New Indyish Artist - Nightwood & E.P. Diary- Part 1

Dear Diary,

“Honestly, I just want to play.” Courtney Love, “Rock n Roll Needs Courtney Love” by Pamela Des Barres, Interview 1994

I’m reading a wonderful collection of essays in a book entitled “Rock She Wrote: Women write about rock, pop, and rap” edited by Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers. The quote above is from an essay in the book with one of rock n roll’s most controversial front women. I’m searching this book for clues. I didn’t realize that was what I was doing when I borrowed it from Serah-Marie and Ted, but I’ve been wolfing it down, running my tongue over gems of truth in the text as if it were a guidebook, a manual or a diary.

It makes me think about my music history; Erin and I have been playing rock n roll music together since we were teenagers. We’d played with others before we met, but something clicked when we started playing together in the hallways of our high school. Maybe it was the melancholic riffs we would play and the words we’d sing. To tell the truth, it felt real and right and to a degree there seemed to be an insularity to the whole thing. Like, I just wrote “riff” but that’s not really part of any language we actually use. Usually there aren’t that many words said between us when songwriting, just a sharing, an encouragement, a mutual satisfaction and agreement in what parts of a melody or a jam we’ll end up keeping. There’s a unique relationship there, one in which amazing things can happen, like the time she resurrected a song I wrote when I was fourteen, rearranged the parts and sung up a whole new melody (Cave of the Spleen). It’s a pleasure to play music with someone for so long that your musical references are each other’s sounds.

” Just when I think I’m king (I just begin).” - Kate Bush, The Dreaming

There was a year or two that we didn’t play music together, when we were in the thick of school and life, and we couldn’t really move forward musically without one another. A strange thing happened in the time we were apart. I gradually realized that I felt vulnerable, like I’d lost my sword and my shield, and the freedom I’d found on the stage seemed irretrievable. I think it took a year or two more of playing together alone, in private, to find our way again. By the time we started searching for a third person, a drummer to help us hold it all down, we’d come out the other side. Eric came into the fold in the most gracious and exciting way, respecting what we’d built and helping us to push ourselves even further.

“I concentrate on the music, and in a moment, all my fears are gone.” - Cherie Currie, The Cherie Currie Story

I like thinking of how rock n roll, as a form considered separately free from content (impossible maybe), can be a liberating genre. I think of rock history, with its stolen roots, its evolution, its gendered-ness, its groupies and fans, and I can understand why it is so powerful. So hot you’re almost afraid to touch it, fresh from the fires of naked sound. Nowadays I feel the same way in the middle of a stage as I did when I was fifteen- something like a channel, something I could only share with people I trust. Like Erin and Eric.

Best,

Amber of Nightwood

Big City E.P. out in May 2008 on Grenadine Records