7S7D D5
“From Hell, With Love”
Howdy, patrons! If you fall into a reward tier with digital rewards, they are ready to go (if you already have access to those folders, they're up and ready for you). I wanted to wait until a few of the "older" patrons were able to switch into the tier they want before doing a reminder blast about the files - I'm trying really hard not to inundate your inboxes. But reminders and instructions will be sent tomorrow or Sunday.
Okay - Day 5. My prompt for today was "from hell."
I could have done anything with this, but I quickly fell in love with the idea of receiving a letter from a friend's afterlife. If you've followed me or my music much beyond the listening of my two major releases, you'll know a little already about how I lost a very special loved one a few years ago. She was, while she was alive, and continues to be, still, one of my greatest muses- she was one of those special tormented humans that even when she was in your proximity, you'd still feel like she wasn't really there.
She was an incredible writer, better than me by leagues. She could turn a phrase so quick, that at just the moment when she had you completely invested in the story the verbal knife would flip and you would be gutted. She really made me a better writer as we would spur each other on, in absolutely gorgeous but very passive-aggressive creative-writing blog-sparring when we fought. She was my gemini, really, a direct reverse of me in some ways, but not unlike a mirror of what I could be, both the good and the bad. Of course, even though our relationship was tumultuous and volatile, I can't begin to describe how much I miss her.
A lot of what we wrote to each other was an underworld myth we established to help cope with what we felt for each other above ground but couldn't really talk about or act on. A modern-day queer Orpheus & Eurydice- two barely-post-adolescents with messiah complexes and a love for literature and comic books expressing this weird thing we couldn't quite comprehend. The ultimate fan fiction where we ourselves were both the anti-heroes. She, Death, and I, a Gatekeeper unlocking the tragedies of our universe. Both of us held to our sacred eternal duties by an unseen force, and inextricably tied to one another. When she was, actually, in real life, the first human I loved whose death I had to endure (and such an important figure in my life at that), our story became THE avenue for me to work through my grief. My work is not done.
I'm giving this detail to give the lyric of this song some context. It's supposed to be macabre, but not quite morbid. In most of these songs about her I typically play on this idea of physical death vs metaphorical death, and certainly a literal hell vs hell-on-earth. When a loved one dies, do we not anguish in our own personal hell? The hell of a life without them, the hell of the awareness of the precariousness of our own mortality? (for instance.)
This song expands on that a bit - of course I am narrating the song as though I am reading a letter she wrote to me, from the literal hell, but the subtext is that I'm really writing it to her from my living metaphorical one without her.
It's hard to really get the performance just right on these heavy pieces when it's so new and you're still getting used to the phrasing and playing of the song passably, but I'm pretty proud of this one.
Give your loved ones a squeeze for me,
Lex
original patreon post comments:
rewards access:
