the lack of resemblance to what I had painted being young and willing to see past the bark to get to the best of everything. In your trail I heard some kind of symphonic sound through your headphones, resting on the ironic scarf dangled from your shoulders. Awkwardly skinny and doubled over. Folded together, bony arms holding a cellphone. So poignantly painting, "Connected, yet alone". I want to write about you and how you've changed, though it becomes increasingly apparent you must have been the same between then and now. You move just like you did. You still carry the confidence I admired as the kid who sat across from you in the mall. So lost, so small, your tortoise shell glasses make eyes so tall. What happened, then? You drip with pretension. Avoiding the public eye as if to get some attention? You were a novel in the eyes of a ten year old child now the whispers of theatre geeks and old books compiled. You notice me staring at you from a table across the room, while the last thing I want to do is be an enabler, it's too soon.
You're prouder now, and show it by looking haunted. A show stopping performance of not caring, is that what you wanted? In the eyes of a child you were a model of difference, to be broken away like seeing kids who would hop a fence and leave some to one side, too weak to break authority. "So why not just dress differently to say that I'm me?" The answer is more clear to a ten year old mind than your arts degree turned retail clerk life can define. If you want to be something, let loose what's within, never forget that clothes simply end at the skin. You painted a picture for me once, vividly, though that was more imagination than anything. Your eyes like God's judgment looking up from a hole, seeking your professor's thoughts on what is or isn't a soul. You're the music player your left hand is holding. You were an eight year old memory that has tarnished, not golden. Like your presence felt years ago in this same room, the funny part is I almost turned out just like you.
(You were painfully beautiful so long as I wanted you.
Any time things went wrong, I told myself that wasn't true.
You weren't the pine tree I climbed up so easily.
You were the lack of even knowing my anatomy.) - Track Name: To be Something
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It'd be nice to say this was written in second grade so you can picture blocky letters sprawled awkwardly on lined page, but sadly my pen touched this paper when I was eighteen. Legally called an adult as if that made life less frightening. I have the papers and a diploma, a card that says I can drive, plastic to fill a wallet and identify in the case I don't survive the head on crash of stubbornness and maturity. Redefining the ideas that once seemed concrete to me. No one tells you growing up there are no markers in the world to guide like your mom made you come home before it got darker than the day that Bambi taught you people get shot in the distant. It took you thirteen more years to find that death can happen in an instant. In this midst of this violent birth and advancing nonexistence, we find that once you have something to say it's hard to make them listen. Conditioning suggests it's their reactions that shape us, but it seems to be the case their reactions will sustain us, since playing in the walls of a cluttered mind was fine for this many years, the crumbs we left to not get lost have fed oh so many fears.
Don't you try and say that you know me.
Even if you're right, I'll say you're wrong.
I'll denounce it with a confidence I can't find in anything else.
Do accusations even belong? - Track Name: Hide and Seek
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You're an afterthought you had on mossy rocks,
After touching the flowing water you were not.
My home is knowing nothing new can hurt.
A once explosive chest now decidedly inert.
Forget your parties, clubs and bars,
Your unthinking smiles turning to scars.
What's so great about talking circles endlessly?
All those late night phone bills, do they mean anything?
I can either live now, or cup hands for sympathy.
Supposedly, but I won't have you pity me.
Don't call it stubborn, it's hardly a choice,
When I can't hear the truth trying to smoothen your voice.
Make a path and stick to it, you indecisive hypocrite.
"I'm young and free," you say, as if attempting
To hide the fact your drying hands are empty. - Track Name: Manhattanhenge
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You weren't as much birthed in love as confusion. Reaching twenty carelessly, assessing measures you've been choosing to communicate. Like bats lash out in blinded flight. Living vicariously by listening instead of sight. And is that possible? I mean, you've been blindfolded before, but what's the difference blindness makes when touching him is all you care about anymore? There might not be much to the two of you inside except the mutual desire to hold a hand that's actually alive. Your own are like driftwood, bloated and made unusual by the stagnant waters only rippled by dissatisfied sighs loud enough to hear so he gets a cue to change, but even if he does, it just reminds him things are still the same. You shouldn't have to be anything more than what you want to, but the feeling of not living up to something is haunting you.
