I’m immensely grateful, and a little pleased, to get to invite you all to the Niantic “Floating Islands” EP release event.
Basically, after everything else you’ve seen and dealt with in the last ten months, our goal is simple: This will be the party of the year. But let me explain to you where this is coming from. Let me tell you a new part of the story first.
Around ten years ago, I watched a close friend’s father fall into a coma for about 8 months. From vibrant and manic to totally unresponsive and frail, in the hospital, and eventually stable enough to basically sleep it off at home. It took that long for him to finally show signs of developing the brain strength necessary to just open his eyes; blink, communicate nonverbally, and then slowly begin the process of working their way back. To a pretty active 20 year old this was mindblowingly limiting, frustrating, painfully debilitating. I had certainly known the loss of close people, the long slow decline of Alzheimer’s, cancer, other conditions like that. From the earliest notions of childhood, I had again and again witnessed the worst that death could throw at you. What was different now was watching up close the process of having so much taken away from a person WHO WAS STILL ALIVE, who could have it all return someday -- hopefully, maybe, if just a couple thousand things would go right.
This fear was even more distant, pulse pounding, nightmare inducing to go through. And when he finally started to, after about a year, speak in small sentences, start to get up and move around very slowly through my friend’s house, after weeks of therapy and effort: it was not exactly a joy we felt, but more a sense of relief that he wasn’t going to have to endure that torture anymore, that he could come back from that kind of suffering and slowly, eventually move on.
We also realized, maybe for not the final time, but far enough that the world owes us nothing. I'll repeat it, the world owes us nothing, and even if it did, it wouldn't be the one to give it to you. We learned that we were fortunate, that so many things could have gone wrong, but chances upon chances had pulled us in this way, and now, seeing that safety was in sight, we learned the true depths of relief.
Toward the end of this, I wrote a song called “Victory” about it: “it’s victory to hear you talk / it’s victory the way you think”. So it’s not a political or pompous song, but really it’s just a song about succeeding. Not in the way that, you know, Kanye West likes to write songs about succeeding -- there’s private jet success, there’s political success, commercial success. Then there’s the success and deep satisfaction you and your loved ones get from just being able to rediscover how to be autonomous, speak to your family and friends, and engage the world around you in the most basic way.
And then about 5 years ago, I’m in a restaurant a couple miles up the road in the desert, playing that song at my little cousin’s high school graduation party, and my other cousin Marty turns to me after -- middle aged guy, pretty cool and with it -- looks me in the eye and says, “God, when you were a kid, you were so weird, we had no idea what you were going to do with your life… now that you have a guitar in front of you, you make so much more sense as a human being.”
-- this is an entirely different kind of relief! I’m thinking, Well shit, now if people can understand I’ve been trying to communicate these kind of huge things my whole life, distilled into something easy, maybe can we imagine a world where we didn’t have people trying to write songs that could get us through this stuff??
Big life challenges, to comfort us when we hurt, when we didn’t know how to go on, when we needed to be pushed and inspired to do our best?? I mean, this comes from someone who was like a lifelong D+ student, and yet.
Which brings us to now. So many of you have been supportive, with your time x contributions x energy that has enabled us to put together the kind of things like the Floating Islands EP release event that’s coming up.
It blows me away that people are still responding, still excited by all the cumulative kind of efforts that began with things like watching friends struggle with loss over a decade ago. Learning the basics of how to turn positive motivations out of losing relatives and struggling through childhood -- not exclusively my struggles of course, but the journeys of everyone I meet. I'm a sponge for people's emotions, I get wrapped up in them and take it personally, then untangle it from the inside out, sometimes over years. After locking myself in a bedroom for most of the mid-aughts to learn guitar from scratch, learning how lonely it is when you have more fingers on your hand than people who truly understand what you’re trying to do.
The frustrations of years passing, chasing dreams through dead end after dead end after dead end, then living through the financial collapse on top of it, not knowing what else to do besides relentlessly toiling, and finally getting to a point where even like ten people are invested, and really give a shit, is really heartwarming and sometimes overwhelming and a source of unforgettable, deep gratitude for me.
This is just a chapter. We know we're learning, but we don't know what it means. Because the journey isn't finished. But here we are, working hard to celebrate it.
Together, we’re launching an event that takes you through our journey of the last several years, and then inverts it into where I think we’re going as a group of human beings -- culturally, politically, spiritually, ecologically, in business, science, art, technology.
A conversation that doesn’t lose that primacy and fear that someday you might not be able to control your limbs, or speak, or not understanding why your hand hurts when you put it in the fire. We intersect that with the excitement we have for the future, the optimism we have in our group of people, and the fire that grows from within us all, to take these hard lessons and primal elements into 2017 and beyond.
We work really hard every record to make something that sounds like those parts of our lives. Feelings that live and authentic and raw (and maybe a little warbly), that you can take it home with you or into your car or your earbuds, so you can bring your own passion and dedication to meet it, so we can mesh and enjoy the things that mean the most to all of us.
Expect an event that feels as familiar and welcoming as it does surprising -- I wasn’t kidding at the beginning, so expect nothing like you’ve seen all year. After that, expect to go happily into the night, and hopefully just a little with a glow that lasts you a lifetime.