October 2011.
I have released eight albums in eight years. Six hours and twenty-four minutes of music. I feel squeezed dry. The last trickles of music seeping from my pores like blood. I’ve sat in my bedroom with a guitar between my heart and my hands and found melodies and textures that never seemed to be my possession. I simply felt them floating in the air and then funneled them onto my fingerboard.
And eight years of ceaseless inner pressure to create an album better than the last one. To discover ideas more stimulating than the previous. To find a better path to my true self.
I am exhausted. And it’s time to rest my bones. Flip the amp to standby. No. Switch it off. Let the tubes cool down like the October air outside. Place my weathered guitar snugly in its case and close the lid to its coffin. Lock the door to the room in which these tools of my ears rest.
Go home. To be alone. Away from the static and racket of creative struggle. The struggle to find something meaningful to say. The struggle to find a better way of listening; a better way of communicating. I am so tired of this process.
The weight of these albums is unbearable. Let them die. They have served their purpose. I am unable and unwilling to learn from them. Read them their last rites. Bury them. Deep. Mark their graves with wooden signs. Visit the gravesites on occasion. Wear my dark glasses and toss flowers to the ground while the rain falls from my cheeks.
When each of these albums was finished, my soul went quiet. I knew nothing of what was next. But each time I had something more to say. Now I do not. I feel no music surrounding my soul. No melodies waiting to be plucked from the air and transformed into emotional conjuring.
I will not mourn forever though. I will celebrate the creative ingenuity and the blessing of my soul’s ear. Eight years of channeling creation. Eight years of challenging myself to find my proper tuning.
But I know these albums will rise again. I will learn the spell to raise them from the dead. To bring their ashes back to form. I will send them into the night. I will call them out by name. One by one. And after they dig through the earth under which they have remained silent for so long, they will slide across telephone poles, creep through the walls of houses, and bury themselves in the ear canals of humans where they will find the fresh wrinkles of brain that they seek.
They will rise again.
But not this October.