Blue Haired Ladies and a Life Alone…
31 Days of Brannan – Day 5
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Today’s Playlist – Blue Haired Lady
(From the forthcoming Always, Then and Now due July 15th!)
So Jay released this about a week or so ago. My granddaughter kept prodding me to watch/listen to it. Yeah, she’s an über Jay fan too. My doing. She couldn’t help herself, really. I play him nearly all the time in the car. She knows the lyrics to his songs nearly as well as I do (though she refuses to sing the third verse of ‘On All Fours” – but not because I prohibit her from doing so, it’s her personal choice to avoid that F-bomb loaded verse). Anyway, she kept telling me to listen to it. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to – über Jay fan here myself, remember?
So what was the hold up?
Simply put: I just wanted to savor something new from him.
I knew the new work was set to drop on the fifteenth of this month so I knew time was ticking away when I’d get all of them into my little mitts. I did watch/listen to Always, Then and Now on his YouTube channel – so there was a small precedent. But for some reason the ‘official’ video release seemed something bigger. So this is a write up after watching it just once. Sort of my first impressions from the moments just after I’ve absorbed it.
It’s a touching piece. There’s a gentle maturity to his work that I am really enthused about (not that his earlier work was juvenile in any way – far from it), but there is a gentility that is threading through his work lately. Even in his choice of covers that he peppers on his youtube channel. He seems to be contemplating things that appear outside of his realm of personal experience. In Blue Haired Lady he gives us a very personal tale that has weight in the longevity of her life. The imagery of the video supports this with the books strewn on the brown and withered field where he is simply singing the song.
This is one of the elements I love about his work. The simplicity of how he brings it to us, allowing the words and melody to take center stage but the visuals are carefully thought out and support the strength of the tale he choses to share with us. There’s solid craft there – not only musically (LOVE the string arrangements, btw) but the overall movement of the tale he is telling. The pace, the evolution and the circular momentum of this woman’s life and her impending demise. How she choses to accept her passing – realizing that it is something that while surrounded by her loved one’s is something she alone will experience (as we all shall). In this is the cautionary moment, the point which her continual thought that she never wanted to die alone to the point where she realizes that death was nothing but a singular experience.
The lens flares were used to great effect here, never becoming a nuisance – indeed, it supports the whole ‘light’ that many have said they see when they’ve experienced a near death experience.
Death is never an easy thing to discuss. The fear of the unknown, of the potential pain involved, the end of one’s existence is not something we all want to contemplate.
Brannan’s tale is emotive without becoming maudlin. If this is an example of what the new work holds in store I am confident that we are in for a stellar release from him. This one may supplant my current favorite ‘Rob Me Blind’ which has become my most played album on my musical devices.
Can’t wait for the 15th to get here.
The Always, Then & Now Tour…
Sidebar: I bought my Deluxe Package from Jay Brannan’s store for the tour he’s embarking on now. The cost of the deluxe package is $40 and you get quite a bit for it. There are other packages as well. But that isn’t why I did it. I did it because I truly feel indebted to this man of words and music. I am enriched by his musical musings and experiences. I am emboldened to discover that I am not alone in my dreams and fears. And for that I will always support him and do what I can to spread the word.
The deluxe tour package from Jay Brannan’s merchandise store – get this or many other offerings from his site.
Please check out his site with links for his upcoming shows. I am definitely a late comer to the Brannan bandwagon whenever he pulls through my city. But now that I am going this year, I am making it a goal never to miss when he swings through town. I hope you take advantage of the opportunity as well. Also be sure to check out his web store at the following link.
Jay’s Website – jaybrannan.com
Everywhere There’s Statues…
31 Days of Brannan – Day 4
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Today’s Playlist – Everywhere There’s Statues
Happy Fourth of July to all the US peeps out there!
There are three songs I am looking forward to (well hoping, actually) that Jay performs on this tour.
They are:
- Rob Me Blind (for sentimental reasons – see first day’s post)
- Denmark (for pretty much the same reasons as number one)
- Everywhere There’s Statues (today’s selection)
As we Yanks in the US celebrate the country’s founding, I was drawn to this song in particular. Jay muses with many things in this song, playing with common threads that no matter where you are in the world brings the question of what constitutes freedom front and center.
