Blonde Redhead

Blonde Redhead are currently writing and recording their latest music / inspiration, and all Good Love willing, we'll hear it soon as it's ready. In the means times, it just feels appropriate to post something for them. I wrote the below in March 2006 and the above was of course rewritten on a bit of a less personal note for the Weekly. I thought I'd republish the personal one here, now. Here it is.

Blonde Redhead have been there for me literally through every love, every breakup, every crush, and every crushing time I thought I wouldn't make it through and did somehow. The album Mi Via Vida Violenta sang me thru a love I could never have, In An Expression of the Inexpressable was my first, and I'd never heard anything like it. It blew me away. That one got me through, I think, myriad others, Fake Can be Just as Good is just plain great and always will be, and I can't even listen to Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons because it was an album that sang to me through the darkness of hell, watching someone I loved get sucked away from me and become unrecognizable in their drug use. When Misery is a Butterfly came out I was in Portland and was already living with enough ghosts. Blonde Redhead came through town and I went, by myself as usual, down to the Crystal Ballroom on 13th & Burnside. I saw Kazu through the second story window and she saw me, and we looked at each other in mutual solitude and thoughtfulness for a long few moments before someone called her inside the room and I had the light to cross the street.

Portlanders were their usual passive aggressive not hip enough to actually just be cool, trying so hard not to care while furtive eyes dart around at one another without words, and I got a Jameson and looked at the albums while kazu, simone, and amodeo tuned and warmed up onstage, checked their connections and setup one last time, and went and changed. I hadn't listened to the album because some part of me felt that there was a lot that needed to be left behind, and Blonde Redhead are about memories, to me. But the music started and I heard these songs that have sang me through so much, when they played 'Misery is a Butterfly' I realized at that moment that these ghosts are MY ghosts, and that if I had made it this far, I had nothing to fear looking back on. And as the three of them looked at each other and connected with each other, making some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard, I hung my head a little and started to tear up because I knew that even though I was a stranger in a room full of people I didn't like, because of these three and what they have given me, because of all the amazing art that has been given to me, I was not alone, and never would be again.