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Dance With Me? (Brian May X Reader)

WC: 3121

Warnings: Some swearing, its Very Australian, y’all it is so fucking cute

Summary: Y/N returns home to Brisbane for Christmas with her boyfriend Brian who is very shocked at how different Christmas is in Australia.

Tagged: @antoouu @ceruleanrainblues (If y’all wanna be tagged in any of my future works lemme know and I’ll do it)

A/N: I’m actually really proud of this one so I hope you guys like it! (Also all temperatures mentioned are in Celsius not Fahrenheit fyi)

BORHAP MASTERLIST

December 17th, 1978

 “Yes mum, I know. I am coming home for Christmas, don’t worry.” Y/N said, glancing at the clock on her bedroom wall. It was 10 at night and she had stayed up late so she could call her mother in Brisbane.

 “Well that’s good to hear. Are you bringing that rock star boyfriend of yours?” Y/N groaned at her mother’s question, her eyes going to the bathroom where Brian was currently taking a shower.

 “I don’t know. Maybe, but it depends on his schedule. You know how busy he is, mum.” Y/N said, twisting the cord of the phone in her hand. Her mum let out a sigh before taking the conversation away from boyfriend-related matters.

 “Mum I love you but its past 10 and I really need to sleep. I’ll talk to you soon, ok? Bye.” Y/N said, hanging up the phone and leaning back against the pillows. Y/N noticed that the shower had stopped, and soon enough Brian was emerging from the bathroom in nothing but his boxers.

 “Who was that on the phone?” Brian said, pulling the covers back and getting into bed next to Y/N, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Y/N snuggled into Brian, feeling calmer now that he was in bed with her.

 “Just mum. She wants to know if you’re coming home with me for Christmas. I said you might, but you’ve got such a busy schedule and my home is on the other side of the bloody world.” Y/N rambled, waving her hands about as she spoke, and Brian gave her a smile before kissing her cheek.

 “Tell your mum I’m coming home for Christmas.” Brian said, and Y/N stopped, her eyes widening in confusion.

 “I mean that’s great Bri, but what about recording and press releases and all that music industry stuff?” She said, and Brian chuckled, shrugging his shoulders.

 “I’ll find a way to get out of it. It’s Christmas after all, and I would want nothing more than to spend it with you and your family half way across the world.” Brian said, and Y/N felt herself smile, leaning up and gently kissing his lips.

 “I love you so much, Brian May. You mean the world to me.” Y/N said genuinely, looking up at Brian with love in her eyes. He smiled back at her, pulling her against him so her head was resting on his chest.

 “The same goes for you, love. I think the Earth would stop spinning if you weren’t in my life, Y/N Y/L/N.” Brian said and even though his words were sweet and sentimental Y/N let out a laugh.

 “Bri, that’s not possible. You’ve practically got a PhD in astrophysics, surely you know what makes the Earth turn and it isn’t me.” Y/N said, poking his chest lightly and Brian groaned, rolling his eyes.

 “God I was trying to be romantic and you went and fact-checked me. Seriously, woman.” Brian said, running a hand through his curly hair. Y/N just laughed, reaching over to switch off the lamp on their bedside table.

 “I love you Brian.” Y/N said, pecking his cheek as they slowly drifted off to sleep, tangled together under the covers.

December 22nd 1978

“Jesus Christ!” Brian exclaimed, wiping the sweat from his forehead as they stepped out of Brisbane International Airport, towing their luggage as they walked.

“Told you it was hot.” Y/N said smugly, adjusting her top as they waited for her sister to arrive with the car. Brian was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt that had become stained with sweat and long black pants. Paired with his thick dark hair, he was a hot mess in the December sun.

“Yeah but I though you meant England hot, not this hellfire.” Brian said, and Y/N laughed, rolling her eyes.

“It’s only 35 degrees, Brian. I’ve had to deal with summers where it gets to over 40 degrees.” Y/N said, and Brian groaned in disgust at the thought of weather that hot.

Suddenly they heard someone blaring their car horn loudly and Y/N looked up to see her sister Lucy sitting in the driver’s seat with a wicked smile on her face. Y/N grabbed Brian’s hand and dragged him up to the car, telling him to open to boot and put their luggage in.

“Luce! How are you baby sister?” Y/N said, once Brian had sat down next to her in the back seats of the car and Lucy had started driving.

“I’m good. I finished my nursing degree last year and I got a job at the Mater private hospital in town earlier in the year. How about you? Would you care to introduce me to the handsome man you’re sitting next to?” Lucy said, and Y/N scowled, sticking her tongue out at her sister.

“Oi, I’ve been back in the country for ten minutes and you’re already trying to nick my boyfriend. Lucy, this is Brian. Brian, Lucy.” Y/N said, and Brian gave Y/N’s sister a wave from the back seat.

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Lucy. Y/N talks about you a lot.” Brian said, and Lucy chuckled, nodding with a smile on her face.

“All good things, I assume, Brian.” Lucy said cheekily, and Brian laughed, taking Y/N’s hand in his as he nodded. 

“Good. It’s nice to meet you, Brian. All Y/N ever talks about when we’re on the phone is Brian this and Brian that. So, tell me, what do you do for a living?” Lucy asked, and Brian smiled, shooting Y/N an amused look before answering.

“I do work in astrophysics, mainly. A bit dull but I love it.” Brian said, and Lucy nodded, turning off the highway onto one of the smaller streets.

“Y/N has always had a thing for smart men. Particularly ones with glasses, but I see you’ve broken that streak.” Lucy commented, and Y/N scoffed, leaning forward to smack her sister on the arm.

“Piss off, Luce. Can you just turn on the radio because I am quickly becoming reminded of why I left this place.” Y/N said causing her sister to roll her eyes before turning on the radio.

The song playing was incredibly familiar, and Brian straightened up as soon as he heard it. “Oh this is a good song.” Lucy said, turning up the volume on the radio, Bohemian Rhapsody playing louder through the car.

“Luce, do you know who sings this song?” Y/N asked cautiously, and Lucy shot her a look as they pulled up into the street Y/N grew up on.

