An introspective musical meditation on death as a form of change

Dear Listener,

This project began over ten years ago without me knowing it. I worked at a nursing home for about ten years and death was an every day occurrence. I remember the first resident who died that I was close to, A little lady named Joanne who rode up and down the hallways in her motorized scooter. When she died I took it hard. I had tears in my eyes for days. Over the nine years I worked there we lost around fifty people that I was close to in one way or another. I learned to cope with it by numbing myself to the process. One day they were there and the next day they were gone and that was just the way it was. No one cried. No one stopped to mourn. We just wrote "expired" on their lunch ticket and moved on.

Then I met Hershel Bloom. Parkinson's disease had taken away his ability to play guitar and draw but I spent a year getting close to him. We talked music on my lunch hours and he told me stories of playing at the Willamette valley folk festival and how he still had Jerry Garcia's glasses. I never knew if that was true but I like to believe that it was. We laughed and cried over things that I am just now beginning to understand. When I finally left the nursing home I visited him once a week and held his hand while his lungs filled up. I sat by his bed side in that cramped, awful smelling room while he looked me in the eyes and told me he didn't want to die. He was one of the most brilliant artists I had ever met and he died penniless and alone in a nursing home. There was no funeral and I don't know what ever happened to his body. One day I went to visit and he was just...gone. He was my friend and I cried because I loved him. I still miss him and hear him singing in my dreams: "Bye bye love, Bye bye happiness, Hello loneliness I think I'm gonna die." He changed the last word for obvious reasons.

The year before I lost Hershel, my wife lost her father. He was fifty-three years old. This was the first time I had ever experienced loss on that level. She has always been the rock in our relationship and she spent an entire week in bed. All I could think of to do was to cook and keep busy. Everything that I made we threw away because neither one of us could eat. That experience changed us. His pictures are all over our house and I have yet to delete his cell number out of my phone. Death once again shook us to the core and left me anguished and desolate.

One day on a trip to West Virginia I stumbled across an old 78 record in an antique store. The name of the original song was scratched out and in its place the words "Graveyard Gertie" were carved into the red Columbia label. After paying the dollar for it and making the voyage home, I listened to it and was transported back to my childhood when my friends and I used to visit the graveyard by my parents house. I had this bizarre vision of the ghosts in that cemetery tucked behind the maples, dancing in unison. After a seven year dry spell of feeling uninspired and broken as an artist...these songs were born.

All of these things forced me to reexamine death and how it affected my life. I began to realize that death was something that consumed me. It was all I thought about but upon further reflection I began to realize that death was not an end. It was the thing that connected us to the universe in the most profound and simplistic way. In life everything changes and even though it is painful to lose friends, a band, dreams, my wife's father...all of these things were inevitable, uncontrollable and unpredictable. People die, things change and we are left here to cope, picking up the beautiful fragments of life and carrying those small torches with us until our own candles inevitably go out.

This record is about death as a form of change and coping with the way it ebbs and flows through every aspect of our being. Writing these songs has given me peace and understanding in a day and age where those things don't come often. I hope you find that peace as well dear listener.

This record is for everyone rotting away in a nursing home, for my wife and her grief I still see daily, for my friend John and his wife who recently lost their infant daughter, for my friend Kyle who lost his grandfather this week, for my friend Teresa who lost the love of her life Cindy (together 20 years but never able to marry due to the world's intolerance) and probably most of all for my best friend Hershel who I barely got to know. I hope somehow he knew how much our time together inspired me and changed me. This wouldn't exist without him.

And for all of you who have experienced loss. Death is the constant that binds us...Be good to each other.

Till next time,

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