Music Day - She

Picture this.

North American Christian culture, 2003. At this time it was still a very common belief that video games of any kind were spawn of Satan himself. VeggieTales' Jonah movie was the only film that millions of Christian children had seen in theatres because all the others were demonic in some way (Harry Potter had magic, Star Wars had magic, The Lord of the Rings was simply 'too scary'...), and were you really a Christian if you didn't listen to Adventures In Odyssey every weeknight at seven o'clock?

Into this culture came a group of three women who found instant popularity with pre-teen girls with their inspiring, poppy, uplifting (in every sense of the word) melodies. Behind trendy, pop art album covers in bright purples, whites, yellows, and oranges, they sang catchy, bright songs with slick production. Were you really a Christian girl if you didn't have a ZOEgirl album in your CD wallet?

In 2003, ZOEgirl dropped their best -- sorry, third studio album, Different Kind Of Free. The pop sound had matured along with their listeners -- now solidly into their mid-teens -- and the record took on an acoustic R&B vibe (probably influenced by BeBe and CeCe Winans, Nicole C. Mullen, and Out Of Eden, who were all big names on Christian radio at the time). Even the bright colours of ZOEgirl's previous offerings were muted, with a palette of blues and greys decorating the album.

DKOF still offered uplifting, poppy lyrics in the first half of the album. The album kicked off with their trademark energetic songs of dedication to God. This is a simple goal, but difficult to execute well. Executing these well had always been ZOEgirl's strength.

But halfway through the album, the subject matter takes a wildly different turn. The electronic bass, staccato rhythm, and lower vocal register of Wait was the only warning the listeners got of the shift. It was skillfully subtle -- I doubt most people realised what Wait was about, as the topic of suicidal ideation was absolutely never touched in churches at the time -- but to those of us who knew, we knew. Those of us who already felt the cold tentacles of depression tightening around our souls and minds knew that song was for us.

In an artistic move both bizarre (given the subject matter) and necessary (given the parents of the target audience), the next song was perhaps the breeziest and most carefree song of ZOEgirl's entire career. Feel Alright was a stylistic, if less manic, throwback to Upside Down from their first album. It was also the song I skipped over the most (despite loving Upside Down when it first come out), because it was the least relatable and the least intellectually stimulating. But they had to put it there, because the following song was a doozy.

She was a slow burner for me. My best friend at the time, a year older than me and a pastor's daughter to boot, caught the significance of it immediately, but she had no way of expressing to me what she saw in her life and in the song. I found the song too slow and boring and brushed it off as album filler. But as our ways parted and I saw the absolute worst the evangelical church had to offer in the wake of my calling and my cousin's death, I began to see what she had seen... enough that when I found Daniel Amos' brilliant album Doppelgänger in 2013, I 'got it' immediately: the church of North America was extremely broken. In Doppelgänger, I could see the indictment of the church in the lyrics clearly. But ten years had passed by then, and I had forgotten about that soft little ZOEgirl song which had sharp teeth.

The other day, out of nowhere, my brain started feeding me lyrics: She's alone / Caught up in the undertow / Where it takes her no-one knows...

I started listening, and the rest of the lyrics arose from my dusty memories from over half my lifetime ago. Then I dug the track out of the bottom of my iTunes and listened to it for real.

What a ballsy song.

To release a song not only about teenage sex and pregnancy out of wedlock, but to also use that song to point the finger directly at the failings of the church on an album specifically targeted to young teenage girls would have been CCM PR suicide if not handled with kid gloves. So they tucked it in one of the 'filler' slots (it's track eight out of eleven), mellowed down the music so it wouldn't attract immediate attention, and trusted God would open the ears of those who needed to hear. My guess is that most listeners, like me, assumed it was a typical 'don't have sex before marriage' song (yes, those are a thing in CCM), and completely failed to see that they weren't placing the blame on the girl, but on the church that didn't have compassion on her.

She went to them for help

But blindly they cast the first stone

They could have taken her in

But instead they left her on her own

All alone...

And it worked. No feathers were ruffled, DKOF is still regarded as their best album, and ZOEgirl made another successful album before calling it quits.