I love the imagery in this song. It is so poetic and riveting in both scope and appeal. It’s a mental floss moment in songwriting:
It’s like looking for hay in a stack of hypodermics
Shooting up grey through the cracks in the yellow brick road
And everywhere there’s statues with their arms open wide
Surrounded by fences that you, that you can’t get inside
That’s brilliant bloody writing, that is. Simplistic in nature yet evoking sentimental imagery that we can all commonly share. Four lines that have a great impact — questioning how we truly view the world and how we sadly often trade security for liberty in this day of casual terrorism. I can’t help thinking as we watch FIFA going on and the image of Cristo Redentor at the top of Mount Corcovado in Rio De Janeiro. Arms open wide (just as Jay calls to question) but there are so many oppressed peoples of the favelas there that will never find a path to a better life.
Heady words and a heady prospect. I often liken it to trying to explain the lofty goals as humans we set for ourselves only to fall well short of the mark. If we had to explain that to beings not from our world, an alien race per se, what would they see in our bold and charismatically infused words? Would they see the strive for that universal acceptance and utopian ideal? Or would they see us for the charlatans that many of us are? All words with very little bite to them?
The verse in the song that I love to sing along with kind of sums it up for me –
Sub-normal people do supernatural things
In a world full of demons with white feathered wings
I feel like I’m open hearted, but it’s a broken range we’re on
I know I’m not the only one asking where have all the cowboys gone
Can’t one of these cowboys come rescue me?
I need a little bit of rope n ride to keep me on my feet(to chorus)
I even allude to these lines of Jay’s in my first novel (coming soon) in that my world deals with the concept of Angels – the potential angelic ideal in all of us, and how sadly we often can’t bring ourselves to care enough to do something. Oh, we can acknowledge the horror, the inhumanity of it all, but how many of us are called to action to do something?
But it is Jay’s bridge in the song that carries the greatest emotional and reasoned impact in the song – for me, it elevates it and gives it its true power.
Face down on the hardwood floor
In one more empty corridor
I’m all alone in these halls
All is fair in love and war
If I can’t find an open door
Then I’ll start taking out walls
I’m face down on the hardwood floor
And not a soul with which to be
If this craving’s one to ignore
Then someone tell me what the fuck a soul is for
You go, Jay. I fucking love it when he kicks me in the emotive and mental parts all at the same time. This song is brilliant and works on so many levels. None the least of which is the orchestrated version on Rob Me Blind. I love the string arrangement in it. Very elegant touch in the final chorus – heightening the production value immensely from this little musical segue. Lovely arrangements, simply moving.
While Jay doesn’t travel with a band, because it would probably be a logistical nightmare for him as he does 99% of his work all by himself, I know I will have to supply the stirring string arrangement myself if he performs this one live. It’s how I’ll hear it in my head. This is bang on one of my absolute favorites songs of his.
I am a fan of his because his music makes me question, leads me to ponder, gives me a good mental flossing and prods me along to reevaluate how I see things. It’s like putting on glasses where things were simply so out of focus but you just plodded along anyway until you put them on and suddenly you realize the details in life you may have been missing all along.
Brilliant, brilliant work!
The Always, Then & Now Tour…
Sidebar: I bought my Deluxe Package from Jay Brannan’s store for the tour he’s embarking on now. The cost of the deluxe package is $40 and you get quite a bit for it. There are other packages as well. But that isn’t why I did it. I did it because I truly feel indebted to this man of words and music. I am enriched by his musical musings and experiences. I am emboldened to discover that I am not alone in my dreams and fears. And for that I will always support him and do what I can to spread the word.
The deluxe tour package from Jay Brannan’s merchandise store – get this or many other offerings from his site.
Please check out his site with links for his upcoming shows. I am definitely a late comer to the Brannan bandwagon whenever he pulls through my city. But now that I am going this year, I am making it a goal never to miss when he swings through town. I hope you take advantage of the opportunity as well. Also be sure to check out his web store at the following link.
Jay’s Website – jaybrannan.com
I wanna be a Casalinga…
31 Days of Brannan – Day 3
Today’s Playlist – ‘Casalinga’
(“Housewife” in Italia)
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So why the Italian version? Well, being a classically trained opera singer I sing quite a bit in Italian. I just loved that he sang it to an Italian audience in their own language. Such a lovely gesture.
