ericprincessdragon

Tag: temple-city

  • Ring Any Bells

    In our song-a-week group there are no rules about what we can submit each week other than it cannot be a previously completed song. Otherwise anything goes – an instrumental, a set of lyrics, a one minute acapella sketch or a fully fleshed out five minute production. The point is simply to write and submit something new. But in week four of the fall 2024 group, Tim brought a surprise. That Monday he sent this:

    “Here’s something I’ve always wanted to try — this week, we’re all going to write a song with the same title. I opened one of the internet’s finest random phrase generators, clicked ‘generate’ and it gave me, ‘Ring Any Bells?’ as in ‘recalling a memory; causing a person to remember something or someone.’ At the end of this week, we’ll have 14 different versions of a song called ‘Ring Any Bells?’ I vowed not to spend too much time searching for the perfect song title. This is what the void has bestowed upon us. Rejoice and be glad.”

    I was blindsided – I was already working on the song I intended to finish that week – but I took on the challenge just as many others would. My first reaction was that the title felt a bit too cliché for my taste. But I’ve found before that constraints can push you somewhere you wouldn’t have landed on your own – I talked about this in the Maytag Land entry – and this was no different. I sat with it through Monday and eventually my mind landed on past lives, which sent me back to a memory of a gal who once told me she’d had a vision of us together in a past life, in which we had held some importance. In her vision we were a king and queen and ruling together long ago. Then, as hippies do, we performed a crystal ritual in the back of a van to verify the vision. The results were inconclusive.

    I’m skeptical of past life recall – I haven’t heard anything particularly compelling to suggest we’d carry memories across lifetimes, and personally I don’t have any indication of having lived before this one. That said, I’ve lived enough of this life to feel like I’ve had several in one. I find the territory interesting to write from. This was also a period where I was reading and thinking a lot about death, mortality, and the nature of consciousness – you can see that thread running through Fallen Giant and Undertow.

    I wove in some core memories from my own childhood – sitting out in the sunny front lawn pulling petals one by one, she loves me, she loves me not, and an old birthday photo – then let myself wander into fantastical territory, imagining past lives, ancient temples, a kind of epic and magical existence I can’t claim to remember. It was a fun departure before returning to my earliest memories of this life, which are not particularly epic or magical – watching too much TV, playing video games, playing in the yard. From there back to the present, musing on the possibilities of a distant life and ultimately landing with focus and gratitude on the simple things we have today – a vision, a dream, a conversation, a connection.

    It’s quite a different type of song than what I normally write, and I’m grateful the challenge of the title pushed me there. I wouldn’t have found this one on my own. Not everyone in the group took on the title that week but in the end this was just one of ten songs written around the title “Ring Any Bells”. I always enjoy listening to the submissions and reading lyrics every week but that week was particularly interesting, what with the collective bell ringin’ and all. I’d like to share some quotes from other submission emails:

    “I gotta admit, when I read your assignment I definitely said, ‘(sigh of exasperation) goddamnit, Tim’, but I made myself have an open mind and I actually had fun with this.” — Theresa Bird

    “I too was chafing a little bit this week with the assignment but it kind of put the screws on me in a good way.” — Lazarus Pearl

    “It made me nervous and excited, which I enjoy leaning into. The lyrical theme constraint made me musically constrain as well.” — Micha Silvius

    “I love hearing all the different creations generated from the same seedling of an idea. I feel like it also pushes me to write my best songs because I know there are listeners on the other side who are going to really dig into my songs because they are songwriters themselves. It adds a little pressure to sort of bring my A-game.” — Jack Isenhart

    Here’s my “Ring Any Bells”

    You say you remember what came before
    What you stored in the core when you were four
    Before picking daisies and tearing them apart
    Saying he loves me he loves me not
    Before the melancholy gaze you gave
    That camera on your birthday

    Were you something else entirely?
    Were you the first to crawl up out of the sea?
    Seems like something you would do
    Were you a cloud before the sky turned blue?
    And whatever you were
    Were we together?

    Tell me does this ring any bells?
    Am I on the right track? Have I gone too far back?

    Yes you say you had a vision of me
    In an ancient temple I was a king
    When I spoke folks listened
    When I stood they kneeled
    You stood by my side and we lived a long time
    You were my queen and my guide
    Into the afterlife

    You ask me does this ring any bells?
    Tell me to ask a crystal if it recalls
    Me being a king and all
    I have to laugh
    Still I ask

    You say we were in a temple, I was your king
    But I was just a kid from Temple City
    Raised on TV and video games
    Before that I can't recall a thing

    I can't say that it rings any bells
    But I love to hear the stories you tell
    I know just as little of before life
    As I could ever know of after life
    But speaking on the in between
    I'm grateful you're my queen
    Hey when I call you my queen does it ring any bells?

  • Musical Snapshots

    Recently I’ve been developing a concept I’m calling the musical snapshot.

    The idea is this: whatever I play or compose or improvise in a given moment is an expression of what I’m feeling at that time – some instinct, some inspiration, some emotion I may not even be fully aware of. I couldn’t have played or composed that particular idea at any other time, in a different place or state of mind. So any piece of music I write is essentially a snapshot of my creative and emotional state at the moment it was made.