“Of course. I’d be a total dumbass if I didn’t recognise a Queen song when I heard it.” Lucy said, stopping the car after parking in their parents’ driveway. Y/N and Brian laughed with each other as they took out their bags and pushed them up to the front porch.

“Guess who I’ve got with me!” Lucy announced as she swung the door open, causing her parents and other relatives to rush into the hallway. 

“Y/N! You made it!” Jo shouted, pulling her daughter into a tight hug. Y/N chuckled and hugged her mum back fiercely, glad to see her again given that it had been a year since her last visit. They walked into the dining room

“Oh it’s good to see you mum, however I have someone I’d like to introduce you to. Mum, dad, this is Brian.” Y/N said, stepping aside as Brian gave a small wave to her parents.

“We’re so glad you could join us. I know you’re always busy, so it means a lot.” Jo said, and Brian smiled as she hugged him tightly.

“Busy with what? Monitoring planets and doing boring sums?” Lucy said, cutting up a mango in the kitchen. Y/N’s parents looked at each other strangely as Brian let out a chuckle.

“Lucy, sweetie, Brian is in a band.” Jo said, and Lucy pulled a face, popping a piece of mango into her mouth.

“What do you mean? He told me he was an astrophysicist.” Lucy said, sitting on the kitchen counter. 

“I am, yes, but my main job is playing guitar in a band.” Brian said, and Lucy’s eyes widened as Y/N fought back a laugh.

“What band then, space man?” Lucy said, and Y/N frowned, walking over to the kitchen and stealing part of her sister’s mango.

“Only I get to call him space man, Luce.” Y/N muttered, and Brian laughed at their dynamic.

“I’m Queen’s guitarist, actually.” Brian said, and Lucy’s jaw dropped, her eyes the size of saucers.

“What? No fucking way!” Lucy said, causing her parents to let out a noise of protest at her swearing.

Brian and Y/N laughed, nodding in confirmation of Brian’s statement. “Yeah, I took a break from working on our new album to visit you guys for Christmas.” Brian said, slinging an arm around Y/N’s shoulders as they sat down at the dinner table.

“Y/N you are a terrible sister. I can’t believe you let me listen to a Queen song not knowing that the bloody guitarist was in the car with me. Tiffany is not going to believe me, I have to call her. Be right back.”

December 23rd 1978

“So how do you guys celebrate Christmas in Australia?” Brian asked over breakfast, a glass of orange juice clutched in his hands.

“Usually it’s loud and chaotic. People are swimming and there’s always water on the deck somehow. There’s a lot of fruit and seafood and champagne is drunk by all.” Jo said, and Brian chuckled, interested to see how this very different Christmas would go down.

“We do have some similar traditions, though. If you want, tonight we could go and check out some Christmas lights. Mum and dad used to put them up competitively when we were kids, but they’ve stopped which is disappointing.” Y/N said, sipping from the mug of hot tea she had.

“That sounds like fun, actually. I do love Christmas lights.” Brian said, and Y/N smiled, pecking her boyfriend’s cheek before stealing the bacon from his plate.

“Y/N!” Jo scolded, and Y/N gave her mum a kind smile, eating a piece of bacon before speaking.

“Mum, Brian is a vegetarian who is too polite to tell you that he doesn’t want bacon. Luckily, his girlfriend adores the stuff.” Y/N said, winking at Brian who had a dumb smile on his face.

“Ok, now that that’s all sorted out you two can go off and have fun somewhere. Your father and I can clean up.” Jo said, kissing Y/N’s cheek as she began cleaning up the table.

“You heard mum. Let’s have some fun.”

“Brian Harold May, don’t you dare!” Y/N screamed as Brian picked her up, holding her in his arms. They were by the Y/L/N family pool and Brian was holding Y/N over the water.

“I thought you said you loved swimming.” Brian said nonchalantly, a smirk on his face as he rocked on his heels, causing Y/N to let out a shout.

“Not when my dickhead boyfriend is threatening to throw me in the pool.” Y/N said, and Brian sighed, pausing for a moment before dropping Y/N into the water, laughing at her face as she fell.

Brian was in tears laughing once Y/N had resurfaced, her hair plastered to her face. She could tell that Brian was distracted so she leaned up, grabbing Brian by the ankles and dragging him into the pool.

Brian was gasping for air and Y/N was laughing hard, treading water next to her boyfriend. “What goes around comes around, May.” Y/N said, splashing Brian in the face.

“You are awful, you know that?” He said, splashing her back. Luckily Y/N avoided most of the water, but her eyes widened once she saw Brian’s hair.

“Oh my god Bri, your hair! You look like a wet dog!” Y/N said, cackling at her boyfriend’s now flat hair. He frowned, playing with his hair slightly.

“So what if I do? Is that a bad thing?” Brian said, swimming closer to Y/N. Y/N rolled her eyes, noticing that Brian was standing up while she still had to tread water.

“Just think you look funny. Not bad, but funny.” She said, wrapping her legs around Brian’s waist. His hands instinctively went to her hips, holding her up even under the water.

“I’ll take that.” Brian said, pressing his lips to Y/N’s. There was a hint of chlorine in the kiss, but it didn’t bother then as Y/N ran her fingers through Brian’s wet hair.

“I love you, poodle boy.” Y/N said, smiling brightly at Brian once the kiss was over.

“And I love you, you weird Australian.”

“It’s Christmas light time!” Y/N announced loudly, squeezing Brian’s hand as they left the house.

“It certainly is.” Brian said, smiling at the excitement his girlfriend had for Christmas lights.

“Sorry if I’m a lot, it’s just that I’ve always loved Christmas and whenever I see the lights they make me happy. Plus they remind me of my childhood which is a nice bonus.” Y/N said, and Brian nodded, kissing her forehead as they began walking along the streets.

“It’s all good, Y/N. I think you look adorable when you’re excited. I mean you look adorable all the time but still.” Brian said, adjusting his shorts with his free hand. 

The couple walked along the streets for an hour or two, checking out varying displays while Brian complained about the mosquitoes. “God they’re awful! How do you deal with them?” Brian asked once the sun had fully set and Y/N chuckled, shrugging her shoulders.

“Cover yourself in insect repellent. That’s my only advice.” Y/N replied, linking her arm with Brian’s as they entered another street. By 9 they returned home and decided to call it a night.