To be honest, I wasn’t so sure what to pick this time around. Not because I ran out of steam about all things Brannan. No where near that – I swear. I can wax on about Jay’s body of work for quite some time and not tire of the subject matter (and I say that will every ounce of ‘non-stalker’ voice I can put to it). Just a very sincere fanboy.
No, I chose this because there is literally so many ways I can take this whole endeavor – my 31 Days of Brannan. You see, Brannan’s work touches on so many elements of a shared journey that as gay men we sort of have to work on making our own way. Not that everyone on the planet doesn’t have to do that to some degree, but for gay men, we have the whole pervasive perception by the straight world that we are swimming upstream – we push against the norm, we are outside the mainstream. Reminders at every turn of how much we are not like everyone else. Yet, we often have to use their terms, their metaphors to explain our world. It can be both challenging as it can be uplifting when we can draw parallels between our commonality with the mainstream world.
My hubby railed about this just today – two beefy looking guys getting married in one of those states that just got the ‘go-ahead’ to git ‘er done. That wasn’t what rattled the hubby’s cage. No, what did was that they were there in their flannel shirts (they looked like lumberjacks – big bear kinda men, but one of them had a typical wedding bouquet of flowers in his hand with long flowing ribbons). This irked my husband in more ways than one. Not because he wouldn’t deny anyone who wanted to do that, but because he felt that it was probably driven by gays having to pick up the definition of what was supposed to take place from their straight counterparts. Why were we defining ourselves by those standards? Aren’t we supposed to be defining it for ourselves? What our marriage equality will truly look like and how we’ll take those elements and make them our own. That’s what he was speaking to, and I got it. I did. But to each his own, I say.
This is a recurring motif throughout Housewife. The duality of wanting those ‘straight’ married bliss concepts but constantly challenging the listener to grapple with why a man would want to be a housewife and that there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it.
Simply put, there isn’t.
Even if the commonplace events Jay speaks of within the piece, mirror the experiences of our straight married counterparts. I just LOVE that Jay does this within his work. The double entendres, the witty bon mots, the dry sense of humor at times. I’ve always thought of him as a modern day bard. I don’t bandy that word around loosely either.
Brannan is a bard. Plain and simple. And I count myself lucky to live at a time when someone like him can come along and do what he does so brilliantly. To revel in the moment – as he creates.
I had the same giddiness back in the late seventies when I heard Donna Summer was gonna release another big selling album. As a gay teen boy I was all about Donna back in the day (withhold judgement as I met her and those horrible rumors about what was attributed to her were completely false – she was a very decent human being). Anyway, the giddy feeling I used to get whenever Donna was gonna drop some new project is EXACTLY what I feel when Jay announces he’s got something on the horizon. Total gay boy freak session for at least an hour – heady, and simply happy that something wonderful is about to come my way.
What I think is bang over the top in Housewife is that it works on so many levels. It holds up the banality of a relationship in a new romantic light (I mean, who really has that romantic gushy feeling about washing dishes – yet in Jay’s vision it is simply rendered and you can’t think of a more beautiful expression of devotion to the man you love. Unless of course, it’s doing his laundry which Jay is more than happy to acknowledge as an option on the table) — that even the most mundane of things have a beauty all on their own. It speaks of hopes and dreams, of sharing meals and a future. Things that I know I pondered myself from the time I could acknowledge my attraction to boys. I wanted those things in my life. Housewife’s greatest accomplishment is the simplicity in it’s threaded revelations of what it means to be in a loving and supportive relationship. One which when he reaches, you’re there. When you falter, he’s there.
The beauty of Brannan’s prose in this is that each element is simplistic and comforting all at the same time. It speaks (to my way of thinking at any rate)
Sure there was the whole sense of adventure in the relationship. That’s always the sexy part – or so you think if you’ve never been in one. What I love about Jay’s take on it is that its the longevity that the song speaks to – how valued those dreams are. Yeah, I definitely had those thoughts. Mostly it was the being close, of breathing him in. The simplest things were held far more magical qualities to them than any of the wildly erotic times. Okay, maybe that was not wholly true. I mean sex was definitely an important part of a new relationship – especially as a young man who sought the affections of another boy.
I wanted so many things in a man that I didn’t feel I had. Things that I admired in other boys (usually of the straight variety). Of course in my day if you were gay it was automatically assumed you were about as fey as they come. I never did fit into that mold, but I wasn’t a football playing hetero-acting stud either. Then again, I never really liked the whole ‘straight-acting’ moniker. Why is it that we have to appear to be anything other than what we are.
