yearlongday

now that the guitars are silent, and the percussion has ceased, i’ve had the peace of mind to focus on what we’ll do next. i’ve already announced that there is a new, yet-untitled, album coming, and even played some songs from it.

however, looking over our set lists from the past 3 years, i’ve also noticed that yearlongday has performed many songs that are not yet recorded. by ‘many’, i mean fifteen… enough for another new album, likely to preceed that which i’ve already announced.

why should this second new album preceed the new album previously announced? one very sensible reason is that all of the songs are complete; we’ve played them countless times over the years, and have mostly, if not entirely, ironed-out the wrinkles. the songs, including some which have merited rough, once-over demos, are just waiting for the studio sessions that will make them part of the ever-expanding catalogue of yearlongday recordings.

so, the bad news is that the forthcoming album we previously announced is pushed back into 2012. the good news is that another new album of familiar, polished songs will preceed it.

love on ya!

… jonathan t marlowe

a knock upon the door,

that’s all i’m asking for.

nothing less, nothing more.

i know you’re still awake,

and i could use a break

from the books, and the ache.

and maybe i was wrong,

ignoring you so long.

i was weak, acting strong.

there’s no one else around.

i’m listening to the sound

of my heart as it pounds

hearing you let me down.

let me down.

let me down.

let me down.

words and music © 2009, jonathan t marlowe

one in a million, a million to one;

when it comes down to numbers, it isn’t much fun.

i’ve kept the statistics, and followed the trends;

as soon as it happens to me, my strategy ends,

i know mathematics, but it’s not math i need.

forget the statistics, ignore probability.

the odds are against me, but odds don’t make destiny.

there isn’t a system. it doesn’t make sense.

i can’t explain it to you without evidence.

it’s not in the numbers. it shouldn’t occur,

but there is no logic to love… haven’t you heard?

i am unlucky, but it’s not luck i need.

dismiss the predictions, and skip the astrology.

the odds are against me, but odds don’t make destiny…

… destiny, destiny, destiny.

i can’t hide forever. why should i try?

the minute i let my guard down, we meet eye to eye.

some say it’s better to love and have lost.

i’ve got my own hypothesis: love is chaos.

dismiss the predictions, and skip the astrology.

forget the statistics, ignore probability.

the odds are against me, but odds don’t make destiny…

… destiny, destiny, destiny.

words and music © 2009, jonathan t marlowe

side A- 2009, mixed media collage

side B- 2009, mixed media collage

open mic- 2009, mixed media collage

restroom happy hour- 2009, mixed media collage

Now that grunge has hit the east coast, we call it “alternative“, as in an option to mainstream lifestyle; which means differences, which, in turn, means preferences. Everyone has their own set of preferences, and I guess that what it comes down to; individuality is what it’s all about. Some people think that doing your own thing is inherently good, but I think that doing your own thing isn’t much good at all. In fact, things seem confusing now more than ever. Political correctness, multiculturalism, gender roles… identity is everything in my generation, but I don’t know if I can identify with it. I can’t separate the superficial from the profound, find out who my friends are on the inside. I sometimes wonder if stereotyping isn’t underrated. It helps me distinguish myself from others, identify the differences and similarities, even discern the boys from the girls in a crowd; in a crowd, they look the same, act the same, dress the same. With so much alternative around, the similarities are ironic.

My friends call themselves punks, but they categorize themselves into sects, like religious denominations. I thought punk culture was all about being anti-establishment, but I guess you and pick and choose which aspects of establishment you want to oppose. Some are against using drugs, some against sex; some are against swearing, and some are against the music industry. All they ever talk about is which bands are on which record labels, and who’s the latest sell-out. Sometimes they tease me because I listen the Beatles, which is “a hippie band” with as much popularity and influence now as in 1963, if not more. Maybe that’s why they like Nirvana; the success of an alternative-label band is the symbolic success for their values and those of the fans who buy their records.

