Memory/The way it was before

It's not often that you get the chance to see your two favorite bands in concert on consecutive days. It's certainly never happened to me before. Last week not only did it happen, but it happened coincident with my and Cara's wedding anniversary.

June 12, the seventh anniversary of our wedding, brought Typhoon to the Beachland Ballroom, my favorite music venue and one where I have so many wonderful memories. It was another amazing show by Typhoon, a band that I have written so much about recently that there's no need to really review the show itself. But I did want to mention some things that lead singer Kyle Morton said both during the show and during our conversation after it.

At one point in between songs, Kyle talked about how new album Offerings (which I just blogged about) is centered around the theme of memory. He said the album describes a worst case scenario of total memory loss, but also that Kyle had become interested in exploring the topic in part due to things he sees happening in society. We seem to be losing our memories, he said. Although he did not directly mention Donald Trump, his remarks made it clear he was alluding to the horrifying way that events in this country today are echoing events from the past and how we as a culture seem to have learned nothing from that past.

He also brought up how (in a not unrelated way) people today seem to have such short attention spans, and tied this to the omnipresent phone screens that we often seem unable to go more than a few minutes without looking at. This is something I've thought a lot about myself. Just as one example, when I was a kid, when I watched sports on TV I didn't feel a need to have something else besides the game on TV to hold my attention. Now when I watch sports on TV I'm often constantly glancing back and forth between my phone screen and the TV screen because my brain rebels at just focusing on one thing for an extended period of time. Of course the TV is just another "screen" and in the past TVs were cited as a cause for shortened attention spans, so these issues aren't novel to the smartphone era. But I do think there has been a major acceleration over the course of my lifetime and the effects, both on individual people's minds and on society's collective consciousness, are in many ways alarming.

Kyle encouraged us not to get too caught up in the digital world of phones and the Internet and to be sure to give attention to real connections with real people and with the real world. Now, I know as well as anyone that the Internet, when used in certain ways, can greatly bolster those real connections - after all, not only did I meet Cara via an online game, but online messaging was the primary way we got to know each other, as we lived in different cities. So context matters, and I'm certainly not saying that online interactions should be completely shunned. But at the same time, it's important to not get trapped in that online world, many aspects of which are designed to give our brains instant gratification but not genuine long term fulfillment. There are so many things in the real physical world - a beautiful day outside, a friend with whom we're conversing, a concert we're attending, a delicious meal we're consuming - that merit our full attention and are cheapened if that attention is constantly split with that little screen in our hand.

The topic of memory and memory loss also hits close to home because I've become increasingly aware of changes in my own cognitive function and ability to remember things since last fall. My brain doesn't seem to work quite as well as it used to. This has multiple aspects, I've noticed. When I think back over my life going back to October, especially the first few months of that period, there's a certain haziness to the memories, a sort of mental fog. As well, I feel I've become somewhat absentminded about everyday tasks and things I'm doing and should be doing. There's a well known phenomenon that can be referred to as "widow brain" - but the interesting thing is I don't feel like these effects happened nearly as much after Cara's death as they did after the breakup last fall. So perhaps that breakup triggered a sort of delayed onset widow brain by compounding on my previous trauma. I don't want to overstate this - I don't feel like I'm losing my mind or anything like that, and overall I think my brain still works well. And I also think things have improved compared to a few months ago. But still, this has all been very noticeable to me.

Trauma affects our ability to remember things. And not remembering things (see: the parallels between Trump and the rises of past fascist dictators that so many seem willfully ignorant of) can help bring on more traumas. Not a good feedback loop.

On a happier note now, the show, as I said, was excellent, and I again got to talk to Kyle afterwards, and he (like his wife Danielle, of the band Wild Ones, in Toronto) was so genuinely pleased to get to see me and talk with me again. I'm very moved by that. I told Kyle about how it was my wedding anniversary, and he, like me, was startled by the odd coincidence. I also mentioned having gotten to see the Decemberists on the anniversary of Cara's death this year. Kyle said something that I really liked, something along the lines of, "We're all mortal. We're all going to go sooner or later. But when someone you love dies, I think a part of that person does live on in the people who loved them. And I think you can especially see that when those sorts of coincidences happen." I like that attitude!

