#ive got a little thing written up of them a couple weeks after ash dies

[embersofhope-if]

I just read the post that talked about how ash was a good liar and now I'm thinking to myself about an MC that made ash promise to them that they would win the games and come back to them and ash being such a convincing liar mc believed them and just the anguish mc would feel after ash died, thinking to themselves "you promised, you promised me" and i-

...what if i told you lowkey, that's literally what happened

[bensaundersposts-blog]

Blog

Wednesday 14th November 2018 Sat down with my collaborator to discuss the upcoming project. I had already decided on doing a concept album based on The Great Gatsby, as we had actually started work on a song with such a concept a few months prior, titled Buchanan Street. We chose this source of inspiration because we both love the book and have great reverence and understanding of it, and we know it is a deep well from which to draw inspiration.

Wednesday 21st November

Had our first songwriting session dedicated to this project, repurposing a song we had started earlier in the year as I thought the mood and lyrical content of the piece fit with the direction of the project nicely. The lyrics evoked to me an image of Gatsby and Daisy Buchannan on their first night together, talking things out late in the evening after the excitement had died down, picking apart each other’s minds and motivations, and trying to peel away the layers of pretence surrounding their personas. The music is melancholy and atmospheric and suggests the beginnings of the disillusionment of Gatsby’s dream as he is finally presented with the object of years of his desire, only to find it imperfect and something that could never live up to the dream.

Wednesday 28th November

Continued work on the aforementioned song which we decided to entitle Behind Dark Glasses. Also started a new song, Sins of the Father, following a discussion on how nobody ever really thinks of the events of The Great Gatsby from Daisy’s perspective, focussing instead on Gatsby and Nick’s feelings, so it would be interesting to look at things through her point of view. As such, we began to think how she would view the situation, torn between an unhappy-but-stable marriage, and the distant promise of a potentially better future with the man she had all but given up on years prior. We also thought about a concept brought up in the book of the cycle of negative behaviours and how they are learned. Daisy is, in essence, as we all are, simply acting out based on her surroundings and upbringing - repeating the sins of her father, as each generation tends to repeat the same mistakes as the preceding one, because it’s how they’ve been brought up, and all they know.

Wednesday 5th December

Decided to potentially do Sins of the Father as a duet, with one verse from Daisy’s perspective and another from Gatsby’s, with the two of them singing in harmony by the end. To accomplish this we can get our singer’s sister to do a guest vocal spot. This was an idea from the mind of my collaborator, who noted that the vocal harmony part I had devised for the end of the tune would lend itself to this approach.

Wednesday 12th December

Decided to employ some of my reharmonisation skills in an attempt to make Behind Dark Glasses more musically interesting. Perhaps a symptom of having spent so much time playing/listening to it, the simplicity of the chord progression was starting to get to me. The song is in 7/8 and alternates meter with 4/4 several times throughout, so is interesting rhythmically, and structurally, but I still felt I needed to spice up the harmony a little. I went from a vi-IV-I-V progression of Am-F-C-G to a vi-ii-I-iii progression of Am-Dm/A-C-Em, which I felt was significantly more interesting and slightly less predictable, and the inclusion of the E minor especially lended a darker, sadder tone to the overall piece.

Wednesday 19th December

Again continuing work on Behind Dark Glasses, I looked at the B section of the song which modulates from A minor to A major and features the progression Dmaj7-E(7). I liked the way the E7 acted as a turnaround chord back to A minor via its appearance in both the A major and A harmonic minor scales, but suddenly realised that I could use the Dmaj7 and E7 as bVI and bVII chords respectively to modulate to the new key of F# major, which sounded extremely triumphant and lended itself to a big, bombastic final “chorus” section for our song. Initially the two A minor and A major sections were already in contrast with each other, one dark and brooding and the other more uplifting and catchy, but this third section really elevated the song to new heights, soaring and really giving the song the kick it needed. How exactly the lyrics would progress into this section after being about such a somber topic for so long, we were yet to discover.

