Category: Music

Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health · Music · Reviews & Reflections

Light

Beth DeFries2 Comments

This one might stay just for me. I don’t know yet. If you are reading now, then that’s obviously not the case.

Yesterday was an anxious, distracted day, for no reason in particular. Bombarded with cravings to snack, drink coffee, and to shop for a new winter coat (despite not knowing what my current size is, let alone what it will be- come the actual colder months) while I was meant to be editing an unfinished piece introduced weighty doubt into the morning that carried on until I drifted off to sleep last night. I acknowledge that I am not even in the same time zone as the realm of perfection and some days are just bound to be spent lost in struggle city without a map. Maybe I should have given in to one of those cravings and the day wouldn’t have been such a write-off, but I resisted whether that was the right call or not. Take that as you will.

Yesterday evening I was on my own while Mike was out and I decided to revisit Beyonce’s “II Most Wanted” having enjoyed it while listening to her full album “Cowboy Carter” a week ago. The song features Miley Cyrus. The sound of Miley’s soothing, silky rasp reminded me of lyrics for one of her own songs so I queued up the “Used to Be Young” video next. 

I watched a bleary eyed Miley play her vulnerability to the camera and I got chills from the top of my head down to my elbows. The video reminded me of those times when you catch yourself in the mirror when you are feeling low and suddenly see your struggle magnified. It felt like Miley was singing to herself in a mirror, guiding herself back up from the bottom of the spiral. It was inspirational and today I’m going to guide myself back up from my own depths.

My lack of productivity yesterday feels like a setback going into today and I’m just as stuck as I was when I sat down with my lap desk and laptop yesterday morning. Today, I chose a different spot. Sometimes you have to follow the inspiration to find motivation and my tiny desk looked inspiring in the filtered morning light beneath the windows in the living room. So, I am writing this sitting on the floor with my keyboard on my tiny desk and my laptop propped up on a stand atop one of our living room end tables. When my hips start to scream and my feet go numb, I’ll move. After that, there’s no telling if the magic of the location will wear off or if I simply need to wait for the pins and needles to subside to resume my work for the day in the correct place. It’s always a mystery. Setting goals is cute when it comes to making art, but art isn’t always cooperative when it comes to following the rules. 

Remember to be kind to yourself. Your flaws are part of you. Your flaws give you dimension. Balance. They make the sparkly moments more dazzling by comparison. 

Maybe this won’t be just for me, after all. I can’t be the only one who feels like this some days. I mean, Miley feels like this some days. If you needed this today, we’re in this together, my friend. If you didn’t and you’re thinking man, what a wackadoodle, don’t worry; I’m alright. Where there are shadows, there’s always light.

Health & Lifestyle · Music · Reviews & Reflections

Standing on [the] Bleachers

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

Good Morning. I’ve been hooked on an album for the past few days, filling the quiet with constant sound because it makes my brain feel good. It’s distracting in the best way and has had me dance writing in giant headphones for a few days now. If you’re feeling like you could use a little more head bobbing, leg bouncing, and shoulder dancing or just a healthy distraction in your week, join me in a listen.

I know it’s been a lot of posts lately. The reason for this is procrastination and overwhelm on my longer writing project. It’s getting there, but it can get there later for right now. I write here because if I don’t, I won’t write there. My type-A personality would have me organize my creative distractions in a spreadsheet and address them in a reasonable order, but that’s not how reality works and recently, I feel a little like a lamb searching for grass on a construction site. Huh– where did I get turned around? How long have I been gone from the pasture? This music is leading me back though. Isn’t “Dream of Mickey Mantle” great?

I went for a run along the beach trail the other day, going a little too fast because adrenaline allowed and it felt good to focus on the pleasant pain of blood pumping in my legs and behind my ears instead of other things. The wind was loud and sharp and the air was salty and fresh. I was exhausted after two miles, but the stretch after was soothing and necessary. Stairs will be tough for a day or so, but that’s part of the fun, no?

I watched Mike run his first half marathon in October my senior year of college. I was amazed that people run that much for fun and actually look happy doing it. After the race, he jokingly asked me if I wanted to do one sometime. I was like, “You’re joking, right?”

He was joking, and yet, the itch to do something BIG crawled onto my skin, seeped into my pores, and sank into my veins. Could I run 13.1 miles? Yeah; I could.

My times weren’t amazing, but I ran the North Jersey Half Marathon twice and felt good for ten miles both times and then felt like my legs would fall off for the last three, which is weird because you need legs to finish the race, and I was determined to finish. I remember a sign that one of the spectators held. She sat in a wheelchair and held up a poster board that said, “Pain is temporary. Pride is forever.” It is what got me through my first race. It is the mantra I used for my second. I think about that sign all of the time because to this day, it urges me to accomplish things that are tough.