The Typhoon show was a perfect way to mark my and Cara's anniversary. The day after found me driving to Detroit, having decided I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see Okkervil River - especially considering that back on that wonderful weekend in June 2011, on the day before the wedding, Cara and I attended an Okkervil River concert in Columbus. So there was a nice parallelism there, and it was one I unintentionally added to. The concert in Detroit was at El Club in Mexicantown, and given that I was in Mexicantown I naturally decided to go to an authentic taqueria for dinner - and as my tacos were served to me, it suddenly struck me that Cara and I had had a taco truck cater our wedding rehearsal dinner. So not only was I replicating the night before our wedding by going to an Okkervil River concert, I was replicating it by having tacos for dinner and then going to an Okkervil River concert! I laughed at the realization. (Oh, and the tacos, at Taqueria El Rey, were delicious.)

El Club is a cool little venue that I'd been to once previously. It was in January of this year, and it was to see Typhoon (obsesssed much?). In retrospect I'm so glad that I went to that show, because on the same trip I visited my great friends Adam and Jackie in Ann Arbor, and then in April Jackie's mother Carol, a wonderful person who had lived with MS for decades, passed away. So that Typhoon show resulted in me getting to see Carol one last time, and I'm grateful for that. There's another interesting parallel there. In January 2015 Cara and I visited Adam and Jackie (and their two young boys and Carol), and then Cara passed away in April 2015, and I became especially glad we had made that trip, just as I became especially glad I made the January 2018 trip after the April 2018 passing of Carol.

The show this week was my eleventh time seeing Okkervil River in concert. It was my fourth time since Cara's death. Each of the three previous post-Cara's death concerts, I realized, had been unusual in some way, distinctly different from a "normal" Okkervil River show. The show in 2015 was for the tenth anniversary of the album Black Sheep Boy and featured (rather than a normal setlist) that album and the accompanying EP Black Sheep Boy Appendix played in their entireties. The show in 2016 was in support of the album Away, and after it I blogged about what a totally different experience that show was. The setlist largely consisted of songs from Away, which is a very different album from any other by the band, and on top of that, "every single non-Away song in the main set was a very heavily reworked version of the original song." And the show in 2017 featured a stripped down, three person, acoustic version of the band, playing an all requests setlist (and that show included probably the most emotional moment for me at any show ever when Will Sheff said "This is a very special request for Jeff McManus" and played a song I had described in my request as being linked to a special memory of my late wife).

So all three of those shows had been major divergences from what I'd think of as a "normal" Okkervil River concert. At the 2016 Away tour show, I wondered if the approach Will was taking to his music at that show would become the new norm going forward, and if perhaps I'd never again experience a "normal" Okkervil River show. I keyed in on a lyric from the last song played at that show, "Black": "It'll never be the way it was before," and I wrote these words:

Perhaps Okkervil River shows will never be the way they were before. Very certainly, my life will never be the way it was before. Before Cara got lung cancer and then died of it. But I will always carry that past with me. And the future? It can still be pretty great.

It's eerie now, looking back, that just weeks later another "It'll never be the way it was before" moment happened and at the time I wasn't even a bit concerned about it because I just didn't think it was going to happen. I'm referring, of course, to Donald Trump's election to the presidency. I realize that I keep going back to Trump even in posts that are mainly about non-political topics, but it's hard to overstate just how much the ongoing crisis in this country has affected me and my view of the world. And I'm a privileged white guy who hasn't even been directly affected by it in any significant way. There are so many people who unfortunately can't say that. It's a collective trauma that's happening to all of us and even if we do turn things back around, there are going to be scars that will remain for as long as this country exists. And there's a part of me that fears our country, as we know it, won't exist anymore in the not so distant future. Trump clearly wants to be a dictator, and although he isn't one at this point in time, our Republican elected officials have so far collectively shown basically no willingness to meaningfully stand up to his corruption and abuses. So what if he just refuses to leave office, and the Republicans just go along with it? I don't see that as the most likely outcome, but I can't discount the possibility. So this is probably another appropriate time to say: make sure everyone you know gets out and votes in November.

This blog entry that is centered around two concerts at which I had fantastic times sure has some unhappy little asides in it!