I think that this is what is at the emotive core of Housewife. Love that simply is. Love that endures, love to strive and hope for, to dream about and to push toward achieving.
Though I think it is in the simple repeated question of “what’s so wrong with that?” that is one of the most powerful tools within the song. Gently intoning and asking the audience to wrap your head around why making such a simple admission that you would want to take on the role of a Housewife holds no negativity, indeed it is probably one of the greatest gestures of love to find the exuberance in doing laundry, making guacamole or hell, even the desire to have his baby (which in this day and age may not be too far off a prospect).
This is one of the songs that truly gets me misty eyed when I hear it. It has every element of what I feel about my life with my own husband. There is no one else I’d rather wash dishes with or for, no one who I wouldn’t want to wash his clothes. His needs always come before my own. As mine do with him. He’s proven that to me time and again. So yeah, Housewife is a brilliant song, encapsulating and distilling for me all of the things I hold dear in my own relationship with my husband of 20 years. He is my best friend, the love of my life and the life of my love.
Yet it is Jay’s last words of Housewife that haunt me terribly, that never fail to make me a bit teary eyed. Knowing how Jay has commented in various live video performances and youtube postings about how lonely he feels at times, it tears me up that someone who brings such an emotive and creative light to my life via his work hasn’t found some of this for himself. I don’t know Jay. Being a performer of the stage since I was 8 and now coming up on my half-centennial mark, that is a number of years to put on a face and sell yourself to the masses. So I have to concede that I don’t know how much of his life is show and how much is an actual representation. My takeaway is that Jay is incredibly honest (insofar as he is willing to share – which seems to be quite a bit) about some of the intimate details (without being salacious) of his life. If that is the case, then I do hold out the day when he might alter the lines to let his audience know he has someone special and worthy of his love. Maybe even changing those last moments to reflect a change in status.
For someone who gives so much of himself, of sharing what he does with his social media accounts, I would be over the moon if there came a time when he would have what he speaks of in Housewife (if that’s what he truly wants). His work brings such an emotive and rich core into my world – substantiating and giving a creative voice to things I concern myself with, if only to know I’m not crazy, what I want is what Jay seems to echo – what everyone else seems to want.
Love, friendship, devotion – getting as much as you put into it and if you’re lucky, you just might get more than you bargained for. And life is sweet when you do.
The Always, Then & Now Tour…
Sidebar: I bought my Deluxe Package from Jay Brannan’s store for the tour he’s embarking on now. The cost of the deluxe package is $40 and you get quite a bit for it. There are other packages as well. But that isn’t why I did it. I did it because I truly feel indebted to this man of words and music. I am enriched by his musical musings and experiences. I am emboldened to discover that I am not alone in my dreams and fears. And for that I will always support him and do what I can to spread the word.
The deluxe tour package from Jay Brannan’s merchandise store – get this or many other offerings from his site.
Please check out his site with links for his upcoming shows. I am definitely a late comer to the Brannan bandwagon whenever he pulls through my city. But now that I am going this year, I am making it a goal never to miss when he swings through town. I hope you take advantage of the opportunity as well. Also be sure to check out his web store at the following link.
Jay’s Website – jaybrannan.com
The Half-Boyfriend… we’ve all been there…
31 Days of Brannan… Day 2
Today’s Playlist: Half-Boyfriend
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So here’s the song that crystallized it for me. It made me a bonafide Brannan-ite (?), Jay-Fan (??), I’m gonna need help with that one. There’s gotta be a marketing moniker for Jay’s fans out there – The Jay Babes? I’ll keep thinking on it.
Anywho- Half-Boyfriend.
Yeah, man or woman, we’ve all been there. The guy you can’t possibly believe you’ve hooked up with but he’s hella hot in his own bad boy way, treats you like a second class citizen at times, but damned if he isn’t either great in the sack or will bust your balls with some romantic (and completely unforeseen) gesture that just makes you have one of those ‘well fuck me running’ moments. So you give in yet again, even if your brain keeps screaming behind that thick pane of glass that separates your head from your heart telling you to give him the boot but you just can’t cause he’s one hell of a number and the other guys and gals are all thinking how you so scored with that one.
Am I right?
Now, I can’t say with any certainty that that is what Jay experienced (I mean, I don’t know the man, personally) but the song had enough common truth in it that that’s what I took away from it.