A friend of mine recommended an incredible book by Glennon Doyle called Untamed. It is a memoir by a woman who did hard things because she realized she could do hard things and that she needed to. I know I can do hard things too. I need to do them. I know because I’ve done them before. No obstacle is too big, no distraction too consuming. If life were easy all the time, the good parts wouldn’t be so good.

What song are you on now?

To reduce less healthy distractions this week, I started listening to music while I write. Normally, I’m horrible at this type of multitasking, but for some reason, this album is fueling me and my fingers are flying. I did make the mistake of watching the music video for one of Bleachers’ newer songs, Tiny Moves, and it is incredible. Don’t watch it unless you have a nice chunk of time, because it is beautiful and you will want to watch it more than once. The video features Margaret Qualley who choreographed, starred, and co-directed the video and Bleachers front man, Jack Antonoff, her husband. I feel a weird connection to Qualley since usually, when people ask me, “You know who you remind me of?”, I could now just answer yes, since the answer is more often than not Andie MacDowell, Qualley’s mother. I shared the link for the video with my friends to whom dance was a huge part of life at some point – it never was for me; I haven’t the talent, but I always wished I could. I’ll happily settle for the talents that I can call mine though.

I got my first “real” haircut since December 2018 yesterday and honestly, it’s just fine. I never was one for salon small talk, so when the pandemic was like, try cutting your own hair, I was all for it. My self-hair cuts were fine too, not to mention free, so maybe the salon and I will do battle in another six months to see who gets to hold the scissors.

The independence of certain skills can be very freeing. Cutting my own hair and doing my own sewing alterations were difficult skills to learn, but they allow me to minimize interactions that I find tedious and that makes the pin pricks and temporarily looking like Samara from The Ring a little more worth it. Making a story outline was similarly difficult to figure out, but I know I picked up the other skills well enough so I have high hopes for what I’ve put together.

I just realized that my head has been bopping the entire time writing this. The music’s getting in my blood, the words are singing in my head. I’ll go for a run in a little bit and the wind in my ears will join the symphony and it will be a brain pounding and body pumping with healthy distraction. I will write words. I will read words. I will stretch mentally and physically, escaping into Gone Now, because it just feels good.

Have a weird day; have a fun day; have the best day you can. Get up, get dressed, brush your teeth. Do something little, because lots of little somethings lead to something big.

Love,

Beth

Health & Lifestyle · Music · Nostalgic Posts · Reviews & Reflections

Vampire Word Salad

Beth DeFriesLeave a comment

I’m a nervous highway driver, on occasion. Weirdly, singing seems to help with that. So, sometimes, I sing when I drive. I sing when I drive when I’m nervous, that is.

When I was new to driving as a teenager, my dad would passenger seat “drive”. He had an imaginary brake pedal on the ceiling of the car and when he’d hold his breath in silence and reach for it with his hand, my confidence would waver. I remember thinking that a very real passenger-side clutch pedal would have been much more practical because no matter how many times my dad told me at first, “G’head; ease up on the clutch. You’ll feel it,” he seemed only to be all sorts of crazy at the time and me – all sorts of confused. Of course, he was right, and if you know how to drive a manual transmission, you know what I’m talking about. For the rest of you, there is no other way I have found to explain it; so you’ll just have to trust me on this one, okay?

Before moving back to New Jersey, I was out of practice with driving, having lived in New York City for seven years where cars are things that you sometimes forget exist as modes of transportation rather than simply as perpetual enemies to face at crosswalks and invisible crosswalks, alike. I decided to ease my way back into highway driving with a nice little “test drive” by following behind the U-Haul that Mike drove during our move. White knuckled and singing, with a nice big U-Haul to tail (and the U-Haul’s being restricted from going on the Parkway), we made it, somehow. Mike was proud of me, I was proud of me, and I think it’s accurate to say we were both sort of in disbelief. Turns out I could do it all along, like the whole time probably, you guys. Who’d have even thought?

Driving and music just sort of go together for me. My sister did most of the driving when we were in high school. She knew the radio stations to preset and had taste in music that I’d not yet honed for myself. I trusted her musical prowess and learned to like the emo pop and rock bands that were so popular in my school days. In middle school or high school (I can’t remember – help me out if you know, dad!), my dad showed me how to use his and my mom’s record player and my musical knowledge expanded to include Van Morrison, the Beatles, The Who, Cream, and Emmitt Rhodes, among others, heard as originally intended. The soft thud and crackle of a needle dropped in a vinyl groove has been a very comforting sound ever since. I’ve not touched a record or a record player for years now, but I can recall that sound as easily as I can hear my neighbor’s music playing next door right now. Unexplainable, yet simultaneously explainable – you know, magic.

Nowadays, I have an included music subscription through Amazon Prime, built on a Prime Music Unlimited subscription that I paid for (and got very limited use out of if I’m being honest), for over a year. It’s basically the same as the paid version, except that I can no longer pick the exact song I want to listen to at the exact moment I think to listen to it. The song’ll come on eventually, I have learned, and I’ll hear new stuff that I’d otherwise not have known about while waiting for it to do so. I use this music subscription, almost solely for car-based purposes and it has been my co-pilot (cough – karaoke machine) for many a long drive.