Even though I hang out with punks, I’m not a punk myself. And while I don’t use drugs, or have sex, or swear, I don’t consider myself “straight-edge“. To me, adopting a label that stands against labeling is a contradiction of values. I’m not claiming to have a superior value system or to be “holier-than-thou”. I’m just indifferent towards the issues that concern most of my peers. It must be indifference that makes me…different. Indifference might be what attracts me to Michelle, a girl at school in the crowd everyone calls “freaks”. I admit she and her friends can act quirky, but everyone has quirks, none better or worse than the next. Anyway, the thing about indifference is that Michelle is beautiful, but she doesn’t care. I mean, she knows it, I think, but doesn’t try to exploit it, not in the way most popular girls do. For example, she hides her meek, ragdoll body in baggy grunge jeans, thrift-store accessories, and out-of-vogue cosmetics. It’s as if Michelle and her friends, go out of their way to be unattractive, forfeiting high school popularity for genuine friendship on a deeper, personal level; an internal, emotional level almost impossible to reach unless you can becomes indifferent towards their superficial attributes. It’s a very clever system, but I’m not fooled. I may be enchanted, but not fooled. I can tell she’s beautiful, even if my closest friends laugh at my attraction to her. I think they’re just jealous… not of me, but of Michelle. The whole school is jealous of how expertly she’s turned their standards and ideals upside down. They can’t resolve the conflict of despising and, at the same time, desiring a “freak”. It goes against the majority, the crowd mentality. School is a great arena for politics.

Chad, my closest friend, said he was going to arrange a date for me with Mandy. Mandy is definitely a girl; there’s no mistaking her attributes! She’s in my history class, but I don’t know her that well or speak to her very often. I’m not really in Mandy’s crowd, and I probably should have known better than to believe she would go out with me. When the night came that Mandy and I were going to double-date with Chad and his girlfriend Jenna, she stood me up. I didn’t feel so bad about being stood up as I did about being a third wheel for the rest of the evening. My opinions about Chad have reversed since we first met, but this night is why I still think of him and his crowd of friends as rather exclusive, like I’m an observer, not a member. It’s as though I’m on the outside looking in. Chad’s social stage takes place behind a pane of glass, and through it, I see the act— the pantomime gestures and superficial bonding rituals that mirror genuine friendship— but I’m never really part of it. I’m his audience, his crowd, his observer.

Being an observer isn’t enough. I want to be an insider, to know what it’s like having an outsider look in. Or, maybe, I can be on the inside with other outsiders… I don’t know. I don’t know much about friendship, but I have learned one thing: “Friends” are just people who enter and exit your life at their own will and convenience. This leaves me with a problem. On one hand, fitting in with any social group is rather easy because there is no anxiety about emotional entanglement. It’s just a matter of imitating their behavior, the words and actions that manifest the ideal image of their group. Take the ravers, for example… I can wear outlandish club fashion, pierce my body, dye my hair with Manic Panic, listen to Chemical Brothers, or act like I’m half-there/half-not in a hazy ecstasy come-down; I can mirror all of it, and still not buy into their politics, because when their political agenda changes, who they are on the inside doesn’t change. If there is one thing I have found, it’s that fitting into a trend is a materialistic adjustment, not an emotional one. The music changes, the fashion changes, the ideal image of their group changes, but the means to fit-in never changes. If I’m willing to trade in one type of music or fashion for another, to betray one ideal image for another, then politics has become a commodity, and fitting-in is, then, easy.

On the other hand, fitting-in is hard, and the very thing that makes it easy is also what makes it hard. It’s the lack of emotion. Sure, Chad and I have a bond, but it’s superficial. Fitting-in with Chad has been the outcome of my own personal decisions, but I don’t know if my decisions are the same as his. I don’t know who he is on the inside, or what friendship means to him.  There’s no emotional entanglement between us; there’s no true intimacy in a crowd, especially the crowd I mingle with. That’s what a crowd is, a group of people who blend in with one another, become indistinguishable from its other members; the opposite of individuality. I’m supposed to look like Chad, and he’s supposed to look like Ronen, and so on until we’re one big hard-core punk-rock family. What seems to be happening to me is that my friends, my so-called family, no longer recognizes my face. They even question my sexual preference. I’m getting lost in a crowd, maybe gone too far inside. Perhaps, I’ve tried too much, or I’ve just done it well.