Anyway, it turned out that my idea that Okkervil River shows might never be the way they were before did not actually come to pass. This show, finally, for the first time for me in almost five years, was an Okkervil River show the way it was before. The band played a set full of songs both from excellent new album In the Rainbow Rain and from most of the other albums in their catalog, and while there were some interesting variations thrown in on the older songs they were generally much more faithful interpretations of the original versions, and the band had so much energy, and for 90 minutes it really did feel like old times again and it was so great and I had so much fun and I kind of just wanted that show to never end! Seriously, it was magical!

Will Sheff is the sole songwriter for Okkervil River and he's actually been for a while now the only original member still in the band; he's gone through a lot of lineup changes over the years, and while the shows have always been fantastic, at times they've felt more like a group of musicians performing Will Sheff's music rather than a performance by a band, if that makes sense. But the current lineup is just clicking in an incredible way and at times I felt like I was transported back to, say, the Pepper Jack Cafe in Hamilton, Ontario on Cara's birthday in 2007. And it's really special how music can do that. Life as a whole is never going to be "the way it was before," but it's nice, for a little while, to be able to recapture that feeling. I think the fact that it had been so long since I had seen a "normal" Okkervil River show made this one all the more special. The last previous "normal" show was also the last time I saw Okkervil River with Cara - at the Beachland in 2013 just about a month after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. At that show she sat right in front of the stage in a wheelchair and she reveled in the fact that she had enough lung capacity to sing along with those familiar songs. After the show she was handed from the stage a setlist from the show, written on a paper plate, and that plate remains on display in my living room. At the show the other day I was able to obtain another such souvenir.

I drove home from Detroit after the show and, although I did not get home until about 3 am, I was so amped up and giddy from the show that I had not the least bit of trouble staying awake - I didn't even feel the need to stop for a caffeinated beverage, as I typically would on such a late night trip. And then, just as I was pulling into the garage, what band's music came onto the college radio station I had playing?

Yep, Okkervil River. Naturally I sat in my car and listened to (and sang along with) the whole song ("The Latest Toughs" from 2005 masterpiece Black Sheep Boy). Another one of those funny, weird little coincidences and a perfect way to cap off a thrilling and emotional two days.

Typhoon - Offerings

One week after Cara died, I published a post on my blog called Typhoon lyrics that make me think of Cara. It ended a long hiatus; I hadn't posted anything on my blog in over one and a half years, covering most of the time since Cara's diagnosis with lung cancer. That post was a pivotal moment in my life. Prior to that, I was a person who did little sharing of my innermost thoughts and feelings. My blog posts were largely descriptive, usually about concerts I went to or other adventures Cara and I went on together, and while I did describe the feelings those experiences evoked in me, I avoided (both in my blog and in my conversations with friends and family) any truly in depth discussions of my life and the challenges contained therein. After Cara died, that all changed.

Now, as a concert approaches on my and Cara's wedding anniversary by the band whose music has most helped carry me through my wife's sickness and death and my own life in the aftermath of all that, I find it a good time to share some thoughts on the spectacular album Typhoon released earlier this year.

Typhoon's 2013 album White Lighter, released on August 20, 2013 - that is, the same week Cara was hospitalized leading to her lung cancer diagnosis - wormed its way into my heart and soul like no other album ever had with its gorgeous songs about life and death and pain and striving to "be good" in the face of all that pain. I realized a long time ago that the lyrical content of a song or album does not have to appeal to me in order for me to greatly enjoy that piece of music, but when both the music itself and the words accompanying it really speak to me, that's usually what elevates music to a truly special place in my heart. Kyle Morton's lyrics spoke to me in a way no one else's ever had. Typhoon's music is so personal to me now that there's no way I could even attempt to write something that approached an unbiased review of a Typhoon album. If you haven't experienced the things I have, the music won't have the same meaning to you. There's nothing wrong with that. At the same time, there's definitely something universal in Kyle's writing.

The long-awaited followup to White Lighter, a 70 minute double LP entitled Offerings, arrived this January.

The album, fourteen tracks in length, is made up of three "movements" - Floodplains, Flood, and Reckoning, along with the one song coda dubbed Afterparty. The first movement, Floodplains, was released by Typhoon as a preview of the upcoming album on October 25 of last year. Floodplains, and therefore Offerings as a whole, begins with an ominous spoken word intro:

"Listen. Of all the things you are about to lose, this will be the most painful."

