Paleo
Let The Examination Begin - It Could Take A Year Or A Life
Feb 12, 2007
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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June 24th, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Astoria, Oregon. I call it "This is the Life." I was literally sitting on the dock of the bay when I wrote this song. Birds were flying by. That night I would be playing in this tiny pizza parlor for eight kids, including Ashleigh and Sally. The cafe paid me in pizza. The tour I was trying to book for that summer was going terribly and I was running out of money. I met with Slim Moon that morning, the head of Kill Rock Stars, in a diner in Olympia. Moon told me he was impressed by my work ethic, but wasn't interested in pursuing anything at the moment. In an e-mail I would receive from him two weeks later, he would tell me that The Song Diary was "all logistics and no emotion" and that I was "too regular Joe." After the show, Ashleigh told me she loved me. Right there in the parking lot outside of the Cannery Cafe. I didn't say anything, she said I didn't have to. And then I drove to Portland to stay the night on my brother's couch."Lyrics and the original recording":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20060624.html
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November 30th, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Patchogue, New York. I call it "Three Stops to the Big Dream I Dream." These United States and Adam Arcuragi and I were playing a show at some bar in Long Island, staying with this very generous older lady there who set up the show. She cooked us lasagna and prepared a Caesar salad, and dedicated an entire room of her house to putting us up. Pillows, mattresses everywhere. But the show was madness. After lasagna, she introduced the gang to cocaine and pot and as much alcohol as anyone could drink. Jesse was scribbling things in my notebook as I tried to write it all down in a sea of cigarette smoke and crunching chatter. But I didn't have a melody. And then it rained. Such a beautiful big rain, and I ran out into it with my tiny guitar and the chords came and the melody came. "My formidable foe!" I put all my notes from the night together into long white rails."Lyrics and the original recording":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20061130.html
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December 6th, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Brooklyn, New York, and is called "Ash In My Eyes." There's a piece of my heart that's been missing for a while now. This piece that I gave to Carie. Ashleigh has been helping me put it back together. We find sticks and branches and leaves and flowers and we gum them all together, we chew them up, and we just stick them on there. It's almost finished now, Ashleigh."Lyrics and the original recording":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20061206.html
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December 7th, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Washington, DC, and is called "Forest For The Past / Future For The Trees." This song was written in a furious blast in a spare room of a friend of mine in DC. It was 4 a.m., and I had to be up the next day at 9 a.m. for the last two days of mixing of These United States' record at Silver Sonya. Jesse's record was to be called The Forest and The Garden, inspired in part by the old saying "you can't see the forest for the trees." There was nothing in the room I was sleeping in. Next to nothing had happened all day. No one had said anything interesting. There was just me and my memories and my imagination. Lyrics and the original recording
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July 5th, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Flagstaff, Arizona, and is called "A Moment." I tell this story at shows sometimes. I was playing on the rooftop of this bar, and across the street from the rooftop there was this lady in a hostel, this Canadian lady, who had come all the way from Quebec to see the Grand Canyon the following morning. The story goes as I began to play, she was so moved by the performance that she got up out of bed, went down three flights of stairs, crossed the street, showed her passport to the door man, climbed three flights of stairs, then waded through people and tables to stand directly in front of me opposite the microphone stand. She waved her arms a little. I finished the song I was singing and leaned forward, thinking she might have something nice to say. But instead "I'm trying to sleep" was all that came out. "I have to be up in four hours." I looked at her a little blankly I had driven six hours from Los Angeles to be there. Still, I wasn't really surprised; this was pretty much par for the course for my summer tour down the west coast. But I didn't stop playing, and I imagine she had some trouble sleeping. For whatever reason, maybe out of guilt, maybe to apologize, it seemed the best way to remember her would be to pretend we'd fallen in love, she and I, and that we'd stayed up all night talking. I imagined she was 20 years younger and there with me on the curb across from the tennis courts as I recorded. There is a train that runs through Flagstaff. In the original recording, you can hear it in the background."Lyrics and the original recording":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20060705.html