“Thanks for today. It’s been wonderful.” Brian said, playing with Y/N’s hair as they laid in bed together, the soft glow of Christmas lights from outside casting a red and green shadow on their faces.

“There’s no one else I’d rather spend Christmas with, Bri.” Y/N said, unknowingly echoing Brian’s words from the night he agreed to come home with her for Christmas.

December 24th 1978

“Ok we’re off to church, we’ll see you two later tonight.” Jo said, kissing Y/N’s cheeks before leaving the house with her husband and youngest daughter.

Once the door was closed and the house all but empty, Y/N smiled at Brian. “I’ll put the kettle on and make us some tea. You get comfy on the couch, mister.” Y/N said, resting a hand on Brian’s chest before kissing him softly.

“Yes ma’am.” Brian muttered, watching as Y/N sauntered into the kitchen, popping the kettle on the stove and leaning against the kitchen counter while she waited for it to boil.

Brian decided to ignore Y/N’s instructions and crept over to the record player in the living room, finding a copy of the Jackson 5’s Christmas album and placing it on the player. As soon as the music started Y/N smiled, recognising it instantly.

“I thought I told you to get comfy on the couch, May.” Y/N called from the kitchen, making tea for her and Brian. A smile settled on Brian’s face as he entered the kitchen, wrapping his arms around Y/N’s waist.

“I was in the mood for some music. Besides, you look so beautiful tonight.” Brian said, pressing a kiss to Y/N’s shoulder. Y/N felt herself blush, picking up a mug and turning around so she could hand it to Brian.

“And you look very handsome. Maybe it’s the sunburn but you’re just glowing, love.” Y/N said, and Brian pulled a face, taking a sip from his mug.

“Don’t bully me. I’m English, we never see the Sun at home.” Brian replied, and Y/N shook her head, setting down her tea and grabbing Brian’s wrist, leading him into the living room with her.

“Dance with me?” Y/N suggested, wrapping her arms around Brian’s neck as he nodded, his hands sitting on Y/N’s waist. The two swayed in time with the music and Y/N hummed along to the Jackson 5’s rendition of ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’.

Suddenly an image of the small velvet box in the drawer beside their bed came into Brian’s head, and he took in a shaky breath at the thought of it. He had been wanting to ask Y/N to marry him for a while, but earlier in the day he asked Y/N’s dad for permission and he granted Brian with it in spades.

“Stay right there. I’ll be back in a sec, I promise.” Brian said, pecking Y/N’s lips before rushing to their shared room. He quickly found the box and slipped it in his pocket, adjusting it so it wasn’t too obvious before returning to the living room.

“Took you long enough.” Y/N said, and Brian huffed, rolling his eyes before taking in a deep breath.

“Y/N, spending the last three years of my life with you have been a dream come true. You are a strong, beautiful, caring woman who takes shit from nobody, including me.” Brian said, chuckling as Y/N nodded at his statement.

“I love you so much and I don’t know where I’d be without you.” Brian said, dropping onto one knee. Y/N gasped, her hands flying to her mouth in shock as she looked at Brian.

“You’re the love of my life, even if you decide to make fun of me sometimes. Which is why I decided now would be the perfect time to ask you, Y/N Y/M/N Y/L/N, if you’ll marry me.” Brian said, opening the box and revealing a beautiful diamond ring that was small enough to sit comfortably on Y/N’s hand, but big enough to get people to ask about it.

“Yes, you stupid man, of course I’ll marry you.” Y/N said, crouching down and holding Brian’s face in her hands, pressing a passionate kiss to his lips. Unfortunately, Brian lost his balance slightly under Y/N’s body and slipped slightly, toppling backwards with Y/N on top of him.

They burst out laughing, unable to believe that this beautifully romantic moment had been ruined by Brian’s awful balance. “Where’s my ring, May?” Y/N asked once the laughter had subsided, and Brian smiled at her, taking the ring and sliding it onto her ring finger.

“Y/N May. That has a lovely ring to it.” Brian mused, and Y/N chuckled, pecking both his cheeks. 

“I’ve got a nice ring to me as well.” Y/N said, waggling her left hand in front of Brian’s face, showing off her new engagement ring. Brian let out a loud laugh, pressing kisses all over her face. 

“I love you so very much, Y/N. You’re the best Christmas present I could ever ask for.”

Delirium (1987) (AKA Le foto di Gioia)

Directed by Lamberto Bava

Screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici and Daniele Stroppa

Story by Luciano Martino

Music by Simon Boswell

Country: Italy

Running Time: 93 minutes

CAST

Serena Grandi as Gloria

Daria Nicolodi as Evelyn

Vanni Corbellini as Tony

David Brandon as Roberto

George Eastman as Alex

Katrine Michelsen as Kim

Karl Zinny as Mark

Lino Salemme as Inspector Corsi

Sabrina Salerno as Sabrina

Capucine as Flora

delirium /dɪˈlɪrɪəm/ noun 1) an acutely disturbed state of mind characterized by restlessness, illusions, and incoherence, occurring in intoxication, fever, and other disorders. 2) a 1987 Italian giallo erotic horror film directed by Lamberto Bava characterized by illusions, incoherence, boobs and dismal 1980s pop “star” Sabrina being stung to death while buck nekkid except for a very poor bee mask.

(Guilt Belch: The print of Delirium I streamed was atrocious. So I have had to nick pics off IMDB. Thanks, Prime.)

Delirium is a terrible but worryingly enjoyable (very) late entry in the Italian giallo cycle. It is also a frighteningly prophetic movie. While it retains enough of the hallmarks of its Italian genre forbears to remain identifiably a giallo, Delirium also clearly points to the forthcoming cultural nightmare of the American cable TV style “erotic thrillers” of the 1990s, which in retrospect were neither erotic nor thrilling. These dismal American exercises in coy peekaboo tedium all starred Shannon Tweed and were about as erotic as sorting the recycling in the rain. They possessed plots so featureless they might in fact all have been the same movie, just edited differently and given a different title (Animal Longings, Nocturnal Emissions, Nocturnal Longings, Animal Emissions, Nocturnal Animals, oh wait…).  I don’t know much about them beyond that because I was busy playing Quake and they were, well, dull; Delirium is anything but dull. Delirium is ridiculous, misogynistic, stupid, and on at least two occasions astoundingly Guinness Book of Records level nuts, but it is rarely ever dull. Delirium is either better than you think or worse than you think, or both. Whatever, it’s definitely something.

