The Bowery Presents
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Hole
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Show & Tell
ojovivo
★
d e v o n
roma★
bliss lane
No title available
𓃗
taylor price
NASA
KIROKAZE
No title available
One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
gracie abrams
Noah Kahan
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from India
seen from Malaysia
seen from Brazil
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Norway
seen from Germany
seen from United States
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@solomon-revisited
"I know that the life of the Neanderthal was perilous, and hard, but I also know that if the world of the Neanderthal does not in some way call to something very near your core, then you and I are cut from different cloth. My cloth is embroidered along its hem with an N, which, do I need to spell it out, stands for "Neanderthal"."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
AUGUST 21 - FOR DENISE MATTHEWS
Stay down when something strikes me down / head off the hounds of chaos at the pass / self-medicate through all my waking hours / gulp down venom by the glass
Head down into the cave / where the white smoke swirls / B-movie demon faces / frighten little boys and girls
But I am not afraid, / and that's what's wrong with me / I am not afraid, I am not afraid / I am not afraid when I should be
Crash hard against any surface that will take me / each time the pain gets worse, increase the dose / hear darkness winging like a falcon sent from hell / stand my ground against it, end up comatose
Jump wild-eyed into the river / pockets full of stones / miss the set call, tear the phone out of the wall / I'm going down alone
But I am not afraid, / and that's what wrong with me / I am not afraid, I am not afraid / I am not afraid when I should be
"A version of this was tracked in Boston at the session where we captured the "High Hawk Season" men's chorus, but it's unreleased. Denise Matthews was better known to the world as Vanity, Prince's protégé from the pre-Purple Rain days; strikingly beautiful and intensely charismatic, she found, in fame and success, something darker and more dangerous than the life she'd hoped for. Another way of putting this is to say that Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe remembers Matthews as the person who taught him how to freebase cocaine. In 1994, after a kidney transplant following several overdoses, she found her way free from addiction and devoted her life to Jesus Christ. In a clip from 2001, on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, she says, with great passion: "I praise the Lord because He lifted me up from the dead." "If you're going through Hell, keep going", they sometimes say in rooms where survivors gather. And so we do."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
i'm not awake enough to type up the entry for tonight because it's unreleased, so i'll type it and the lyrics as well out tomorrow... it's a good un
"I was in Portland; I looked up Quinn, who I'd been told by a hairdresser was still alive. He was not. Back in my hotel, I wrote this in the middle of the night without an instrument to hand, just writing something for later. I remembered Quinn, visiting me in my apartment on the other side of the river in late winter of 1986. Just casual friends getting to know each other a little better. Pictures of Quinn from that time exist but of me there is only one. We were not terribly close but I felt his absence, and the distance from then to now, and I traced a little of that distance on the page: as I say—for later."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
"After 1997 the love songs thin out a little as I become attracted to knottier themes—death, struggle, alienation—and after Tallahassee they complete their journey from common to uncommon to rare. They're like desert rain with me now, but when I wrote love songs all the time I had multiple defenses of the form in reserve in case anybody wanted to argue the point with me. This title germinated in my notebook for several years, from around the time of Get Lonely, waiting for its moment. Its earliest draft was a song in memory of the Aurora monster models of the 1970s, and it rhymed "moon" with Creature from the Black Lagoon, but only the foolish would imagine it was any less a love song."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
"A fairly in-the-moment confessional song from when I had to let our tour bus go on ahead of us for a couple of days in 2009 while I stayed behind in Los Angeles, trying to get over some ghost malaise I couldn't shake. I lay down on the sidewalk to take a picture of myself next to Liza Minnelli's star on the Walk of Fame. In the picture, my eyes are closed, and I'm thinking about a club not far from there where I spent time in the 1980s. Bowie's "Life on Mars?" was envisioned as a song for crooners to sing, and this is my version of that: an openly sentimental song with room for a big voice and heavy chops. To date, either the crooners haven't noticed it, or they're just chicken."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
"Prior to outlining this book I hadn't realised there were two songs involving masks on All Eternals Deck; had I noticed it while writing, all its songs would have featured a mask, and I would have tried to title the album Mask 2, since Bauhaus already has an album called Mask. My manager and Merge Records, then, would likely have raised the following objections: First, that although Mask 2 redirects, on Wikipedia, to a forgotten sequel called Son of the Mask, it's still a sequel to a Jim Carrey movie, and people who own the rights to Jim Carrey movies tend to have armies of lawyers just itching for work. Second, that there was also a Peter Bogdanovich movie called Mask, about a disfigured teenager named Rocky, who dies at the end of the movie, and that people therefore might take Mask 2 as a tasteless joke. Preemptively and retroactively I wish to reject both objections and suggest that the real reason Mask 2 is rejected involves the failure of Taboo VI to chart when it was released. This is cowardly thinking. Mask 2 is an entirely different record."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
i love getting emails
my partner: reverse situation, your favourite band is being sold to you?
