Femme Fatale

Cards on the table: when things got icy in Center City Philly in 2009, and it became clear that the Center City cultural scene was not going to regain its wits anytime soon, a part of me fell apart. As of the early and mid-Aughts, I was simply too young to understand that the party in Philly would or could end that painfully. Stands to reason that Third/Sister Lovers became my anthem album for the second half of 2009. It is an album about pain. In this case, legendary pain, i.e. Steve Cropper shows up to lay down a guitar track, and they have to run a cable to him standing in the hallway. Cropper couldn't enter the studio, because Alex was being weird. The emergence of Dani at the Last Drop in 2009, as is documented in Flaming Red Hair, was also weird. It was the first icicle summer I ever spent at the Drop. Dani and I were weird together. I moved towards writing Apparition Poems, amidst a fractured, suddenly listless landscape. Abby Heller-Burnham at the time wouldn't talk about anything but wanting to die. Rough stuff. The Great Recession itself was almost over. We would all have to live in its aftermath. The encounter with Dani was my final Aughts encounter. No starlit idealism at all. Just a sense of being willing to junk things up to express what needs to be expressed. So there's Alex, again. And the ice in the music was palliative for me at the time, because I was living through something similar. Starlit idealism is still difficult to come by.