A brief explanation of this whole “Trains Across the Sea” endeavor:

In case you didn’t know, the title of this musical project is taken from the song of the same name by a band called Silver Jews. If you haven’t listened to them, stop reading right now and find their albums. No question, David Berman (the main force behind Silver Jews) is the reason I started writing and singing my own songs. All my favorite singers couldn’t sing either.

Three weeks before I took this full-time plunge into music, David Berman poetically announced the “Joos” were finished. As an additional twist, Berman revealed to the public that his father is Richard Berman, a D.C. based consultant and lobbyist whose company develops numerous media campaigns for multinational corporations to downplay the dangers of obesity, smoking, mad cow disease, and drunk driving, among others. David Berman states in his open letter:

“This winter I decided that the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused.”

And that’s exactly why I started this band: it’s not that music is powerless to undo the crimes of the Richard Bermans of this country, but that music is essential to developing the good and right foundation in those who will inevitably replace them. That even if music can’t change laws, it can sure as hell change minds (which are infinitely more powerful anyway). That all Music ever was at its best was a morsel of COMMON TRUTH which rang true over the din of chords and melodies and the dancing and stomping and sweating of MOVEMENT and the simple joy of true communion between strangers. That we can argue about what SHOULD be until we’re blue in the face, but the only real answer to this mess is an educated populous who knows the right thing to do and DOES IT. And if the music of Silver Jews or Trains Across the Sea or anybody else can help eliminate the gap between what you’re currently doing and what you know you should be doing, then music won’t be pining to undo one millionth of anything; it will simply provide the soundtrack to all of us building our better future.

“But what happens, and why I think the world doesn’t fall apart, is that when there are irrational old people in charge, there is a countervailing group of young, cooperative straight arrows who are great at teamwork and are not seeking to nihilistically shut down the system. They have an investment in repair…” (David Berman)

That’s right! We got ourselves interviewed by The Columbus Dispatch! It should run in the Weekender this Thursday (10/1/2009), and will even have adorable pictures of us. In the highly likely scenario that Andy’s responses are heavily edited (no paper should ever include my words without many deletions) and due to the fact that it’s my website and I can say anything I want!, I’d like to put here my alternate response to the final question of the interview. Enjoy.

“Why should people come to a Trains Across the Sea show?”

You should come to a Trains Across the Sea show for the same reason you should be supporting all these local independent artists all over this beautiful city – because you used to. Before the kids, before the sixty hour weeks, before you let the wild-eyed idealism of youth fade quietly into the comfort of domestication, you cared about local art, you drank whenever it felt good, you rolled in the grass like an idiot, you learned a few chords on guitar and sang some song to impress a girl, you tried to sketch your friend, you saw your friend’s band in empty bars on Tuesdays, you ran wild and free throughout the city. And it’s not that you wanted to stop, or even distinctly chose to; it just the importance of self-happiness seemed to fade behind the deadlines and kids’ soccer practices and stiff social gatherings and now, suddenly, you’re on this other side, importing your art from the far corners of the globe that NPR tells you about, while the rest of us local artists are still playing those empty bars to our friends on Tuesdays, still making albums, still painting, still trying our damndest to peel off some corner of this city so we can keep providing it with a product as essential as any other local grocer or carpenter or plumber or librarian – a night of loud music to cut loose once in a while or a few words to a melody to change your mind about something, or knocking you upside the head with some twisted painting you didn’t expect – that art is important, damnit! And as long as we agree that art is important, then let us also agree that LOCAL art is important.

You should come to a Trains Across the Sea show, to any show, to every show, because “artists are workers and they need to eat too.” And if the only way to survive as an artist is to move to a coast, to flee this beautiful city, then we’ll keep losing the best of them and continue to think that “local” art is somehow “inferior.” But anybody who has taken a good long look under this city at all these people who are genuinely trying to build something greater than themselves through art can’t help but agree that we’ve got a hell of a party on our hands, and everyone’s invited.