For me his name was Ron. And lord did he fuck up my life for a while. He was the son of a friend that my mom knew back when she was a kid in her old neighborhood. Small world right? I mean the guy’s family moved away when my mom was still young. But somehow fate had a hand in it and Ron turned out to be gay and so did I – what were the chances of that? Say nothing of his finding his way to me?
Stupidly, I took it as a sign. The universe was saying we should be together… (yeah, not so much).
We did a lot of shit that was technically illegal (how we got away with it I’ll never know). I was in my late teens (just outta high school) and just yearning for some man on man love. Ron was energetic, he was built, he was – okay, he was a little quirky when it came to the bedroom (at least at that stage in my life). Ron was far more sexually adventurous than I was at that stage but I went along for the ride (save the dumb-ass remarks ’cause you ain’t thinkin’ anything I haven’t thought or said to myself). So I got into shit I probably shoulda saved until I was a bit more mature. But it didn’t go that way. I wanted the bad boy adventure he promised – it was wild, it was certainly dangerous, and it was flat out stupid.
Ron and I were really rarely on the same page – probably why Jay’s lines from Half-Boyfriend hit me over the emotive head rather hard:
I could give a million reasons
Why we should not be friends
Our moods change like the seasons
My mood ends your mood begins and
You’re a tease, you’re a cockblocker
You’re a loud mouth bitch, and a big talker,
But that’s okay.
You’ll grow up someday.
They are certainly what I latched onto and took away as ‘preach it, brotha…’ because in those few lines he took me right back to those heady and wild and completely stupid days of young love.
Oh, and a sidebar here – I should come clean about my fangirl stalker write up of the day before. I tend to write with tongue firmly planted in cheek. So while I have nothing but complete admiration and am often awestruck by Brannan’s prose, I am hardly the wild and nut-ball cray-cray I prattled on about in yesterday’s post. I was just having a bit of fun. I can be off that way sometimes. Partially why I get it when Jay riffs esoterically on his YouTube channel. When I am in the doldrums and can’t figure out how to get the creative juices flowing I just listen to a few of his mental musings and it’s like splashing cool water all over my tired brain. If brains could gain any benefits from such an exercise. But, well, hopefully you get my meanin’…
So back to Ron the bad-boy Half-Boyfriend in my life:
So I finally got smart, or should I say my friends and family got smarter than me at that point and made me see the light. This after a bad drug induced moment where Ron went completely off the rails and I had to, with the assistance of his parents who were then living in Seattle (we were in San Diego) have him committed to County Mental Health so he could recuperate and get some much needed help. Turns out there were a whole lot of issues I didn’t want to even look at then that came out in the wash from that little drug induced scene.
Looking back on it now, I just shake my head and thank the universe that I smartened up. In a way, I kind of thank Ron for being the whack job that he was. I got my bad boy phase through early on in life. Which led me to the man who I would spend the next ten years of my life with (and no, that’s not the hubby of 20 years that I am married to now). But more on boyfriend number 2 when we get to the post about the song that reminds me of him. I’ll let you all know when that is.
Now for a completely esoteric moment from Jay – I love it when he just does something fearless… never fails to make me smile.
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JAY’S TOUR DATES – Please check them out and catch his show in your area…
31 Days of Jay – Robbing Me Blind…
Kicking off 31 Days of Brannan…
Robbing Me Blind
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Disclaimer – Okay, first off – I can be a bit of a fanboy when it comes to Jay Brannan. No, strike that – I’m more of a teen gay boy with a darkly amorous affection for my pop hero. No wait, it’s worse than that. I am a gushing teenaged Japanese Hentai fangirl when it comes to Jay Brannan. But it’s compartmentalized. I swear. I am a happily (ahem, older) married gay man (it’s even legal) whose hubby just shakes his head but allows me my teen-girl giddiness over all things Brannan.
And there’s good reason too.
You see, I am a musician (classically trained so my genre of choice is not the same as Jay’s but I’m cool with that. In fact, I am better than cool with it.) Jay is my creative escape. He’s been my go-to when I want to become inspired. And aside from his music (or maybe because of it) I have come to appreciate him in the best possible light – I mean, he’s one sexy guy (why hasn’t someone snatched that up has got to be one of the biggest damned mysteries in life). But aside from the way the camera obviously loves him, Mr. Brannan has a brilliant mind and is an incredible wordsmith. As an author known to do a bit of word smithing of my own, Jay is bang on brilliant with the prose. Nothing short of it.
