I’m waking up at Amy’s house, dazed from dreams. I don’t remember most of them, but I think they were pretty worth while – there was art and Love and beauty and rain. Strange things too. I remember trying to parallel park my mom’s huge Ford van at the edge of a big grassy park. It took me quite a while and THEN I saw the sign that stated I could only be parked there for about 15 minutes. I jammed it into reverse and backed into the trees.
I remember a big square building with a courtyard in the centre with waxed floors and waxed walls of flickering images and television screens. People were clustered in the centre, looking inwards and watching things on the inner screens, but that left me plenty of room to run around the outer edge, sometimes up on to the walls, simply enjoying the slippery smooth of my socks on the floor… running, running running till members of my party got quite annoyed. I was pretty enamoured with the building, and started fantasizing about what I would put on the walls if I Lived there, and eventually slipped and skidded out, meeting a woman from college that I can’t put a name to anymore. Short-cropped blonde hair, she showed me into the courtyard at the centre of the square and we discovered sculptures and installations… she liked how excitable I was.
I lay in bed for a while trying to remember the details, but they slipped past me as I lay there grasping. It’s the dreams where I fall in Love that are the hardest to wake from, the least well-remembered, and the ones that I feel the most melancholy leaving. They can make the whole day grey with the vague feeling of loss.
And in this case, the desire for freshly-waxed floors and a clean pair of socks.
This past weekend, Heather and I headed out to Shepherdstown to play the NewSong Festival. We drove up on Friday night, winding our way out through the darkness of Interstate 70, my fantasy road. Finding smaller and smaller roads and seeing the speed limits stay the same. There are small, winding twisting snake-like roads in West Virginia with speed limit signs telling you you’re SUPPOSED to be driving at 55mph. Not a chance in Hell. Trees and ditches looming suddenly out of the mist, twists and turns highlighted by oncoming cars that haven’t got a clue about that knob that turns down their high-beams, or more frequently, gigantic 4x4s that shove us to the poorly trimmed shoulders and whose headlights are at headlevel.
We were pretty exhausted and an hour late by the time we showed up at our friends’ house in Inwood, WV. There was this theory that from there we’d head over to all the open mics being sponsored by the festival, but we found Roger, Mitch and Chantal all clustered around the television, watching the last few episodes of Firefly…. there was no real resisting that.
Heather and I had been introduced to Joss Whedon’s sci-fi series in Philadelphia, by our friend Shane… we lost a lot of sleep over it that time, too… and again, we bundled up on the couches with cats and friends till around 1.30 in the morning watching Firefly, fearful of the knowledge that we had to be up by 6am the next morning… but not SO fearful that we didn’t finish the whole disk.
Saturday morning totally failed to dawn. At first I thought it was simply because we were bedded down in the basement, but after being nearly blinded by the nova-like light shining out of my cellphone, and using that radiance to stumble to the stairs and climb labouriously to the surface… I realized that a) I really HAD managed to wake up at 6.30 in the morning, and there just wasn’t a lot of sun at that time and that b) the rain hadn’t stopped yet…. the feeble rays of dawn were being waylaid by clouds and mist and drizzle.
I knew Heather would be THRILLED to see that. Rain is still a source of contrast and beauty and skin-tingling cold for me. For Heather it’s generally a sign that the whole world was going to implode, and I got my tired joy on while I could, knowing that to express happiness with the weather once Heather was conscious was sort of like pulling the switch to my own electric chair with a brightly coloured piece of yarn.
We drove tiredly into town and found the festival and found our place in it and stumbled to chairs and sat down looking forward to some time to rest our eyes before we had to pay attention to our surroundings. And then Heather found out that although she was “number 7”, she went first. That sort of sucked. Being the first performer of the day meant they hadn’t sussed out the bugs in their system OR their contest OR the sound system yet. Some of Heather’s 4 minutes got wasted trying to get a sound out of the monitors, and some of them were upended by my guitar suddenly being discovered half-way through the song and being blasted out at us during the second verse, nearly causing my tired bladder to let loose on the front row of the audience.
It was stressful.
I was in the second round, and was surprised when I won. LooseN had gotten me through the beginning of yet another contest… and I’m tired of writing now. More later.
Cause I know that YOU NEED to KNOW!!!
These songwriting contests are always so strange – competing to see who’s the best is a frightening thing… even in just the everyday aspect of gigging and fighting for audiences, I try to avoid putting gigs on the same night as other people we know, not just from the professional point of view of dividing our audiences, but also from the point of view of… I don’t want to know who will lose out. I don’t really want to know which band which audience member will pick. And in the formalized competitive atmosphere of these singer/songwriter contests, it’s even stranger. Heather and I know most everyone else in the competition, by name and reputation if not personally, and I’m always sort of weird about competing in that fashion against friends.
Oh, and of course the competitive side of me gets pissy when I DON’T win, and the fearful side of me gets fearful when we DON’T win. It can get me pretty negative at times.
So, my emotions ran back and forth over the course of the morning. Bored by a seemingly endless string of low-key acoustic performers with mediocre metaphors, it was actually pretty hard to stay awake at first. Then came the rush of adreneline of performance – LooseN had to fit in a four minute time slot, agonizing considering the song is usually about seven minutes long. We got a MASSIVE audience response, but after one of the judges came up to me and confided that I was extremely hard to follow even WITH printed lyric sheets, I was pretty sure that we’d driven out for just those 240 seconds.
After the semi-finalist round (where I competed against 12 other singer/songwriters, most of which were AWESOME) we REALLY had people cheering for us – we sold a good number of CDs, got a lot of names for the mailing list, really great response. Met a lot of fun people. After the results were announced (I was beaten by two songs about TELEVISION!!! – see, there’s the competitive rob coming out) a LOT of people came up and confided that they were pretty disappointed that I hadn’t won. Including several judges…
I don’t know. That night we went and watched the final competition, and I was almost glad that I hadn’t gotten that far. Daniel Lee just blows my mind, and … wow. I’m glad I was in the audience for his performance that night. If I’d been on stage and competing, I might’ve wandered off after I’d played, but I’m so glad I got to see Daniel do his thing. He was born for this.
An exciting day of hurry up and wait and passion and fear and finally being done. I received a new favourite compliment… “If this was the 70s, they’d call you cocaine”. Goes on my list with “You’re a MOTHERFUCKER of a guitar player” and “I remember you, you like… tore a guitar apart on stage.” *preen*
“You know, it’d be just as easy to lead’em.”
“Eh, I like smackin’ em!”
Jane rocks.