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December 23rd, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Brooklyn, New York, and is called "Love With An Illegal." My sister left for Guatemala in August to be with Clemente. She met him on her first trip down there in March, and fell for the boy. She was crazy about him. Clemente and I have the same birthday, and Jessica believed that was a sign, that the stars were aligned in her favor this time. She could see volcanoes from the kitchen window. There was a lizard on the ceiling over their bed. She wanted to bring him to America. Here they could be happy forever. She could take care of him. He would make her feel beautiful. When our dad passed on, Clemente would be her old man. But as the pressures to deal with the near-impossible immigration process mounted, Clemente flaked. He stopped calling, stopped writing. She thought for a long time he might be dead. In December, she was crashing in Chicago, the dried up hope of their reunion the only thing she had. Clemente's name means "forgiveness." "Lyrics and the original recording":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20061223.html
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September 21st, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Lexington, Kentucky. I titled this one "Marry My Baby." Meanwhile, my dad, nestled in Tampa, Florida, is trying to console my mother over their daughter's decision to marry a boy in Guatemala. Jessica says her worst fear in the whole world is being an old spinster with a room full of cats. She refuses to get a cat because of this, as much as loving cats is in our blood. I don't really know, but I imagine as a father your children's fears become your fears. Their loneliness becomes yours. Their heartbreak your heartbreak. My dad will never truly be retired until all his children are happy. In this way, he may be the hardest working man I've ever met. His heart never stops beating."Lyrics":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20060921.html
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April 29th, 2006
This song was written and recorded in Lutz, Florida. It goes by "In The Morning Linda Dies." Ashleigh's cousin Sally is taking pole-dancing lessons. My friend Kelly in Athens tells me that that's a thing these days, that it's good exercise. I suppose I'll have to try it myself to see. Sally told me after my show in Portland on June 22nd that linda means "pretty" in Spanish. I think sometimes when we think we're figuring poetry out, what's really happening is that the poetry is figuring us out."Lyrics and the original recording":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20060429.html
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August 4th, 2006
This song was written and recorded Chicago, Illinois, and is called "When Money Talks." I was staying with my sister Sarah and her husband Tom in Chicago. They have an attic crawlspace above their apartment into which I retreated for the night to write this song. I had spent the last five days in Elgin, Ill., boxing up all my childhood belongings, determining what I wanted to throw away and what I wanted to put into storage. I grew up in Elgin, an old river town swallowed up by Chicago suburbs, and in August of 2006 the house I was born in, the house I left and came home to and left again, was sold. On August 3rd it was a crypt. All the rooms were empty. Like a body being prepared. It made me think of wakes. When you look at the people you love when they're lying there in their casket, and it's not them at all. There's absolutely nothing there of the person you knew. And the next day on August 4th in the place in my heart where home used to be, there was an empty check."Lyrics and the original recording":http://www.paleo.ws/songdiary/20060624.htmlFor the original versions of these songs, recorded the day they were written, and 300 other Paleo songs, check out "Paleo's Official Website":http://www.paleo.ws/
Warring at all times within our fleshy, bloody walls are thousands of big and little things that despite all their intrinsic, natural differences, tender enough connections that they can be uniformly seen as being collusive - like a dentist giving out lollipops to children for good behavior. It's how the bitter and the sweet, the longing and the riddance and the truth and the white lies usually interact with one another that give us that melodramatic sheen that refuses to wash clean from us under a showerhead. The happiest, most content person under the sun will swallow enough calamity over their lifetime to cancel everything out. This isn't pessimism working here, it's just the way it works when the sadness plays hotter, the aftertaste of it wages on even when it shouldn't, when the new chapters have been stacked deeply upon the old. There is always that temptation to desire one without the other, though that day's never that close. Happiness takes struggle and sadness takes effort. Combine the two and you've got normal. A conflicted man or woman is simply rational - looking at the dark and the light and finding that their pupils adjust automatically to both of them. It has to say something about the two contrasting elements. David Strackany, or Paleo, is a man - Daytrotter's newly crowned, first-ever poet laureate - intimate with contradictory emotions, with the person who's as cool as a melon on the outside and splintered to pieces on the inside, raging like Pamplona on the inside, knocking over china cabinets, smashing their knuckles into countertops and ripping up the carpeting, exposing padding underneath.
