Salty Waves Of Blue

 

As with Fortis Green, Salty Waves of Blue is hinged heavily to Mary H. By 2007, I'd moved beyond perceiving her as a poor-little-girl or Catherine Earnshaw, and seen that she was craftier then she'd seemed at surviving. Mary did PAFA at Penn; a system by which PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts) graduates could do work at Penn and receive a Penn diploma; and she was 29, older and wiser. She had a studio in Port Richmond and lived at 49th and Baltimore in West Philly, several blocks from where she'd lived in the early Aughts. Yet some of the old demons still circulated beneath the surface, compulsions and addictions. I was frazzled, also, by fulfilling my full-time University Fellowship at Temple. I couldn't pick up my guitar, by the time we did the Eris Temple EP tracks in the spring of '07, without feeling awkward and overextended. I felt the same way about shacking up with Mary H. We were careening slightly out of control; Mary, still at Barnes and Noble for a day-job, me in academia. The relaxed exuberance of the early Aughts was lost; and we weren't seeing too much of Abs, either. 

So, I was writing out of these impulses. Mary H had moved from one form/manner of shadiness towards me to another, even if we still cared about each other. I went through a few weeks of writing in Open G (influences being the usual suspects), and Salty Waves Of Blue was conceived then. The sound and ambiance of the track prove that by the Eris Temple EP in '07, Matt Stevenson was completely the master of his domain. The fullness and well-balanced richness of the sound competes with any acoustic recording in the history of rock music. Once we'd done a number of tracks, I abruptly scrapped the project to focus on another task at hand in '07; the release and dissemination of my first books. Yet, Salty Waves Of Blue taps into something very raw and edgy about me and Mary H at the time which proved to be prescient. We had another year or two in Aughts Philadelphia, and then the party really did end definitively.