Because to be perfectly honest, I’ve no fucking clue what’s next. All I can do is write. This is what came out yesterday. There are a billion different things you can do with a song – pay people with recording studios to record a better version to sell to people who want their music to sound NICE, find other (better) musicians and get them to play on it with you, tour the country and play it in front of people, license it to pretty people with great voices or great publicists – but that’s all part this OTHER thing, and I honestly couldn’t give a damn about all that. They are the temporary modern solutions to the forever problem of song (starving artists!), and are constantly reinvented as the technology changes. I just want to write great songs that will outlast the dizzying pace with which media is produced and consumed these days. So if you’ve any decent ideas on how we validate the thirty or so hours a week I put into music as an honest craft deserving an honest wage, I’m all ears. Until then I’m just going to stay holed up in my room and keep writing and driving a van.

P.S. It’s meant as a singalong. Feel free to join in wherever you are.

My journal entry for the final leg of The Migratory Office’s first business trip: Charleston, SC.

and finally Pat wakes up and Joe’s been awake for a little while and we all agree that NOW, on this big sweaty car ride that started at five am with pretty much no sleep and way too much coffee from the thrift store thermos, that THE TIME HAS COME FOR THE SINGALONG. and out of the speakers jumps arcade fire’s “funeral,” and now it’s windows down and heads thrashing and we shout along to the parts we know and mumble vowels over the parts we don’t and play drums on everything and THIS IS THE HOME STRETCH down I-26 and the speedometer of this magnificent beast is pushing 90 but the-other-cars-are-doing-it-too so it’s okay, and for the softer songs we lay back and pant like dogs and it’s that great sweaty moment where the wind is cooling you everywhere and you stare at the skyclouds and your mind does that “REMEMBER THIS” thing and you’re just happy to be MOVING towards A COAST! because back while they were sleeping i decided i’m driving this thing straight into the ocean and there’s nothing else i need more than to dive into those waves and lick my lips all salty and completely wrap myself in the water and hair-be-tangled! and that’s exactly what happens and madeline meets us there and of course i tackle patrick into the ocean in his jeans and button-down shirt and he’s all soaked but fuck it, he dives in and i dive in and joe finally decides to dive in and its way too windy for a frisbee but WHO THE HECK CARES and it’s a little more fetch than catch with Reliable Pink Disc that keeps almost getting lost, and pat’s jump-kicking the waves and i’m diving through them and joe’s stepping over them until we’re too tired to move and we flop back on the beach, chests heaving, out of breath and sorta doing the nice-to-meet-you-what-do-you-do-shuffle with madeline but mostly just letting the five o’clock sun blind us and the let the sand stick to us in too many places and just waiting until our bellies finally cry out for love and that’s exactly what we do, reluctantly throw on shirts and start back inland, but only slightly, and only because we haven’t had a good meal since leaving our fair city, and tonight’s taco night.

My journal entry on the hilarious debacle of Dan’s toes a few weeks back:

and dan stops into the shop and we’re all lounging all over those blue chairs and we quickly stop at my place to grab more summer supplies and then to goodale park – lying around and frisbee and etc., and then to hilarious giant eagle with greeting cards that make noise and back to park with feast of dinners and beer and whisky and ANDY FINDS HIS FIRST GOOD GOODALE HAMACAS LOCATION! and we chill there and peter makes a taco run to junior’s and ryan stops by and we do handstands and cartwheels and andy demonstrates OPERATION HAMACAS! and i strip down and jump in the pond and everyone else strips down and jumps in the pond and everything’s magnificent and great and we keep drinking whisky and are floating all around and naked in fountains and then dan jumps in and cuts both toes on whatever and starts bleeding all over the place (is the fact that we jumped in to blame or that somebody put fucking glass in this place?). and then it’s that thing where people jump into hypermode and help out and I rip my shirt up and bandage him and henkel’s there on the pedicab and bikes him to the nearest location where one of us lives and we’re washing the blood off the sidewalk and we’re packing up our bags and i’m REALLY REALLY trying to focus but it’s cool because everybody else is being quite helpful and we pack everything up except the ukelele – brian walks my bike to the house and i mistrel it up the whole way there, singing any damn song out to the entire neighborhood. truly magnificent. then we get there and it’s back to intense focus and dan doesn’t have health insurance and we’re doing the “big brother convince little brother to go to the hospital” and henkel and i are making jokes because there’s shit else for us to do; it actually is deep and he actually needs to go. and then they’re off in a huff and we just sit on the patio and trade hospital stories and talk about how this is nice because tonight is going to become one of those stories we tell – we’re in the middle of a collective future memory and it’s delightful and silly. dan is texting me while at the hospital (“there are crazy machines here!”) and we drain most of the remaining beer in the house and just as everybody else is crashing dan texts me that he’s out and i bike up there to him and bring him the final two beers in wilber house and we drink them and smoke cigarettes and laugh and giggle and end this ridiculous adventure together, triumphantly, bitching about health insurance and how much his toes are going to hurt tomorrow.