Your hands may be clutching at flesh and warm reluctantly, walking down the street together, displaying proudly the fact that flesh on flesh is confidence, and though the intentions clear, there's always going to be a touching that one finds more sincere. You didn't know the sinews of your back say 'I love you' with his fingernails etching urgently 'I trust you'. But conversation is dead, the tree of topics withered with frost unlike the yellow-green hues of summer passion, sun-soaked moments hopelessly lost. And that's goodnight, whether or not you believe it. Instead of saying nothing, your silence becomes your secret. - Track Name: Calloused
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We might have been, but now we're not.
We might have known, but we forgot.
No one can live like this, you know.
No ones lives life.
Are you prepared to be a joke without a punchline?
Living, caressing the world out key and time?
Ribs pressed like piano keys out of tune.
You'd be ridiculous to think it's only you.
There used to be an honesty there, now there's only pictures.
Of you holding her hand as if to say, "Look I fixed her."
Feel around, tell me what you touch.
Don't try and tell me this sensation is too much.
Feel around, tell me what you touch.
Don't try and tell me this sensation is too much. - Track Name: Plaster
- From the dry dust of the prairies you grew up in, and the hot, wet air between your mouths, you made plaster to set in the shape of a future. Needless to say, you've exhausted every mold by this point, and resorted to just dumping it on the highway, to stiffen with the sun that felt condemning, while persistently beading the sweat off your arms to drip into the plaster your hands work furiously to shape. Never truly drying with the renewing moisture, your lover places their hands on your shoulders. "Tact and common sense dictate it's time to give up," the sun says politely as it crosses the sky. "Perhaps you should go". Disappearing behind a mockingly flat horizon, you watch his exit. You pack up your things head home to bed where you can expect unfulfilling sex and mental wandering, often at the same time. But before you're consumed by respite from consciousness, you realize you haven't said goodnight aloud in quite a while. But, as your mouth creaks open, the water that earlier was so proud to spill from your body is absent. The prairie dust is back. Even laying next to the best part of your life, it chokes yours words and coats your mouth. You wanted water, just not badly enough to get up. Morning comes and you know full well that coffee is the only thing that can wash the plaster from your mouth. Plaster. You remember. You run to the highway with legs long dormant, you look for the hardened mess on the road. Every dead animal is a false alarm. Eventually, you see it. Hardened to the ground beside a four way stop. The sun got to it like it gets to you. The plaster is rough, in a shape devoid of meaning, but that doesn't stop you from finding a meaning. It's beautiful. But only from the inside. And it's beautiful. In the same way your friends describe the concerts you couldn't go to. It's beautiful, and you want to tell the world even though you know the story ends with, "You had to be there". You run back to that dusty bed like a child so you can share this sight with the best example of love you can think of, but they're not there. They never were. You woke up early and climbed back into bed even earlier. Are you dreaming? Would it even matter if you were? It's noon, and the sun is right above you urgently warning, "There's nothing for you here". The wheat to either side of highway has about as much spine as any person to try and admire the fact that no matter how loudly you're screaming at the colossal skies that brought people here in the first place, your open mouth will fill up with enough dust to build you a city. This is where you are, and like that plaster, I pray that you'll stick to the road for the rest of your life.
- Track Name: Prairie Winter
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I followed your bread crumb trail.
The one that led you out of the woods.
I followed the path for days.
And then I found you'd been gone for years.
I stumbled home to my front door.
Everything you own on the kitchen floor.
Come home, please just,
Won't you come home?
It's getting too cold for your pale skin out there.
Because there are wolves, haven't you heard?
How they have a thing for blonde haired blue eyed girls like you.
If any of them touches one thread on your winter coat,
I'll hunt each one down and slit their god-damned throats.
