ericprincessdragon

Tag: friendship

  • Dust / Been Missin’

    In October 2023 we began the first round of Tim Bulster’s song-a-week songwriting group. This came at a perfect time – I had resolved to dedicate the fall and winter to writing and recording, stepping away from other obligations to hold space for that. I was also on the mend from a rough break-up that happened a few months before and coming out of a depressive spell that followed (and preceded).

    Writing became the main engine for processing everything I was feeling. There was one evening where I was trying to play guitar and felt so disconnected from the instrument – there was a huge emotional block and I couldn’t stand it. I started playing with the intention of letting out anything and everything I was feeling. I spent the next couple of hours improvising a handful of songs and this unlocked something in my process. From that point forward I began to put more intention into externalizing what I was feeling, which meant connecting with my body and tapping into whatever emotions I was feeling at the time.

    Dust started on October 9th, 2023 – the very first day of the writing group. I began the song that morning after reading Tim’s first email. I began singing “I’m sorry” and then it started to pour out from there.

    I was reflecting on the past, reflecting on the period of my life spent traveling, on the people that I met and places that I went, the places that I hadn’t returned to and the people that I have lost touch with over the years. These reflections… hurt.

    I have a basket filled to the top with journals, trinkets, things I found along the way and wrote and scribbled – sketches, doodles, notes, lyrics, contact information on places I traveled, phrases and translations in a number of languages, and other things which I’m scared to look at. At the time of writing this song, the basket was under my bed, and I thought it was a good reference point for how I felt about this period of my life and about this past.

    I was envisioning the dust-sealed old box of notes, physical material artifacts from this period, and I feel cowardly, too cowardly to return to them. It just hits something deep – longing, regret – the emotions that come with a past lost, a connection lost, a friend lost, with the words that haven’t been sent or said yet, the things I’ll never get the chance to say because it’s too late. These artifacts carry all of it – and they’re from some of the simplest, most wild, most ambitious, most dangerous and reckless and careless and carefree and wonderful and rewarding times of my life. I loved those days.

    “Dust” starts here:

    Under my bed
    Tucked away are pictures and notes
    Written by a ghost and left for someday
    Someday I have the strength to reconnect

    The ghost is a past version of me. There was simply too much happening all the time, every day – too many adventures to remember it all, too many periods of motion without stopping to reflect or write regularly. Even if I went through every note and drawing, there may be more lost than recovered. I still haven’t found the strength to dive into the box.

    More than 10 years have passed
    Haven’t taken one glance
    Just let the dust take it over
    The words on the pages
    Places and faces
    Phases and names
    Feel so far away in the dust

    Going into the chorus:

    I know someday I’ll go back to the places
    As they remain, everything else seems to change
    Some friends have passed and gone
    I know now how I was wrong
    Not to connect while I had the chance

    I have returned to many sites of my early travels. I love to return to places just to soak them in – to see what I see, think what I think, feel what I feel, remember what I remember. There are places I’ve yet to return to which I still intend to. And even more so I hope to reach out and find some of the people I’ve lost touch with out in the world. Those I still can. Others are gone now – people I can only connect with through memories, photos, dreams, or if I’m lucky, their art and music. I regret not reaching out to them more while I still had the chance.

    When I’m really struggling, I tend to withdraw, hide away. I won’t reach out. I remember in some of the worst of times grabbing my phone and looking at the contact list, stopping on names for a moment, but not being able to bring myself to just ring them up.

    It’s so simple. It’s such a simple action – just pressing a button on the screen. But what if they answer? I will have to acknowledge the difficulty that I’m facing. I will have to acknowledge that I’m not doing well, that I need help. But if they’re not doing well? And what if they’re not available? What if they don’t answer and never call back? More pain on top of what I was already feeling.

    I don’t know that these thoughts would even go through my head in that moment. It’s more of a general feeling of paralysis. There’s this part of me that wants to reach out, but I just cannot bring myself to do it. And instead, I isolate. It ain’t good, but that’s where I was at and that’s where I was writing from in verse two:

    Heavy in bed, I lay awake
    Thinking of you and all my mistakes
    All the dreams I didn’t share
    The words I didn’t say
    The songs I didn’t sing
    I wrote them for you and I locked them away
    To pick up the phone, look at your name
    I wanna press my thumb
    But I’m paralyzed by my aching heart
    My heart aching, but I know that someday we must reconnect
    No matter how much it hurts, I know it
    Someday we must reconnect
    I can’t lose you like the rest
    I want so bad just to tell you I’m sorry

    The song moves from the dusty past which I’ve hidden under my bed to the present where I’m lying in bed struggling, wanting to connect, feeling unable, and recognizing that I just need to do it – I have to, before it’s too late. By the end of the song, I still haven’t accomplished the task. I leave this song as a declaration of love, of hurt, of regret, of accountability, of genuine apology. If not a request for forgiveness, at least an expression, an explanation, and hope for understanding.

