I was in the men’s room on the second floor building 14N, the music floor of the arts building, and I was crying. You might imagine the day I learned how to cry again would have been filled with all-out bawling or hours of tears. Or that fourteen dry-eyed years would come to an end because some catastrophic event. You might be wrong.

I don’t remember when I stopped crying, but as a youngster I cried easily. I’m not sure why; I don’t think I was particularly insecure or sad. In fact, I remember being happy and care-free, but something minor would happen and my eyes would well up and I’m be sniffling and wiping my nose on my sleeve like kids are wont to do.

I don’t remember when I realized I’d forgotten how to cry. I thought I just didn’t have a reason to cry, perhaps. I do remember wanting to cry, curled up in a ball on my floor after my first girlfriend broke up with me and waiting for the tears to come. I waited for hours. They didn’t come.

But I do remember when I learned how to cry again. It was February. It was bitterly cold in Boston. I was halfway through my freshman year and to say things weren’t going my way is an understatement. Going from being a top student at a regular Joe high school to MIT could be the archetype of going from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond.

And so my sense of identity started to erode. The Adrian Bischoff of my mind was a good student, the best student; I was doing okay in my classes. He was a good Christian; I spent my days doubting and questioning. He was a good friend; I had no grasp of how to help my friends cope with a recent suicide of a person close to many of them.

And he was a good musician, which brings us to the second floor of 14N. There was a spot open in the orchestra for fourth trumpet on the Mahler and I wanted it. The Italian director had me audition in his office and, though it didn’t go horribly, he picked apart my intonation and my phrasing. When he was finished, I speed walked to the bathroom and as I walked through the door, I put my forehead against the cold window and my shoulders shuddered and my eyes wet my cheeks.

I love this clip. Among other reasons why, it reminds me of how great it is to just open up and sing along with gusto.

It should be noted that Mark Kozelek (of Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon and solo) is the first to start singing.

They meet and sing in a small chapel in a theoligical seminary just north of the UC campus. Pews are moved around to make a square with a couple rows per side: basses are across from trebles, altos are across from tenors. Some started–the first person to lead got up in the center of the square and called out a number–28, I think it was. We all turned our books, the Sacred Harp, 9th Edition to that page. The leader–in this case, but sometimes it was another singer–sang the starting notes. We sang through the song once on “so la fa mi” then through with the words and then the cycle repeated. We repeated this process until the evening was up–perhaps 40 times in total.

I was a bit nervous about giving this a try. I haven’t sung from music in a number of years and even then it was quite briefly, with a lot of voices to hide behind and with a lot of rehearsals. It turned out to be fine, of course. I still can’t sight sing, but I could follow the strong singers in my section just fine. By the end I had even picked up the names of the shape notes. As it turns out, these help a lot–going from “fa” to “fa”, for instance is always either a fifth or an octave.

When it came my time to lead, I said I’d pick one–one of my favorites, “Sherburne”–but didn’t want to lead it. I got cajoled into leading that song with someone else.

Anyway, at this group at least, people sang. And loud. And without any pretensions or adornment in their voices. It was a lot of fun. Just letting your voice go and singing out. I was a bit hoarse the next day.

Alabama Sacred Harp Convention – Sherburne (mp3)

After two weeks, I decided I should have it checked out. I’m going to be place next week where it’ll be even harder to go to a doctor, so with the help of some coworkers I went to a doctor this evening and he checked me out.

There’s no water, ear wax or ear infection in there. The doctor things it’s noise trauma. Basically (hopefully) short term partial hearing loss. (Ironically, I’d light-heartedly talked about thinking I was going deaf in my left ear because my ear buds were breaking about 3 weeks ago.) His instructions: no ear buds/ headphones and try to limit limit noise for a few days.

The short term is unpleasant: no ear buds at work (at night I can play music softly on speakers that I have) means no music and I don’t like being without music. It makes me antsy. I’m going to be on planes and trains for most of Friday, alone and that would be a particularly nice time to listen to some tunes. More than it being nice, at times I almost find it necessary. After a bad or long day, after a frustrating decision, when I need to drown out this foreign world or mitigate loneliness, music is often my first resort. It may not be the best thing to turn to but it’s certainly better than turning to the bottle. This is a bit distressing.

The longer term, the prospects, the possibilities, at least, are traumatizing. That there’s even a possibility of longer term hearing loss is scary. Music is a big part of my life and between being a college radio DJ and having a music blog it’s more like a vocation. That that might be endangered or altered permanently is not a prospect I look forward to.

Just to note, I’ve always been very careful about the volume of my music on earphones and other people who try my headphones often think I listen to music too softly. I wear ear plugs at concerts, even advocating them publicly. If there’s one probable culprit here it’s listening to music on the bus and/ or while walking along streets here. Both are quite noisy and can encourage a louder-than-healthy volume on ear buds.

I’ve felt for a while that I was writing too little about music for this to be a music blog and too much about music for this to be a personal blog. In one case, outside readers see too much personal ranting and in the other, friends get alienated by the constant music talk , so I’ve split it off.

I’ll still be blogging here. I won’t be posting here about music, unless it’s related directly to me, like music I write/ record, radio playlists or if it’s a mixtape. I’ll be co-posting the last two of those.

I feel a bit weird about it—I’m always written this for myself and maybe a couple friends, but writing about any specific x is an admission that someone wants to read that. Now I have a whole blog where I pretend that people want to read my writing about music.

Here’s one gem Andy found yesterday:

[yeah, I should crop this and make it a smaller file.]

It’s the original lyric sheet to the Where’s Luke theme song. This was when we were preparing for the coffee house that they hosted at Westminster Presbyterian. I think we might have just been asking Colin if he’d be our drummer.

Tonight I went through my drawers in my desk tonight. I was laughing again, this time at myself. Despite myself I did have an embarrassing adolescence. I found all sorts of ridiculous things that I saved. The pot of gold at the end of the embarrassment rainbow was the half-drawer full of love notes, poems and drawings from a high school girlfriend. I was smiling so much at the ridicilousness of it that I almost cried.

I don’t remember my dreams much.

• Sort of an update to that Sufjan @ Zellerbach post: the East Bay Express has an interesting article about how the Pacific Mozart Ensemble got to sing with Sufjan
• TW Walsh is now giving away (free! with artwork!) his band, the Soft Drugs’ latest EP, In Moderation. Solid stuff and I particularly like Defending the Paint (mp3)
• It looks like Dave and I (as Greetings from Johannesburg) are going to enter “Thaw” in Salon’s Song Search Contest

see also: the covers contest

And this is a songwriting blog with some tips and whatnot on various aspects of songwriting. I’m not sure I’m picking up all that they’re putting down, but it gets the mind going.

Both of these, I think, I got from largeheartedboy.