flight of the raven

where has he been? (liner notes)

People say you’re in hiding, when really you just want to be away. Secluded where things are in order and more familiar, if not totally known.

It could take a while to realize how that stands against everything you believe in or stood for once upon a time. Since ideally, it’s the unfamiliar that draws the focus inward.

Now I’m looking into old songs I thought were long finished, songs I never really thought about again, but am only now beginning to revisit. Maybe they’re not so familiar to me after all.

This was the idea behind the night visions, the working name for a compendium of songs, featuring different and not-so-different ideas that altogether seem like a grouping but really they’re all just one kind of movement.

It began with Dark City. That was first song I wrote about what's on the other side of the door, something the night reminds you all the more is very much alive, far more alive than those checkboxes we get busy crossing off in the broad daylight.

I wrote something like 400 tales of romance while in Los Angeles living at my first apartment with some old friends of mine, right there on ol’ Hollywood Blvd with bacchanalias and wine parties, card games, meditations and walks in the moonlight where you’d hear and taste and dig all the sounds of the city and fog rolling in from the sea waiting there low on the hillside, as mountain lions and coyotes roam just a little higher up in a dark wilderness.

It was sometime later that I set out on Generals Highway, which was much bigger than it seemed even far outside the reach of the grandest of sequoias. Out beyond the highway I traveled, across the sea and as far east as the cobblestone streets of Vienna and Budapest, far beyond Paris and Madrid and eventually right on back again, to the east coast of America and down to the river Mississippi returning to ol’ New Orleans.

It might be true that I am a man moving in circles, embracing duality and expressing these dichotomies within the one, that I move in the seasons expressed four-fold in the all.

The raven marks the full departure, the breaking down of those old walls that used to keep us each boxed into the old stuffy rooms, rooms that we still keep chained to our pockets until we decide to outgrow them.

The raven, in her way, helps lead the path home. or at the very least, lets us know when the beacons have been lit.

Conclave (2024); directed by Edward Berger.

Once there was a time that I read my writing and grew damn-near horrified. I’ll be honest, it still happens every now and again.

What if no one understands these words? What if it’s not the way it’s done?

What if there’s no choice but to imitate some old screwy, coffee-drinking intellectuals handing things out like deviled eggs and sushi rolls so that it’s ironclad and understood and accompanied with a here-you-go-people, that’s the way it is? And that’s it?

No, that can’t be what anyone really wants.

Sometimes I think to myself, how the fuck did we put up with it for so long? Being lectured instead of shown? Knowledge over experience. Reading instead of feeling.

Why didn't we realize it sooner?

I’m certainly not going to explain this part anymore than I would anything else, as I've said it all over what feels a million times and in so many different ways already.

I don’t have any answers.

A while back, I saw a movie called Conclave and the villain of the film criticizes the cardinals for embracing relativism as he insists that things are strict and absolute as we live them, here on earth. He and they were talking about the relative in another context but it's similar enough to what we're addressing here in these words right now.

We’re both taking about laws. And truth.

It’s true I was raised a Catholic. I was confirmed in the church and it was there I chose my own name. I haven’t been to Mass in a few years but these days I feel at home most places. Inside or outside any halls of worship.

Now again, I don’t have any truth to offer you. I can only make suggestions in finding your own. Outside mathematics and the gates of eden, sometimes I feel like nothing is true and everything is allowed; and personally I’d beware of people who tell you otherwise.

The way I see it, keep your eyes and ears open and your feet moving.

And over time your own word will grow in value.

—If you even care about that kind of thing.

I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.