Your neck on the tracks,
Your back was never strong enough,
X's on your maps,
Good luck untangling this mess. - Track Name: Found
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You don't always look for happy 'things are alright' poems. You want something to tell you that you're not alone in what you've thought and felt, both taking and giving from the idea that you're the only person in your life that's living. Maybe you've been labelled as the weird one from the start. Every family has the artist, and it feels like you're it's only heart. You're beating your tissues against walls of unthinking. You're the only damn person that doesn't resort to drinking to make clocks go faster or blur as you're plastered like magazine sheets on a girls wall or following pastors words like they sprang from your own mind. You're making a new path, but slowly, and that's fine. You'll know your body, your thoughts, your patterns. Wait from someone to know them or fix them or light lanterns down where foresight meets what could or could not have been, as the compass of security and new things won't spin.
Live everyone else, you doubt where you are. You don't trust your head, and you've never met your heart. I'm scared I can't do anything, because we're all chained to a bed, and for me that comes with panicking over what might happen when I'm dead. But I can't be the only one who sees that clock read the same time every day by coincidence, or doubt that love exists despite my parents being evidence. I'm terrified to be silent, but no more confident to talk. Our lives are children down the street scraping asphalt with chalk. The girl always draws in pink, the boys in green and blue. We're the kid who always draws a circle regardless of if he wants to. - Track Name: Summer Tinted Brown
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I was found by something before I was lost.
I was summer, you were frost.
The sun is further away from me, it seems.
Not like I pictured it going differently.
Birds are leaving all their homes.
Only promises of warmth say where they're going.
Twigs fall from branches like bleached bones.
Wondering where their airborne friends flown. - Track Name: Degrees
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The only degree of separation between us is a loneliness that willingly sustains itself.
I am still the romance that won me when I was thirteen. Post dating every letter with how late we wanted to be seen as writing. And how the later it was, the better. Sleeping, curving 'I's, dotting each the wrong letter, because that's just what we did. Wrapped in fantastic novelty. A mixture of new drinks to wet hearts with dopamine. You are still the mom you screamed at when you were fifteen. Putting up a wall against her lack of understanding. You are still the plans you set when you were seventeen. Ignoring the doubt by speaking out with certainty. I am still the fear of waking up and being nineteen. Like Sunday scared of Monday, hiding from a heavy twenty years with twenty minutes spent staring at a clock. Like all those nights of writing promises that I'm sure we've both forgotten. We are still the sky we saw at when we were kids. Squinting at a backdrop, wondering what might be behind it. Something, if you've been taught that, and look again if you've forgot that like some kind of mocking curtain, the unseen has made like uncertain. You are still the candles in your burnt out birthday cake. Recounting all the wicks to check for a mistake. "This was is burning for each year I've been alive," you should have said. "Melt away in twelve months time." It's things like that I can't forget that you said.
The only degree of separation between us is a loneliness that willingly sustains itself. - Track Name: Like Anchors
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It's like in that split second you what to say and how to say it, but instead of catharsis, you get lethargic and carsick. Coughing and spitting the breathlessness to no one with urgency, hoping for paper and pens thinking "They'll be the death of me". Die on an empty mind rather than stomach, becomes someone said your thoughts in a book as your questions thumb it. Your confidence driving into grey storms as they're brewing, knowing your speechlessness was their doing. And they do it regardless, and they do it for fun, because speaking your mind is like holding antique guns by a safety catch with a broken finger. Blisters, barre chords, doorbells linger alone now. You don't go out most nights, and how can you expect to hold an image in this light? I don't want to see features, like most, only a reflection, because that means at least half of you is in my direction. Facing outwards, spacing forwards, you said you're sorry despite what that whore heard. Motion can only be described as in motion, and that's one of the saddest things I've thought about in my entire life.
It feels redundant to say that I'm creating since creativity as a whole was exhausted sometime in the early eighties by thinkers, not doers. Their plans embody a stillness that's been known by most to sneak up and fill us with a desperation to breaks someone mold. Like January sun beaming, deceptively cold. You'll run away then, and that's okay. You'll be back to your easel again in some form, some day. You can't hide from the artist inside you. You may repeat someone else's words, but that doesn't make them any less true.
I watched you run away from what you could make,
if your spider fingers would only create.
I see your feet reluctantly touching the concrete,
as you're running away.
It's written on your face. - Track Name: Caught Between
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I was thinking about the end and the means we took to get there.
