our mama taught us everything. to get downs, to be up, to get through it because you dig it while you live it. be loud, be still, be stubborn, be soft. give, take, determine to listen closely. be heard. feel it, feel it, feel it. sing it, sing it, sing it louder. real wonderful things happen all the time, all the fucking time, and all the time is only right now.
here we are. we live for a second, in the whole of it all, in a hole, with it all, then we pass. we missed a lot already. we leave early. we never find out what happens after we find out what happens next. don't sweat it, babe. we can hear the songs echo in the streets. and we cross bridges, barefoot, on bicycles, built by gone strangers. we sit stilll see the words, scrawled on the walls, built without meaning, made to mean something, a long time ago, now faint with wonder, re-lit by broken bics and pieces of some kind of understanding, and we'll plant edens of weeds and disorderly pines. leave muddy footprints on white-out carpets. broken noses bleed rorschachs in invisible ink over million dollar portraits you cannot bring yourself to sell before they cart you off to debtors prison. mama's seen beyond the real, the objection, the subject, the imagination, and so have i and so have you. who is mama? she is wise and beautiful, and so are you and so am i. who are you? you are the president. who am i? the slave. the lonely chipmunk. the immigrant. i am you and i together. she says "boys, i am quite sure you'll never lose a dime on this racket, but this is not the game you need to keep your head in. for people come and people go and people come and people really go and one day you find you miss just one of them, and it hurts worse than a thousand 1110-yard field goal kicks to the balls. your chest feels like a fleet of big janitor's vacuums, or a black hole, and you'll cry and cry and cry... but remember the things, those little things, that tiny thing, and turn all inside-out and upside down and you surprisingly always have been staring at a rainbow in the night and all you can really do is laugh. about it, before it, beside it, below it. laugh. side one again. greatest hits volume infinity. laugh. the world is full of those people and places who make funny faces in funny spaces when they are alone with you, and of course the world is too a sad, sad thing. that's the sorry punchline.
so if you start to feel sick: the news aint new, its stupid. the silliest colors poke out the mildew, symptoms are bored and the cause aint the issue. even the biggest dollar cannot find the friend you lost somewhere out there. be as loud as you can, paint the billboards, carve on the shoreline, fly the flags, dig up the graves, turn the city to a smoke signal. anything you want. no matter whatever, you can't turn bread back to dough, you shouldn't love your frankenstein, sometimes you just can't fix a broken heart like that and its time to start over. side one again."
and we listen to the crickets and the cicadas and the ferris wheel and the roller coaster and the woods in the summer and the dead air of the winter and the sound of ice breaking and cars passing and kids laughing on the street and it sounds the same anywhere and a wave breaking in the night sounds the same everywhere and we listened to the birds and the byrds and the beatles in the porches and backseats of new jersey. we listen to our mistakes. we listen to our warmest feelings. we listen to anything, everything. we can dig it. we can all dig it.
she taught us how to sing and how to play and how to love and to be loved and to try and remember never to hate, try and remember every single person on this planet's got something, and oh! if the flowers and the trees and the sand and the mud and the animals and the trash and the asphault and the moon and the sun and all the tiny particles could talk, hell, what a story they could tell. they would tell you, "baby, its no ones' fault, you poor thing. we all hurt bad sometimes. the thing to do, dear child: be real fucking sure, when you know its over, when you can't add nothing more, you got no voice left, leave the song be just a little sweeter, just a little more color, just a little more light. say you're sorry, do what you will; but leave knowing you've done some good, just because you could. everything is fine." and mama taught us how to write when we read her letters, her stories, heard her poems and when we watched her smile. mama said sometimes you just want to dance and nobody can tell you why. sometimes you should pet your dog. sometimes you just have to take a walk. and when the smoke cleared, as it often turns out, all the fortunes: just lies.
you need a jingle or maybe some jangle: whatever it is the hole you dig. there, you got something; art, science, the party, whatever you want to call it, be appreciated, because someone somewhere is ready to love something, small or large; because there are always people like you, and they and you, when you stick together, will be lifted up, up, up, up, up, forever as long as you keep in mind that the best feeling in the world is doing something nice for somebody else. there are people that are not like you. be proud, the world is full of beautiful bullshit. be proud, the world is full of laughing children. be proud, the world is full of strange life and the strange lives of the living. be proud, the world is full of more love than this. be proud of the things you make and make happen. always be humble. be proud of the things you see. always be humble. be proud, time doesnt stand still for long. always be humble. be proud of wherever you are. always be humble. be proud of who you are, not what you are. be proud of mama and a lifetime learning. everything i hope to know, she knows, and she told me one morning, "one thing you will never know is what we all want to know. what am i?" that's for someone else to decide, or left up to nothing at all.
we want to rock like we wanted to rock before when she said, "your thing is your thing. its real special and it comes natural and its trapped inside so let it out, you little fuckers." she was very much of everything.
so we decided to put our the love-lines right up front, made them real easy so you wont know its spiked with sugar or spice or whatever sounds nice, and then there's the hugs and kisses in the backdrop, subtle sequences speaking mystified wonder, pleasure, pain, or the accident, or the fist fight or the accidental fistfight, though we have decided it better to be a lover than the other. i hope you agree. i think you do. sometimes we like to have something come from somewhere sounding like a factory building building or a soldier marching marching or an old man snoring snoring or a basketball dribble dribbling into a run and a jump and a throw and then hang time and then.................... swish, something that sometimes sounds a little like a big waterfall or a little big waterfall (because it aint really yours or mine or even mama's place to say what's what, what isn't, what should be, only what you wish). maybe (from the cave behind the water) you hear the rocks get wet and never in a lifetime get dry again, or the water freeze for the winter. imagine a tropical rainforest or all your friends feeling alive in the summer time, jumping on a trampoline for a bit that felt short and reverbs forever and forever and ever ago in your head even if you dont remember all the notes, just the jist of it... everything comes back to you when you talk about remembering. then you hope it sounds like a car full of friends singing along to some some song on some tape on a broken boom box or a staticy ipod radio converter or something on WOGL or some old song on a really sweet system with subwoofers and lights, or maybe you could do something else. write a song that feels like the time you've spent in comfortable silence, or a pretty girl, or some trouble you got into, or an imaginary girl, or some imaginary trouble, or the time you found a dollar on the ground. or anything.
we are trying to make momma proud.
pocket patrol is very reasonable and knows that magic is real.
our first ep (this thing we made in the summer) is 5 songs long and its called make it plain. you can ask us for one or you can download it in mp3 format right here. we also have an older one that is somewhat out of print but we could make you a copy that is a full-legnth b-sides type thing for an album we've been working on for many years that might get finished at any time.