So why the 31 days of all things Brannan?
Well. I suppose I should fess up here and explain how Jay’s world of all things darkly amorous (“the constant stream of longing” as E. M. Forester put it so brilliantly in Maurice) entered my world.
I found Jay as a reference on some blog back in 2008 for up and coming out gay artists. I was in a particularly bored mood with the musical offerings out there. I mean as gay artists went I had Levi Kraus (who I still love immensely). and Ivri Lieder (another fave), but then I happened upon Jay’s first offerings and a small write up on some blog that I can’t even find any more extolling the amazing gifts and talents that Mr. Brannan had at his disposal. The write-up so intrigued me that I immediately went out and bought whatever I could find online from him (which if I remember at the time was precious little – I think one album (the fiery and brilliant goddamned) and maybe a single or two. So I paid (yes, paid – because as a fellow artist and musician I just can’t see my way to NOT support them monetarily for their endeavors) for whatever I could get my digital hands on.
And then, horror of horrors – they languished for three years unplayed. {Insert mental and emotive flogging here – I still do it to this day over this incredibly stupid period in my life). I liken it to being a parched man working his way out of the desert and being offered the tallest glass of cool crystal clear water and then setting it on the counter and not taking so much as a sip. Yeah, dip-shit moron over here: party of one.
Anyway – so there was that ostensibly bleak artistic period where I immersed myself in my classical world of operas and the like and Jay languished (paid for, mind you) on my iPod, iPhone, and iTunes.
I was living in San Diego at the time and that part of California can suck any artistry right out of a person. So flash forward three years (can it be a flash anything if it takes 3 years?). I relocated with the hubby, daughter and granddaughter to San Francisco (where I truly belong). I’m in the gym and I had put together a song list of out gay artists to keep me motivated as I did my workout because we’re gay and it’s the law.
So of course I had Jay lumped in with the techno and dance stuff (I think by now I had a plethora of gay men crooning in my ear one way or another). If you were gay, a male then you got on the playlist – it was just that simple.
And then ‘Housewife‘ played and I simply stopped… (I wasn’t on the treadmill or that could’ve been disastrous).
But the music just caught me and I was riveted to a world that I had grown up in. Here was a song that spoke of dreams and desires that I had worked my whole life to achieve and it was as if he’d plucked them right out of my existence. I know, a common truth when done right can do this in a song. Musician myself, remember? So I get it but it was that I was completely in my groove of I think Colton Ford or Johnny McGovern or hell, it might’ve been Jason Walker wailing like the righteous black woman he so wants to be (you go Jason… I am still a fan). The point was that I was in dance land groove from hell when Jay’s Housewife kicked me square in the emotive rubber parts. I remember sitting down on a weight bench and just listened to the song.
It was a transformative moment in that, within those words I suddenly found the passion to write some of my own.
Now I have always been the type of artist that doesn’t feel lessened by the greatness of someone else’s talent. Indeed, instead I am inspired to achieve other things that I may have only mused about inwardly, never giving them any hope of solidity in my life. But Housewife changed that. I found I wanted to add my own voice to the gay man’s journey for love and acceptance.
So I started to practice my craft, started honing in on what I wanted to accomplish – how I wanted to develop my characters and watch them take root and grow. While Jay had music as his venue I was turning to writing novels as my path. And words matter, they have weight, they have purpose. I read voraciously any and all things I could get my hands on (so thankful that all of the books can live on one e-reader device).
Jay’s music became the soundtrack for that. His YouTube channel gave me emotive inspiration to try other things. And for that I am truly grateful. And at my age, turning the train around ain’t such an easy thing to do. Old dog’s and all that…
Anyway, I get a big ol’ shit eating grin whenever one artist inspires another. That’s such a cool thing when it happens and everyone can admit it and accept it for the great gift it is and grow and (hopefully) prosper. Well, it is in my book anyway.
So… Rob Me Blind.
Here is the crux of why I am focusing on this song as my first of 31 days of Brannan. Rob Me Blind is a brilliant album in it’s own right. It’s thought provoking, it’s definitely emotive, and profound in how Jay imbues with such clarity and precision the darker qualities and aspects of love and loss. It would be simplistic to say that Jay’s work borders on maudlin. I don’t see it that way at all. Sure there are some dark things permeating every aspect of it. But in that I see such hope and striving for acceptance – and in this age of marriage equality where so many of us are literally fighting to establish legal protections and hopefully acceptance of our relationships, Brannan’s recent works are completely evocative of the time.