My taste has since evolved into something with an identity of its own that I’m proud of and that I don’t care whether or not other people share in. My go to for driving is almost always something by Vampire Weekend (or something similar now, by the unpredictable nature of the Amazon Music roulette wheel). Before I got rid of my paid music subscription, I mourned the final days of still having the ability to play the entire Father of the Bride album in its intended order, getting lost in songs like Bambina, Sunflower, and Flower Moon. I’d like to say I sing along to Vampire Weekend, but what I actually do is try to sing along to Vampire Weekend, as, at least for me, many of the songs would take a gazillion driving listens to get the words right (as you must remember; I cannot look at the lyrics because – driving). No, I sing whatever words fit the pleasant Koenigean warbles and “my audience” is not displeased.

I think of the Beatles writing Yesterday and Paul McCartney using the original placeholder lyrics of, “Scrambled Eggs. Oh my baby how I love your legs,” and I think it’s totally reasonable to change the words to something like Diane Young, Don’t Lie, or Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa for my own listening (and driving) pleasure. Someday I’ll look up the words, though I’m happy enough with my own versions for the time being.

Perhaps my nervous reaction to driving was born from that invisible ceiling brake. Maybe it was the watching for the opposing traffic’s yellow lights while I was stopped at a red at intersections (you know – to leave sufficient time to feel the clutch). Maybe it was how fifth gear liked to keep me on my toes by sticking every once in a while when downshifting to fourth. At some point in time, specific origin unknown, it came to be, and here I live to tell the tale, much improved thanks to uninhibited car singing and an affinity for Vampire Word Salad.

I’ll end it here before this last track skips, but feel free to set the needle down at the beginning again if you so choose.

Movies · Music · Reviews & Reflections

“… Begin Again”

Beth DeFries1 Comment

I just finished watching “Begin Again” again and have the film’s kick-ass soundtrack playing on my brain, the notes dancing on the goopy, textured surface in rainboot tap shoes, splashing in puddles of imaginary sound, raising drops of neon rainbow slime-matter in the dark space of my mind. Right now, this is how I envision the way I hear the music that is not actually playing. How do you “not hear” music?

To quote my mom, “Anyway…”

The movie took me on a tour of my home city of seven years, inviting me to revisit a bench I used to eat lunch on almost every day in Soho as an escape from a job I really didn’t enjoy, the stage-for-activism-and-art steps leading up to Union Sq. Park, the Washington Square Park Arch and fountain where I tried and failed to write my final Playwriting assignment in my senior year of college while visiting New York and waiting for Mike to get out of class. I was distracted by a sunny day and the ultimate people watching opportunity, my desire to write evaporating off the warm pavers, floating away from me like an escaped balloon.

I often forget how much I miss it… but I recognize how defining my NYC residency is to me that going back and revisiting old haunts evokes a nostalgia that gives me a (good – kind of?) heartburn. It also, at times, reminds me that I am missing out on unique experiences of New York City-living during these historic times, jabbing me in the ribs each time a once-in-a-lifetime experience passes me by because I wanted to and influenced us leaving.

We visited our erstwhile neighborhood on Friday and stopped “in” to enjoy outdoor experiences at some of our, once-local, establishments. We even brought some Brooklyn home with us. To-go growlers are a wonderful thing as I am – currently – pleasantly quenched with my favorite Brooklyn brew, Green Eyes IPA from Keg & Lantern Brewing Company in Greenpoint. Set in a washed up musician/producer headspace a la Mark Ruffalo in the beginning of Begin Again, I drank a couple of juice glasses of this emerald eyed elixir because I was too lazy to wash a real glass.

I am continuing a celebratory mood sparked by current events and outcomes from Saturday, November 7th, ones that washed a sense of calm and relief over most of those in my personal community. The tension and uncertainty of last week caused a lot of stress for me and for many people whom I love and since midday Saturday, that tension melted into relief, tears, smiles, cheers, and a spreading warmth of hope.

For those of you who are disappointed, I hope you will see the positive in this change and see unity, justice, and representation as possible, necessary, and important. People are born in many different forms. Some experience evolution of self during their lifetime. Some just want to have the right to love and to live without judgement, threat, or fear, and to not only feel safe but to be safe in those identities. Those differences are a wonderful thing and life would be un-recognizable without them.

I did not get to dance (you’re welcome) or swig champagne in the streets of NYC, but I sure wanted to. I am so grateful to even have had the experience to see videos, posts, and photos of individual and neighborhood-wide celebrations, of friends crying tears of joy, of my Philadelphia family cheering on their city with such deserved pride. Thank you to the wave of humanity, empathy, love, inclusion that showed up and turned out; we wouldn’t be here without you. I am ready for this rebirth. I am ready to…