Strackany has a knack for delivering purviews that are as authentic as they are powerful. He plays mousy at times, coyly sending out a dry, wilting ripple of a line and as he begins to go, that line is suddenly being roared into air like a lion audibly staking out its territory. It's mostly just the protagonist trying so hard not to be done under by whatever's afflicting him at the time. Getting worked up - as the defense goes - is a mechanism for protecting that soft, gooey, vulnerable inner core. Some quickly after the flourishes and the harrumphs, the blood cools back off and tries to be civil again, but the remains of the torment loom like icicles hanging from gutters on melting days, ready to fall and do something that requires stitches. Those that he peoples his never-ending string of songs with are average people - like you and I - who go forth every morning trying to get better at living life, though the rules continually change, the rewards sometimes feel abbreviated or subject to disagreement and the protective armor is often discovered to be a veiled coating. These are not those out of the ordinary with problems that are unable to be related to or easily solved. They are unsolvable quandaries that he ruminates on and spends most of his waking hours mulling - is this happiness enough, will that other person I love ever find their happiness, why do I find myself struggling to accept my lot, will this sadness just be replaced by more of the same?
Strackany is masterful at getting to the crux of his characters' dilemmas and then cloaking what he's identified in indisputably beautiful abstraction. There's a lot of himself in the situations that he rolls out with his shaken, quivering voice - stories about his sisters, stories about his parents, stories about his days spent fighting the loneliness that he doesn't mind being stranded with almost every day of the year. He follows the dictum of Socrates, who famously said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." His songs are clarion calls out to all that is not summarized. He doesn't Cliff note his life, the lives of those closest to him or even those lives conjured up in the daily drives from city-to-city as he's been sacrificing his sanity and the sanctity of a stable home life (where personal relationships can be nurtured and not abandoned for long periods of time) for a Song Diary that has him writing, recording and posting a new song on his website every day for 365-straight days. He can see the finish line, though it might always seem to be moving like a desert's mirage -- a thirst-quenching lake, perhaps - just ahead on April 15 th, when he puts the brakes on a project that has taken he and his dinky, $30 guitar, which was purchased at Wal-Mart, into so many lives that the available lives to examine (after his own) are endless. He can remind of the ways that David Sedaris finds new insight in all of the tiniest escapades he and his siblings endured during their childhood, or the act of looking for a place to live, but those episodes were drummed up for comedic reasons and Strackany's way is to give it to us straight, with no garnish or punchline. Watch him stand on stage with his legs lightly crossed and his eyes just as lightly shaded, offering these things that he's learned through much examination with a magical wind behind them. It knocks you back some and then you do conclude -- ever to yourself because in its admittance you realize that you're on the other side - that this, what he is doing - is living. Socrates wins again.
*The Daytrotter interview:*
*How are you going to celebrate tax day this year?*
David Strackany: April 15th I will wake up in Philadelphia and I will drive to Washington D.C. where I will play two shows at The Warehouse Next Door, a matinee and a late show. Between and during those three things I will work on writing my 365th song in as many days. The 54th incarnation of a prayer I've been rewriting every Sunday. After the second show I'm going to start heading west for Little Egypt, on the southern tip of Illinois.
*Will you take a day off? Are you capable of that at this point?*
DS: It's hard to say. I'm sure I'll get ideas for songs, but I won't write them down. And I'll get ideas for melodies, but I won't record them. I'll row a rowboat, and I'll count chickens.
*Your "this year" is out there for everyone to take in. What's next year going to be like for you? What do you hope it's like? Is it going to be hard settling in to a more regular-styled life or won't that be in the cards?*
DS: This year was a waterfall. Next year will be similar in some ways, but different in others. I'm planning on trying to tour a few other continents for five or six months of it, and working on finishing a second record for the first half of it. I'm going to try to figure out how to get distribution without giving 50% of my earnings to a label, and I think I'm going to take out a loan and build a barn that I can record in.
