Finales and Friendship

I sit down to write this at Arsaga’s espresso café in Fayetteville Arkansas over a week after returning from our summer explorations in Nueva York. My recollections of the end of our time there are through a lens of places, projects, and friends that have come into my life since then, but I will do my best.

How should I couch this? In terms of lessons learned? Observations made? Personal growth experiences? Maybe all of the above, maybe none of the above.

I leave New York with more resolve than ever before to capture, produce, and disseminate my music in album form. Performing this music will always be a part of my life, but it is only a small part of the picture. Performance is extremely tiring, taxing, harrowing. Hours and hours of practice, arranging, traveling, self promotion, self promotion, self promotion, all for a few moments of glory for the few people who took times out of their busy schedules to listen to your art. Your original and authentic and slightly quirky art that they maybe like, maybe remember, but most likely will appreciate ephemerally and then leave to the past, to their memories of your vague images and strange costume changes (yes, Lee Ellen and I incorporated two costume changes into our show at Bar 4). Now there is the desire to produce, to concretize, hold in ones and zeroes and silicone my music. Give it a little more staying power. To turn it into history, literally. Lesson eight million and three: Your music, no matter how good it is, will disappear forever if it is not recorded and listened to. That is the reality of contemporary popular music production and consumption. You are better off having recordings, selling them ON THE INTERNET, and having occasional performances than you are trying to work the old-fashioned way. People are too into their iphones and computers to be able to support live musicians anymore. Well, until they are quite famous already. Until being into a band boosts your status.

And more resolve than ever to hold as sacred my relationships with my female friends. Lee Ellen and I, despite the could-have-beens of living and sleeping and working together 24/7, have become much more intimate and connected. In a music world in which everything is an obstacle—finding the motivation to create art amidst just trying to live life, having the courage to get up in front of strangers every night and promote yourself, learning how to manage dozens of men who find you oh so interesting and talented and beautiful and attractive because you are brave enough to get on stage and sing about something meaningful to you, hangovers, tempting cupcakes—having intimate female collaborators, or at least supporters, is completely necessary. Lesson sixty seven.

Our last week in New York Lee Ellen and I set forth on a mission we created for ourselves the first day we arrived: walk the entire length of Broadway, north to south. From 219th street to Battery Park. We left at 10:45 AM and eleven hours, sixteen miles, a detour to the Met to see the Francis Bacon exhibit, getting broken up with by long distance boyfriends, a torrential thunderstorm, pinched knees, bruised soles, dozens of demographic changes, we arrived at the memorial of the twin towers. Broken bodies permitted us from making it the last ten blocks to battery park (have you ever walked sixteen miles on concrete??? Do it, but your knees will hate you), but we had completed enough of it to call our mission accomplished.

I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we now feel an intimate connection with New York that we never would have gained without that monumental trek. It’s like knowing the inches of a lovers skin that are usually beneath the clothes. The transitions, the links, the length, the immensity of the city that is lost on those who travel underground, or take cabs, or never leave their little neighborhoods. I think we traveled through a few hundred worlds that day. Maybe millions.

That walk solidified much. Our friendship. Our gratitude to the city for opening up experiences. Our alacrity to leave the city, not despite it’s gifts but because of them. A strengthened resolve to create for me. A strengthened resolve for self-establishment for Lee Ellen.

Many thanks to the people who enabled us to be in New York for the summer. Kirsten for offering us the room, Dana for being all around amazing and introducing us to so many cool people, Lauren for...everything. Parents, old friends, new friends, lovers. Everyone.