Yesterday against a backdrop of golden sun and monkey puzzle trees lining the streets I now call my new hood, I found myself humming a lot of The Album Leaf songs. They have an eclectic mix of indie beats with a sort of synthesized ambiance. With an album titled In a Safe Place it seems an ideal album for my summer. Not to mention that this album was recorded with Sigur Ros and feels...well, safe I suppose. On a wagon ride with the love of my life in tow, I pull effortlessly down cobble streets with the sound of her tiny voice reading an old century fairy tale to her "baby". I pass Mt. Tabor school and see two hip ten-year-olds swinging on rusty bars chatting quietly with their hipster shag and skinny pants, aware that I feel intimidated by them as even Portland kids can be hipper than most adults I know. I can smell slow-simmered marinara sauce inside a home I can only imagine serves gluten-free pasta and says pagan prayer before suppertime. I stumble across my favorite house on the block, sort of a dream house, with porch furniture and beautiful landscaping and I wonder if they have a perfect life. I feel like it's a life I have never known and I imagine they don't have drinking problems and have many friends with them to laugh in the kitchen, sipping red wine, nibbling on stinky cheese, cracking hazelnuts into a beautiful African bowl sharing stories about their last trip to Italy where they took an olive marinating workshop. There would be conversation of how pottery classes are going and what new festival they will all be attending. I snap back into reality for a brief moment and realize that it's in my head. All of this has always been in my head, this idea of pure light and love and no scratches or dents. I take a deep breath, watch a large spider weave an intricate web in the setting sun high up in an old pine tree. I feel still. And I realize that I have had an adventurous three weeks of job lay-off, car accident, moving out and into a cramped apartment space with my best friend and her new wife. I fell in love briefly in this time and then lost it. I see that my insides are a bit ripped up and it's because I feel I cannot make things grow that I go to this place in my mind. But I turn around, flash a smile to my co-pilot, my sidekick, my sidecar hero, and see that I have at least made some progress. Okay, a lot of it actually. I think of this love I thought I might acquire and close my eyes, hearing beautiful sounds in my mind that sound like this.
Big changes. Deep breath.
Living life sober is no picnic. It is difficult. Very difficult. You do not realize how much you run away from uncomfortable emotions or delve way too much into the good ones with a little "celebration". I have to stay centered and aware and stable and careful and tender and light. It is hardcore. This album is helping.
The Album Leaf is an American solo musical project founded in San Diego, California in 1998 by Jimmy LaValle. I sometimes wonder how many dates he has been on where people have told him he's so intense. I think I am a visceral person, feeling and interpreting and experiencing and analyzing and dissecting and thinking. This music is all of that, all of those emotions, all of it. I imagine him to live a life with purpose, with strong intent. I could totally be wrong but for now, I do not feel so alone with his music by my side. His performances often feature projected visual art. Jimmy LaValle started an instrumental post-rock band called Tristeza and eventually found his way through several other bands before settling on his solo project called The Album Leaf.
Before Tristeza released Spine and Sensory on Makoto records in 1998, the band was talking with a handful of different indie record labels. There was one in particular, he chose to hound about releasing his solo material. They accepted his request and in 1999, Jimmy revealed An Orchestrated Rise to Fall.
LaValle played his first official Album Leaf show at the Che Cafe in the winter of 1999. Band members for this show consisted of Rafter Roberts, Jimmy Lehner (of Tristeza), Leilani Clark (of local San Diego band, "the Straight A's" also with LaValle), Benjamin White (of GoGoGo Airheart), and John Pham.
LaValle started performing solo concerts worldwide and Sigur Ros decided to collaborate. Together they performed on stage as a group and were found to be contributing to similar projects in their off-time. They both felt they had a vision of incorporating the synthesized dream world unitarily. And what a dream it was for the rest of us.
I have decided to forego the technical explanation of The Album Leaf's structural position within the music world and allow my reading audience to just feel and experience for themselves. In a single phrase, I sum up Jimmy LaValle's successful mind-blowing project to pure genius. Artists like this inspire me to keep going, doing what I love to do, to keep writing even if no one is reading or to keep dreaming even if I have no one to share them with.
IN OTHER NEWS: Bjork came out with a new video for "Moon". Hot.
Bon Iver has graced Portland with his presence at Edgefield tonight and I am sure to hear that it is an amazing show.
Who woulda thunk it but MGMT and The Shins are collaborating to cover Pink Floyd hits. Say wha? I'm going along with a positive attitude. I do love them both. We shall see.
R.E.M. is to release another Greatest Hits album as they bring their career to a final close. Thank you for all of the wonderful years of amazing music. What an amazing band they were and how fortunate am I to have been around for most of it, witnessing their musical progression and successful experiments unfold onto my television screen as a child and onto the NPR airwaves as an adult. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will be sure to purchase your last album.
Portland, you are good to me. And you have been surprisingly comfortable but difficult. I am excited to be here, even in the chaotic mess that has been set before me and I feel brave. As terrible as moving is for most, I have managed to sell most of my belongings in my life and was left with a few boxes living like the nomad that I am, like a college-aged girl most of my life. As much as I feel excited to daydream about this perfect dinner party, olive growing, pottery class going life, I am also one hell of a loving bohemian who feels and thinks and is okay with herself. No matter how many people, even those I care about, who call me disingenuous, self-involved with my blog and otherwise, doesn't matter. I feel perfectly okay. The other day I went through the boxes of my life and found photos from my childhood. There are two large albums from my past that mark my "achievements" in school, my dance classes, my sports teams, and adventure camps up to my exchange programs overseas and giving birth at home to my little one. These albums put so much in perspective for me. It has been quite the journey thus far.