I just... I am in awe if the finesse they needed to pull this off, especially at that time, and it worked. Nowadays critique on Christian culture in Christian music is more common (and still sorely needed), but at that time for a Christian band to make a song blaming the church instead of the girl was revolutionary. It was countercultural. It could have ended their careers. They could have been excommunicated from the church for a song like that, but they did it anyway. They hid a scathing critique in plain sight for those of us who needed the warning the most and they lived to tell the tale. And those teenagers in 2003 are now the ones calling out the hypocrisy of the evangelicals.

Maybe that's why I can never quite let this group go. I've always chalked it up to nostalgia (which is definitely a factor in my enduring love for them), but the more I listen with my jaded adult ears, the more I realise there was more to this little pop-vocal group than any of us realised.

Rising

Lately I've been doing daily stretch and strengthen exercises, mostly cobbled from dance classes over the years... my favourite and most influential teacher was always on the cutting edge of strength and conditioning programs to keep her dancers safe. She regularly set aside 15-30 minutes either at the beginning or the end of each class for strengthening exercises.

I had made many of these stretches part of my daily routine for several years in college, however, when I moved back to Alberta, depressed and thoroughly burnt out, everything went out the window except laying in bed until the afternoon sun covered me as well as the blankets. Then came the major life change called marriage (nobody tells you how STRESSFUL that is) and my first full-time job since before college, both of which sapped my energy and motivation to do literally anything. It was all I could do to go to work, make it through the day, and stagger back home and stare blankly at the television screen or my phone until bedtime.

Lately I've had some motivation returning, and I decided to bring back my daily stretches. This was also partly out of necessity, as my ankle is very angry at being made to stand on a concrete floor for 32 hours a week, no matter HOW good my shoes are, and is requiring either physio or total bedrest. Obviously physio is the option that keeps the bills paid, and many of the exercises that the doctor gave me are exactly the same ones that my dance teacher made us do years ago in class. This, then, leads quite naturally into the re-instation of a daily stretching program.

The most basic and most effective ankle strengthening exercise (as far as I know) is what we in ballet class call the rise. Rises on two feet and rises on one foot could take up as much as 45 minutes of class time -- different amounts, different combinations, different speeds. Students from our school were known locally for their incredible strength and confidence en pointe simply because we had so much ankle training in class. Once I fell off pointe (at a different school, after this one), and while I nearly broke my wrist, my ankles were completely unscathed (well, maybe not completely, otherwise I wouldn't need the physio now).

Rises, then, are the core of my strengthening exercises. I have sort of accidentally claimed a specific spot by the big picture window in the living room as the spot to do my exercises. On my days off, I typically do my exercises in the morning, so then the late morning winter light lies pale along the snow-lined road, reminding me of more carefree days gone by... the days when I would go to morning dance classes and do rises in classes with M, my sister, and other friends with whom I've more or less lost touch, with the calm, caring spirit of my teacher filling the room.

I would give almost anything in the world to have those days back. Of course I savoured them as much as I could while I was there -- knowing even at that young age how fleeting life is -- but I still somehow thought that it would never end, at least not completely. I thought that M would live a good long life and that my friends would stay in touch and that that school would continue turning out well-trained and deeply nurtured students for generations and that no matter how far away I traveled or for how long, I would always have a place at the barre in the sunlight.

Doing rises in front of that picture window takes me back to those days in the tiniest of ways -- strongly enough to bring tears to my eyes, but never strongly enough to be real. It breaks my heart every morning when I do rises, but I would rather remember those days than forget them. All I can do now is carry M and the spirit of my teacher and the school she gave to us for that short time in my heart and keep doing the rises that keep us connected.

National Choreography Month, Day 10

For the first time in probably about five years, I was NOT dying of a severe lung infection in December/January (thanks, masks!), which means I've actually been able to properly do National Choreography Month this year.

I've almost done my first piece -- Queen's 'Who Wants To Live Forever.' It's probably the first widely recognisable band I've ever choreographed to in almost nine years of officially choreographing.