When I first heard those words, I was in the wake of another extraordinarily painful loss. As White Lighter had before it, Offerings immediately began to worm its way into my heart and soul.

At the Typhoon show I attended in Detroit earlier this year, Kyle remarked at one point, "We're a rock band now." The new album does tend more to the rock side of the "indie folk-rock" that is probably the best summary of Typhoon's genre. The orchestral flourishes are a little pared down (although lovely string parts still accent a number of the songs); there's a little more emphasis on electric guitar. There are still delicate moments interspersed with stirring crescendos. It's a fitting evolution of Typhoon's sound but not an extreme departure. What makes Offerings more ambitious is its symphonic nature – multiple self-contained movements together making up a larger cohesive album, with little motifs, both musical and lyrical, that show up repeatedly and help tie the whole thing together. I love Typhoon's sound, but again, it's the lyrics that really elevate the work for me, so let's once more talk about some of the lyrics that stand out.

The new album continues the theme of reckoning with one's mortality, but now with a special emphasis on the concept of memory, and how we try to hold on to memory in the terrifying face of inevitable death. In Kyle Morton's own words from the email newsletter announcement of the album:

It's a record from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history. The urgent question becomes: without casualty, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence / oblivion?

With no past and no future, there is only suffocating, annihilating present, looping on and on ad infinitum (to me, one plausible definition of hell) and the best you can hope for is that somewhere in the void there exists some small, irreducible certainty—a fragment, a kernel, something—that you may have the good future to stumble upon before it's all over.

As you may have noticed if you know me well, I am a person who places enormous value on staying in touch with and keeping alive significant past events from my own history. Coupled with my own intimate experience with death and loss, this again is an album that seems like it could have been written specifically for me.

The first song on Offerings, “Wake,” poses a question: “My life one brief unbroken loop – goes round and round with nothing left to hold onto. But if there's nothing, if there's nothing, then what's that song that keeps hounding me?” And over the course of the album this topic is explored from multiple angles. How do we find something, something of real value, something of enduring meaning, onto which we can hold?

The subject matter is often very dark and unsettling. From “Rorschach” (track two): “And I'm trying to stay sane – meanwhile, the river of forgetfulness starts spilling the banks.” From “Empiricist” (track three): “Empty room. Cast about for a familiar object. Because my body needs coordinates to move. In the dark. Range of motion shrivels all around me. All my nightmares I am slowly being cocooned.”

The song that follows, “Algernon,” is one of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful things I think I've ever encountered, so I want to give it special attention. Whereas much of the album's lyrical content is more abstract in nature, "Algernon" clearly and vividly portrays a little scene from the point of view of a person who has lost much of his essential memory. Having seen this happen to my grandmother, I can relate to the song, and can only imagine that it would be even more moving for someone who has seen it happen to a closer loved one, a parent or spouse or sibling. The picture Morton paints with his lyrics, without ever directly saying what's going on in the song (because the narrator, losing his mind, doesn't know what's going on), is so vivid and captivating and sad. The song begins:

A woman leans in her chair.
Holds her face close to mine.
She's curious, am I comfortable?
Would I care to give it one more try?
She holds the picture up
while she studies my eyes.
I'm trying hard to recall the routine,
but I can't and so I improvise.

The narrator attempts to describe the contents of the picture, and at his attempt, the woman is clearly saddened, but probably not surprised:

A woman shrinks in her chair.
She says the picture's of you.
I have no idea what she's talking about
but I nod my head as if I do.

She goes on, until he interrupts:

I say enough is enough.
You have found me out.
You have called my bluff.
I don't know anything
about this stuff.
I'm just tired
and I'm waiting
for my wife to pick me up.

And the reaction to this:

A woman slouched in her chair
disrupts the silence to say.
The part of you that I love is still in there
even if it doesn't know my name.

Is the woman, slouched in her chair, the narrator's wife for whom he's waiting, but doesn't recognize? That's the obvious reading. And the way that we the listeners know that, and the woman knows that, but the narrator of the song has lost the ability to know that because of his declining cognitive faculties is tremendously powerful to me. (The title of the song “Algernon” is of course a reference to the Daniel Keyes short story “Flowers for Algernon,” another incredibly powerful work with similar themes. I definitely cried when I read the story a couple of years ago in a way that had definitely not happened when I first read it in middle school.)