Wednesday 9th January 2019

After a short (ish) break for Christmas, we got right back into the swing of things by practicing the two songs we had written thus far, making slight alterations to the lyrics and melody. We then re-began work on the song that started it all, Buchanan Street. We already had a vague idea that this would be a more general, retrospective look at the events of the novel, mentioning things like he green light, the expensive cars and the valley of ashes. We also had a line for the ending of the song, “Don’t know where to go//Got to go my own way”, which we felt encapsulated a feeling of wanting to move on after the life-changing events of the novel, albeit being unsure of exactly where or how.

Wednesday 20th February

Contact with my collaborator at this point had become very sporadic and it was becoming increasingly difficult to actually get any work done with him. In his defense he had a couple of good excuses - his uncle died, then he had to attend the funeral, then his family went away on holiday, then his grandma got diagnosed with dementia and he had to help out in the purchase and renovation of a property close to his own house to which he and his family members could easily travel to look after her, etc etc. Every week he had a new excuse and every week I began to get more and more anxious over whether or not I would be able to make the May deadline for our project, and it was my degree on the line, not his. I don’t really blame him for circumstances outwith his control, but he has also proven to be somewhat unreliable on occasions prior and since. Due to all of this, during discussions with my lecturer we elected that I make a final decision on whether or not to proceed with the collaborative side of the project, or just do it all on my own, most likely completely instrumentally. Feeling that our idea had a lot of potential and that it would be a shame not to attempt to push forward with our project as initially planned, I decided to carry on with the collaboration, but really start to drill into my partner just how important this is and how little time we have left. Perhaps I could have planned things a little better, met up with him more than once a week and had other avenues available for myself to explore should our partnership give way, but I was a little one-track-minded on this idea and hoped everything would work out well.

Wednesday 6th March

We decided from this point on to really get a move on and to try and get one studio rehearsal session and one at-home writing session per week, in order to work on vocal melodies and lyrics respectively. We found that writing at my house was great for coming up with lyrics but bad for trying to come up with vocal melodies as we couldn’t be as loud outwith a studio, so decided to combine approaches. Continuing to work on Behind Dark Glasses, Sins of the Father and Buchanan Street, I had by this point created MIDI demos with some recorded audio tracks in Logic, nailing out structures and sounds and other minutia of our songs, coming up with vocal melodies and harmonies, etc. I had also started music for two new songs, tentatively titled Sailing (Track 01) and Oatabix.

Wednesday 13th March

At this point I had noticed something - all of our songs thus-far are mostly mid-tempo, ballad-y sorts of songs, which are great in isolation, but a good album needs variation. Look at my favourite concept album, American Idiot, for example - it has a nice blend of short, punky songs (American Idiot, She’s A Rebel), longer, more operatic songs (Jesus of Suburbia, Homecoming), and slower ballads (Are We the Waiting, Wake Me Up When September Ends). Noting this, I decided to make our opening track Sailing a faster, more exciting, more direct and more simple, back-to-basics rocker, and attempt to come up with at least one other new song in a similar vein, as Oatabix was another slow-burner.

Wednesday 20th March

Finding it very difficult to come up with more exciting songs than the ones we have already, we turned our attention to first tidying up the lyrics we had written thus far, and then finishing off all of the lyrics for Behind Dark Glasses, Sins of the Father and Buchanan Street. Noting that is was getting very close to April, the month in which we had initially planned to begin our recording process, we chatted briefly about recording avenues, and decided to record at West College Scotland’s Greenock campus, as we know Andrew McDermid who works there, and my collaborator guaranteed that we could get in. For the recordings I decided I am going to re-amp all of my guitars, meaning I will get perfect performances recorded at home into my computer which I can then bring into the studio to be re-recorded through amplifiers, in order to save time in the studio. I am going to do guitars and bass and program any synth parts, and Mark is going to do all the vocals, and we are going to get my friend and longtime collaborator Jake Fisher to do the drums.

Wednesday 27th March

Another week of no correspondence from Mark, I was beginning to get very stressed. However, we arranged to meet up in a studio on the upcoming Friday and hopefully blast out as much as we possibly can in the three hours allotted.