That feeling of wind blew across my ears after I cut off all my hair.
Because I was sick of feeling so young, thought my body should catch up.
To how much older I felt when my life half emptied it's cup.
And the evidence, don't get me started,
on the footprints left when my higher self parted.
Let every step be an apology for me not doing anything.
The clean bill of health we still haven't paid,
since wishing the headaches and heartache would stay.
What are we running to, and what are we running from?
The only chance we have to ever be anyone?
What are we running from, and what are we running to?
I never thought that I'd be running without you.
And the evidence, don't get me started,
on the footprints left when my higher self parted.
Let every step be an apology for me not doing anything. - Track Name: Stillness
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Just like you won't become a fish by drinking with your mouth wide open, the world would be hard pressed to call you a man with your eyes shut, hoping that one night, puzzle pieces will fall lightly in a breeze so they can come together and let you sleep, with sheets squeezed tightly. Holding back the choking coughs and sobs, lungs sounding off twenty-one shots for the battles lost to apathetics. Entire sieges of saying we loved each other when we never really meant it. Thick lipstick spouting 'not I's Like a volcano, with black clothes to convey that we'll explode like clockwork. Wandering like nocturnal mysteries blinded by the light and scrutiny of hindsight. You toss side to side like a wayward boulder. Caught halfway between things looking up and looking over your shoulder. As much as we preoccupy life with ourselves, there's always going to be a stray eye cast over everyone else, though half blinded by the dark and blurriness it beings, and the cracked windshield of thinking we know everything there is to know. You're lamenting this. Tight eyes paying a price for every elderly woman we didn't assist. We'll all be there someday, aching proudly and waiting, writing off each day as another spent regretting chances we never even thought of taking.
Because the instant when inspiration nails us, arms and legs bound to a cross, will be the day that in trying to catch a fleeting sunrise, our muscles fail us, like Goliath's battle lost. You want to stop that, but this is no way to go about it. Hamlet wouldn't know his mother died if she didn't shout it. I mean, you went hiking once, but you know truthfully it never counted, because you stood still like a rabbit does, alert to every motion, but there was a stillness in those mountains that made it too terrifying to approach them. Your shaking hands like earthquakes, your shallow breath a tornado, so you chose to stay at the bottom and call it's massive shadow your shade so you could feel at least in the most insignificant sense important. Like your gift shop map telling you to see the sights, but you ignore there. You are no jagged cliff, and you are certainly no river. You can never say that you met love, but you know you did out live her. And there's a reason your heavy hearted sighs make music like a wet reed, and a reason the stubborn muscle that's your heart has grown up so atrophied. It's because we're here. With what we are fit into boxes. Taught to either wish for what we're not, or stop and cut our losses. And it might be possible to argue that neither one applies to you, but you're still going to be one or the other, or a haphazard combination of the two. We're all wanting a better planet, and if you listen long enough you'll understand that if you ever want to reach a soul on this Earth, you'll have to be ready to stand it for some scattered length of time, casting smiles as it rolls through. Because it will take a lot more heart to change the world, even more if no one asked you to. And that's where we stand. You and I and everything. The world is pulling triggers at people's heads and you're not changing anything. That doesn't meat stop caring, and I know it's hard to see, but while you can't expect to change the world, you've already changed reality. - Track Name: Your Holy Ghost
- I've loved you at arms length since I was eleven, but that's never mattered because I'm not going to heaven. It breaks your heart. That fact that so many people like me have this affinity for suffering in some promised eternity. Heard of, but never known. I'm sorry I need to touch the love that I'll call home. I'm sorry I'm frightened and need security, or at least the knowledge that if I fall, someone will catch me, and not call me out for every time I didn't believe it. I won't call what happens after death take it or leave it. I know you want to see the world as rippled by God's hands, or as a series of messages that we can't understand, but while all you see is Him, His Glory, and His Eminence, the dirt and sand between my palms speaks only of his absence. And that's the saddest part, we see the same picture, though mine's run by making sense, and not run by scripture. Because the only rules more solid than the ones written on stone, brought down from the highest mountains are the ones we call our own. But your rules are different, and sadly make you choose between who will be there until you die, and who is coming with you. Don't make me sit beside you with sweaty palms to tell that no matter what you or I feel, my doubt is dragging me to Hell. No Holy Ghost scratching behind the walls, listening and marking every time we chose in our own ways to do the right or wrong thing. You're living and hurt because in some way, you love everyone you've ever met. We could have it all together, but we all haven't found that kind of confidence yet.
