Music Write-Ups
How do you know Chris Earley? Chris is my good friend. I also work with him.
How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive? <10
The second half of 1995 really sucked. I was stuck living with my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend in a very small apartment, and I wasn’t dealing with it very well. Not well at all. I listened to a lot of Cranberries.
At the end of the year, 2 good things happened. First, I found another place to live. Second, I found very cheap tickets to Spain for the winter break. I rounded up a bunch of friends, and we took off for a few weeks.
After a trans-Atlantic flight and a long bus ride to northern Spain, I crashed on my friend Cova’s living room floor exhausted. In the morning, as I was waking up, this song filled the apartment. After months of stressful energy, Solid Air washed over me like a massage for the soul. It was a surprise to remember what peace felt like. It was a turning point, and I returned from Spain a happier, healthier person.
I forgot all about John Martyn’s Solid Air until this year.
I’ve always been musically illiterate, so when Chris gave me a mix of CDs for my birthday last year I took it as an opportunity to catch up with the rest of my generation. I spent months looking up each of the artists on Wikipedia to learn about them, the songs I got from Chris, and the different music genres.
One of my favorite songs of the collection is “One of These Things First” by Nick Drake. His story on Wikipedia is heartbreaking - he suffered from severe depression that cut him off from the world, limited his music career, and eventually led to his suicide at 26. His life was a series of self-inflicted disappointments. You can read his story here.
John Martyn wrote Solid Air about and for Nick Drake, his good friend, 2 years before Nick killed himself. “I know you, I love you, and I can be your friend. I can follow you anywhere - even through solid air.”
Thank you to all of my friends who have been there for me during tough times. May we all have - and be - friends this true.
-Bonita Treinen
My father bought a house in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, declaring it the place his family of 11 would finally settle down. It was a beat-up yellow house down the road from an airport, with a gravel pit buried in the woods across the street. My siblings and I fought incessantly over bedroom space, went on adventures in the gravel pit, watched the Blue Angels from our rooftop, and buried treasures in the backyard.
Not long after we moved in my father was diagnosed with cancer, and over the next couple of years he slowly died in that house. The summer before he died - the last summer of youth for a lot of us - “Our House” was released in the US. I remember that song blaring on the radio as we rode our bikes in the driveway. After that summer, one by one, we each grew up and moved on.
I went on to live in 20 more homes in 5 different countries, and I’m far from ‘settled’ now. I hadn’t seen the old house since 1998, long before my mother, the last one to leave, moved into a smaller home in the city.
Last night I was fiddling around with Google Maps, and tried to look up my old house. My old street didn’t register, so I had to find the airport and trace the path to my house to discover that they had replaced all the street names with numbers, so what used to be Iona Beach Road is now a tidy 91st Street. I’m not even sure the old house is still there, but the memories will always be.
The beauty of “Our House” is in its ability to bring out, in each one of us, memories of a place we once called (or perhaps still do call) home. Feel free to share your memories below.
-Bonita Treinen