[dmmowers]

In the Presence of My Enemies

"In the Presence of My Enemies" A sermon for St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis. and Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. IV Lent | Year A | March 26, 2017 I Samuel 16.1-13 | Psalm 23 | Ephesians 5.8-14 | John 9.1-41 The shipping box sat in the middle of the table, its label staring up at me: This box contains cremated human remains.  I was a new priest, just a couple of months into my first job in the church. A few days before, the rector of the parish had walked into my office and said, Congratulations, this is a milestone. I am assigning you your first funeral. So I called the family and arranged to meet with them to plan the service later in the week. Even though I hadn't been a priest for very long, I have been an every-Sunday kind of church person my whole life, I have a pretty good radar for picking up church people. Within a few moments of meeting someone, I can make a pretty good guess about whether the person has ever spent much time in church. When I walked in to meet with the family, my radar began screaming that these were not people who had spent much time in church for a very long time. It wasn't that the family was mean to each other; in fact, they clearly enjoyed being with each other. It wasn't even the box that they had brought into the room and carefully placed in the center of the table. Their mother had died in Florida and her ashes had been shipped back to Minnesota, hence "This box contains cremated human remains." Maybe it was the confused looks on their faces when I started to explain what a funeral service from the prayer book looks like. Or maybe it was the request for a musician to play Frank Sinatra's "My Way" just before the gospel reading. Maybe it was the blank looks I got when I asked them what hymns they would like for the service. These adult children might have been confirmed in the church, or at least come occasionally as children, but they looked at me with big eyes and blank expressions at every turn. Until we got to the Psalm, when two of the adult children piped up at once: We really want to have Psalm 23 read at our mom's service.  So here are folks who haven't seen the inside of a church in quite some time, with very little idea about what sorts of things they would like to have in a funeral, but they each knew, independently of their siblings, that they wanted Psalm 23 in their mother's funeral.  I/II.  On the one hand, it's easy to see why. Psalm 23 is arguably the most famous chapter in Scripture, and maybe the best known text outside of John 3.16. Psalm 23 describes a person who is without needs because the Lord takes care of them, a person who is led by God to lie down in green pastures, to walk beside quiet rivers, who is comforted as they walk through what our translation this morning called the "darkest valley" but which the King James Version much more memorably calls "the valley of the shadow of death." This person fears no evil because the Lord is with them, because the Lord prepares a feast before them with their enemies sitting all around, a person who is followed by goodness and mercy all of the days of their lives and who will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Even if you don't have much of a church background, if you found yourself sitting around a table with a priest and your loved one's boxed remains, it's easy to see why you might be drawn to Psalm 23. In the midst of death, in the midst of grief, we all want comfort. We want to know that our beloved are loved and cared for by God even in death, and are awaiting that day when Jesus will come again to raise them from the dead, and we want to believe that Psalm 23 describes the life they are living right now.  I don't have any reason to think that is wrong. But on the other hand, if you read the psalm carefully, I'm struck by what you don't find there. You don't find any mention of human remains, boxed or otherwise.  No mention of heaven. Instead, there is every indication that this psalm is talking about present-day life. The Psalms, like most of the Old Testament, don't talk directly about heaven, but they are intimately concerned with the fallout of everyday human life. The experience of the author of this Psalm is that when you put your trust in the Lord, the Lord gives you all the things you need - I shall not want.  When the author walks, through the valley of the shadow of death, they feel no evil, because the Lord is with them. When there are enemies all around, the author feels secure and comfortable, as though the Lord has thrown them a banquet with their enemies sitting around watching them. The experience of the author is that the Lord gives them everything that they need, their fears are stilled, their security is found completely in God alone.  But this way of reading the text bothered me, or, at least, it provoked some hard questions. Earlier this week, I met with the principal of Baraboo High School to greet him, introduce myself, and learn about Baraboo as a community through what's happening at the high school. The principal mentioned that more than 50% of the children in the Baraboo School District qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, meaning that as many as 1 in 2 Baraboo children are growing up in poverty, and that a fair number of those might be food insecure - meaning that they might not know any given day where their next meal is coming from. And then I came back to my office and read: "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want" and thought about those kids who I will come to know, and those kids who many of you already know, kids who might be here today. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. What does that mean to the hungry? And what does it mean to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and yet not fear? We Christians sometimes have a reputation of being people who are not able to face up to how terrible reality can sometimes be. When my father had a brain aneurysm and died suddenly six years ago at age 57, I was in the midst of a seminary degree, and so I paid attention to what friends of my parents said to me as they came through the receiving line at the visitation. "It was God's time for him to go," one person said. "God needed him in heaven," another person told me. More than one quoted Scripture: "The Lord works in mysterious ways," or "the Lord will never give you more than you can bear." These people were all trying to comfort me, and they all loved my dad and our family. But months later, after I had had time to process, I started thinking about what the people had said. Death is the last enemy that shall be destroyed, says St. John in Revelation. The Lord does not use evil events to further his plans. I realized that something so terrible had happened that people were trying to comfort themselves and me so that we did not have to feel the depth of pain and loss such a death inevitably brings about. But no one is served well when we try to make up reasons for bad things that happen when there are no reasons. No one is served well when we use clichés because we feel like we have to say something but there are no words to say. It’s far better to say that we’re sorry for a loss, and to be truly sorry, and to look forward with the bereaved when God will make all of our losses whole. Far better to acknowledge the valley of the shadow of death where we find it, to stare it in the face, and then to proclaim to it that our God has promised to be with us in the midst of it. III.  Psalm 23 is what scholars call a "trust psalm" (Jacobsen, Working Preacher), and meaning that its author wrote it in a time of dire crisis to ask for help and to express trust in God in spite of the crisis in front of him. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”  It means that we are sheep, and that we are easily distracted, that we are easily lost, that we wander away and then have trouble finding food. Because the Lord is our shepherd, we shall not want, we shall not be allowed to wander away and get lost. The Lord will lead us in right paths and will provide for our needs.    This psalm doesn't ignore hungry kids or grieving people or people who are besieged by enemies: its author is one of them. And so from the depths of that darkness, from the swirl of chaos, from grief and a cry goes up: Surely goodness and mercy will follow me every day of my life. It's not a cry that ignores the crisis, that pretends it's not going on, but rather a cry of trust in the Lord's goodness and faithfulness from the midst of crisis. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. The Lord prepares a banquet table before me, and my enemies are surrounding me, seating themselves at my very table, and yet I am full, I am satisfied, I am more than secure: my cup overflows because the Lord has provided abundantly beyond anything I could have hoped for. Even in the midst of chaos, the Shepherd God uses his staff on his sheep, his people, to scoot them back onto the right path, to pull them up out of pits they have fallen into. He uses his rod to gently correct, to convict us of wrongs that we have minimized or written off so that we might become whole.     IV. Have you ever found yourself in a moment of crisis? Have you ever felt lost and alone, and wondered what choices would lead you to the right path? Those sound a little bit like the questions a lost sheep would ask. Maybe you're feeling lost and alone this morning. Maybe the path ahead is not clear; you're not sure what direction to go. You don't know what you believe, where to go to college, how to interact with a child, what career to choose, what to do with retirement, how to comfort a friend. The Lord will Shepherd us, will help us, will lead us in right paths for his name's sake.  Maybe this morning you don't feel lost; in fact, you know exactly where you are. You know what the psalm means when it says, "the valley of the shadow of death", because you are walking there. The doctors tell you they're not sure if this treatment is going to work. A loved one died several years back and you just didn't know that it would still be so hard after so long. A friend has received a terrifying diagnosis. You walk in the valley of the shadow of death, and yet from there, the Lord promises to be with us: I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Or maybe the bill collectors are after you; you're hungry, you're worried about whether you're about to lose your job. So much about life makes you feel insecure, as though the joy and happiness you feel can be snatched away at a moment's notice. It feels like enemies closing in on you, and you are afraid. And yet from the midst of that insecurity, the Lord prepares a table before us in the presence of our enemies. In the presence of evil, the Lord promises to make our cups overflow.  The Lord's promise in this psalm is for us this morning. For all who are lost, for all who walk through the valley of the shadow of death, for all whose enemies circle around them: the Lord has promised to meet us. And indeed, the Lord still does prepare for us a table in the presence of our enemies, as the crucified Lord Jesus offers himself for the sake of the world in the Eucharist as bread and wine, as bread and wine that we receive into our bodies. May all of us who are lost find our way at this table. May all of us who are broken find healing at this table. May all of us who are fearful find strength and solace at this table. And may the Lord Jesus, the shepherd of the sheep, follow us with goodness and mercy today and all the days of our lives, and may we dwell in house of the Lord forever. Amen.