Gloria (Serena Grandi; chesty) is an ex-“glamour” model who has used the money from her husband’s recent death to empower herself by moving into publishing. In a strikingly feminist move Gloria has chosen to publish the same kind of glossy booberama she used to appear in; it’s called Pussycat, because classy never goes out of fashion. Her next door neighbour is Mark (Karl Zinny; overwrought), a young man confined to a wheelchair after a car accident in which his fiancé died. He peeps on the Pussycat photoshoots Gloria stages poolside, and frequently rings Gloria up to tell her how hard she makes him and how much he wants to “invade her flower”, because contrary to reports romance isn’t dead. Kim (Katrine Michelsen; expendable), Gloria’s friend is, however, very dead; stabbed by a pitchfork in front of Mark’s creepy peepers. Gloria thinks Mark’s having her on since no body is found, but then photos arrive showing Kim’s corpse posed in front of a blown up photo of Gloria’s chest, and when Kim herself turns up in a skip Inspector Corsi (Lino Salemme; macho) is called in to look virile and get everything wrong.

Delirium being a giallo first and a cinematic spank mag second, the dead bodies accumulate faster than the glimpses of skin, and almost as fast as the red herrings. Basically, the race is on to unmask the killer before everybody in the movie is dead. Mark saw the killer had long blonde hair so is the killer Gloria’s blonde haired assistant Evelyn (Daria Nicolodi; too good for this)? But Kim was posed in front of an old photoshoot only Roberto (David Brandon; again, too good for this) has access to, so it must be him right? Yet Roberto claims the negatives were stolen, so maybe it’s Flora (Capucine; think an evil Sybil Danning) who is trying to wrest the magazine from Gloria, who Flora feels owes her one since she saved Gloria and her brother from “the street”. Or maybe it’s Gloria’s brother Tony (Vanni Corbellini) who can’t get it up for ‘80s pop footnote Sabrina? Gloria bumps into an old flame, Alex (George Eastman; rugged), who can get it up, as we see in a scene where he humps Gloria’s thigh in the bath while she shakes about a bit, but Alex proves elusive after his comeback hump so maybe it’s him? There are so many suspects I even forgot to mention Mark, but then he can’t walk, so it can’t be him. Or can he, so can it? Or something?

Delirium’s mystery is enjoyably daft, and despite the flat lighting, terrible music and capable but unadventurous direction you will find yourself trying to guess who the killer is, as though you are watching something that actually might make sense. This is the fundamental magic of giallo; it tramples the boundaries of sanity so enchantingly that to not go along with it would leave you feeling like a sour faced party pooper. Delirium is trash, yes; but it’s magnificently, unapologetically trashy. Now, you can either take my word on that and watch the movie and have your mind blown harder than a sailor on shore leave, or you can read on where there be SPOILERS for the twin trash highpoints of Delirium.

For connoisseurs of the bizarre there are two great reasons to watch Delirium, and no, that’s not a set up for a very poor joke about the physical talents of the well upholstered star Serena Grandi. At one point Kim, smoking by a swimming pool, without any whiff of warning, inexplicably and suddenly has a face like a giant eyeball in a wig. The fact she is promptly pitchforked to death is just the icing on the, uh, eyeball. (Eventually you figure out that this eyeball faced lady is what the killer sees in the grip of their…(ta dah!) delirium, but I’m pretty sure the movie never explicitly explains it. Which is either lazy or brave; you decide.) This scene alone is all kinds of amazing, so much so that I feared Delirium had peaked early (like Tony; Boom! Boom!), but luckily even the pitchfork murder of an eyeball faced woman is not ridiculous enough for Delirium. No, Delirium also has a scene where 1980s pop warbler Sabrina is stung to death by bees in her own apartment while wearing only an unconvincing bee mask. This latter scene goes on at eye glazing length. It’s sobering to realise how quickly the human mind can become bored by the sight of a 1980s pop shouter being stung to death while wearing only a very poor bee mask. Unless of course you have a fetish for 1980s pop nonentities being stung to death while wearing only a very poor bee mask, in which case you might want to marry this movie. I’m certainly not judging you; it’s a big world. And Delirium is big, guilty fun.

Sunday-Thursday, 26-30 September

Sunday

I spent most of the day in the van working on my photos and blog: a pleasant enough task, but it always takes much longer than I ever anticipate. We went to the supermarket for a few things in the afternoon and then went out to the Beach Club for their Sunday Roast for dinner.

We missed our on the roast last time we tried because they ran out just ahead of us in the queue, so we got there just after 5 pm and ordered, imagining that they wouldn’t be serving it straight away. Sure enough, it arrived by 5.15 and we were finished dinner and twiddling our thumbs over the second half of our bottle of wine well before 6 o’clock. Needless to say, the restaurant was by no means full (although there were quite a few ‘reserved’ signs on the tables) so we could easily have arrived at 6 or 6.30 and still enjoyed a roast after that. Having said that, the roast was nothing to write home about (so I am writing about it here!). It was a big meal though with heaps of good veges and we needed a doggy box to take the remainders home again.

Monday

We had quite a productive morning once we got up and moving.

After breakfast, we did a little bit of hand washing (an almost daily task lately) and then we tackled replacing our broken door mechanism with the new one we purchased in Exmouth. It was a very fiddly job with quite poor instructions but we finally got the new piece in place and everything is now operating correctly. It is nice to be able the separate the fly screen from the main door and to lock the door securely again. A small but welcome achievement.

Next little job was to clean the flush water for our loo. It had started to grow some algae in the flush-tank so we emptied it and flushed some chemicals and disinfectant through it, then quite a few litres of clean water and it all looks sparklingly clean again.

