Warning: personal bullshit to come.
I misheard a lyric tonight. It was from an album I listened to non-stop in high school and college, so I’m surprised I misremembered and misheard it.
Due to random playlist serendipity, I was reminded of Dredg’s El Cielo while driving to band practice. I put on the album on the way to the rehearsal space and continued listening on the way home and while walking Mae tonight. Although this has to be one of my most frequently listened to albums of all time, I don’t think it was until now that I realized how influential it was on me. It has many of the elements of art rock, experimental rock, post-rock (ish) that consumed my taste as I grew away from the post-hardcore, post-punk, and emo I listened to as a teenager. El Cielo has rhythmic complexity. It’s sparse at times. It has brilliant use of reverb and delay and crunch that are all reflected in the kind of guitar tones I chase now. It’s got equal parts groove and triumph, melancholy and serenity, beauty and strangeness.
You should probably stop reading now and just listen to El Cielo instead of finishing this blog post.
I remember always finding the last track, The Canyon Behind Her, uplifting. The choral arrangement, rich harmonies, and full sound always felt like the relief of coming home after a strange journey. If you know me well, you’ll know that I don’t care much for lyrics. Even when I have nearly every word of an album memorized, despite the fact that I haven’t listened to it in at least a decade, possibly 15 years, I couldn’t tell you what they are about.
So today, walking the dog, breaking through the surface of the water for that final track, entering the final stretch, I heard:
Though half of me is gone, the loathsome part is left I cannot find the other half
The actual lyric is “the lonesome part is left”– which definitely would have resonated with me from 2002-2009 when I listened to this album at least weekly. But this time, I heard something that felt much more like the Jason of 2017-2023.
In particular, I’m thinking about the summer and fall of 2021. It was dark. I felt awful “re-entering” the world a bit at that time. I felt deeply unsure of my role in life– at home, at work, and with my friends. I had a deep spiral of anxiety and lack of confidence and low self worth. I wrote about my spiraling constantly in DayOne– I felt it, I knew it was wrong, I knew it was hurting me and people around me, but I was helpless to stop it.
I felt like those misheard lyrics– half of me was gone, the loathsome part is left, and I cannot find the other half.
I am a different person today. But I think about that time quite a bit. I worry it could return, and I worry a bit that I am not really sure how I got past it. It just… took almost a full year. A year during which I lost 40 pounds (which I regained, then lost again), threw myself into new hobbies, started traveling more, meditated, wrote, went to therapy, and a whole lot of other things. But still, from about May 2021 until October 2022 I was a mess.
I’m glad I found the other half.