"I've told this story before: I was no older than five, and possibly only four, when I announced to my parents that I knew who I would marry when I grew up: Judy Garland. They exchanged a "he doesn't know" look, and as gently as they could told me she was dead. I cried; then as now I cry easily. Her story is a story of child exploitation and mine isn't, but I share with her knowledge of the sound a mask makes when it slips from its wearer's fave and hits the floor. All Eternals Deck is, like Heretic Pride, an album in which I reached out to figures whose stories I carry with me. Hers is one of the oldest, and dearest, to me."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
another weaving wednesday, another old favorite from 2023.
inspired by my favorite album by the mountain goats, the sunset tree.
if all goes according to plan i will have most of my fave tmg CDs soon.................
[for context: the lyrics here are printed with slashes rather than line breaks at certain points on the page]
"The slashes: They were in the original document when I dug it up for this book. The text itself I like a lot, but at the moment I am more interested in the slashes, because I'm pretty particular about how lines sit on the page. I don't abbreviate "yr" for "your"—I avoid shorthand almost everywhere. Most likely I did it here to fit the whole thing on one page, and possibly I will, in my future but your past, get a polite letter from my editor asking politely if we might adopt a similar strategy for other lyrics that run long. To this I will reply, just as politely: No, we might not. Charles Bronson rose from poverty most of us can't even contemplate to study under Strasberg. To him alone do I dedicate this song, slashes in its working draft and all."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
"I have this abiding idea about the "pure" song, even knowing that all notions of purity are nonsense—but allowing the conceit for the moment: The pure song does not exist on the page, and exists only by default in the recorded artifact. The pure song can only exist in the air, where its phrases do and don't have punctuation: We hear the breath pauses and intuit commas, semicolons, question marks, et cetera, and share these momentary inflections in the space of the song, but that's the only space where the meaning of the song can be fixed. "Fixed" here is no less difficult than "pure"—can something be fixed if it's strictly temporal by definition? "Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece" describes the action of Indestructible Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr., a 1956 Hollywood curiosity mainly memorable for Chaney Jr.'s silence throughout most of the film—he's said to have been recovering from surgery, necessitating a rewrite of his character, a betrayed criminal who rises from the dead to seek revenge. As a song, it approaches my absurd standard for what constitutes "purity", valiantly resisting the siren call of the printed page, where its best effects—the drawn-out "hours", the "those two who/speak through you" quadruple rhyme, the breath-pauses in the chorus—simply vanish; and for this, I am exceedingly fond of it, and it holds, for me, a place of high privilege among all my songs."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
"Henry McCarty was born in New York City in either September or November of 1859; his younger brother, Joseph, in 1863. When their father died, his mother, Catherine, moved, with her sons, to Indianapolis. There she met William Antrim; in 1870, they all moved together to Wichita. Antrim and McCarty were married three years later. By this time they resided in the New Mexico Territory, in Santa Fe. A year later, she contracted tuberculosis and died. William didn't stick around to see what would become of the kids.
In the short span of Henry's life he'd moved all the way across the country, and now he was an orphan. He's known as Billy the Kid in the popular imagination, and only one photograph of him survives, though a second disputed image surfaced in 2010. In any case, he did not live to see twenty-two. This song visits him for the second time in my catalog. Lots of us find trouble to get into when we are young. But few of us do so in such a way that our names live on forever, even when the known details of our lives are murky, and uncertain, and contradictory. Of those few, even fewer succeed in largely vanishing into the icon they've left behind."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
the mountain goats, protein source of the future...now! (1999, ajax records)
liner notes made me laugh
"The piano in this one, recorded by Scott Solter at New York's Mission Sound, sounds unbelievably good; as a ballad of longing, I like the song, too. But there were already two piano ballads on the second side of All Eternals Deck, and both of them were more complex, lyrically and musically, and side two is where you have the luxury of complexity. On side one you bang the drum, and then on side two, as a reward, you get to complicate things. You know the phrase "I don't make the rules"? It doesn't apply here, because I made this rule."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
"This was written for All Eternals Deck but is too pious to live there. The All Eternals Deck is thirteen face cards and all of them are people. This song is about God. There is no God card in the All Eternals Deck. Everybody knows this."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
[version with intro commentary]