I was introduced to this song by someone I knew from college during my final year. We managed to be in three different shows together and as such spent many hours carpooling and sharing music (something we were both extremely passionate about), and one day Queen came up. I was familiar with Bohemian Rhapsody, of course (and if I never hear that song again in my entire life it will be too soon), and We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions because hockey, but neither of those cuts inspired me to delve deeply into their work.

While I picked up Queen songs that I love and play much more than this one from these carpool conversations, this one caught my melancholy mind's attention.

At that time in my life, M's death was extremely fresh, having only happened some four months earlier. Her death sent me into an odd but extremely intense nostalgic state wherein in the nostalgia is so strong it's physically painful and since I can't go back to the places and events and people I'm nostalgic for, I often feel like I don't want to be in this world anymore. I'm tired of longing for a time that can never be again, and every second of existing under that vicious longing feels like a personal attack -- like I'm being slapped in the face with all I've loved and lost. This state of extreme nostalgia continues to this day (if anything, it's intensified in the past few months). This song captured it perfectly... who wants to live forever? For sure not me. It's too painful to live that long under the weight of memories that will only ever be memories.

This is only the third not-tap dance I've choreographed since before M's death two and a half years ago (and one of those was literally the week she died). I haven't taken any ballet classes since I graduated college in April 2019. I had already begun to accept that I might never dance ballet again. I was just too beat down and too burnt out, and I felt I could never enjoy ballet again, so I focused on tap. But lately I've been feeling this pull back to ballet.

This piece was VERY different from what I usually choreograph. It was extremely slow, with a heavy focus on arms and lines (and a good bit of emphasis on character/mood). My usual work is at breakneck speed and I'm lucky if I choreograph five arms for an entire piece. It was such a departure, but at a time when I am still feeling such heavy nostalgia, the song fit and I think so did all the port de bras and lines -- this is a pensive song of reflection and melancholy, not dazzle and fun or even anger and sass. Slow movements, like that of an old man, or one who knows she is not long for this world, fit the yearning and 'so be it' mood of the song. It's a rather cathartic piece to dance.

That being said, there is this one section of allegro...

My husband and I have now been together for a year and a half (total). In all that time, that relationship has never inspired me to create anything artistic. It sounds bad, but there it is. Until this song -- the lyrics 'Touch my tears with your lips / Touch my world with your fingertips / And we will have forever / And we can love forever...'

My husband and I will not live forever, and that is perhaps a mercy for us both. But the time we have together transcends time.

I haven't officially picked a second piece for the contest; all I know is I want it to be a LOT more upbeat (read: less slow/boring) than this one. While I appreciate the beauty and the lines I've created here and I'm fairly certain this will work really well on stage, I'm tired of having slow songs stuck in my head.

Writing Update

Been a while since I did one of those, eh?

Lately I've been feeling this pull back to the keyboard. Do I have inspiration? No. But I do have this urge to write that I haven't felt for a very long time. I also, while cleaning out my old room at my parents' house in recent weeks (that's a whole other blog post and also probably one of the main forces for this sudden nostalgia for the writing beast that I used to be), I found Chris Baty's much-lesser-known work Ready, Set, Novel!, a workbook for novel planning. At the time my parents gifted it to me for Christmas, I had inspiration coming out the wazoo and it was all I could do to keep up with it (remember when I'd do three novels a year? Ah, the good old days). But now... now that I've survived a college degree that did everything in its power to kill me, now that my only real writing buddy is dead, now that I've moved for good out of my parents' house... I'm tired of the seismic shifts, and I want to go back to the good old days, the way things were. Not literally, of course, I was living with an emotionally unstable caregiver and being ostracised by the church that is SUPPOSED to be loving and kind. But back to the days where I could escape by writing. Back before all the deaths. I want to time travel, just a few years. And the best way I can think of is to write again.

So what does that mean?

