I’ve mentioned them before on here, if you remember, and this marks kind of a huge end of an era for me. We all grew up together in Brazil, IN, building a community there that is pretty much unparallelled in my life to date. I learned most of what I know about a fret board from Dustin and Alan.

One summer, Alan and I had the idea to build a model boat, and we did, and it was cheap and simple, and we didn’t care. We had built it, we had built it. It was like most everything else most of us had in our lives.

A few months later, Canterbury rolled out a new song at a show I was at, and by the end, I was a shaking fit.

We spent the last few months building this model of the most beautiful schooner I’ve ever seen. We both dreamed of gliding across the ocean the warning on the box said that it won’t be. So we set it to sail in the bathtub, manufactured it some waves. You can pretend that you’re the captain, and I’ll be your cast-iron first mate. We’ll sink it to see if it floats, it’s the only way we’ll ever know.

Tomorrow will be the first time I’ve seen Alan in years, and probably the last time I’ll see Alan in years, and all those years float.

• Anti-flag: You Can Kill the Protester, But You Can’t Kill the Protest
• Sigur Ros: All Alright
• Neutral Milk Hotel: Two-Headed Boy
• Appleseed Cast: Marigold & Patchwork
• Tallest Man on Earth: The Sparrow and the Medicine

Seriously couldn’t have had a much better shuffle for this morning’s ride to work.

But recently, having grown tired of my recently slimmed down selection of music on my work computer (IT departments don’t like employees to have 30+ gigs of music on their work computers–who’d have thought?), I’ve turned again to Pandora. (IT will just have to deal with the increased streaming bandwidth.)

I’ve honed my personal station pretty well, and what I’m finding is a renewed appreciation for some of my classic tastes–songs and bands I’d forgotten I liked:

• Alkaline Trio
• Fugazi
• Samiam
• Avail
• Small Brown Bike
• &c

I’ll admit, this station is pretty rock & roll. Occasionally some Sufjan pops up, Sigur Ros lilts across the headphones, Rocky Votolato belts one out, Pedro the Lion doubts himself, but mostly, it keeps my air drum tendencies bursting forth. It’s something good for here at work, something worth rediscovering for the rediscovery it brings.

But, today on Google Chat, Laura and I rapid-fired the first 10 important songs of our lives to come to mind, and I couldn’t pass up posting it here:

Laura: haha!
okay
here we go
we’re going to list important songs
ten each, whatever comes to you
“scythian empire” Andrew Bird
Christopher: umm. “no love” get up kids.
Laura: “Zebra” Beach House
Christopher: “Vaka” Sigur Ros
Laura: “KC Accidental” Broken Social Scene
Christopher: “Turnstile” Hot Water Music
Laura: “Lloyd I’m Ready to be Heartbroken” Camera Obscura
Christopher: “The Crowd” Operation Ivy
Laura: “The Transfiguration” Sufjan Stevens
Christopher: “The River” Anathallo
Laura: “Cathedrals” Jump Little Children
Christopher: “Mistress Witch of McClure” Sufjan Stevens
Laura: “Shot in the Arm” Wilco
Christopher: “Microchip” Penfold
Laura: “Running, Returning” Akron/Family
Christopher: “Slower” Mineral
Laura: “One Hundred Million Years” M Ward
Christopher: “The Last Secret Name of God” No Heroics, Please* (is that self-aggrandizing?)
Laura: no because my next one was “Katherine” This Story*
Christopher: haha. awesome.
it’s just the song that changed everything for us.
the first we wrote as No Heroics and realized where we were supposed to go as musicians.
Laura: yeah, katherine was a very era-defining tune
for me
Christopher: how many do we have left?
Laura: you have one more
Christopher: okay.
hell.
i think.. sleeping weather, small brown bike.
oh. hell.
Laura: smart
Christopher: but.. also, circles, by sunny day real estate.

I love how diverse our choices are given our friendship, and how similar despite obvious differences. I feel like mine were maybe a bit more “classic,” mainly because the majority of them are from different points in my life where a song seemed prevalent at the end/beginning of a personal era, and most of these being in high school and early college–major developmental years, as it were. Some are more recent developments (e.g. ”The River” by Anathallo being the song Britt and I used as our wedding recessional, &c).

Feel free to comment, nag, or heckle our choices.

*No Heroics, Please and This Story are the bands we used to play in, respectively.

It started with a small group of kids going to shows at The Basement Collective in Terre Haute, satelliting around a handful of bands: Canterbury Effect, Not Forgotten, Dead of Winter. It was at the Collective that our group met Under a Dying Sun on their way back to San Francisco, and started a friendship and tradition of summer shows, the last and most memorable of which happened the summer of 2002.

The Basement Collective had long since folded, and we were doing shows out of my friend Dustin’s basement; I had left Not Forgotten to play bass for Since Forever and Dustin had left Canterbury Effect and started another band, The Graveyard Heart.

It was the 3rd annual Summer’s Summary show, and what had once been 15-20 kids gathering at the Collective had become almost 100 trying to cram into Dustin’s small basement to see the all of the local mainstays and Under a Dying Sun as they passed through for the 3rd year running on the last leg of their summer tour back to SanFran.

There’s a smattering of images from the night I hope to never forget–the ceiling sweating, Shaye’s wonder at the quiet corn and the fireflies, everyone I loved so much at that time in my life in the same room shouting along to the same songs, the sting and shred in my throat, Konane a fuzz through the microphone speaking about how what we had there in that basement was something he’d never found anywhere else in all their touring.