*I've asked you this before, but I'm going to ask again as I think that you can probably have a different answer on different days for this question: What's been the real challenge of the Song Diary?*
DS: Sometimes art requires you interact with things under a microscope or from a bird's eye. And you can't talk to anyone at either of those distances. People who used to know who I am don't know me anymore, and I don't know what to tell them. I feel almost as if I don't have an identity beyond the art that I make. The Diary was supposed to be a reflection of me. But every day, more and more, I became a reflection of it.
*Which people are you missing? There are family members and friends that you've had to neglect because of this odyssey, right? Is an odyssey a good word for it?*
DS: That's the perfect word for it. Before I chose the name Paleo, I thought about going by Leo Bloom, because in Joyce's Ulysses, Bloom is Odysseus' parallel. Wendell Berry wrote some really smart things about Odysseus that I always think on out here in the desert. I have a Penelope. And I have islands. And beds built around trees I have not seen in some time.
*Are you going to expect any kind of royalties when we name our future venue Trotsky's?*
DS: Just invite me to play the grand opening show and we'll call it even.
*How is it sleeping on the floor in the Daytrotter studio?*
DS: I slept on the couch. It's a little short. My leg fell asleep. But my other one was just fine. The cup therefore, near as I can tell, was half full.
*Would you say that your characters are constantly struggling with something? What do you mentally wrestle with?*
DS: The absence of purpose. Hemingway used darkness as a metaphor for finding meaning in a world with no God. Art has no utility, you can not pour water into a song. You can not sweep the hall with a song. The problems you forget about while listening to music are still there when you come to.
*What's stronger: love or money? What is it about both that turns good people bad?*
DS: Yeah, the exchange rate's real bad between those two, but there is nothing about love that corrupts. I love my parents. I love my girl; My love for them fills their hearts up. You have a child now, Sean. and if you love that child with every little thing inside you, neither you nor your baby girl will go bad. Right? You'll go good.
*Can you tell me how you met and began working with Jesse and These United States and then, furthermore, tell everyone how bad fucking ass that record is?*
DS: Jesse I and met in English class in 7th grade. We were reading The Iliad. Jesse believes in the earth. I believe in the sky. We made an airplane together, and we called it The Forest & The Garden. It's something to get lost in; don't forget your bread crumbs.
*When you were working in Florida mapping/cataloging all those roads, where there places that you found you really liked? What else did you do to stay sane while driving?*
DS: March - April 2006 I worked for the DOT of Florida doing inventory of state routes: driving every road both directions with cameras and pavement scanners attached to a Chevy Express panel van. The first month and a half I was working on Jesse's record, getting all the music together: the drums, the keyboards, the bass guitar. I worked on that record every day after work for eight hours and for 16 hours on my days off. I finished it in the middle of April. And then I had an idea.
*Are you currently traveling alone? If you are, is that hard?*
DS: Yeah, I'm travelling alone. I prefer it, actually. I'm really lonely, whether I'm with people or not, so if someone's always around, it becomes really easy to ignore work I have to do in favor of blissing out with someone. But when I'm alone, it's easier to focus on the things that are really on my mind, and focus on what I have to do every day. But the song diary wouldn't exist if it weren't for all the magical people I meet along the way.
*You realize that you picked a fine time to be in California, right*
DS: Jealous?
*What was your favorite cartoon growing up?*
DS: I watched those Spiderman things that came out when I was in 4th grade or so. Spiders are really powerful symbols. I often think of my art like it's a spider web. And not just for all the beauty. But for all the sinister stuff too. I think we're all after blood, whether we like to admit it or not. But it's both things - blood and beauty both - one doesn't cancel the other out. For every day, there is night. If you take a swastika and you flip it around, it is a symbol for zen.
*What makes the most sense in your life right now? How about the least?*
DS: I just put one foot in front of the other. If I look up I get dizzy.
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