Ryland Bouchard
Chilling Accords Of Bloody Valentines
Apr 26, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Married To The Ground
original version appears on Seeds (A-Sides)
My mother is a diagnosed schizophrenic who has been in and out of mental health facilities since I was a kid. In 2007, she refused to open her car window for a police officer who had pulled her over. As he smashed the window, she stepped on the gas and slammed into a police car taking with her the top half of the officer. While in prison she was taken to a solitary confinement cell by the prison guards, stripped to her skin, pinned to the ground, raped and beaten.
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Another Day #2
original version appears on Seeds (A-Sides)
On Christmas day, I went to visit my brother. Over dinner I accidentally said God's name in vain. Being a devout Christian he freaked out, hit me in the face, and continued to beat me until I was able to pull myself out the front door and into my car. With my face and back covered in blood I drove myself to the hospital where I was refused care for not having health insurance.
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Lover
original version appears on Seeds (A-Sides)
Last year I was taking a walk in a friend's neighborhood here in Portland and noticed my girlfriend's car in someone's driveway. She had told me a few hours before that she was going to sleep -- so I walked up to the house. Through the window I saw her naked on the living room floor with someone else. With his blood dripping from my fists I was carried off to jail.
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Golden You
original version appears on Seeds (A-Sides)
After leaving my girlfriend, I drove around the US sleeping in my car for a few months. In the rural parts of Wyoming there is public land along most of the major highways. At certain points you can take small dirt roads off of the highway into the public land and camp in the hills. One of these roads led me up a hill and then to a valley with hundreds of jackrabbits running circles around a burning 1940's Ford truck. As I drove closer they ran into the fire.
There are things that you just don't ask of a man that you've only met twice, though you've listened to the songs he's written dozens and dozens of times and you've heard stories about his personality and stage mannerisms that are peculiarly at best. Ryland Bouchard is the man that you don't ask these things of. It's not really that you don't feel like you can ask these questions that are burning a car-sized hole in your temples. Well, there's some of that or, oddly enough, you'd like some of that uncomfortable intrigue to continue floating up near the surface, never to go away completely, just to keep staring you awkwardly in the eyes with its darks. Mostly, the reason you don't want to ask these questions about his songs or about his life is because (and this is a personal preference, maybe you're more of a body who can't stand mysteries and can't just wait to see what sex of child you're going to have until the day it's born) you want it all to be so fucking true, all of it. You want him to be the antagonist as gorgeously articulate and unassuming protagonist. You want him to be a confliction worth listening to over and over again, not only for the ability to crack into him on your own, personally and without any sort of freebie assistance, but because it seems not to make any sense at all - that the life and its occurrences are his own. Over the short, 10 minutes of this session that Bouchard taped with the help of tourmates Emperor X and I Need Sleep, the new Portland resident sings what are actually very lovely songs about his schizophrenic mother getting raped and beaten in a mental hospital a few years ago, his devout Christian brother beating him silly on Christmas day for taking the lord's name in vain somehow in some context, how he found his girlfriend lying naked on a living room floor with another man that let to a fist sopping with that dude's blood and a night in jail and lastly, being in Wyoming and watching a kingdom of jackrabbits running into the burning carcass of an antique Ford pickup truck. Oh, that's a crock of shit. Isn't that the impulse that typically gets taken when confronted by supposed whoppers like that? But here we are and I'm buying it, for no other reason than this is what I want. It allows you - by fully trusting these words and their back story - to take this plunge into one of the most creative and potentially scary (though you'd never know it) minds of our generation. Big words, sure, but any of the scenarios that that Bouchard has built any of these songs out of would be the pride of any great novelist and he's got them queued up for miles. He breaks them off and presents them as these tales of near-Americana, where the body's been exhausted and turned into a pulp, but the mind's learning something from all of it, slowly tying little, fractured insights and black logic (a family member of black ice) together and deciding to instruct the hands and fingers to pick up a needle and some sterile string and start stitching up the open wounds wherever they can be found by looking down. Everything's somewhat painful in Bouchard's world, but it somehow always feels as if those pains are the kinds of disarming and cleansing sunrises that are celebrated greatly. He sings, "The harmless seeds grow dangerous weeds" on "Golden You" and this is when the chills up their magnitude, when you shiver like a scared dog and quietly, very quietly to yourself hope that this is all for real, all the while hoping you're wrong.
Ryland Bouchard MySpace Page
Swim Slowly Records
