What Is There To Say?
👋 Happy day
I caught myself doing a funny thing this morning when I sat down to write. I tried to pull a personal update out of thin air for you guys. I thought: "I must write something intellectually juicy, I must leave them with an insight! I must make them think!!"
That sounds like a lot of pressure to put on myself right? Yeah. You can probably start to see how I end up shooting myself in the foot for keeping consistent with these things. I frequently bite off more than I can chew and then choke disastrously. So that got me thinking - how might I still show up authentically in this space in the absence of organized thoughts and a heightened transcription fluency? Well, if you know me IRL you know I have a set of questions I will always end up asking you on a weekly basis if given the opportunity:
• What are you particularly grateful for this week?
• What personal challenges are you currently facing down?
I find that these help paint a picture of what world my friends are living in that week and it invites them to be a generous friend with me. Two questions is all it takes to get a high level idea of what is exciting or soothing to someone, as well as what may be haunting their days. For the friends that constantly oblige my cringe social habits, I love y'all ❤️. Anyways, during weeks like this where theres so much noise "upstairs", I will resort to keeping it simple by answering this prompt while inviting you to do the same with me! Let's give it a go.
The brief moments of sunlight that break through the overcast on a cloudy day. There's a metaphor in here somewhere. I'll be sitting around the apartment and suddenly feel and see in my peripheries the room slowly beginning to glow with warmth. If I'm lucky, it'll last long enough for me to look up and watch the hardwood floors shift from grey to burnt orange. White shoes caught in the rays will shine with a brightness that you haven't seen on them since the first day you got them.
One word - Change. Prior to this year, the change that entered my life felt measured; predictable. I was always privy to its presence but I always felt we, me and change, were in silent agreement about the allowed areas of affect. I thought we had an arrangement. Career change? Yes, let's push it! Living space change? You betcha, crank up the dials! Community change? Yes, I could use new friends, send it, but please leave my family and relationships out of it this year will ya? Now that I've put my finger on the pulse, perhaps I'll shortlist this topic for next week's personal exploration. I have a lot to say and share on the matter!
It's interesting how starting with nothing to say ended up producing 300 words. I guess that's what happens when you invite yourself to show up! If you want to make this fun, please answer that prompt for yourself in an email response to me! One last thing, major shout out to friend of the newsletter, Sandra Gonzalez, for absolutely making my week with this amazing Attack & Flux feedback:
So grateful for your love for music. It’s giving me Rick Rubin energy and I’m stoked to be a part of this journey. Really Love is also my favorite.
Now to what you're all here for!
🎧 A Song to Study
I hesitate sharing this song because its so good I assume everybody on Earth has listened to it so much that they're sick of it and I'm the last straggler to the party. This song invites you to step out and find love within your own pastel drenched world of Wes Anderson adornment. I'm actually shocked it hasn't been featured in one of his many masterpieces, maybe it has honestly, I haven't looked. The power of this song lays in its ability to elicit such a strong emotional response and sense of catharsis with the grand total of 3 unique bars of lyric. This will be the easiest song you ever memorized, ready? Here we go.
Ram on
Give your heart to somebody soon
Right away
Right away
That's it, you've done it you genius you.
🏡 An Album to Live In
Okay, this one is a heavy hitter. I don't imagine this album will resonate for everyone, not because the music is necessarily challenging or intense in anyway, but because of Damon McMahon's polarizing vocals. I've been listening to this album regularly since its release in 2018 and still have yet to discern what is actually being said across a majority of tracks. Damon's phrasing is unpredictable and he almost stumbles from word to word arriving with perfect delivery almost by accident. I haven't found that to matter much though. The sense of inertia here is immense, songs that start slow will evolve into a breakneck, almost rave like trance state. This album plays like a psychedelic fever dream where you get pushed through vision after vision of disjointed memory spilling out from a private mind into a public forum. It feels like the penultimate scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in a way I can't properly explain. It's like wandering into a Malibu bungalow beach party where you know no one, but somehow you end up having the best night of your life dancing your demons away and sweating yourself clean.
It's a landscape that paints the picture of reckless youth, legendary surfers, vampires, and pretty girls smoking cigarettes. It shines in a gunmetal gray type of way, shimmery but with a hint of sinister, a record made of liquid night. This record was written during the time where Damon McMahon's mother was dying of terminal cancer, you can sense that he found release in treading the memory lanes present in these songs. It's like a reflective trip through time searching memories for the answer to the question "How did it all come to this? How did I get here?". I hope you all enjoy this one as much as I do, it has quickly risen into the upper echelon of definitive albums for my lifetime so far.
👋 Until next time...
I understand how sacred privacy is in our day and I feel tremendously honored when someone trusts me enough to let me into their inbox week after week. Thanks for being here ❤️.