Rob Me Blind is also special to me in that it gave me the gift of my main character in my current story that I’ve been slaving away on for the past six months.
Rob Me Blind was playing in the car as I drove back from picking up lunch for the family as I sat at the intersection to get onto Hwy 101 – I suddenly had a vision of a young teenaged boy, out, gay and terrified to be noticed. Keeping to the shadows in high school because that was how he figured he survived – if no one noticed him at all. Only he never thought in a million years that the star quarterback of his high school football team had been eyeing him for the past two years in school – too afraid to come close, to seek him out. And when he does, Elliot (my shy out gay kid) is not the same ever again.
His boyfriend is magical to him, and he doesn’t know why he says that he is Elliot’s and Elliot is his. He thinks he’ll get through it and enjoy it while it lasts – always an eye to when it will fall apart (never really accepting that when Marco (the QB) says it’s real he means just that). I wanted the jock in the story for once to be the solid one – the one who never wavers, and the out gay kid to be the doubter. Rob Me Blind had a couple of lines in the song that completely distilled that for me. That song gave my first novel it’s emotive core.
From there out the story developed quite quickly. It took me a number of months to hone and whittle down to what it is today. Rob Me Blind gave me something more than entertainment. It gave me these two boy’s voices. Voices I had to put down on digital paper. Voices that sprang from those words of another brilliant writer. Voices I couldn’t deny. So in many respects, my Marco and Elliot owe their literary lives to another artist altogether. And for that I am deeply grateful. Whenever I needed a emotive recharge – this song provided it and got me through.
Writing can be a very painful, cathartic process (even when it’s fiction) – probably because we write what we know (if we’re smart about it) and that can be a very intimidating prospect. You’re putting your shit out there for others to read and comment on – and that can feel very daunting to the point were you can become discouraged to go on. It’s frightening, it’s dangerous in that as you write you discover things long buried and tucked away. But somehow, Jay’s rich tapestry of words (particularly on this album) got me through. I even have Elliot as a fanboy of Jay’s in the book. It just seemed fitting when you have so many teenaged kids (okay mostly girls, but the gay boys, if they were anything like I was back then, are in there I am sure would’ve been just as enamored with someone like Jay who spoke to them and of their dreams and nightmares). So I get to live out my teenaged dreams vicariously through Elliot. And I get to say ‘thank you’ to Jay for being the incredible and brilliant artist he is.
As an older gay man I am comforted in seeing such brilliance and poise come in one amazing package. It gives me hope that our collective gay history is in such capable hands to keep the story going.
I’ve never had the opportunity to see Jay perform live – due to schedule conflicts and the like (my daughter bought me tickets this summer for my birthday present which follows two days after he rolls through SF this time around) so I am looking forward to the prospect of seeing him for the first time. I have the Live at Eddie’s Attic album and I’ve seen the numerous video postings of his live performances on his YouTube channel so I know I am in for one helluva treat. I couldn’t think of any better way to ring in another year of slogging through this thing we call life.
I have a line in my book that is my meager attempt to capture the emotive quality that Jay expresses in his work – at a particularly poignant moment where Marco reveals to Elliot the way his love has history when he thinks of Elliot and how it has weight in his life for everything that is his greatest love – Elliot is overwhelmed with absolute wonder that someone so confident and successful in who he is could even take notice of a boy like him that they end up in a ‘tangle of limbs and leaves, of kisses and unspoken dreams…‘ on the forest floor behind Elliot’s home.
Jay’s world to me is all of that – especially the kisses and unspoken dreams we all carry in life. I can’t wait until we see what future melilifulous dreams Jay has in store for us. Hey the new album drops in 13 days so it won’t be long…
Hit up his store over at HelloMerch. There’s some great items on offer and it will support this guy in getting his message out there to the masses.
So begins my 31 days of all things Brannan.
Please check out his site (jaybrannan.com) and be sure to check out his touring dates (posted to his site and on Facebook). He does all of his own promotions and gets the fans to help out wherever and whenever we can. I just want to do my part to support such an amazing musical talent and a gift to us all.