    The last chorus:

    I’m sorry I didn’t call
    I had no good reason at all
    I love you with all my heart
    I’m just hurt by the distance that’s grown between us
    That’s left us in the dust
    That’s left us in the dust

    Interestingly, one of the friends I had in mind when writing this actually reached out to me for the first time in a couple years that morning while I was finishing up the recording.

    Been Missing

    “Been Missing” is the sister song to “Dust.” Where “Dust” is the somber snapshot – reflecting on the past with regret and heaviness – this is a song of triumph. When I’ve managed to overcome that disconnect, let go of the regret, and make the connection.

    I was truly inspired after writing “Dust” to actually reach out to some friends from the past. I started writing “Been Missing” after a very long and deep conversation with an old friend I hadn’t talked to in years and seen in even longer. It was a sunny day and I was just getting to the beach when I took her call. We walked and talked for close to two hours – catching up, going through all the motions of reminiscing about the past, joking and laughing and getting very serious, sharing the difficulties we’d gone through and the good things in our lives. The dogs were running around on the sand. The sun was shining. After the conversation ended I took that feeling of goodness and put it into this song.

    I tried to write in the motions of that kind of catch up conversation. The questions that come with it: How have you been? Where you at these days? What have you been up to? How did that one thing work out? Have you seen so and so?

    I want to know that the people I care about are doing well. But it’s not always that way, and if it’s not, I want to hear about that too. I want to know what their struggles are, what their dreams and hopes are, what stands in the way of those things. I want to know if I can help.

    And eventually it’s my turn. Where have I been? What have I been up to? Where do I begin… There is always lots to catch up on. Many of my old friends don’t even know where I live. People will ask me how Portland is and I’ll say I don’t know, I haven’t been there in some time. It’s five hours away from me. Sometimes I’m catching up with people and I realize my life is crazy – weaving between periods of intense travel or isolation, of staying home, relationships in and out, being intensely focused on family, or music, or work, or just being far, far away for extended periods of time. So much happens in this life and I’ll often lose track along the way.

    The part I love most about reconnecting with old friends – the discovery that though much has changed, much is the same. One friend says “No time passes in the hearts of good folk” and I am so grateful for this. When I can reconnect with someone and it feels like we’ve just picked up from where we left off. Sure there are things to catch up on, but the understanding, openness and love has been there all along – across great distances in space and time. We can still be ourselves, silly and ridiculous, deep and thoughtful. And receive each other as friends. I cherish these connections.


    Been Missin (Original Demo)

    Been Missin’ (Live from home)

    Where you at 
    These days 
    I’ve missed you 
    Since I been away 
    Tell me now
    What’s changed 
    And what’s remained the same 
    Let’s take our time
    Catching up
    Before we get to reminiscing 

    Have the years been kind to you
    Have you done the things that you wanted to
    And when you did how good was it
    Take me there I want to know what 
    I been missing 

    Where have I been
    Where do I start
    Some years happened to someone else
    And I lost touch along the way
    Between everywhere and nowhere

    Do you
    Remember the last time
    Last time it was just you and I
    I do

    In the grand scheme of things
    It was less than a blink
    But in these brief human lives
    It was a long long time

    Now talk to me I want to know what
    You want today everything that
    Stands in the way of your dream
    I love you and you know I believe

    Though much has changed
    Much is the same
    Our bits are as dumb as ever
    One second we’re on the ocean floor
    The next we’re in an uproar
    Our laughter scores the night
    And sleepless voices jam til sunrise
    You don’t stay up like this 
    But you’re not surprised
    We did the same thing last time

    Last time it was just you and I
    And when we did 
    How good was it
    We’re here today I’ll never forget
    What I been missing
    What I been missing

    P.S.

    I still struggle. I still withhold and isolate. It all goes in phases. I still haven’t opened up those notebooks, revisited those trinkets, revisited that past. And I still haven’t reached out to some of those whom I dream about and write about and think about. Some of them are gone. Some of them I’ve lost touch with, lost contact – I don’t know how to find them. And others, I just have no good reason at all. But sometimes I pick up the phone. Send a message or make a call. And when I do, it’s good. No time passes in the hearts of good folk.

  • Our Golden Days Have Passed

    This is the last song I wrote for the winter/spring round of the 2026 songwriting group. It was written during an extremely emotional time. I was mourning the sudden death of a dear friend – Stephen Reed – and I had returned to the LA area, the place where I spent the first 20 years of my life and a few more on and off after that.

    I took two trips down and spent nearly a month there consecutively – more time than I’d spent down there in seven or eight years, including flying home for a weekend in between. I was returning to people and places I hadn’t returned to in far too long. I knew that I had to. In this time, I had to reconnect.