It ended up being the last show Since Forever ever played, the last summer of Under a Dying Sun passing through, the last summer of a lot of things. It’s a strange sort of nostalgia looking back, one I could easily let myself grow sad over–wondering if I’ll ever feel anything like I felt in that basement again, thinking about how I still search for similar feelings–how I climb now to feel the rocks tear at the skin of my fingers like bass strings once did, how I still gather people around me who know and love the same anthems I used to shout, how I still sometimes go into my basement, simply because the smell, the way it smells like Dustin’s old basement.

ce.

*Photo compliments of John Joh.

I want to get into a barfight today. Can anyone else here throw a punch? I mean a punch with follow through, a punch like your father taught you to throw, your father who taught you to throw a punch only when necessary, when there’s not a lamp or a chair or a pool cue handy, “Save your fists,” he said, “Save some broken knuckes.” That’s the kind of father who knows how to throw a punch. You should hear my dad’s barfight stories. My dad knows how to break a damn jaw.

Christopher Earl

The music is brilliant and are matched in brilliance by lyrics like these:

there’s a girl with a flower pot full of dirt and bullet shells she puts it by her window gives it sunlight restores its health after a month or two the shells start to grow into branches of barbed wire they spread across the walls the windows and the floors and their grip never tires.

And:

old scratch has dealt us a dirty hand he had the look of a saint but the greed of a man and his face was worn and wrinkled like a leather book and if i put this revolver to my head will god turn against me instead of taking pity on a broken man?

And:

set the fields on fire let the devil come let him come I’ll be waitin’ for him this time I am stronger now and I can fight it I’ll be waitin’ at the end of the line.

Happy Hallows everyone!

-Christopher

And, on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have Tim Kasher, muttering and screaming it about a man with no blood on his hands.

Weeks ago now, I saw Cursive live for the first time. I’ve loved Cursive since highschool–in fact, they’ve sat comfortably at no. 3 on my all-time top 5 since 2001–and I’ve always been afraid that they’d split up before I got to see them, as has happened with pretty much every other band on my top 5.

They ended their set with What Have I Done?, and the entire sentiment reverberated, and ever since has echoed and echoed.

I’m 26 now, and beg the question; I wonder what blood might be on my hands, whether from ending or saving a life; I wonder if there is any at all. What have I accomplished? Who have I helped? Have I made the world any better? I want the answer to be yes, and include a litany of people who feel improved by my actions or words.

Today, I asked my father where the point in life is that you harden against the world, where you decide you can’t change a damn thing? If there is one. I feel right in the void where the man in the song feels:

Stranded in Ann Arbor with a flat tire
I watched the sun sadly set
Any younger I may have wept
Much older I wouldn’t have noticed

I don’t ever want to get to the point where I don’t notice, but some days, I’m tired of weeping for it all.

Copper and stars,
christopher earl.

Don’t chide me. I ride my bike with headphones sometimes, when I know that it’s safe to ride with headphones. You see, I had The Tallest Man on Earth singing over the wind in my ears. The sun was like confetti through the trees. And, I was dancing as much as a person can dance on a bike, singing loud, at times playing air drums (though there are no drums backing The Tallest Man on Earth, I was playing them), and other times, when necessity necessitated that my hands should be on the handlebars, I strummed along on the bars. For some reason, The Tallest Man on Earth conveys to me an air and countenance of Beirut’s, Zach Condon, but yet dusty with the creaks and groans of say, an ancient wooden trade vessel or a ghost of a cabin deep in the woods of Georgia or Mississippi.

I passed people, and they smiled at me; some laughed. It’s probably hard to see a large, tattooed man riding his bike in this manner, singing and carrying on, and not take part in the joy he is feeling, to be affected by it. I felt as though lilting lines of music and notes were wafting away n my wake. It felt good to believe, to want to believe, that those people who saw me, who smiled and laughed, knew a day better than they would have otherwise, simply because I cared to sing.

christopher earl.

Wanderlust of the sort that I and a good portion of my friends have (a couple of whom also write for this blog) is at once a wonder and a torment. It keeps us sharp and alert, always looking around to see the things around us, and most especially to see the things that most would see as trivial, we see as miracle.

But, it also keeps our minds loud, spinning, at times like a playful top, and others more like a whirlpool. We’ve ruined relationships with our whirling–at times, we’ve ruined ourselves. I’m not sure that you ever grow out of it; like I’ve written before, I think there are still hints of my wanderlust in the relative life of minimalism I lead. I used to be able to fit all that I own in a sedan, just in case I needed to make a break.

Sounds a bit overly dramatic, I suppose, and I suppose, it’s because it was. There was a time I never thought I’d settle in somewhere, and now I have a mortage payment, and I am marrying a wonder of a girl in just a few months. My mind still spins sometimes–I constantly beg for instances of good in the world, sometimes I ask Jesus or whoever to come back soon and fix everything, sometimes I just have a hard time with memories that I’d rather not carry so much weight.

The first chance I got to play music at the new house, all I could think of was the refrain of Sufjan’s “Majesty Snowbird”:

Don’t stop, don’t break
You can delight because you have a place
Quiet room, I need you now

I spun my finger around the dial of my iPod, and pressed play. I looked around, saw the dust of the remodeling still hanging in the sunlight, sat down on the floor, and listened to the house breathing around me, growing lungs, a beating heart, wrinkle upon wrinkle of new memories making a home. Something I was never sure I’d find.

-christopher earl.