He says profound things to me. David Strackany, this Paleo, makes a world of milk and honey happen in front of me after just having read about a world of milk and honey (was it California in the 60s?) in a book earlier in the day. It’s a form of omnipotence. And this fashionable – though sincerely out-of-date idea of the milk and honey coming out of all the bushes, from the sky, out of hot, sticky springs in the forest or in fields every time a new fence post is dug is the epitome of the American dream for many – this fictitious fantasyland of openness, this boundless stretching out of immaculate blue and brown paint, and a shimmering, moveable swatch of pink, corduroy and more brown colors providing the entertainment across the middle of the view. It’s the milk and honey – that ideal of it – that becomes the laughing stock of all stories though, simply because of the abusive twist that almost everyone decides to apply to the standard line. ... [Story Continues Below]

First song
January 25th, 2007 (Paleo) [3.35MB] [855 downloads]


– original version appears as part of Paleo’s Song Diary
This song was written and originally recorded in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I call it “X”.
I admire the letter X. It stands for a great many things: for Christ, Saint Andrew, porno, civil rights, straightedge kids, omission, poison, and for old, dead love. It was the last item in that list that captivated this particular song. Ashleigh had just been traveling with me for almost a full week, and she flew out that morning back to New York City, on United flight 5805. We were still just getting to know one another. A few days prior we found ourselves driving through a snowstorm, and we got to talking about our histories, our pasts. With every revelation, I felt like she was sorta dissecting my heart like a hot bowl of ice cream, with a big fat spoon. I didn’t really want to know. I wanted it, us, to be new, to be pristine. I think that’s what all the fuss is with Mother Mary. She’s a fantasy, an allegory for undiscovered love. To find a secret sacred impossible temple buried somewhere deep beneath the Andes of reckless dating. Never, not in a million years. And the funny thing was, she felt liberated by the conversation. She felt closer to me. While all the while all I really wanted was for her to put the veil back on, to turn the mirror around. Because I am a coward.

Second song
May 30th, 2006 (Paleo) [3.73MB] [786 downloads]


— original version appears as part of Paleo’s Song Diary
This song was written and originally recorded in Denver, Colorado. I call it “Saturn Returns”.
This song is special to me because it was the first to be written on a children’s guitar. I was touring with a 27-year-old Johanna Kunin at this point, and her beau Jeremy Hadley had set us up with a house to stay in. The family who lived there was out of town, and the kid had this little children’s guitar sitting around. Discovering that instrument would change the way the diary unraveled. A few weeks later, north of San Francisco, I would track down my own children’s guitar and begin writing more and more of my songs on the tiny instrument while driving down the highway. Using my knee to steer, and resting the guitar in my lap, I would hammer out the basic structures of the day’s song literally on the road. Eventually, I would play the majority of my shows on it. It changed the way I played guitar, and transformed the way I wrote songs. To this day I still write songs with it in the car while traveling from city to city, show to show.

Third song
April 13th, 2007 (Paleo) [4.64MB] [748 downloads]


— original version appears as part of Paleo’s Song Diary
This song was written and originally recorded in Waterbury, Connecticut. I call it “Dead Wings Beat”.
“Dead Wings Beat” is the 363rd song of the Diary. Toward the end there the songs started coming faster, almost effortless. I became a conduit, and I could turn it on like a faucet. I stopped dreaming. If you think of dreams as a kind of a healing process, where the mind strips your day into ribbons and makes a kind of möbius bow out of them, then you can imagine writing a song might serve a similar function. It’s a little bit like what we use God for. All the things that happen to us day to day, the accidents and incidents, the nonsense, the insignificant sound and fury. Dreams inject meaning into that meaningless. And so does art. I started to think that perhaps I stopped dreaming because I didn’t have to anymore. The songs became the process through which all the coincidences were given just cause. Why did those men yell “faggot” at me out of their car? So I could write about it. Why did the bees bloom & the sun shine? So I could write about it. The song became the voice of God in my mouth, the dream, the raison d‘être that stitched it all up.

Fourth song
December 18th, 2006 (Paleo) [3.05MB] [742 downloads]


— original version appears as part of Paleo’s Song Diary
This song was written and originally recorded in Baltimore, Maryland. I call it “Of Athens”.
Loosely based on a kaleidoscopic evening in Athens at Charlotte’s Web the night before, “Of Athens” is about the choices we make late at night when we shouldn’t be making choices. It’s about the shortcuts we take to be a little less alone, and the little deaths we suffer. That night was full of eyes. We drank stars. People got ditched. Feelings got hurt. The song was written mostly on the road while driving from Athens to Baltimore. When Todd and I finally arrived in Baltimore, a guy named John was crashing on Ari’s couch. Ari mentioned that they had just finished recording a record together. The record would be later dubbed War Elephant, and John might soon be better known as Deer Tick. I recorded the song in Ari’s bathroom, so as not to disturb the various bards asleep at their various posts throughout the house.

The monies all get spent, the people and their once precocious and daredevil hearts break into smithereens, their excesses and confidences take the plunge into plunder. So nothing good lasts longer than a couple attention spans, than the contraction of an insect’s heart anymore, maybe it never did. Though, nothing prohibits good things from lasting. Nothing necessarily prohibits people staying strong and lives that don’t involve the milk going sour or spilling and the honey getting into your hair and attracting bears and bees. There used to be a time when a good job was the most sought after thing in the world. He’s got a good job – pays well, etc. – leads to all those other things is what would be thought, nodded to appreciatively and enviously. It used to be enough to bring home bacon and to find a house with a white picket fence, a good-sized yard and all of that. Strackany and his daily dilemma – though its become less of a burden since his 365-day Song Diary, as ambitious of a test of sanity, smarts and brainpower that was an affirming artistic expression, came to an end over one year ago – to figuratively work as a skinner – hanging the world up by a hind leg and taking a knife to the belly and letting all of the guts and entrails flop out onto the floor, before sewing it all back up and then charging the chest to make it all move again following the operation and observation – couldn’t be more fascinating. Say that you’re the people he’s with, that he’s hanging around. He could do this to you without you ever knowing that you’d been put out or put under. You’d have the scar – red and tender – passing like a train between your tits and you’d maybe even feel energized, like something had been fixed when you least expected it. Everything could be just as it was and yet there would have been a removal, something extracted to just study and play around with for a little while. It’s a darkened cobweb, a squirrel’s nest of debatable worth, clutter that wouldn’t be missed, that had been forgotten long before, a haunting that was just a distant memory now. As it’s batted around and looked at, it seems so fragile and harmless and it gives off a powdery dust and a mothball-y smell – like old clothes and swimming pools. He looks them over – these parts of souls – and he treats them respectfully, just borrowing them for the time being. He’ll give them back when asked and does so even when he’s not questioned. While he holds them and talks with them – receiving their whispers – he moves in with them, pulls another chair up to the dinner table, brings flowers for the vases that sit by the sunny window. He romanticizes with the misery and from that gives it a flame, gives that a new meaning. He uses a phrase, in describing his song “Dead Wings Beat” that seems so apt for the gravy that he wrings out of these moments in life that don’t ever seem monumental at the time – until the milk and the honey have expired or dried up, when the lemons are on parade. Strackany thinks about many things as just part of the “insignificant sound and fury” and that’s just a gorgeous way to think about all of the collateral damage that doesn’t register until it adds up, until there’s a trending. Paleo’s music is a way to see ourselves in others – a better way than any other I can think of. You’ll say, “That’s me. That’s me too,” again and again until you stop hearing yourself talk. The listening to yourself is better. It’s hearing it come back to you in a different voice that makes it resounding.

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