Joel P West
Surrounded By The Black Sea And Collage Workings
Sep 25, 2008
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Admirers And Allies
original version appears on Something Makes Us Move
I used to assume that my loneliness was a result of other peoples' unwillingness to see me as I am. I would hide away or drive places by myself; convinced that since I don't communicate the same way other people do that I would never really know or be known. Eventually, through the love of my friends, I learned that the beauty of knowing each other is that nobody communicates the same way and that the sum of all of our experiences defines truth and creates beauty. There's no violin on the original recording but once Kelly played her stuff on it . Suzi squeezed into our car in Chicago to come sing on this one and Justin, who kindly drove us out to the studio, shook a tambourine.
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Blue And Grey
original version appears on Dust Jacket
I went to Iceland last summer and wrote a bunch. When I decided to write Dust Jacket, I started by going through my journals and this is the first song I started working on. It has to do with one of the initial feelings I had when I arrived, the feeling of eyes on me all the time, even when I was doing the most routine things. I'm interested in the way that we shape our actions knowing that other people are watching us, which can be a really good and important thing but can also be really restrictive. This is something that I participate in every day but was highlighted amidst an exclusive language and the midnight sun.
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Pinhole
original version appears on Dust Jacket
Another one from my Iceland journals. We seem to associate home with location, space, and structure, but in my experience what really sticks with us are specific sounds, smells, objects, colors, and so on. It's never what we plan on remembering but we have these fragments we can refer to, little sensations that allow us access to memories. I think I try to escape my own skin from time to time, but for the most part we're bound to these sensations and there's no way out. We crave them, we assume them, we hide behind them, we live for them. We are all of them at once. It's profound and beautiful to share in some of the details of memories with other people and I found it particularly fascinating to share that with people completely outside of the context of my experience out on that little island.
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Everybody's Business
unreleased
This is an old song I originally made years ago with computer beats and an old tape player. I've been playing with Kelly, Donovan, and Kenny for a while now and this was the first song we tried together. I wrote it while staying in the rural Oregon town that I grew up in for the first time after moving to San Diego. The American tradition of competition to have and to be is extremely visible in small towns because there are no secrets and nowhere to go.
Joel P. West has the kind of name of someone who should have a well-placed esquire following it. It's a mixture between Alfred E. Neuman and a naval officer of high esteem or a title given to some fat cat attorney - only in theory. The real Joel P. West is a high school art teacher in a public school in San Diego that's not really close to being the best one out there, from all reports. There are attention spans to deal with, truancy, lackluster effort in all classrooms - the very dilemmas that have gone ahead and riddled all aspects of young American culture. You just can't find someone between the ages of 10 and 18 who's not less interested in more things than he or she is interested in. We could just put a gentleman's bet on it if that's what it would take to prove it in your eyes. Either way it is, West is surrounded (in song) by a tired, black sea and in real life he just shares a border with a tired blue sea that fosters unreachable dreams and more than a healthy amount of absent gazing.
He's a guy who has taken his art to places that it never knew it could belong to, ripping it out of its element and forcing it to be cool with adverse situations and surroundings. He's been to Iceland to meditate and be alone with his art, where it was forced to decide what its new definition was going to be. He's let his art reflect the kinds of self-conscious inhibitions that a person often gets faced with while living in a country far away from home and choosing to experience life in a completely different manner than the one that is usually most prevailing. The words that West uses to express a sort of unconnected and yet fully absorbed life are the kinds of road warrioring words that we're most used to hearing in Bob Segar and John Mellencamp songs - where people are as strong as they can be and where there's tough, grit to be chewed on and appreciated. There's a lot of trying to figure out how it all works and how all of these various lives and roads all fit together for the person contemplating them.
West chisels out a picture that makes a lovely plea for friendship and for communal humanity in the face of exasperating odds and oddities. He seems willing to welcome all of the cooks into the kitchen because it certainly could lead to better meals and it most definitely would lead to bigger, more interesting meals. The topics of conversation would stretch as endlessly as the eyes can carry and they'd be flying haphazardly all over the map. It would be something to drink to, to toast to and rejoice in. He's assembled uncertainties - of friends (he calls them allies) and enemies (he doesn't have a word for them) - into little pieces of collage clippings that are then put together in a glued up, snapshot way. It carries a flowing narrative of the mind jumping and clearing small buildings below or just buzzing by scenery, motioning out to all that's going on out there. It's more of a feeling out a hot air balloon though, where there's enough time to zero in on all of the minor details of things below, where you can follow a progression, some steps walking, some people changing others or changing themselves.
West has a lazy and colorful voice that gives off a golden glow and an intellect that seizes you and wraps you up in the dramatic escapes and cliffhangers. It's woozy like Jeff Mangum in places and it takes on magical sorts of climates when he sings about a hummingbird hiding in an orange tree - a descriptive particle of lyric that allows for extraordinary daydreaming. West's current record and the project that he's centered it around also allow for interjections and appreciations from anyone who wants in. Dust Jacket has become a web site - or vice versa - and the way to get a copy of it is to visit the site and volunteer any piece of handmade art in exchange. It's West inviting others into his scrapbook and the results already have been profound. It seems to make sense that they would be.
Dust Jacket Official Site
