GANGING UP ON THE SUN

The new Guster album came in the mail today. It was in a handwritten package. That sort of stuck in my head since this morning.

It's not that I don't like it -- it's very good music -- it just doesn't seem like a Guster album. It sounds a lot like Coldplay or maybe the Shins. I like both of those bands, but I was looking forward to a Guster album and, I dunno, it didn't come. They dropped the acoustic guitars and the bongos for Keep it Together so it was no suprise when they remained absent for this album, but there were even more transformations this time around. The lead singer seems to rely a lot more on falsetto stuff in this album (a major reason for the connection between Ganging Up on the Sun and Coldplay -- I honestly think the vocals in the new album sound a lot like Chris Martin's vocals in X & Y) and there is a ton of synthesized stuff, weird background noises, and extremely layered, complicated music. It all sounds good. It's just so far removed from the folky pop songs I remember hearing in Parachute and Lost and Gone Forever. They're better musicians, yes, but I think they "evolved" out of their niche, out of the place they held in my music library. It's a very polished album, though. I do like it a lot.

Around this time last year I was gearing up to leave for New York City for the summer. I think I left before graduation last year. This is going to be a very different summer. Last summer was -- what's the word? -- doubled sided. I left for six weeks, had an amazing time, learned a ton of useful information, made new friends, blah blah blah, but I came back and I had no connections to anyone in Irondequoit anymore. It was the most surreal shift I've ever encountered. I went from the buzz of a living, breathing city, the constant flow of visitors coming and going, and an endless series of acitivities to silence. I remember the first day back. I woke up and stepped into the hallway outside my room and was shocked into stillness. There wasn't anyone around. There was no elevator sliding open. There was no argument sounding from someone's room. There was nobody sitting in the hallway thumbing through a book. It suddenly occured to me that I hadn't been by myself in six weeks and solitude was a completely alien thing to me. I stepped back into my room, shut the door, and went back to sleep. It really wasn't until school started up again that I settled back in.

So far this summer has been somewhere in between. Nothing can match the intensity of what I experienced last summer, but there is a pretty much constant flow of phone calls, things to accomplish, activities to engage in, etc. I hope it doesn't get overwhelming. I need to remember that between work and what else I still need to find time to read, to study movies, to, most importantly, continue to write. I don't know how much time I'm going to have for that in the next couple of years.

Meh, could be worse. Could be bored.

Somebody told me last year -- I think it was my mentor from school -- that they like to keep a certain amount of suffering and solitude in their life so they can remain a skillful and inspired writer. It seems so strange, to keep everyone at an arm's distance, just so you're not content or, rather, complacent. I think about that from time to time, but something about it always strikes me funny. Sometimes I think that philosophy kind of defeats itself.