This past Wednesday morning, I woke up mildly hungover to an 8am phone call from my grandmother reminding me to pick her up.  In Cleveland.  This is not a usual Wednesday morning occurence for me.  However, on this specific day, we were following through on our previously-made plans for me to drive her to see her 91 year old brother (who thinks he’s 92) and his wife and family in Pennsylvania.  That’s right, an all-expense-paid trip to Middletown, PA!  Ahh, the unpredictable perks of being the unemployed member of the extended family.

But to be perfectly honest, this is something everyone should do.  I genuinely had an absolute ball, and you could tell it meant the world to all parties involved.  Want some reasons you should take your grandmother on a road trip?  In bullet point format?  You got ‘em!

• Past a certain age, the elders really can’t drive by themselves for any length of time.  They are physically constrained to a shrinking geographic radius (something I hadn’t considered), and if the people they love are outside of that and also can’t travel, there’s little to no hope of them seeing each other before they go.  You have the opportunity to quite literally become a superhero.
• The jokes the elders make about their imminent death are bluntly hilarious.
• Your eyes get to see more of the planet – this, in my book, is a nearly universal positive.
• They’re saving money on travel, and it’s ideal door-to-door service for them.
• They buy you (in my case) a lot of free food.  And with that “fatten-you-up” grandmother mentality that’s ideal for the starving unemployed.
• If we’re talking about good and bad uses of government money (social security), I’d be hard-pressed to find a better one than this.
• Hearing stories of people you’ve never seen without wrinkles about all the WWII soldiers hitting on them in the forties is awesome.
• You don’t live seventy-plus years without learning a metric ton of life lessons.  Just sit back and let the wisdom flow.

So, if you find yourself with a sudden pile of free time, I highly recommend calling the elderly members of your (or any) family and asking them if there’s anybody they want to see before they go.  And, if you make it to Capitol Diner in Middletown, PA, be sure to try the scrapple.  With maple syrup.  It’s…an…experience…

I stumbled across this passage reading and I couldn’t help myself.

“They used to talk about how when UHF got in really strong we’d have something like eighty-six channels, so you could watch “Green Acres” on Channel 2, the Bolshoi Ballet on 34 and reruns of old Miss America pageants on 63 – what a piddling peon’s dream! Come the Revolution, we’ll have thousands of channels where you can watch anything the human mind can conceive, from “I Love Lucy” to beatniks jacking off at campaign glossies of Eisenhower to Sun Ra jamming with Iggy and an old Geritol-stewed yodeler from “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour”! Plus movies, movies, MOVIES! All of ‘em and often. All power to the People’s TV!, and get up off your big fat rusty dusty and man them barricades with me! This is a conspiracy.

-Lester Bangs, Creem, 1973

Location: Columbus Metropolitan Library (Northside Branch)
Ears: Dane Terry on patradio.org

I have now lived 130 consecutive days in Modern America with no real obligations. I am running an open mic at Taj Mahal on Tuesdays, but one could hardly call that a “job,” especially when the hourly wage probably works out to about two bucks (three if you count the free beer). Other than that, I have not had to really answer to anybody in an abnormally long time for an American. What does a human do with this amount of freedom? Is there such a thing as too much? What would you do? Would you be bored? Would you be happier? Would you be healthier? Would you start drinking at noon? Would you beef up your resume and start looking for a job? Would you be your drug dealer’s greatest client? Worst? Now that you can do anything, what do you do?

