On Moon Pix and the Nature of Inspiration
I’m sitting here with a guitar, idly picking away and musing to myself about why I own the instrument to begin with.
I remember back in 2006, just a little while after I had moved to Denver to go to school, I was standing in line in one of the three hundred Starbucks on the 16th Street Mall. It was still a hot Indian Summer at that point and I remember being kind of anxious to get my frappuccino and get on my merry way. Suddenly something registers in my consciousness–”You’re supposed to have the answer, you’re supposed to have living proof.” I know that voice. I even know that song, after a second, but it’s the voice that registers with me first. It’s a smooth, confident Chan Marshall. Cat Power is playing in Starbucks.
I’m not a hater, far be it for me to begrudge someone I admire such success. But it was a surreal moment, like an out of body experience almost.
Flash back a little over seven years to the summer of 1999, when fourteen (almost fifteen) year old me is in the height of my Sonic Youth phase. Pretty much every fourth word that came out of my mouth was either “Thurston,” “Kim,” “Lee,” or “Steve” (with a “Bob” and “Richard” thrown in there now and again). My copies of Washing Machine and Daydream Nation were all but worn out–the center pieces of the CD tray broken, the booklets scuffed up, etc.
This was also back when CDNow still existed and I was quite happy to spend my allowance on it, collecting whatever related merchandise would feed my obsession. The 100% CD-Single? Hell yes. The Touch Me I’m Sick/Halloween split 12″ with Mudhoney? Fuckin’ A.
Then I find that drummer Steve lent his sticks to this odd looking album called What Would the Community Think. So I check up on it. Looks interesting, as does its follow up–Moon Pix. What better do I have to spend my money on at 14? So I order them both. As luck would have it, something happened–I don’t even remember now–they had to backorder WWtCT or something. The point is, a week or so later, Moon Pix shows up in its little mailer all by its lonesome.
I’ve become somewhat jaded now–it’s nothing to download and listen to an album while browsing around messageboards or whatever. This is the cost of the digital age, maybe, or maybe I’m just getting older, but at the time, listening to a new CD was an event, a ritual. There was ceremony to be observed. So I put it off til the wee hours of the morning. Because it was summer, I was allowed to stay up as late as I damn well pleased, so once my mother had retired to her bedroom, I sat myself down in the living room with a bottle of cream soda, a pack of Red Vines and my discman.
I’m not really sure what happened after that. The cliche would be to say I saw God. I’m not sure about that. I like to think of it more as seeing myself. I’m pretty sure by the time “Back of Your Head” came on I was crying. I know I was by “Colors and the Kids.”
There’s a point in that song (2:58, specifically) where it reaches this climactic moment: “I could stay here, become someone different / I could stay here, become someone better…”
I had had revelatory experiences with music before this. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, for example, was a creation just for me, my music, not somebody else’s. Little Earthquakes was the voice of a mentor, both a cautionary tale and adventure story, something I could become. But this… this was something I actually was, something I could embody right then and there with no separation. The simplicity of the music wasn’t lost on me–that the entire 6:38 song is built over two piano chords. I could play it. I could express something that beautiful. It brought this lofty idea of beautiful music to my level, or maybe me up to that level. I felt a kinship with this woman and this music because it made me feel, for the first time, like something I could do and not just observe.
That record stayed on repeat the entire night. Our backyard at the time faced the woods and I remember once the light started to rise in the distance, I went through the kitchen to the door to the porch. A huge doe was practically standing on my back porch. She let me open the door, headphones and all, and come within a few inches of her nose before she ran off. I still feel like that was some kind of sign, of what I’m not sure, but it moved me.
The next Christmas I got my first guitar (a black Epiphone that’s still a sexy machine, although I need to resolder a few things to get her working properly). I spent hours learning “Cross Bones Style” and “You May Know Him.” And more to the point, I started figuring out my own little tunes. Maybe they were a little imitative, but I was inspired.
Flash back to that coffee line in Denver. I went home and put The Greatest on. It’s a wonderful record, full of this lovely sway–look at “The Moon” for example. But it’s also very polished, accomplished… as strong as that makes it and as glad as I am that she’s branching out, those qualities keep it from having the “I am You” impact Moon Pix had on me that night, the qualities that made me pick up a guitar in the first place. But maybe for someone else, it’ll be the right thing–just what they need to hear. Maybe they’ll even hear it in Starbucks, who knows?
They say everyone who’s bought a copy of the first Velvet Underground record has, at some point, started a band. I was never that much of a joiner–for me, songwriting was something that happened in my bedroom with a tiny Peavey amp and a black and white composition notebook. But the method isn’t the point. That any music can have that power–to inspire, to plant the seed of possibility in the mind of some kid in a bedroom or a garage somewhere–it’s magical, mystical, maybe a little bit insane. Art is a self-perpetuating thing, like anything alive, it breathes and eats and procreates.
I get to participate in that, and I owe that participation to 11 songs by a southern belle by way of NYC.
