Soundtrack of my life

I lost all my thoughts of angels in an aspirin billboard, walking down 16th street, hit the cross street "Catatonia"

Blake Schwarzenbach is my favorite lyricist. That's him in the middle looking very Kerouac in black and white, and wearing Mission Street like a halo (even though he's from L.A., the anti-San Francisco). He's also a really creative guitarist, but its his words that have made his bands stand out to me. People always ask me what the weird tattoo is on my wrist, and I can't seem to describe it succinctly. Well, succinctly, its the symbol of Blake's band Jawbreaker...but it's not really a rock n' roll tattoo in the same sense as an "AC-DC", or a zig-zag man. It's more of a symbol of my favorite poet, who's able to put words to exactly how I feel, and the guy I still like to listen to after about 16 years and counting.

When almost all punk bands were writing very political, angry and anarchistic songs about class warfare (sometimes articulately, sometimes not), he wrote about himself. Some people who do this are pretentious and narcissistic. He doesn't sound that way because he was just writing about what he actually knew, unlike most of the punks who knew alot more about PBR than class warfare, for example. His songs tend toward the melancholic

"I could walk a million miles, suffer freezing rain and failure. Its familiar"

"I'm sick, not hungry, sick of people starved for love"

....but usually not all the way to depression.

"Everyone is drowning in sand, couldn't you use a hand?"

This theme makes the happy songs even happier,

"she thinks it's stupid that we get paid to jump around. Its what I live for. I hope I never touch the ground"

and the jokes even funnier because they are surprising.

" I wanna be your shirt, so I can hug you while you work. I wanna be your wife, so you can beat me every night"

He has a sense of humor, with a subtle joke hiding in maybe half of his songs, and a particular skill at plays on words:

"I learned to put on airs, I needed them to breath"
"now I need a guillotine to get you off my mind"
"I fell from the wagon into the night train"
" We live like astronauts, but our missions never cross"
"I tried to drink you off my mind. I just got wasted. It only made the pain that much more acute. But cute isn't strong enough a word. Unintentionally gorgeous. An accidental charm. A graceful drinking arm. Disarming..."

There's a few enigma's built in here and there, ripe with symbology and significance. But it's bring-your-own-symbol, these could mean many things to different people and despite their elusive meaning they can't easily be forgotten :

"This is your angel. Please respond"
"There was a sun once. It lit the whole damned sky. It kept everything, everything, alive."

After his band Jets to Brazil disintegrated, he sort of disappeared from music in a J.D. Salinger kind of way (ok not that extreme, but it is strange for a musician to just stop recording music for years) and teaches English at a college. You can even look him up on Rate My Professor and read about how many of his students think he's brilliant, hot, or a dick who shouldn't be discussing politics in an English class. I always though he might write a book or something but I don't think he ever did. I am so psyched he has a new band, the Thorns of Life. He's playing with Aaron Cometbus, the guy who had an equal impact on the punk fanzines, basically the punk literature. He was also the drummer of Crimpshrine and Pinhead Gunpowder. Still may favorite zine was his travel log of his ill-fated bike tour of Europe from many years ago, turned stolen canoe tour after the bike was hopelessly broken, turned travelling circus with the french jugglers and their pogues tape. I need to pick up his anthology just so I can read that one again. Anyways, I hope this is a real band, and not just a garage project. I also hope these two icons can actually equate to a good band, instead of a half-assed all star game. So far the videos from crowded house parties pretty much sound great (given that they are shitty shaky videos from crowded house parties) , kind of halfway between jawbreaker and pinhead gunpowder go figure.