Well, if you’re me, you further develop your coffee addiction, you keep building a website, you get your friends to help with your album art, you read like a maniac, you finally catch up on all years of sleep lost to engineering homework and unnecessarily early meetings, you volunteer a bit (but constantly feel guilty that it’s not enough), you help your friends organize things you all actually care about and aren’t just paid to do (fuck funding, we can start and massively distribute a website in five minutes about any idea that comes in our head [and remember that at the end of the day the best IDEAS win, everything else just tries to catch up]), you watch your possessions obey Murphy’s Law and start breaking down (hence this library computer), you hop a ride to New York City and back, you play as many shows as you can, you chuckle at the slow, inevitable deflation of your bank account, and you genuinely begin to see things with the sort of clarity that usually creeps in near the final pages of a Herman Hesse novel.

Because maybe those mid-nineties grunge kids genuinely did aspire to that infamous Office Space dream, “to do nothing,” but I think we’re different. The internet has taught us too much, the speed with which we can start something is stunning, the basic realities of that silly “recession” thing has changed the game, and we can’t sit on our ass getting paid to sell China’s shit to fat people at a big box retailer anymore. We’ve decided acting locally isn’t a far off dream you only fulfill when you move to Portland, but something that has zero negative consequences and can and should be actively pursued by everyone everywhere. Now.

So my days are pretty damn full, to be honest. I ran some sound at the Confronting Racism Conference , helped organize The Peach District Classic 2009 (check out Kevin’s stuff as well), taught the band some Springsteen, fixed plenty of my friends’ bikes, began educating myself about modern day slavery (holy hell!), worked on some new songs, am helping out a lot of other local musicians get on their feet and sharing what little I know with them, and almost hourly genuinely ponder that “what do I want to do with my life” question. But between you and me, I really want to just keep doing this – the ability to continually educate myself and pursue all of my passions to the fullest extent of my energy. I gave up on TV a long time ago.

So I’m moving into a cheaper apartment, I’m going to see if enough people want to buy the album, I’m going to keep playing shows for anybody that wants us, and I’ll let you know in 130 more days if those dreams of the beats are possible in Modern America. Because I still don’t know if I do any of this well enough for enough people to voluntarily exchange money for it, but I feel I owe it to everybody who wants a life they somehow believe they can’t live to keep going until I can’t anymore. Plus that glorious Michael Prats (somebody I’ve never met) downloaded the album and paid five bucks for it. Now I really can’t stop.

4.23.2009
Location: Kick Start, Columbus, OH
Pages: Mother Night (Vonnegut)
Ears: Birds, Car Horns, Wind Whistles

What if everyone played?

What if every street corner was always exploding with live music? What if you couldn’t go a block without hearing another of your fellow Columbusites ignite this city, singing to the heavens, for at least a moment enjoying one of those precious few moments of life granted to him by the unexplainable. What if we all played musical instruments, and did so all the time?

What if we just stopped rolling our windows up, blaring the temporarily popular music of America, assuming great music comes from the most expensive studios by the people with the best ability to market it to you? What if we stopped plugging up our ears with the sounds of far-off towns and listened to our own city breathe?

What if we all carried harmonicas and stapled sheet music over the bus stop advertisements and “jammed out” till that hilariously unpredictable bus finally rolls up? What if we remembered that childish joy we got in fifth grade when the other end of our trombone lit up with Mary and Her Little Lamb? What if for every pickup basketball game there was a pickup pep band, filling this city with enough of the fresh oxygen of creativity, of music, of art, of that lifeblood that is happily nurtured in all those cities on the coasts we keep running away to, as though a geography change is the supreme fix for your head.

What if cocktail parties were B-Y-O-Instrument, and we bypased all the identical “what do you do” conversations and leapt straight to the music. And those in the mood for a dignified waltz group in this corner with copies of the sheet music, and the drum circle kids wagged their heads back and forth to the constantly evolving beat, and the whole night inevitably moves towards endless singalongs to CCR and mid-nineties pop songs and anything else everyone happens to know at this gathering?