I've started on the workbook, though I went through my 'story ideas' file the other day and found one idea that feels promising. I'm also tossing about the idea of writing the sequel to 2253... the first actually decent novel that I wrote. I had a synopsis for a sequel sketched out before I even wrote the original in 2009, but in my early college years I started to lose the ability to write sci-fi, then I lost writing altogether after my 2016 novel. But if the goal is to time-travel, this would be the perfect choice -- the novel itself is about time travel, and this novel in particular is very strongly tied to and influenced by my dear late friend Brittney. She was the inspiration for the main character, and she also read and endorsed the original 2253 draft. Even before her death, I had planned to dedicate the book to her. If I write the sequel, I get to re-live -- just for a few more days -- the good times when she was alive and we would talk about computers and science together and we would write things and critique each other's work. It would be the continuation of a novel I have dreamed of writing since I was fifteen years old. My concern is that I'm so far removed from the person I was when I wrote it in 2009 that I wouldn't be able to get into the characters and the world of the novel properly and I wouldn't do it justice.

The other idea -- the one from my 'story ideas' file -- deals with societal and evangelical corruption, a theme I have visited several times over the years (probably because my writing is the only place I can have the illusion of even being heard, let alone getting justice). My main concern is that it would be too heavy for me to write this year, given everything that's happening in the world. I'm worn out from reading about and seeing injustice on my social media, and I don't know if writing a novel about it will make me feel worse or better. I'm also struggling to resist the temptation to overly-politicise this novel (which is difficult to avoid given the amount of social media I've been consuming lately -- no, I'm not proud of it, but I've been too worn out/unmotivated to do much else). This temptation has so far not been an issue with the 2253 sequel.

I'm not sure yet if I'm actually up to the challenge of NaNoWriMo, mentally. Yes, I did it last year, but that novel was actual garbage and I only won with fifteen minutes to spare. I have literally never cut it that close and never hated every word as thoroughly as I hated those 50k.

For now, I'll keep percolating these two ideas and probably decide at midnight on November first which one I'm going to do, like usual (I suppose it will be nice to have a 'usual' thing though -- there's so little of that left nowadays).

My Room

Cleaning out my room at my parents' house for the final time.

Sure, I've moved away before, but before I always had the option of coming back. My possessions continued to reside here in this cheery pink room, under increasingly thick grey layers of dust and the occasional spiderweb. I never really truly had to move out of this room. I left for years at a time, but it was still my room.

But now I've just gotten married, and my sister is planning to take over my room. This requires me to clean it out for perhaps the first time ever. I've certainly straightened it up once or twice, but never truly deep-cleaned, and I've especially not had to pack it all away into storage at the same time. It's funny how few of my finds truly surprised me (apparently I pretty much knew exactly where everything was, despite some things not seeing the light of day for over a decade), yet when I dusted them off, only then did they bring back memories.

I'm a terribly, terribly sentimental person. I will keep a Staples receipt for pens and paperclips for nostalgic reasons, even though I know I will probably never look at it again. Part of the reason I had never truly cleaned out my room was because I was suffering so much loss already and I knew I couldn't bear to throw anything away. But now I'm forced to, and that, coupled with knowing this room is no longer my safe place anymore, is a very emotional process.

This room was where I cowered in fear from my mother's outbursts and listened to ABBA CDs nonstop on my headphones. This room was where I listened to Oilers hockey games and paced the carpet in the dark as I listened, working out some new plot idea. This room is where I would write all day long and late into the night on my old Windows XP machine with a 20GB hard drive (pretty sure the processor on that thing was measured in megahertz), or simply stare at the screensaver and daydream. This room was where I would sit on the floor after dance class and choreograph to Petra and White Heart, planning all sorts of dance shows with M. This room was where I sketched out revenge stories centering around the youth group that hated me. I've fallen asleep on the grey-pink carpet, I've made endless crochet and cross-stitch projects, I played hours of Polly Pocket with my sister, I've written over half a million words of ideas and prose, I've tap danced, I've even practiced a few ballet steps here. I've done so many self-portrait photoshoots, written so many blog posts, lost myself in so many dreams, cried so many silent but tortured tears. I moved into this room somewhere around 2003/2004, and it's been a home base for me ever since.