That took all of the morning but we packed our lunch and set off to explore a little south of Onslow. When we had visited the Information Centre a week or two ago, the woman there recommended that we go to the Ashburton Port ‘to see what they are doing out there’. Onslow is in the Ashburton Shire and close to the mouth of the Ashburton River (and coincidentally, Heather and I both lived in the same little street in Ashburton, Victoria, albeit at quite separate times), so we took her advice and went to check it out. The Port is about 15 kilometres off the highway but when we got there, the entire area is closed to the public. There are two large gas processing plants there (Wheatstone and Macedon) and the whole area is well and truly off limits to mere mortals like us. (Wheatstone is interesting to the physicists among us due to the Wheatstone Bridge – a device used for determining where breaks in power lines have occurred – regrettably, nothing to do with Heather Wheat – even if she were stoned!)

Not ot be discouraged, we left the precinct and headed a few kilometres further to the turnoff to Old Onslow. We explored this area 4 years ago and I recall the scores of caravans free-parking along the banks of the Ashburton River. It is a surprisingly large river (but virtually dry upstream) and we found a place at its very edge to sit and enjoy our lunch. There were a few birds around and we relaxed for close to an hour before moving on to the site of the old town.

There were scads of caravans scattered right along the edge of the river with more coming and going as we drove in, but we eventually reached the site of the original Old Onslow. It seems to have been at least as big – certainly in area – as the current town and there are still a few remnants of the old structures and equipment there. We drove right around the area, out to where the old port had been, around where all the pubs, stores and public buildings had been, even out to the old cemetery. It is quite amazing: there are tens of kilometres (maybe hundreds) of track in and around the old town – all of which was simply picked up and moved to the current townsite more than a hundred years ago. There is not a lot to see – a single bollard where the pier used to be, several acres of broken bottles adjacent (and non-adjacent) to the old pub-sites, a more substantial ruin of the police station and courthouse, but not a lot else. We explored as much as we could and eventually found a beautifully-maintained gravel road that we followed for perhaps 15 kilometres until it simply stopped at the fence of the Macedon gas-plant. It intrigued me why such a wonderful road would be so meticulously-maintained if it led to nothing at all! Very strange indeed!

In due course, we got back to the main road and returned to the new Onslow where we explored a few more local roads, past the salt plant belching fresh salt into a gigantic stockpile, out to the marina and nearby industrial area, and eventually back to the safety and security of our own little cubbyhouse.

Tuesday

Heather started with a big load of washing – time to do the bedding again – while I went back to the industrial area to try to get our tyre fixed. That was a big disappointment because the guy out there found two big tears in the sidewall due to driving with the tyre being too flat.

We spent a fortune on tyre monitors a few years ago, but don’t use them because we have never had a single day without false warnings and failures of the system. We took them back to the suppliers numerous times and they replaced them and did some troubleshooting, but we have never had a day’s value out of them. Their only value is that the system beeps at you if there is a problem with any tyre – under- or over- pressure, rapidly changing pressure, overheating, etc., – and because at least one of the twelve sensors was always malfunctioning, we were subjected to beeping from the moment we started the car until it was turned off – and we never knew if it was a false alarm or a real problem. In this case, if we had the system installed and working, we would have known of the slow leak and saved ourselves the roughly $700 for a new tyre.

But that was not the end of the issue. The guy in Onslow didn’t have a tyre that would fit – and he said our tyres are very hard to get at present. He suggested we ring ahead in an attempt to have one waiting for us in Carnarvon. Alas, none in Carnarvon. Hamelin Pool? No! Denham? No, but he might be able to get one sent up from Geraldton – with a $45 freight charge. But if we are going to Geraldton anyway, he will ring his mate down there to ensure he has one available when we get there next week. Fnigres coresds – you try typing with your fingers crossed!

Wednesday

We fuelled up at the more expensive servo because all four of the bowsers at the cheaper one were out of order. The one we had to use is one of the automated ones so everything takes a bit longer and we had to join the queue of travellers trying to purchase their fuel before we got our turn. Eventually, we achieved our objective!

We then drove the 469 kilometres (by our odometer) to Carnarvon. The map indicates that the distance should be 493 kilometres but our caravan park is 6 kilometres out of the town centre. This is very consistent with all our measurements, with our speedometer and odometer both always being 2 or 3 percent out. This has always been an issue because we have oversized wheels and tyres on the car so all the readings we have are about 3% less than actual. What this means is that although our records show (according to our odometer) that we have just ticked over 17000 kilometres towing the van this trip, it is actually a tad over 17500 kilometres. We always have to over- or under- estimate our figures depending on what we are trying to do – it’s very marginal but if we were running very short of fuel, it could be critical.

We left the tropics behind us when we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, but we haven’t encountered any temperate rain forests yet. It was an interesting drive though with very noticeable changes in terrain and importantly, vegetation as we moved slowly south. Then, just a few kilometres out of Carnarvon, a really big change occurred with lush banana plantations and other fruit and vegetable farms filling the landscape. Our caravan park sits right on the edge of a large pomegranate orchard, something I don’t recall seeing anywhere before. It is also right under the Space Museum that we enjoyed almost exactly 4 years ago. Maybe I won’t bore anyone with that, but it was one of the more important NASA stations during the lunar ventures as well as being the key OTC station that introduced Australia to international television. It is a great museum and anyone who gets close to Carnarvon should definitely give it a visit.

At night, we tried to watch more of the short series of DVDs we started last week, but it wouldn’t play as it should – long pauses and complete pixilation being the main problems. We tried to clean the lens, but maybe our cleaner is not in good nick. We were able to watch a film on DVD without a hitch, although when we tried the following night, nothing would play correctly. I will try to buy a new lens cleaner (we have been looking for one for at least 5000 kilometres) but maybe our old TV has reached its Use-by date.

Thursday

We had a fairly relaxed day today – a bit of shopping in the morning and then a drive out to the ocean. Almost by accident, we ended up driving around Babbage Island – an island on the map, but with a road out that indicated many years since it was an island, definitely a low-level causeway rather than anything like a bridge. We drove out on some 4WD tracks and I enjoyed photographing a few shorebirds out there, but we then drove to the end of the island and enjoyed watching a few fishermen and picnickers across the lagoon – but we chose not to tackle the very sandy track out to join them. We also explored the entrance to Oyster Creek – a few desolate clicks out of town in the opposite direction, but quite interesting due to the very shallow area of the ocean that it empties into. All mangrove areas.

We also explored an area shown on the map as a large area of water just north of the NASA telescope. There is not a lot of water there are present, but what there is has attracted hundreds of birds and I did a bit of bush-bashing trying to see what they all were. Most of them were relatively common for me, but I was pleased to see quite a few dozen Black-tailed Native Hens – that I last saw about 15-20000 kilometres ago.

Interview with Joe Pernice — 2005

Sunday Interview with PERNICE. There’s been a bunch of 1998 music chatter lately, but for my money, the Pernice Brothers’ Overcome By Happiness should be dominating all such chatter. Anyway, this talk took place a few years later ...

Over the past decade, Joe Pernice has established himself as one of the most reliably great songwriters of his generation. From his days in the not-so-alt-country collective, the Scud Mountain Boys, to side-trips into the Chappaquiddick Skyline, to his ongoing role as frontman for the Pernice Brothers, Joe's stirring storytelling skills and his distinctive way with a gorgeous melody have remained firmly in place. The Pernice Brothers began life as an orch-pop project, but the band's last two records, 2003's Yours, Mine & Ours and this year's Discover A Lovelier You, see them taking their cues from such '80s luminaries as the Smiths, New Order and Echo & the Bunnymen. Whatever direction Pernice takes his music in, the results are always worth hearing. He chatted with Junkmedia from his hometown of Holbrook, Mass.

At your recent show in Denver, you encored with "Doll On A Music Box," a song from [the semi-obscure mid-60s flying car movie starring Dick Van Dyke] "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." I was curious as to how you chose that song to cover.

On the tour for the last record, we used that soundtrack as opening music, and we decided to work it into our set. We're just fans of it. We actually recorded a version of it in Europe a little while ago. We had been doing these kind of heavier covers -- stuff like New Order and the Pretenders -- and we thought we should do something a little more low-key. James [Walbourne] my piano player, was going through a heavy spell of listening to that soundtrack, as well as the "Willie Wonka" soundtrack. Those records are just unbelievable -- there's no irony there in our covering that song.

I was surprised to see that Thom Monahan (bassist/co-producer) was missing from your touring lineup. Where'd he go?

He's taking a leave. We've been together for 10 years now, but he recently moved out to L.A., got married and has been working on a bunch of different recording projects. He just needed a break. We haven't made any big decisions, it's just that he had been working with some other bands, and it turned out that if he came out on tour with us, he'd have something like a single day off in between.

Like you said, you and Thom have been making records together for ten years. Why is he such a good collaborator for you?

[Pause] I don't know. [Laughs] We just hit it off. We've been working together since the second Scud Mountain Boys record in 1994, I think. We're both pretty headstrong guys, but we've learned how to not let things escalate if there are arguments in the studio. And there are arguments. But all of the guys I work with, we like working long hours. It's just fun for us. [Guitarist] Peyton [Pinkerton] and James, those guys would stay in the studio forever if they could. Time goes by so quick in there -- it'll feel like two hours and it'll actually be nine hours. Even when it's a pain in the ass, it's still fun.

Can you imagine making a record without Thom?

Oh, sure. It would be different, but I think different can be good. There are a lot of good people to record with out there. The more musicians I meet, I find that there are more people who are like us -- people who love to spend a lot of time in the studio. I haven't given it too much thought, but a change could be good. As a songwriter, it might be a good thing to have a little change.

From the liners, it looks as though you recorded the new album all over the place.

Yeah, we did some tracking in New York when Thom and I were both living there and then I did some on my own in Boston and Toronto and then we finished it up in Los Angeles.

Was it challenging to make a record in such a piecemeal fashion?

It wasn't a problem. It's good to get away from it sometimes. I think if we had done it all in one place, I still would've wanted to have the breaks that we had because of moving. Having some time off from a record can give you some space, some perspective on it.

The other mainstay in the band is Peyton Pinkerton, who's played on all the Pernice Brothers records. How'd you originally hook up with him?

We were all living in Northampton at the time. I was in grad school and Peyton had his band the New Radiant Storm Kings. It's really a kind of small town, so everybody sort of knows everybody. When I was putting together the first Pernice Brothers record, I asked him to come along and it's evolved from there.

It seems as though he's taken a more prominent role on the last two records. Do you pretty much give him free reign in the studio, in terms of guitar parts?

Sometimes. It's both. Sometimes there'll be a set idea I have for a guitar part. I'm a hack at best on guitar - no matter how much I practice, I'll just never be that good at guitar. I can hear guitar parts, but I can't play 'em. So I'll hum a part to Peyton, or I'll say "Can you do something like this?" And he can play it and change it a little and make it better. But he'll show up with a lot of ideas, too, so it's both. There's a lot of editing and forming that goes on in the studio.

Is it safe to say that a song on the new record like "Amazing Glow" -- with its mentions of changing cities and lifestyles -- is autobiographical? Or do you shy away from that sort of songwriting?

Oh no. Most everything that I've ever written comes from a real event or thing. But I try to step back from it at some point. I try to see what's the better story I can tell, even if it's not necessarily true. It's fun to see where a song can go, just to step back and let it take a left turn, regardless of what really happened or not.

Personally, I think it'd be pretty boring if I was just up there spouting the truth all the time. But that particular song did come out of something real and true. And it probably is true.

Another song from the new record, "My So-Called Celibate Life" -- is that your commentary on Los Angeles? (Sample lyric: "All the stars out in disguise / Look at all the money that money buys.")

Yeah, it's something I finished while I was out there. It's crazy, you go out to eat at a diner or something there and literally everyone there is working on a script or a project or something. I don't know if I was just going to places that were script workshop places, or what?

Have you caught some of that bug yourself? I was just reading that you're working on a script based on your novella (Meat Is Murder, a fictionalized memoir centered around the titular Smiths album).

Yeah, I've been working on a script for that with someone for about a year. It's getting pretty close to finished. But I'm not interested in selling the script. The plan is to produce it in a real DIY kind of way. It's almost done, and the hope is that early next year, we'll turn up the heat in terms of organizing the whole thing.

So you've got a book of poetry, a novella and now a film script. Can you foresee a time when these concerns might take precedence over music?

If I start to enjoy those things more, sure. I really take the path of least resistance. If sitting around alone in my house writing a book is more fulfilling than making music with people, than that's what I'll do. I just have to go with what I love.

We mentioned the Scud Mountain Boys earlier. It's been a decade since you put out those records. How do you view that band and that era?

I haven't listened to the records in a long time. The last time I did, I remember thinking they sounded pretty good. It was a really brief burst, when I think about it now. We put out three records in about two and a half years, maybe less than that. More like 15 months. But I think we made three good albums, we made our stamp. It was an exciting period. I felt I had hit upon something really good in terms of songwriting. I wrote most of those songs really quickly, in a matter of months, I think, with a few exceptions. I was writing a ton of songs back then, because I had just started really writing and taking time with it. It was just a really inspiring time. And everything started happening really quickly.

What's funny is that back then I was going through a heavy Jimmy Webb thing, and I had just started listening to Nick Drake and Burt Bacharach, too. So even though those early records have some undeniably country elements, that had a little more to do with the set up of the band, with pedal steel and mandolin taking such prominent roles. In fact, I remember the two records I listened to the most around that time might have been Dinosaur Jr's Green Mind and [Guided By Voices'] Bee Thousand.

Yeah, I was listening to Massachusetts recently and though the knee jerk reaction to that record would be to label it "alt-country," there were a lot of songs that didn't really fit into that category at all.

Yeah, I mean, going back to Jimmy Webb -- he's known for his country hits with Glen Campbell, like "Wichita Lineman" and "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." But you listen to those songs, and they're not country at all. They just happen to be set in Texas or something. They're insane. They don't really have any of the trappings that we think of as "country." They're so damn complex and a lot of times they don't have any choruses! They just go on and on without choruses. And they're amazing.

Photo by Hannah White/Collegiate Images/Getty Images

Auburn was off, what about everyone else?

What’d you guys get up to yesterday? Head outside? Enjoy the weather? Same here. Auburn had its lone bye week of the season yesterday before finishing up the final four games of the regular season. The Tigers are up to 4-2 at this point after the huge win over LSU on Halloween, and they’ll certainly be favored over a Mississippi State team that’s done nothing but get worse each week since beating LSU.

There were some very interesting results around the country this weekend, however, so let’s get the highlights of the rankings and a rundown of what happened around the SEC.

POLL ALERT: Alabama reaches No. 1 in AP Top 25 for record 13th consecutive season; Notre Dame jumps to No. 2, Clemson slips to No. 4. Full poll >> https://t.co/7dTTUiSC1j More coverage >> https://t.co/2qlqr09CPm pic.twitter.com/gBe2izVZO2

— AP Top 25 (@AP_Top25) November 8, 2020

Unfortunately, Alabama is back atop the standings after Clemson lost in double overtime to Notre Dame last night, so here’s your new top ten:

Alabama

Notre Dame

Ohio State

Clemson

Texas A&M

Florida

Cincinnati

BYU

Miami

Indiana

That’s... an interesting top ten. Indiana?? After three weeks? BYU? They haven’t played a single Power Five team this season. Texas A&M has only the loss to Alabama, but they might be the most unassuming top five team you could imagine.

Other SEC teams in the rankings include Georgia at #12, and Auburn still at #24 after the off week. Let’s get some thoughts on the conference as a whole.

ALABAMA: Off this week, the Tide are now the top-ranked team in the country, and they’ve already played what many think is the toughest test on their schedule in Georgia, despite the fact that Georgia hasn’t beaten them since Nick Saban’s first season, and definitely not when it matters. Running back Trey Sanders got hurt in a car crash and is probably out for the year, so depth takes a hit, but they’re still the best team in the league.

ARKANSAS: Arkansas fans are torn between saying that Chad Morris is the reason they sucked for the past couple of years, and saying that he brought in the players that are currently performing well. The Hogs put up a 24-0 third quarter yesterday against Tennessee, and that was all they’d need. Arkansas is now 3-3 after a surprisingly efficient day from Feleipe Franks, who threw for 3 touchdowns.

AUBURN: Off this week, but looking good. The win over LSU is super satisfying, and up next it’s the two teams struggling the most in Mississippi State and Tennessee. Win those and you’re 6-2 heading into the Iron Bowl. Not bad.

FLORIDA: Ok, they looked fast. Made Georgia look slow and dull. Kyle Trask made up for Kyles everywhere and threw for more than 300 yards in the first half on the way to 38 Gator points, and they cruised from there. Now, they’re in the East driver’s seat and suddenly have a clear path to the College Football Playoff, unlike...

GEORGIA: These guys no longer have a clear path to the Playoff, let alone the SEC Championship Game. For the proximity to meaningful accomplishments that Kirby has achieved, Georgia has little in the trophy case to show for it. Now, they’re going to likely miss the SEC Championship Game for the first time since 2016, and Kirby’s glaringly poor quarterback management is super apparent now with the way that Justin Fields is playing at the moment at Ohio State. Kirby’s record is worse than Mark Richt’s at this point in their respective careers, and now he’s going to be missing games in Atlanta. That’s how a championship-starved Georgia fanbase turns on you.

KENTUCKY: Off this week, they’ll get a chance to bounce back under the quarterback leadership of Joey Gatewood next Saturday against Vanderbilt, so they’ll likely get a victory. Gatewood clearly wasn’t trusted to let ‘er rip last weekend, so Auburn fans have to feel good about Gus’ quarterback decision at the beginning of 2019.

LSU: Off this week, but oh boy, where do you go from here? LSU currently sits at 2-3, and what’s next? Oh brother, they get Alabama at home. Now, Death Valley is the kind of spot where weird things tend to happen, especially at night, but not with the way this Tiger team is playing. They’re... awful. And right now, this season may completely fall apart. Alabama is a sure loss, then they have to go to Arkansas, who’s getting better by the week. Then it’s at Texas A&M before returning home to take on an Ole Miss team that’s just drooling at the pass defense they’ve seen from LSU. Ah, yes, then you finish at Florida. That’s three top six teams left in the final five games, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that LSU ends up 2-8 at the end of this one. What an encore from a national championship. Worth it, though.