What if you personally knew everyone on your iPod? What if Monday mornings at the office were a big trading of all the weekend jams, of the new verses to old songs, of all the music everyone spent their free time creating? What if the connectivity power of music was completely redefined and you no longer try to figure out how this man you’ve never met is dealing with a breakup, but instead learn how your best friend is coping with his? Because really, a good song is a few chords, a melody of words, and some instrumentation. The rest is clever marketing. As long as we believe “good” music must come from elsewhere (both time and place), it always will.

What if vending machines only dispensed kazoos and slide whistles? What if you could literally sing for you supper? What if we stopped hiding our music in the soundproof areas of the city and let it run loose in the parks like dogs (whose criteria of friendship is only “are you also a dog”)?

Maybe, if everyone played, the buses would be uninhabitable. Maybe the market would be saturated and nobody could sell a cd (as though that’s the point of ever picking up a guitar in the first place). Maybe we’d all tire of music as an art form at all and just stop listening entirely. Maybe things would be worse, but I doubt it. Because I know I’m a happier guy because I play music. I honestly have no idea how I’d spend my time without it, and I know I’m not alone. One has to wonder what would a city would be like if all we asked in return for our time we inevitably have to exchange for money is the chance to lay in the park and play our instrument for as long as we feel like it, and if in the process we lightened somebody’s day doing that, then we’d never ask for more than the chance to try to do it again.

4.19.2009
Location: Fifth and High, Columbus, OH
Pages: Yage Letters, Walden
Ears: Indians-Yankees Baseball Game

For all of the questions posed by Andy in the recent weeks, Toronto has proved to be the answer.  The ol’ “change of scenery,” the semi-bohemian living simplicity of these fantastic friends I meet there, the recording of invaluable Jeremy drum tracks, the joyous flow of whisky and coffee and wine and pasta, all during that strange section of our lives caught between that tail end of our undergraduate degrees and the cautious decision of The Next Step.  It’s that comfort you get when you discover more people really alive out there, the comfort of suddenly feeling less alone in your own stutter-stepping into the specifics of the rest of your life.  Everyone makes very little and spends very little, everyone has their own creative projects they’re working on in any free time they can muster, everyone has separately come to their own opinion of the insanity of the modern age and has defiantly rambled through temp agencies, volunteer opportunities, karaoke bars on weekdays, shelves of timeless counter culture literature, minor drug experimentation, and both successes and failures in love to find themselves temporarily here, on Concord Avenue, this gang fully interchangeable with the rest of the modern noncomformists I run amok with back in Columbus.

Truly out of a dream

So the week is a happy blur, beginning with the joyous vegetarian potluck-slash-wine-guzzling extraordinaire (which transitions nicely to the shouting to the heavens from the jam room), and ending with a hard drive full of recordings, new friends, and a bit more confidence that the world hasn’t died yet as long as there are the happy few of us scattered in these increasingly-connected social coves who haven’t stopped learning, who haven’t begun the slow death into domestication, who are fighting to live our own lives raging against the ridiculous concept they snuck in on us years before we were born that whoso would be a man must have a real job.  But of course it’s all futile and temporary – it is the goal of every living cell to become two cells – and we’ll eventually find that comfortable mix of time we’re willing to exchange for the amount of money we need to feed our offspring, keep ourselves happy, and stray not too far from our youthful stubbornness.  But, in the meantime, we’re certainly learning to capitalize on these few precious months of freedom before a kid pops out and your entire priority system is upended.

There's my boy

Anyway, the details of the week are fantastic and non-stop, but I hasten to turn this into another “boy my egg salad sandwich was delicious” blogs that dilute this here world wide web, and suffice it to say that though the specifics of our modern existential dilemmas seem to make them unique, the time-tested remedies still hold true: travel, wine, a good night’s sleep, and a genuine sense that, if only momentarily, that we actually lived our lives as we see fit – a joy I experienced for nine glorious days in Toronto, Ontario.

Anna Sudac taking these clapping tracks seriously