"Unusual" is another song with lyrics that especially stand out to me, but in a different way from the rest of the album. Whereas most of the rest of the album is more timeless in nature, this song seems to directly describe the horrifyingly strange Trump-as-president reality we now all inhabit.

This brave new world—
It's gonna take some getting used to
The cretin's lips are curled
He swings a wrecking ball around the court room

The song opens, and I immediately think of Trump as the cretin with his lips curled, trying to destroy the rule of law in our country.

It's unusual
Except now it happens all the time

I think of the constant refrains of "this is not normal" from people sharing stories about the crisis that continues to envelop our country, and of how we seem to be growing numb to those refrains, because it now is all happening all the time.

Now the truth is immaterial:
Every teller's got an axe to grind

And here I think of how we seem to be entering a "post-truth" society, in which Donald Trump labels any news he dislikes as "fake," and his followers readily gobble it up, having been conditioned for years by talking heads with axes to grind in preparation for this horrifying moment. And most of those talking heads were probably not intending to create this monster, but now they go along with it, because what else can they do, and because perhaps after so many years of pretending the truth as immaterial, it's become immaterial to them too.

The song could also, I suppose, be interpreted as being simply about an individual person losing his mind and facing the "brave new world" that comes with that loss, and have nothing to do with Donald Trump. That's also striking to me - the world in which we live, with a buffoonish reality TV star playing the role of most powerful man on Earth, is so strange and so wrong and so stupid that just living in that world and being keenly aware of the reality of it is enough to make one question one's sanity. Being sane in an insane world is like, well, being insane. Perhaps we are all collectively losing our minds.

Fun stuff, huh?

It's a very dark album, with moments of hope occasionally shining through (from "Bergeron": "You gotta learn how to live/On an ever shorter tether/But if you're good – even for once/It's written: you'll be good forever"), and then the last song, "Sleep," depicts the last moments of a human life, and the narrator passing into death. "We can all agree it's a mixed bag for the living/Full of sorrow, full of grief" the song begins, and I, listening, nod my head knowingly. But in those last moments the narrator finds the answer to that question posed in the first song, finds something onto which he can hold. "A single thought that could comfort me. Something small, something sweet."

That single thought: "It was once in the spring, you were on the porch, I heard you singing/From inside, sat and listened through the screen."

This is the thought that comforts the narrator as he prepares to leave the world. And then he asks (presumably his wife) to stay, put her "gnarled hands" in his, and then repeats the refrain "Don't let me go to sleep."

Repeats it until it fades away. Until everything fades away. As this happens, little distorted snippets from various moments in the album play, in the familiar way that as we fall asleep, we lose control of our thoughts, and random phrases pop into our heads that we didn't consciously summon, and I can only assume that a dying person might experience something similar in their last moments. Sleep comes to the narrator, and with it, death. And that's the end of the album.

Except that it's actually not quite the end of the album. After a silence, a raucous and joyful hidden track begins, and it clearly depicts the narrator now entering the afterlife, with those who passed before him greeting him and encouraging him to "shed your clothes," "jump the boat," and "join us in the river." It's an interesting decision to include this hidden track. After over an hour of very intense and haunting music that, although occasionally sprinkled with moments of hope and lightness, is largely just overwhelmingly dark, here's this joyous and carefree number that seems almost out of place after everything that came before. The album, I think, would be equally effective with or without the hidden track, but would leave the listener in a different state after the music stopped playing. Perhaps the album ending with the narrator's death would just be too much of a downer.

Either way, though, the overall message I take from Offerings could be summed up as: life is short, uncertain, and in many ways horrifying, and in the face of all that we have to find what comforts we can, and some of the best sources of those comforts are our loved ones and our memories of our loved ones - oh, and also music.

I highly recommend this album and all of Typhoon's music. At the same time I recognize that the circumstances of my life have conspired to give Typhoon's music so much personal meaning to me that most people could never be impacted by it in the same way. Perhaps you have something else that fills a similar role in your life. I'm very grateful to have Typhoon.