I found cards with greetings in both M's and Brittney's handwriting. I found a bear that my late grandfather gave me when I got baptised. I found mementos from a 2004 trip to see my now-deceased great-uncle and his wife in B.C. I found bookmarks my sister had made me, story ideas I'd sketched out on the back of church bulletins, and tickets for shows I'd performed in as a child. I even found a folder with all my work and costume designs and very early choreography for a book/dance company idea I had nursed for some three or four years in my early teens before joining the real world and realising that that exact particular idea was simply not feasible (it's not completely dead, though, the dream of a dance team and even some sections of choreography from that period still live on in my present work).

These are things that you never know the value of when you first receive them. This is another part of why I can't throw anything out. How could I have known on my 20th birthday when I received that card from M that she would be dead barely five years later? If I had thrown that card out two weeks later like I'm told 'normal people' always do, I would now have nothing left of the fierce woman who so often inspired and encouraged me. No-one else will ever exist with that exact handwriting, that exact way of wording things. And even if someone could forge it, they could never forge her personality, her essence, her spirit, her -- the things that all who knew her fell in love with.

Brittney was one of the very few people who was capable of being encouraging in writing. Sometimes her birthday cards to me were the only source of encouragement I would get for that entire year. This words-of-affirmation person had to scrape together all the encouragement she could, and sometimes it was contained only in the left-handed script of this one dear friend.

How could I know that my grandfather would only give me two gifts in the entire twenty-three years he knew me? Yes, I will never play with that stuffed bear, but my grandfather was a hardened, bitter man who rarely showed approval, let alone affection. That bear showed me what his gruff voice and distant actions never managed to do. I would rather remember that than simply replay the fading memory of his critical voice over and over in my head.

Memories fade. And these people meant far too much to me for me to justify callously tossing aside the things that remind me of them and their huge, huge impacts on my life. And because I never know which bright young life will disappear next, I can't afford to lose any of those memories. I learned when M died that just because something is statistically improbable (losing TWO best friends at age 22 in three years?), DOES NOT mean it's impossible. Especially if it's something bad. You know, like losing SEVEN people to death in four years; all but one under the age of 27. What's to say there won't be an eighth? Statistically, there should have been no more deaths in my life after Brittney for a good fifteen years, save maybe my grandfather due to his age and health. Yet there were five more in 1,461 days. Improbable, you say -- but it happened. It happened in real life, in my life. You truly never know. You can 'be positive' and 'not think about it now' and believe in the health and wealth of your friends all you want, but you truly. never. know. Nobody escapes the death of the ones they love the most. Nobody. (Except the ones who die young.)

(Side note: I am literally not even joking, iTunes just started playing Memories Fade by Tears For Fears. I did not plan this, and I am not making this up. I just started playing TFF and I had completely forgotten that song even existed.)

This room has been my safe haven through a lot of things, when there was no-one to talk to and no-one to go to. The golden light, amplified by the pink walls, seemed to bring a modicum of hope even on the darkest days of suicidal depression. The lone incandescent bulb that hung from the 2x10s that made up the upper floor above me lit the way to many a late-night story idea -- the spaceships that allowed me to travel through time and space, away from the pain of whatever situation I was in.

To not have even the option of spending a day alone in this room again -- it steals the breath from my chest. This room was one of my few constants in a world that insisted on dying away around me. It was always there, even after Brittney died and M died. It was my sanctuary when the world was against me (and let's be honest, it still is in many ways). I feel untethered without it, but it is time...
Another goodbye. It never gets easier.

Thank you, big pink room with the tree-dappled southern sunlight and the desks lining the walls, for all the good times and for sheltering me through all the bad times. Thank you for all the memories. Thank you for the safety and protection and inspiration you provided. I'll miss you something awful.

Music Day - When Everyone Wore Hats

I was raised in the shadow of the world of the good old days, in the farm country of Alberta -- close enough to the 'big city' to know what was happening in the world, but far enough from it to still have real neighbours, real community. The actual time of old-fashioned gentility had long passed by the time I was born, but the scent of it still lingered in our neighbourhood. I remember it, vaguely, but at the same time I knew it was lost. I lived in its ghost.

For me this song is at once a trip down memory lane and a yearning for a time I never knew. The world of the good old days. The melancholic grace of the electric guitar so perfectly captures the wistful tone of the lyrics.