- Track Name: Recursive
- This is waking up and knowing nothing holds me back, it's crazy. The fact that I can be whatever I want, but know that it won't save me from being the things I've chosen before. Tide in or out doesn't mean it's not the same shore that we've been washed up on before. Consistently. Since learning the word love. We made it a North Star we could never take our eyes off of. Fixed on that lofty promise, we walked forward unthinking into neck deep pools of water, we're sinking into thoughts projecting forward across what might choose to come up next. They tell you tomorrow is another day as if it yields some difference. I won't write off a calendar in the same way I did to lust. You don't need me to say we don't know tomorrow, and that won't change with trust. We drink to our future and chase it with foresight, thought blurred with tired eyes and the dark of the night. But somewhere out there, you know there's a sunrise. Run towards it pretending it's just there for your eyes. Let it shut up the tongue and the thoughts trailing off it. Falling to the skin of the world, knowing full well we're atop it.
- Track Name: To Justify
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We were born with a pair of hands,
Conspicuously built to fit each other's throats.
Instead of trying to kill the world that way,
I forced these hands to hold the songs I wrote.
I can't always justify what I am and what I do,
The closest thing to hope I have is that it means something to you.
But if it doesn't, that's okay, too.
There's always going to be someone new.
And I'd rather not see them.
I am who you were.
I am who you're not.
As much as I love to sit, and pretend things to differently,
You see clear as any other day what I force myself to be. - Track Name: Ribs, and the Things Between Them
- It's easy to divide people into convenient niches like normal and different, but you'd be much quicker to call them happy or not if you'd listen to their tone when they explain what you don't know. Whether words or concepts with an air of contempt. Maybe due to feeling better than you, but it might be envy. Because as empty as your life may seem to them, it isn't misery. Realizing that as an individual, you can't express yourself to the point of generalized understanding is the rock, and the hard place is silence. Words clamouring, climbing single mindedly and idly to violence. Like mutiny by an oppressed crew, thoughts can't be repressed in you. Your throat won't be rough to the touch. Instead, it'll be worn ans smooth from overuse. Cuts from where you bit off more than you can chew are buffed and hidden, but not by pride like a father, more time spent caring for looks than living, but glossed and smoothed to keep the machine simply moving. It's not worth enough to stay put behind because their are bloody lines running down our throats and minds and lungs. Truly the only things that make us anything to anyone. I wonder at what point people see that. They're oblivious to the fact that half their lung contractions are blood spat across the room, because you're amounting to finally showing yourself, so you better be shouting. The blood sprayed through words have cured more when heard than touching a cloak ever would. I don't know that I'd do if Jesus stood there, I'd only really care if he spoke. I'd listen, because there's healing in that at least. If you want to be an open book to read, you'd better hope your pages are creased to the point of falling apart. Speaking and listening to the point of not knowing where your feet are. That's the only way to live, even if what you say outweighs the input that you give, because the happy are receptive, and complacent to sit and be, while you can get caught and swept up and talking endlessly. Once in a while, if you drew a clearer map than you used to, maybe we could follow your path and that's the difference. The ones whose ideas come from a path that can be navigated without assistance are boring. They are no mountain road, half scared and half intrigued by the beauty shown in having a sheer boundary. This line defined by more concrete and rock than there is inside of me. You're on this ledge, wheel in hand, and trying to understand that urge to pull your left arm up. You know there's more death in that commitment than in the act of getting up morning after morning, maybe even after noon. Grudgingly waking from drinking yourself to ruin. We are not anchors, but we like to think we need them. We all have fears, but that's just because we feed them. There are a few of us who wade in water, clutching nets for catching whatever we find, but there are more of us who sink and drown in public pools, weighed down by regrets that could have easily been mine. We'd be fools to grab each other's sinking ships for safety, but even bigger fools to let the water filling our lungs say don't save me.
