By February 2017, I’d completed work on a collection of songs that I was calling “Radical Songs for Rough Times.” We are living in the Anthropocene, where climate instability, fascism, police killings, abuse of immigrants and refugees, and other grave crises are our daily reality. As an artist living in such times, one feels compelled to respond: with rage, with poetry, with humor, with anything that might penetrate the lies and assert sanity and spirit.
When I decided that I wanted to write a series of songs on such dire themes, I began to research the ballad form. It seemed like a way to approach writing about tragedy in song without having to resort to vague theoretical language like “society” or journalistic language like, “abuse.” Songs from the Scottish oral tradition collected in the famous Childe Ballads book were a great teacher. From pop music, I learned a lot about how to convey resistance lyrically from the Brazilian Tropicalia and MPB songwriters, as well as from the Nueva Trova songwriters from Cuba. (I speak Portuguese and Spanish).
My compositional method in those days often resembled the following routine: I would listen to the daily episode of Democracy Now as I drank my morning coffee and then I’d walk through the winding back streets of Charles Village in Baltimore, taking in centuries-old churchyards, the stone monolith that is the Masonic Grand Temple (1866) on Charles St., and the little parks and backyards where I sometimes happened upon a hawk perched on low branches searching for prey. While out and about and perambulating, I would start to sing some lyrics and proceed to build the song from there – the rhythm of the step with the breathing and the flowing air being conducive to singing and to writing words.
The songs began to come together, grouped around themes of ecological decline, Donald Trump, fascism, capitalism, war and police killings. Grim topics, to be sure. But when they are approached in the realm of song, hope or at least energy can arise and certainly meaning can appear. I contacted Baltimore musicians who I knew would connect to the songs and help them to coalesce and ascend into compelling pieces of music. We recorded in the front living room of the house Christine and I shared on Calvin Avenue in the eclectic Waverley neighborhood. We counted on the mobile recording prowess of Anthony Staiti, while Alan Weatherhead (Sparklehorse, Daniel Johnston, Camper Van Beethoven), in Richmond, Virginia mixed the album and added some nice arrangement touches. I thought the album sounded terrific.
And then something dreadful occurred.
I was dealing with chronic pain in the form of sciatica, while on the emotional/interpersonal front, Christine (my partner) and I were confronting the presence of a serial abuser of women being present and in a position of power in the Baltimore theater community. This ordeal ended up shattering much of the DIY arts scene in the city and we lost our closest friend and closest collaborator as a result of it. I was having trouble sleeping and an acquaintance of Christine’s had prepared some tinctures to aid in our relaxation. Not being able to sleep one evening, I had a portion of the tincture and went to bed. Upon awaking, I found myself in a state of near psychosis. I was feeling paranoid; I was having intense stomach issues; I was shaking and my heart was galloping at a very high rate. I called my psychiatrist and he explained that I was likely experiencing serotonin syndrome – a state that occurs when there is an excess of the neurochemical serotonin in the system. The tincture I took contained St. John’s Wort, which apparently works as a serotonin enhancer, and it combined with Lexapro (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI that I was taking for OCD) to create the serotonin syndrome. I could not sleep nor relax nor focus and I was experiencing thoughts that I could only describe as galloping horrors. After three days, the symptoms subsided and I resumed taking my Lexapro. However, one night a week later, I couldn’t sleep again and I took an antihistamine to relax and I experienced, once again, all the same punishing symptoms as in the first serotonin syndrome. Antihistamines do not normally counter-indicate with SSRIs; however, there were evidently some residual issues from the first serotonin syndrome still present that made this second incident possible.
It was terrifying and I became dreadfully afraid of ever having serotonin syndrome again. I tried to resume the Lexapro, the medication I’ve been taking at a relatively high dose for 12 years, and I experienced heart palpitations. I was unable to contact my psychiatrist and decided to take myself off of the Lexapro in attempt to avoid any possible future serotonin syndromes. This turned out to be a near fatal decision. I saw a doctor who sent me to a psychiatric day hospital, but a depression wherein the world was emptied of all meaning and all pleasure, was taking hold of me. I had to quit work. And ultimately, after eight months of flailing around in an abject suicidal state between Baltimoe and my parents' house in Milwaukee, the fourth doctor I had consulted mandated that I check into the Mood Disorders wing at Johns Hopkins Hospital on the East Side of Baltimore. After five weeks of treatment there, I was deemed well enough to leave in early May 2018 and by December, 2018, I was feeling like my old self. I felt good, optimistic, social and creative.
It is probably not surprising that I was unable to do any shows to support the "Radical Songs for Rough Times" (currently up on Bandcamp) album in 2017. But now, two years and some change later, I feel well. I have moved to Chicago and I feel it is never too late to send out into the world the music that one creates. I will be performing in support of the album and sending it out to all manner of music websites and journals. I will also be writing a reflection about each of the songs on the album and sharing that on Facebook and on my blog, which brings us to…"Oh, Civilazation," the song which opens the album. After reading Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth [sic], which lays out the climate-fueled ecological collapse problem pretty clearly, I found myself getting acquainted with the work of an anarcho-primitivist/anti-civilization authors Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan. In their work, they describe how agricultural and industrial civilizations remove themselves from the larger web of life on the planet, degrading both the health of the earth and the human condition in the process. Those are some of the ideas that I was thinking about as I composed this song walking through the alleys of Charles Village in Baltimore in 2016.