Title: When Everyone Wore Hats
Artist: Daniel Amos
Album: Songs Of The Heart
Year: 1995
Label: Brainstorm Artists International/Frontline Records
iTunes here; YouTube here.

This song takes on a stronger meaning for me now, as I'm so far from home. I'm nearing the end of the semester, and I feel I can almost step into the small-town restaurant where my parents would sometimes take my sister and me for breakfast on Saturday mornings, as an occasional treat. I feel that would be the closest I could get -- the place where everyone really could wear hats and it wouldn't seem out of place.

This is really just an all-round beautiful song. It's five and a half minutes of that lovely DA blend of rock and melancholy and poetry. Perhaps one of their best.

Music Day

Hi everyone!

So you're probably (hopefully) starting to wonder why on earth I haven't posted anything more than Music Day lately.

Well, this is why:

Photo by Kate

Despite appearances, no, I didn't upload the wrong photo. This is a small part of what I've been working on lately.

That's choreography -- the (rough draft) intro to today's featured song, in fact.

See, my search for choreography resources was not entirely a waste. I found a book on eBay, Dance Notation For Beginners, and bought it.

Lately I've finally gotten around to seriously reading it rather than just skimming it every once in a while and starting to apply everything I've learnt so that it sticks in my mind and becomes natural (It's working too -- the other day my dance teacher asked us to put our feet in fifth, left foot front, and right away I thought of how it would be notated, though I'd only reached that part earlier this week).

It's a little confusing as the notation I'm learning is written as if you were watching the dancer perform it from behind. Prior to this I was writing little stick figures on a musical stave and was writing them as if watching them from the front -- that is, as if I were a member in the audience. It wasn't particularly precise though. It really only served as a memory aid so that I could later remember the dances and write them in a more common notation. Now that I'm learning 'official' notation I hope to break out of the habit of stick figures and thus speed up the whole process (it's astounding how time-consuming it can be to draw basic stick figures).

Now, about the song.

This was the song that sold me on classicchristian247.com the night I was introduced to it. I don't remember what the first song was that I heard, but this was the second.

I already knew the artist -- my father has quite a few of their records. Though I didn't recognise the song, knowing the artist, I think, helped solidify my allegiance to the station.

Over the next few weeks I heard the song several times. Each time I caught a few more of the words, committed another portion of the tune to my memory, before I finally looked it up on iTunes and bought a copy for myself.

This reminds me of my own nostalgia. The child in their father's vehicle listening to their parents talk... remembering those days with fondness and with gratitude that they got to experience them.

And all set to a now-nostalgic eighties pop sound.

This song sets me daydreaming, quite simply. It reminds me of all those good times of my own childhood, just as this very style of music was falling out of favour.

Title: Every Moment
Artist: DeGarmo & Key
Album: Streetlight
Year: 1986
Label: Power Discs
iTunes here; YouTube here.

I remember riding in the back seat
Of my daddy's Chevrolet car...

Pretty

The word nerd in me recently noticed that the word 'pretty' is hardly ever used anymore except as an adverb (pretty good, pretty stupid, pretty intense...).
And the word nerd found it sad.
As children -- specifically little girls -- 'pretty' is one of the most-used words in our vocabularies. Everything that is a) pink; b) has flowers and/or hearts on it; c) involves dress-up or make-up; or d) looks frilly or lacy is called 'pretty.'
'Pretty' is one of the highest compliments a little girl can receive and it's one of the highest compliments a little girl can pay anybody. It doesn't matter if you're fifty and 300 pounds overweight with whiskers or if you're twenty-two with 'perfect' skin and a seven-year string of beauty pageant championships, if a little girl calls you 'pretty,' you will treasure that forever. (And little girls, if my recollections of the experience are any indication, tend to think of almost all adult women as 'pretty.' Now that I think about it, when and why does that change?)
But somewhere in the teen years, 'pretty' is replaced by 'hot.' Sorry, I mean 'hawt.' Or 'sexy.'
Call me an innocent purist, but none of those have the same sweet ring to it as 'pretty' does.
Let's bring it back, shall we?