- Track Name: Wanderlust
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You force your skin into the cracks of your childhood home.
Skin and bone.
You life is the well worn story, and anticlimactic ending
that everyone's been dead the whole time and just pretending
to walk and drink and breathe through a scenery that screams
past a paper thing mid-western set, "I'm empty look, behind me!"
You need motion in your fingers, brushing past a door
you've seen a hundred times, but never gone through before.
Your home isn't where you're used to.
It's a novelty.
Getting lost in subways, or just trying new things.
Revolving doors like an airport, a door we're both using to swing back and forth between, a tango dance with confusion. Every person seems to find a rock eventually, to hold onto, to stop moving, or to hide under, most likely. But I can't trust that as legitimate happiness. It seems just like me their motion sickness got sick of this duality between what we want and really need. I want to run away, but I need you to stop me. As much as you weren't stars or my sun, it's pretty likely you knew me better than anyone. Pushing and pulling like tides and wide currents, surviving the bad thoughts to keep ones that weren't around when I held you. You felt like an oval with squarish sides, an armful of noble thoughts held together with hands across your back. Fingers overlapped because I lied about what we lacked. More than anything, I got sick of the me in you and scared of the alternative asserting itself as true. No one is owned but that doesn't mean we're free. It means you have to be anything before you're something.
I tried to be living, but ended up sleeping, because then when bad things happen, you choose to stop dreaming. Three in the morning, but the sweat stains are worth it. Dirt in your half full cup is no problem so long as you don't stir it or lure it out with driving by one more time to see how their garden is growing, or if the same thoughts are on their mind. We're all coping somehow, you'll find new ways to make your spine pop. Hitting the limit where your body makes the tears stop. But we don't cry, at least not privately. It's much more productive to take scissors and atrophy part of yourself to be seen as once inhabited by a creature called faith who found your soul and took a stab at it.
You spun around the door to find yourself a few years older. A sunburn, a backpack, a white chip on your shoulder. The door spins again and invites you inside, but you'd far sooner kill yourself than give this another try. That's how we live. on the maxims of everything. There's a thousand more doors, each heavy and spinning. Handles waxy, dripping, melting. You write on the glass, "You will try, but can't help me." - Track Name: To be Anything
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This is for all the dry brushes, and songs we never wrote.
Perspective never did sit well in the back of the throat.
There are over six billion souls on the Earth, half awake and half in slumber. It's hard to think about my own ever fitting in that number. Why? Because I'm bigger. A monster that lives in my own head. Narrating every instant, will it exist after I'm dead? The monologue of senses and desires like looping feedback. So many impulses at once that it creates a white washed soundtrack. The hum behind the dissonance is purring in contentment. A selfishness consuming, I wish I never met him. It's the giant cut of knowing that within you is a greatness that whenever put to paper, just becomes a solid grey mess. The feeling of writing down three pages off songs and knowing full well that only one couplet belongs. He is inside all of us. Inside the trophies and the memories of scoring on the soccer field for your mom and dad to see, and praise and raise their expectations. But the next time your foot meets the ball, you can know no patience. It's in your foot, it's in your hands, it's in your ears and it demands to be translated from the knowledge you have skill and heart to something so deftly known as art. So what if you can't release true expression? It consumes you, eats you, it demands public confession. Because this is you, on this tape, in those book. If we wanted to get closer, you could just hold it up and say, "look". The pages may be creased, but they're held together relief. This is me, my heart my soul, my pen has killed this beast. - Track Name: Whatever You Want to Be
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This has been one of the strangest attempts I've ever made at making peace. Like the greatest piece of advice I was every given was that you have to learn to accept the person you see in the mirror because that's who you have to wake up and face each and every morning. My dad told me that, and I think it came from his dad before him. His dad was a musician, and sometimes I wish someone in the family could talk to me about what it's like to be one. To be anything. To be anything that exists because you feel it pulling from inside yourself. And that's why I'm here, dripping wet onto this page to try and make some sense of every near-identical page before it. That's all I've been doing since I realized that I'm alone inside my mind. Is that selfish? Hardly, I think. Because I know I'm not alone.
