Music: We Are Trees

This is what Spotify can do. I searched for songs with "sunset" in the title and I was given a list to browse, listen, and found We Are Trees this way.  Their song "Sunrise, Sunset" captured me with its first "ohh-oh-oh" and held me through to the last beat.  They even have a mesmerizing video (in my opinion) on YouTube for the song.  View it here:

We Are Trees have two EPs available for download through their bandcamp.com website: Boyfriend (July 2010) and Girlfriend (March 2011). Each digital album has four or five songs for your listening pleasure. These are songs I imagine I'd appreciate most while walking in a park, bicycling through neighborhoods, or driving with the windows down on an early spring day in the country. Plenty of trees. Bound to lift a smile on your face with the free-spirited lilt of the instrumentation. Virginia Beach's own James Nee has a voice that provides the just-right optimism his lyrics already contain, he just releases it into every sung lyric. The fullness of the drums and percussion carries the music with that insistent hopefulness of happy-go-lucky songs. I can't stay seated; These are motivating rhythms. The opening guitar in "You" on Girlfriend is thoughtful and comforting. The melodies are happy, wistful, wishful, but the lyrics address relationship troubles on the horizon in this 2-minute song: "How am I supposed to try to pretend that everything's all right". This might be my second favorite song by them other than "Sunrise, Sunset" on Boyfriend, which was my first impression and introduction to the their magic. Girlfriend's last song has more electric power and push, more energy to send you off into your day. View this lovely video here:
We Are Trees - I Don't Believe In Love from Illusive Media on Vimeo.
So a late Saturday night browsing in Spotify turned into a magical discovery of uplifting music. What a sweet gift.

Addict

I find it just a little mind-boggling how a book read twice during high school was one of the contributing texts that convinced me to not pursue drugs, curious as I might have been, and yet it continues to be banned and removed from public and school libraries.  When I read it I did not know that it was actually a work of fiction or imaginatively compiled and edited diary entries of a psychologist's patient instead of the claimed anonymous diary of a troubled teen. Go Ask Alice was a quick read that both sparked curiosity in certain drugs but also solidified my own grounded sense of self-control and self-preservation.  I wanted to be freer than I felt, but the stories told by those who went too far with drugs never presented them as being free and in control of their lives, but instead wracked with the turmoil caused by heroin, cocaine, acid, ecstasy, and meth.

I remember reading Go Ask Alice sometime in eighth or ninth grade for the first time.  I read it again my senior year because I had a friend (on whom I had a crush on) who progressed from one drug to another during the fall semester until one day he came to school so high on acid that he allegedly had danced like a chicken on the discipline dean's desk. His charisma had perked my interest, and if I had been in the right place at the wrong time I would have tried anything with him just to be around him.  And I realized this, so I set my feet back on the ground by rereading Go Ask Alice.  And when I learned he went to rehab during the winter break, I sent my book by way of a friend to him.  I don't recall if he ever said he got it, or if my friend succeeded in getting it to him.  I never did manage to run with any friends who did hard drugs, but I knew some of my classmates did. I've never seen the made-for-TV movie based on the book.

I believe I read Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates during my freshman year, or the summer before sophomore year.  Foxfire was another novel that had a real weight of honesty and reality drawn into the plot.  I don't remember specifics from the novel so much anymore because in 1996 a film was made from the novel, leaving out some of the lengthy plot and adding a few more twists. When I think of Foxfire I recall mostly scenes from the film.  A mix-match group of girls bonded together by the same cause, who help and protect each other when various problems rise up in each one's lives.  The hardest of them all is Goldie and how her drug addiction spirals into a mess of problems and disappointment.

There's any number of songs that heighten and raise up the creativity-inducing elements of drugs, but there's nearly an equal amount that share the ails of addiction.  I did not hear this song when it first came out but instead heard it years later when I delved into a myriad of female indie-alternative folk musicians.  Somehow I came across K's Choice and their song "Not An Addict."  The song's lyrics are poignant, nevermind that the intro is like a sad crying of someone desperate, alone, addicted, and wrecked.

I've still never tried acid or 'shrooms, and certainly have never tried anything like the cocaine, heroin, meth, etc.  A glass of wine, a beer, a little bourbon is about as far as my interests go.  But even alcohol is something I approach cautiously, knowing that I do have an addictive nature if I let it go completely.  I've never liked the idea of drinking to get drunk because the few times I have felt drunk I did not find it a pleasant feeling that I wanted to repeat.  No, instead, I have a glass or two of wine with a meal, or three beers over the course of a long evening, followed by a glass of water.  I have fun by being surrounded by music, or talking with people, or taking pictures.  I enjoy being myself with friends who are stronger and more entertaining than any state-altering drug could propose.