If you're not up to date with this, I'm singing songs and I'm writing about said songs I sing. Here's the first one:
I also wrote about the writer of this song here:
Today in Max on Musics, I present to you IN GLORIOUS LO-FI: Saturday, 2:43 PM or The Death of a Dreamer, by Logan Whitehurst and the Junior Science Club. Follow the link below, please!
INSTRUCTIONS: Don't click anything that says download except for the blue text in the yellow box that says: Download File 4.37 MB. NOT the green thing that says download now, and not the blue button that says download, or anything else that says download. Just the blue text in the yellow box. I'm sorry for the not so user friendly shit, once I find a better way to file host I'll do that. If anyone has problems downloading, just let me know!
LYRICS:
The sun is very bright today
And still the clouds are big and gray
I wonder why that makes me think of you
The light that lands upon your face
Is from the depths of outer space
A billion years from Western Avenue
CHORUS:
My emotional survival
Depends on your arrival
Right hand on the Bible
Do you solemnly swear
That you'll keep our agreement
And meet me on the pavement
And come to my apartment
At the top of the stairs
I'll sing a little breakup song
Until I see you come along
Or maybe I will write that song for you
And then a circuit in my brain
Will explode, and there you'll be again
And we can count the craters on the moon
CHORUS
A sudden connection
A flying sensation
A little celebration
As I crumble to the ground
A painful situation
Followed by the realization
That there's a somber congregation
Standing all around
You're there among the fading crowd
I smile and then I sing aloud
'Goodbye, Goodbye' is all I have to say
It seems as though I should have known
But then I never would have flown
It doesn't seem too high a price to pay
Although I may be dying
My body may be lying
Taxis may be crying
In a chorus of cars
Reality receding
My heart no longer beating
My life will not be fleeting
When I'm out among the stars
One of my personal favorite Logan Whitehurst songs, and the ballad closing one of his finest albums: Earth Is Big. He really set the token pretty Junior Science Club ballad bar high with this one, but topped it several times before he left us way too soon in 2006. The last few lines in this song are especially exquisite. They show that this guy was not just a master of damn near every instrument he put in his hands, including the drums, accordion, concertina and the lobster, but also of writing.
To me this song is a part of several songs Logan wrote as lamentations on dying. There are about five others that I can think of off the top of my head, but all of them were written long before he was diagnosed with brain cancer, and are definitely closer to the aforementioned "crying" Logan songs, than the "laughing" ones. The omnipresence of death in the creative mind is not something I'm unfamiliar with. So much of that understanding informs so much of my everyday life and philosophy, and hopefully I'll cover that in my Max on Music's on Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel... but I'm getting ahead of myself. It's definitely something that I connect with personally.
The foreshadowing of Logan's untimely death by his own music is something I'd like to cover in more detail, but just the parallels between this one song and his life are chilling. The fact that this song illustrates so poetically exactly what it says in the title; the death of a dreamer, in a very painful, sudden way, unexpected but accepting in a sense, especially towards the end. Like a visit from an old friend you haven't seen since you were a kid. That fear of your impending death you first felt in the middle of the night in your room alone, returning every once in a while throughout your life, moving towards the background and then coming back the minute it left your mind.
To me the narrator seems to be like this upon realizing death is fast approaching: ...Oh shit. I guess this is it. Fuck. Oh well. At least the black will take me in soon... But in a much more poetic way. Returning back to non-existance with a smile.
If only Logan had been so lucky to not have suffered and deal with his mortality in a much heavier sense before months left turned to weeks left. The guy who introduced me to Logan's music said that if anyone deserved to live to be a hundred it was Logan, and I can't find myself arguing with that. But at the least he didn't deserve to go the way he did. Being diagnosed with brain cancer, being told that it's in recession and building your life back up before you're told its come back and you're going to die within the year.
Yeah, I know this is a downer, and yeah, you might not want to read the un-fun Logan stuff if you're not in the mood for that, but the guy had so many songs that were just pure, uncut fun. Hopefully before I return to this note I'll get to some of that stuff, but to not cover some of the guy's best music would be blasphemy. I think next I'm going to do a quick biography of Logan and his music with some recommendations and then do one of his quirky, fun songs to break up the sad.
I might also do a re-edit of this post, some of it was rushed and delayed, but I hope you all got the idea.
-And because the original version is way, way better than mine (no duh), here is a linkypoo to that and also a massive archive of most of Logan's music:
Also, now that winter break is here I'm finally writing as much as I want to. I'm trying to get stuff done, primarily Ram's Head, before moving onto hardcore book making on this... but I just got done developing this real cool twist to Detective Antipathy that I'm pretty excited about. The people I've told about it have been pretty blown away mouths agape and whatnot, which is nice because for a while I was kind of down and thinking that it was a dumb idea and maybe scrapping the whole thing...... But yeah. You sons a bitches won't know what hit you. I can't wait for me to get a chance at having people read this baby.
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