Everything I have thought and felt has the potential to be analyzed and questioned by every person around and before me. We just don't always have the liberty of talking about it. Because what, it's not like anyone cares, right? It's not like anyone else worries about the masks their friends put on, or that fact that two people walking down a street at two AM is the loudest, most deafening silence they've ever heard. You're wrong. We were raised to ignore the things that inconsequentially matter. To niche ourselves into groups that are so well versed on a particular subject that there is a starting point from every inane and repetitive night we plunge into readily. But you're the only one that thinks that, aren't you? You're the only one who grew up with a song in your throat, or paint on your cuffs, or a plan to get you out of every contingency. You dreamt. You picked what you were, or could be, and what that meant to you and you alone. So you set out. But that melody that struck you on the walk home is in some weird time signature that you can't remember, or the mountain you meant to sketch ends up looking more and more like the hill in your backyard with every stroke. It falls apart.
No one wants to hear how your business is doing, or how you won that figure skating medal, because it just reminds them of the dreams they had and left behind for whatever excuse they spit out as more a question than an answer. You peak. You beat your head against your hands because you don't know how to do better. The mental picture you spent hours hiding from the world is getting farther and farther behind piles of paperwork and deadlines to make. Your third grade self wants to know what you've become. Everything your hands touch is supposed to be the big one. The one that you accept. That you proudly label as the potential your mind cultivated made flesh. But it's hard. It's damn hard. And you're doing it so utterly alone. Your mouth moves too slow for your head and everything comes out wrong. Painfully and completely wrong.
They're scared by the fire in your eyes as you lay out what you think matters. But they're the same. Bubbled together, wishing just to be understood in terms they can accept. Your something became an anything. It's not you defined on paper anymore. It's the experienced reactions of others that define what you do and have done. You're not alone. We're all throwing sentences and ideas and songs and half thought out monologues in hope of someone grasping the essence of what it is to be you. To see and feel the world as you understand it. But, I can't write for you. This is what I wrote, crudely pushing my understanding of the world through a medium that may or may not be understood. This is my reality. How I see love, potential, art, the mind, friends, thought, and the concept of writing as it applies to be you and I. It's simply refusing to believe that no one else can feel this.
Maybe you're scared, too. Or maybe you have it figured out for you. I can't know. All I know is that these are words I chose like a child's dodgeball team to make sense of the world and my place it it. The thoughts swirling painfully as I pretend to feel fulfilled. This was supposed to be a release. Was it? No. Because every day was just more thoughts thrusting in and out of remembrance, each Earth shattering and novel. But they're gone, and yours leave too. They were somethings. Pull them back, distorted and half misunderstood. They're anything now. Accessible to all, but totally undefinable. This is me labelling that. But only the questions. I have no answers. I can only live the way I know best. And if I can't justify that to anyone, what's the point of saying anything?
Everything has brought me to this couch, wanting to desperately convey that everyone will make sense of the world as it applies to them. Again, this is my world. Take it, ignore it, answer it, cry for it, do anything. Because it's a circle. Unbroken, unending. And it may overlap with yours, and your lover's, and your parent's, and those of composers and writers before us. But know that it's not just you. We're all terrified and learning to live with that. We're all bigger versions of children whose teachers couldn't tell us what we'd be. We all look up to people, and there are always people that look up to us. You're more than the clothes on your body and practised words you exchange in elevators. You're a collection of thoughts, no matter how pointless or contrived you may fear they sound.
You knew begrudgingly who you were, and that was something. The world never was your playground, though. Your hands and words were never good enough for you. That dream, that something, becomes an anything. It's not about making your mark anymore. It's about staying alive with no final fairytale destination in sight. You long to be anything. Your potential came close and crumbled, but you still fight. Why?
Because you are you, but you're also me. We understand the sun above us and the gravity that ties us down even if the words are different. Don't fear the understanding that you have. Don't hide the experiences or thoughts that made you the mind you are today. Never lose the something you set out to be.
Because anything is the smoke your hands tirelessly try to hold. You're the something you've dreamed about since you were eight years old.