    Of course there are other factors. The environment plays a role – the people around me, the conversations happening nearby, the ambient noise or quiet outside. What I’ve been practicing or listening to at the time makes its way in. So many things influence the expression, both consciously and subconsciously. But the core idea holds: the music captures something true about that moment, whether I understood it at the time or not.

    This means that returning to any musical idea is like time traveling. There’s a time capsule waiting – a connection back to a past version of myself, back to wherever I was, whatever I was feeling. When I listen back to an old voice memo or an old recording, I’m hearing something that past me left behind. And when I write about it now, I’m entering into a kind of conversation between that past self and whoever I am today – with hindsight, perspective, and hopefully a bit more understanding than I had in the moment.

    I arrived at this idea while thinking about the storytelling potential of a live set. I started arranging my songs not just alphabetically or by project or theme, but by the period of life they describe. I’ve written enough songs now that many different periods of my life can be told in song – different places I’ve lived, relationships I’ve been in, periods of travel, periods of staying still. Looking at them this way I started to see stages my life, with certain chapters more fully written than others. My childhood, for instance, is a notable gap – only recently have a couple of songs started to cover that territory.

    While thinking about performing songs in biographical order, I started to think about the fact I’m most always most excited about my newest song (finished or in progress) – and I landed on this idea that the newest ideas are closest to who I am and where I’m at at any given time. If I wanted to give an audience the most present and authentic version of myself, I should open with my newest song.

    Then I pushed the idea further. If the newest completed song is the most current snapshot, what’s even more present than that? Improvisation. Whatever I play in the moment, unplanned, is the most accurate expression of where I am right now. That’s what led me to the concept of opening a set with an improvisation – before any prepared material, before any rehearsed songs, just whatever comes out in that moment.

    In the performances I’ve done since developing this thinking I’ve been playing my newest songs in roughly reverse chronological order, keeping the spirit of the snapshot idea in mind. But the full biographical storytelling set – I haven’t fully realized yet in a live setting yet. This is all fresh territory, concepts I’ve only arrived at in the last few months.

    As for the retroactive writing process itself, the best example currently in this archive is Acaso – a song written about the house I grew up in, which integrates a piece of music I originally called Temple City Theme, an instrumental I wrote while traveling that I eventually dedicated to the city where I was raised. It’s a slightly different flavor of the process, but the essence is there: old music, new words, a conversation between two points in time.

    The clearest examples of this process in my catalog are the Alice songs – recordings made during a period living in an Amsterdam squat in 2014, which I’ve been slowly writing about from the distance of a decade. That’s a whole entry of its own – coming eventually.

    For now this is the framework. Many of the entries on this site were written this way – old music, new words, past self meeting present self somewhere in between. When you read them, that’s the conversation you’re listening in on.

  • 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

  • Acaso

    Acaso

    From the March album – originally written Fall 2023

    “Acaso” came together during one of the most emotionally intensive periods of my songwriting life, built around a piece of music I’d been playing with for years. It was 2014 when I returned to the states after over a year of traveling abroad – this was a piece I’d begun playing on the road but finalized and decided to dedicate to the San Gabriel Valley suburb where I grew up. I called it “Temple City Theme.” Here’s a recording of the piece I did with my friend Stephen Reed (of the brilliant band Xinxin) on drums:

    The Songwriting Challenge

    “Acaso” was written in fall 2023 during the first round of a new songwriting group led by Tim Bulster (of Tiller of The Moon – check out The Songwriting Mind episode with this talented musician). We committed to eight weeks of writing a song per week, recording demos and sharing them with the group. This became the first of four challenges we’d complete between fall 2023 and winter 2024.

    Here’s “Acaso” as originally submitted to the song-a-week group:

    (Original demo recording)

    Back in 2017, my childhood home in Temple City had been sold and my parents separated at long last. The anchor that had tethered a broken, unhappy family was finally cut loose.

    “Acaso” became my reflection on that time and process – from a free life on the road to returning “home” to serve my family through this transition and see them through to the other side. Eventually leaving to find new homes where the search and quest to claim spaces for ourselves continues.

    Here’s the version released with the collection of songs “March” performed live in my living room.

    Video:


    The unknowns been good to me
    Much better friend than certainty
    I traveled long and I traveled far
    Found myself across the world
    Now I got a call I been waiting for
    It’s time to go back home

    Hey it’s okay
    To finish what you started
    It’s run its course
    I know we’re all exhausted
    Don’t fret we’ll be alright
    This days been coming all our lives
    No more tears no more fights
    Just step through the door
    Gotta go back home
    For the last time

    At home I got a role to play
    Our folks are going their separate ways
    It got so bad they can’t speak
    Their voices move through me
    It ain’t fun but it’s gotta get done
    If we’re gonna move on

    All packed up and I’m the last one out
    Last chord needing cutting was this house
    Where we were born where we grew old
    What stood between us and the cold
    This broken home is all we’ve ever known
    But it’s time we close the door
    We’re gonna find new homes

    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.
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