There are a few things in my fridge. Lemon wedges have begun to turn into thick hides and a Chinese food container keeps its place, despite its uselessness. Sometimes I feel akin to it. I pace my apartment. I look at cat hair statically forming along the edges of rooms. I note that it is time to do laundry. I can do none of these things. I walk around some more. Should I turn on music? Maybe I should turn on music. I walk back into the other room again. I don’t turn on music.
This is what I’ve been doing lately. Well, lately meaning post-TUSK. I will write TUSK in all capitals because that’s how it rests in my head, with the left side of the “T” pressing against the one side of my head and the right side of the “K” on the other like a support beam.
I realize the phrase post-TUSK will come as very foreign to some and perhaps that’s why I write, to familiarize you with this thing. TUSK is a Fleetwood Mac record that was put out in 1979. It’s a double record. It’s very pastel and earthy on the cover in a very late 70’s early 80’s way and sometimes I imagine myself sitting on a precipice in the desert having a heart to heart with a lip-glossed lady whispering really close as her long gauzy colored skirt falls over the skin on my leg. In the imagined situation I am completely scared and completely excited and completely at peace and totally feeling like a pawn in the weird experiment that living can be, which I guess is what TUSK is all about.
A group of us got together to perform this record from start to finish in May in three different cities...Boston, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia. I should mention though that we’d been getting together to rehearse it for months, in a way that I was needing to rehearse for a long time, whatever the project. We made pacts and got up early and encouraged each other and went for it. We drove in cars with new friends and told jokes and stories. We shared music like we were revealing treasures from vaults and listened like seashells held up to ears.
I find such beauty in people who stick with this love. They follow it like a shepherd sometimes and then other times like a wolf and then sometimes they lay gently with it, patiently why it sleeps, totally confused as to why they follow it at all. I’ve played shows and made recordings where it seems like I’d been as Cinderella, up in some tucked away place meticulously weaving and placing and loving only to walk down to meet others and feel as though it gets overlooked, torn to shreds. When you find these kindreds its a wonder we don't burst into phoenix flames. Let this piece be a thank you to these star-crossed companions who I miss terribly already and to all of you who came to partake not only in the celebration of a great record, but in the celebration of everything.
Hopefully you go out and get TUSK. Hopefully we will do this again.
Blame it on my wild heart, don’t blame it on me,
Birdie Busch
A few photos from the three day odyssey...and to find out more about this project you can visit us, The Lindsey buckingham Appreciation Society, at http://tlbas.tumblr.com/
You're such an awesome writer. Love this:
ReplyDelete"They follow it like a shepherd sometimes and then other times like a wolf and then sometimes they lay gently with it, patiently why it sleeps, totally confused as to why they follow it at all."
Yeah.