    The relationships and conversations that came out of that month were long overdue. Some of my oldest and dearest friends – people I’ve known for half my life, people we were brought together by music. We played in bands together, played countless gigs together. There was a period for me from about 18 to 21 where my life revolved mostly around this community. We were studying music, working whatever jobs we had, but most of our free time revolved around each other. We played cover gigs, corporate events, fundraisers, weddings, country clubs, bars and restaurants. Beyond all that, we all had original projects going, playing bars, clubs, house parties, pizza spots and more. When we weren’t playing we were together – piling into cars to go on all sorts of adventures day and night.

    We were young, idealistic, naive, lucky. Life felt simpler then. I’m not sure we knew quite who or what we were. I know I didn’t. But somehow none of us have changed all that much. We’ve aged into our 30s and 40s now – still young, but no longer living wildly and freely and recklessly. The gigs and hangouts no longer feel endless and playful in the same way.

    I drove by Rad Stop – the first building a group of my friends began renting, which turned into many things over the years. First a rehearsal studio, then a bike shop, eventually a warehouse with many rooms used as artist studios and residences. It was one of my main home bases when I was visiting and spending time down there between 2014-2016. I stayed in several different rooms throughout the years. It was eventually condemned and demolished. Rad Pro, the successor to that space and the place where many of my early recordings were made – where I lived, kept space, and ran live sound for bands – has since moved and the original location is all boarded up. But Rad Stop is simply gone. When I drove by it was the first time I’d been in that area in eight or nine years. Where it once stood there is now an empty lot surrounded by a fence. In between the cement cracks there are weeds reaching up to the sky.

    I had a conversation with my old friend Ivan that I keep coming back to. He told me he’d been quite sad thinking about the people we came up with. He wanted to put on a concert in his parents’ backyard like he used to, invite bands from back in the day – but he quickly realized that three of the bands he thought of have all had members who passed away at tragically young ages. Stephen is just the latest in that string of three. Ivan said that they used to feel like we had so much promise, so much potential, all of us reaching for our dreams. But we’ve lived long enough to see the end of some of those dreams, the end of some of those stories. To him it appeared that those were golden days, when we were becoming. But those days are gone and now we are what has been.

    I replied: that’s bleak, bro.

    I told him I don’t feel that way. For me the growth has not stopped. I’m still learning, still crossing boundaries and finding myself on the other side of good things. I still believe in our potential – individually and collectively. We are still here and our stories are not done yet. And even in the case of Stephen, the actions of his lifetime are still ringing out in ways that are truly powerful and surprising. His work and influence on earth is not done. His story is not done.

    But still I was definitely feeling Ivan’s sentiments. It seemed like many people I visited with were struggling – with their work, their living situations, their relationships and the grief of losing our friend.

    Friends told me they wished I hadn’t left. They asked if I was coming back to stay. I told them no. Leaving one gathering, a friend asked if I was heading back to Oregon. I said yes. He asked when he would see me again. I said I don’t know.

    I’m writing this at home. I just stepped out the front door and into the forest. I feel no worry for tomorrow, little stress from the day. I’ve managed to find myself in a place I genuinely love, living a relatively simple, but fulfilling, interesting and peaceful life in a small town by the sea.

    But I carry complicated emotions around it. Deep gratitude for this life sits right alongside shame and guilt when I return to that place and those friends. In order to find this life for myself, I had to the old life behind.

    This song became a meditation on these feelings, these thoughts. Giving into some of the bleak and fatalistic feelings of the time and all that comes with the idea that our golden days may have passed.

    “Our Golden Days Have Passed”

    I left pieces of my heart in chunks down below
    Hit the road to save my soul
    To build new life I let the old one go
    I didn’t mean to abandon you
    I didn’t mean to abandon you

    Is it too late to say I love you too
    Is it too late to show my face in this place
    Where we once built a home now it’s an empty lot
    Gone without a trace fenced up and blocked off
    Now there’s just a few weeds reaching up J
    ust a few weeds reaching for us

    Our tribe was broken up spread out and beaten down
    And I feel like an alien when I come around
    Until we’re face-to-face and we start digging in
    We’re all struggling

    What started with a dream ended in death
    The best of us is gone we are what’s left
    Becoming has past now we are what has been
    Stuck in the present
    Our golden days have passed
    Our golden days have passed

  • Scroll Hole/Alex

    “Scroll Hole”

    I like short songs. I don’t like being addicted to the phone. If I’m going to be addicted to the phone I might as well make short songs about it. This is based on true, recurring events. This ditty tells the story of reaching for my phone to perform a simple task (tuning a guitar) and mindlessly getting lost scrolling instagram. I wrote the song in March 2024, finishing the recording and shot the video while staying in the guestroom of my friend and his mum’s house in the suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia. While they were off working I was in the dark with my face buried in a camera lens, experimenting with the video edits to pull off what I saw in my head. Watch the video here:

