MAINE, ANNE SEXTON, AND ESCAPING THE VINES OF DECLINE.

06/13/23

I don’t know where to begin so I will jump in with my concrete shoes like this:

Six something am. I’m back in LA and sipping black cold brew that was just delivered. I have glasses on but vision is still a little blurry. Thats because of the shows. Landed here at midnight last night after a delayed flight out of Boston. We were still out of it from the Depeche Mode European dates. Add some East Coast American Nightmare shows and the last few weeks feel like a year and I’m not sure which time zone to live in. Sobering stadiums to insane hardcore shows… it’s honestly a little psychedelic. Don’t trip. Photo above was taken by Joe Lacy.

Woke up in Portland, Maine yesterday. It was the morning after the show there. As I mentioned before, I used to live in Maine. It went like this: two years in the town of Topsham for 11th and 12th grade, followed by almost two years in Portland for fake college. Then I split to Boston to do American Nightmare. Music was my forever calling and I was patiently stirring in the waiting room. Thankfully life had been cruel enough to give me source material that keeps giving to this day. I had not really been back to Maine since 2001.

The show was beautiful. It was a homecoming. The early AN songs came to life walking those city streets cold and alone with zero hope except the possibility of those songs. No one ever bet on me. I hardly did. To be back there and to feel the love and release in the room was all this was ever made for. You never know what anyone’s going through or why they arrive and the timing of their personal journey. We all have our trials and sliding scales of struggle and sadness and some primal urge to keep showing up against odds that feel so stacked against us and our strength that’s continually tested. I could read those across the crowd that night. We turn our failure into celebration in order to keep moving. It’s why we keep showing up. No other language really speaks for us. It’s what we do.

I’ve received so many messages regarding this catharsis. If you were in these rooms not only for yourself, but for the ones you’ve lost, you were not alone. That’s how it has two edges. We arrive because something is wrong and this helps us to continue on. Not all of us make it through. These souls live on through us and these moments and through the songs that made their time here more bearable for them, any sound that gave them strength. That’s what we do.

I didn’t catch up with anyone. I saw old faces during the show. In the fifteen minutes I took to recover after the set... by the time I emerged the room was near emptied. Maybe it’s better that way. I don’t know what to say post-show and my voice so strained against the music playing over the PA. But everywhere I went, from airport lounges to hotels to restaurants to walking the streets, people said hello. I appreciate that.

So anyway - yesterday morning, before headed back to Boston, I wanted to see a few places. First stop was the State Street Church in Portland, Maine. This is where the first AN show was. I walked into there in 1999 and plead my case to book a show there and the church agreed to let me do it. I think the room was $400 and the only other thing I needed was a vocal PA. My life in music has not stopped since that day. I didn't realize at the time the impact of booking your own first show would have on my life, but it absolutely set a precedent to keep hustling and looking out for yourself. The building looked beautiful.

We then drove the length of Congress Street to where it ended at the Eastern Promenade. This is the street on which I lived when I started the band and where the lyrics to the demo, first seven inch, and part of the second seven inch were written. I love the way the air felt and even more, I loved that I had last been here in such despair and anguish and hopelessness, and now I was here in a better way, with my partner and son and the feeling I had survived, til now, that black sludge that permeated every moment of my teens and twenties. The inability to speak and the frustration of life for those so emotionally entangled in the vines of decline.

Bid Farewell to Portland with gratitude. A city I had only an association of sadness has reemerged with new purpose. I’m proud of my time there and thankful for what it brought out in me. And I’m even more thankful that all of that has translated to meaning anything to anyone else.

We then headed south on our two hour drive to Boston. I had one last stop I needed to make before retuning home. Spiraling through parts of the city I’d never seen, some beautiful and some destitute, the way Boston is, curving along Morrissey Blvd and passing ponds and greenery and the sun shooting through it all… we arrived at Forrest Hills cemetery twenty minutes before the gates were to close. Found a map and wound our way to the hillside where the late Anne Sexton rests. A photo of Anne is featured on the cover of the new American Nightmare record, that we were out playing for, and I wanted to leave one for her, in tribute, in love. I wrote a piece for the Talkhouse recently and wrote about my connection to her work:

On the cover of Dedicated… is a picture of the late Boston poet Anne Sexton on vacation in Italy on the island of Capri. Anne, of course, spent her life battling depression and bipolar disorder and sadly lost the war to suicide at the age of 45 in 1974. As a poet from Boston at age 44 who knows what it feels like to smile in a photograph in a futile attempt to normalize and outrun yourself… I feel a deep connection with her work and how she tried. I think a lot of people who connect with my music are trying. 

As I referenced earlier in this piece… not all of us make it through and we do what we do for them. These souls live on. In the next few days I will write about the shows in Boston and Beverly.. for now I will end with this piece by Anne Sexton. I hope you will enjoy.

More soon…