I am not here

Written in 2019 for guitar (11 minutes)

Thoughts on the piece(s)

I’m going to copy/paste these thoughts for I am not here, All I Know, and On Portra because I wrote these three pieces basically on top of each other and at the same time during the span of about a month in the summer of 2019.

These pieces are dedicated to Stephen Hennessey and Adam Kennaugh, two of my good friends from my time in Bowling Green. Inside these pieces are tons of references and a lot of personal gestures to all the time we spent together and all the things we had talked about over those two years: shared musical interests that we have together, including some quotation from punk songs and references to my old hardcore band, as well as a number of other things I’m not sure anyone would really get. I won’t divulge where all the secrets are in these pieces because - it wouldn’t be as fun - but they are there.

The summer that I wrote these three pieces was my first summer in Texas - our first summer in Texas: Caiman, and I and our new dog Ollie. Because I was in Germany and trying to do a number of other things that summer, I opted to be unemployed the break; having saved as much as I could from my extremely small teaching stipend as a fellow at UNT, it was able to do this and spent the summer writing, reading, and playing a whole lot of Oblivion.

I know writing these pieces spanned a longer stretch of time, but I mostly think about these pieces within a specific week in July when Caiman went back to Ohio and Michigan to visit her family. The week that Caiman was gone, it was just me and the dog, but I was so concerned with money that I only ran the air conditioning at night to sleep and otherwise endured the hot Texas summer in my apartment with the windows open and a box fan. Days at a time of 100-degree F (38 C). I decided to just turn it into a little residency in my apartment and wrote music all day, watched The X-Files at night, didn’t see or talk to anybody in person and drank a lot of cheap red wine and ate a lot of pizza from Aldi… I’m not sure if this is even compelling to read or talk about, but that’s what it felt like.

I wanted these pieces to feel like memories. Fragments of sound that you hear from far away when you’re sitting on your front porch on a hot summer day.

I wanted to make some sort of a collection of my guitar music, so I asked Stephen to record a few pieces, and reached out to my friend Denis Sorokin – one person in Virginia, the other in St. Petersburg, Russia, and ultimately, this came out on Australian record label. It’s really a global project that I don’t think I have really appreciated enough at the time we were recording and putting everything together. That changed when the album came out: it was released a few days Russia illegally invaded Ukraine and changed the lives of so many, including my friends, and many people that worked on this project.

In the words of the Wingnut Dishwashers Union: “A punk rock song won't ever change the world! But I can tell you about a couple that changed me.” I’m not always convinced that music or art can make a huge impact, but this project made a big impact on me. I hope that in some way this story – beginning from a close personal relationship and spreading into a truly global project can at least demonstrate a little bit that we are connected, and that art can make great friendships flower into something. Maybe it’s a cliché, and maybe I’m overly sentimental and naive, but sometimes we need to think in cliches and embrace that their meaning can still be real and impactful. It’s something.