The survey took place at the Echelon Mall, with a help from my friends Chris and, of course, Chad. The mall has been the hot-spot this season for a broad sample of the whole alternative spectrum. There are punks, ravers, treehuggers, even Rocky Horror role-playing freaks. I wore Aneurysm Fanzine ID and brought a camera for snapshots. The fanzine ID wasn’t entirely genuine because Aneurysm wasn’t my ‘zine; I didn’t even write for it, although I once helped Ronen print and bind an edition at Kinko’s. My goal was to gather as much information as possible about the members of these groups, partly for fun, but partly to get an eyewitness perspective on a single moment in the life and times of my generation, to find out who we were on the inside. Through a crowd of nameless faces, I caught the blue-eyed gaze of girl I knew from school…It was an obscured gaze, but I found it, and gazed in return. It was Michelle, as flamboyant as ever in jeans held to her waist by a car seatbelt! Some shoppers smirked, some “mall rats” jeered, but I was…indifferent, not towards Michelle, by no means. I was indifferent towards her superficial attributes like fashion and image. These things can change; they will change, as the crowds change, and as their preferences change. Even Michelle’s quirks will change, but who she is on the inside will last. That’s what I want: to know her on a deep, personal level. It doesn’t matter to me which crowd she fits into, or which label she falls under. I’m concerned with what distinguishes her from a crowd, her individuality. Is Michelle an observer like me? Is she an outsider looking in… at me?

I gazed, for the first time, as an insider. The crowd around us seemed to become obscured in contrast to the clarity of our gaze. It was so intense that sound became silence, like at night, when the noise of a wakeful day sinks into the quiet stillness of sleep. The gaze was like a pane of glass, and through it, we saw each other, but in it, we saw a soundless, placid image of each other. In a single moment, in 1/60th of a second to be exact, the shutter of my camera opened, breaking the moment of silence Michelle and I had shared. The survey was over, and I left with more than superficial details about my generation…I had become emotionally entangled with someone inside it. General feelings of harmony and euphoria replaced my confusion.

Less than a week remained until Christmas.

916 whp, oaklyn, nj.
8pm.
modest admission.

sometimes i want to let people know who or what influences my music. other times, i hesitate because naming those influences might narrow the perception readers and listeners have of me. if i were to list all of the experiences that have influenced my songwriting, woud that give you a better understanding and appreciation of my music, or would it just make me appear more artistically informed?

i’ve also kept my list of influences short because the music i have made over the past four years relates most to those names. but what if yearlongday was around, say, eight years ago? who was inspiring me then, and what would my list have looked like?

[dream sequence...]

in 1999, i was finishing my painting thesis in art school; writing music, yes, but more as a recreational pastime then as a serious pursuit. the walls of my studio were white; the odors were linseed oil and turpentine; and the sounds included a borrowed copy of black sabbath’s paranoid filling the commercial gaps between country music on the radio. while the paintings i made then were very successful, the songs i wrote don’t have much in common with “electric funeral” or “friends in low places“. do they? [try comparing either of these songs to "nobody hurt" or "my formula"]

after graduation, i took summer courses in pedagogy, exploring the possibility of a teaching career. commuting to the university might have been a lot less interesting without mix tapes [old-school to the bitter end, i guess] that included: adrian belew, belle and sebastian, the flaming lips, pizzicato five, the innocence mission, jeremy enigk, cornelius, utah phillips & ani difranco, bjork, smashing pumpkins, april march, the cure, and the list goes on, and on, and on. this presents further confusion about influences… who wasn’t an influence in some way?

returning to the present, there are artists and experiences that continue to inspire me, but i find no urgency or need to name all of them. besides, i’d rather be enlightened by who or what you hear in the music, and that’s an invitation for your comments.

… jonathan t marlowe