    I’m reaching to do something quick and simple on my phone
    Then suddenly
    I get lost
    In a hole as I scroll I have no control at all
    I’m sinking
    Precious fleeting
    Moments of my life
    That I’ll never get back
    I can’t recall
    A single thing that I was just looking at

    I never close this app with more than
    I had when I opened it

    Where was I at
    Oh that’s right
    All I was trying to do was open up the tuner app

    LISTEN


    Every video, every recording and every day is a fresh experiment. From the album “March 2024” available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms. “March 2024” is a collection of songs that reflect my life and travels. Recorded across various states and continents, the sounds and images for the album cover a span of six years and 11,000 miles.
    https://linktr.ee/ericprincessdragon

    Alex

    I will add some additional notes to fill in some details of the trip from Oahu onto Tassie. I will also take a detour to talk about my good friend Alex and some of our adventures around the globe.

    I arrived in Australia on March 12, just two days before my birthday, beginning a one-year working holiday visa. I flew on a one-way ticket with more luggage and gear than I had ever traveled with before. I wanted to be ready for a whole range of possible gig/recording/photo/video scenarios and packed enough gear to perform as a solo act, take photos & videos in different scenarios, record myself or a full band, put on an impromptu hostel porch open mic and more. Between the guitar, backpack, and big suitcase, it was too much to comfortably lug around a city, on buses, trains, or the side of the road – too much even to easily stash at a hostel. I had planned to purchase a vehicle as soon as I arrived and continue my adventure into the unknown. The only step of the trip I had figured out was the very first: arrival in Adelaide and a stay with my longtime friend and travel buddy Alex.

    Alex is a multi-talented fella and all around sweet heart. He is a photographer, actor, ASMR artist and after living and traveling around the world for years has settled back into his home in Adelaide working for VFX company Rising Sun Pictures.

    We first met in the winter of 2013 when I was working in Granada, Spain at a hostel called Makuto. He came in as a guest while touring Europe and we hit it off, wandering the cobblestone city, sharing travel stories, and hiking out early one morning to catch the sunrise over La Alhambra.

    I was nearing the end of my stint in Granada and nearly ready to head to Berlin for Christmas & New Years. As it turned out, Berlin was one of Alex’s next stops and our visits would overlap. Just a week or two later we met up to spend more quality time wandering, this time in the grittier urban setting of Berlin. One of the highlights from that visit was attending an event in the basement of a bookstore – a storytelling open mic where everyone was encouraged to get up and tell an improvised story on a particular theme. That night the theme was “family.”

    We both joined the audience and told our stories. I spoke about my grandparents and what I knew of their migrations from Cuba & Mexico, of my paternal grandfather working in forced labor camps operated by the new Cuban government under Fidel Castro. I spoke of my maternal grandparents being robbed by the “coyotes” they hired to take them across the border and my mother eventually crossing into the US underneath the seat of a car as a child. And I spoke of my life and travels being a walk in the park in comparison to the experiences they endured.


    After Berlin we went our separate ways, keeping in touch but living worlds away, both of us traveling regularly over those next years. Eventually, in 2016, Alex’s travels brought him to North America and he came to visit me in LA. I was living in San Bernardino County at a warehouse at the time – a condemned building which just a year or so later would be demolished without a trace, but at that time provided refuge for a large cast of artists, musicians, hippies, stoners, and weirdos. Me being one of the all-those-things. We went wandering around the area from the warehouse, my childhood home (Acaso) out to downtown LA where we drove past tent cities and looked over the skyline. Alex returned to the US once again in 2018 and our adventures continued around my new home in Oregon. Across over a decade we have met up on three continents in four countries.

    Back to 2024: I felt like family coming to stay with Alex and his mum, an intelligent and hilarious woman from South Africa. We shared lots of interesting conversations and she took an active interest in helping me figure out my next move. When I first got the inkling to go to Tasmania, she was very encouraging, recounting the itinerary of her honeymoon trip around Tassie while I saved the locations of all her favorite places on the map. I remember just after that conversation, finding Frying Pan Studios while researching Tasmania and being overcome with a sense that I must go there and record. Tasmania was pulling me in.

    I only stayed about a week in Adelaide, and Alex was working for much of that week, but we found time to do plenty of wandering around Adelaide and take a trip along the coast of South Australia, share meals with his family, catch some comedy at Adelaide Fringe and share plenty of d&m (deep and meaningful conversations) along the way. Here are some photos taken on film. I shot the photo of him, and he the photos of me.

    Also within that week I managed to fit in an all nighter, staying up past sunrise working on the Scroll Hole video. The song was written just before I left for Australia, but I recorded it, shot the video and mixed/edited everything right there in Alex’s family home.

    On March 20th, after a quality stay in Adelaide, I was off for Hobart.