MISSISSIPPI STATE: This team is terrible. They managed to outlast Vanderbilt and hold on despite a second-half Commodore comeback, but they seemed to somehow get worse in the process. Will Rogers threw for 226 yards on 35 completions. Mississippi State ran for... wait for it, NEGATIVE 22 yards. Vanderbilt’s quarterback Kenny Seals hit the 300-yard mark on them through the air. We’re going to likely be a 20-point favorite, and you’ll need to bet the Tigers with every penny.

MISSOURI: Off this week, but they host Georgia on Saturday at noon. Man, that’s a sneaky spot. With what Georgia has been up to lately, and with the way that Missouri can score, watch out if the Tigers happen to get up by a couple of scores somehow. Yeah, Georgia’s defense is great, but a big play or two could really put Kirby on roller skates. You’d hate to see it.

OLE MISS: Off this week, but they’ll get to play the boring version of themselves next weekend when South Carolina comes to town. It’s a battle of former coordinators now turned head coaches with Kiffin vs Muschamp, but I have to think that Ole Miss blows them out of the water unless Matt Corral has another Hyde performance with a myriad of picks.

SOUTH CAROLINA: When we look back at this season, we’ll chalk up the Auburn loss to South Carolina as a true 2020 moment. Since that time they’ve given up 100 points to LSU and Texas A&M combined. Yesterday was a listless effort that had message boards wondering if Hugh Freeze was en route to Columbia to pull Muschamp’s chair out from under him and start paying Chicago recruits to come play for the Gamecocks. 48-3 to Texas A&M. What a loss. They’re 2-4, and we’re one of the two. Gross.

TENNESSEE: Is Jeremy Pruitt in trouble? Tennessee had the top winning streak in the country early on this year, and now they’ve lost four straight games since leading Georgia at halftime a few weeks ago. Yesterday they got up 13-0 over Arkansas and then died, letting the Hogs roll over them in the third quarter for the win. Pruitt still sticks with Jarrett Guarantano for some reason, but he doesn’t have anyone better. For all of the tricks he learned working with Saban and Jimbo, you’d think that this guy would be able to grab a better quarterback.

TEXAS A&M: I don’t really know what to make of this team. I’ve seen them get absolutely blasted in Tuscaloosa, and I’ve seen them do the same thing to some other teams. They’re somehow in the top five, but that could be a function of people not believing in more than four good teams (Bama, Clemson, Ohio State, Notre Dame) and just sticking the Aggies there for fun. Kellen Mond looks... good? The run game is... decent? The defense... tough? Maybe they are good. They play Tennessee next weekend, so it’s likely another win for Jimbo and another bit of frustration for Pruitt.

VANDERBILT: They play hard and get exercise/fresh air, that’s for sure. Not much more than that. Won’t win a game this year.

from College and Magnolia - All Posts https://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2020/11/8/21555559/saturday-sec-impressions-rankings-peeking-around-the-bye-week

31-Day Music Challenge

The social media is now flooded with all kinds of funny challenges, as people are stuck at home with nothing much to do. I guess online gaming, or getting shitfaced, becomes increasingly boring, when all kinds of tiresome responsibilites, like work, do not present any restrictions and limitations anymore. In a way, Facebook has started to resonate the air of those naive first few years, when your newsfeed was basically just one continuous stream of challenge that and challenge this.

Well, why the hell not?

What else is there to do, in order to pass the time with your mental health intact?

So, here I am...just another bored individual to join this endless crusade to make life worth living again, to make my personal life great again. Thus, I jumped on the wagon, and took on this fancy 31-day music challenge, that has been circulating in Facebook (for years, I think).

Although, I didn't find it challenging enough to just type the daily keyword in the Spotify search box and post the result in my Facebook wall. Because: more is more.

(Go ask Yngwie Malmsteen, if you don't believe me...)

The challenge for day #1 was to pick a song with a colour in the title.

I could immediately come up with a bunch of songs, only to realize that the vast majority of the song titles were themed around two basic colours: black and blue. I guess songwriters are a lazy bunch, when it comes to colours. It's pretty obvious, why lyricist everywhere find these two colours exceptionally appealing and resort to the abundant use of them, neglecting all the wonderful possibilites posed by the other colours of the spectrum. Of course black and blue, in terms of emotion and imagination, are much stronger than, say, yellow and orange. So, instead of just settling with the first few titles that came to mind, I wondered if I could come up with one song for each colour I can think of. I mean: a song that bears some personal meaning to me. In practice, this challenge basically meant that I would have to think hard while rummaging through the main three Spotify playlists that I have compiled with something like +16k or +17k songtitles, with the addition of my personal collection of some +2600 cd's – at least the rarities section for songs that are not available in Spotify.

Let's see if I have the stamina to go through my cd-racks, though. I had the forethought to organize my cd's in alphabetical order, by the name of the artist, years ago. For some weird reason, my beloved spouse has not yet agreed to the idea of re-furnishing our apartment with the central theme being those precious compact discs. That's why the cd-racks are placed in somewhat random and impractical fashion: most of them are located in the living room, with a few sections located in our bedroom. I guess, it's a good thing I had disposed of my vintage Rhodes-electric piano by the time when we started dating 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure she would have opposed strongly to the idea of having the instrument as a kitchen table, with the giant lid down. My Rhodes-piano was the so-called suitcase model, with a keyboard of 73 keys. When I moved out from my parents' house in the mid-90's, I decorated my one-room-apartment in the ethos of Japanese minimalism, due to the fact that I spent most of my income on records and alcohol. That Rhodes-piano served as a kitchen table, when I wasn't actually playing with it. Because: why the hell not?

Ok, then. The first colour...it shall be black.

Oh, boy! What a multitude of choices it presents! Should I pick an iconic 90's grunge anthem, like Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun? After all, I saw the band on stage in Helsinki cirka 1995. (I say ”cirka” because I'm not 100% sure about the year, and I'm too lazy to look it up in Google) The fond memories of those grungey early years in the 90's instantly remind me of a couple of equally important bands: Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. Although, I've never seen either of them live. Pearl Jam had a song titled Black on their breakthrough debut album Ten. Alice in Chains had a killer track titled Black Gives Way to Blue. That epochal Pearl Jam album played non-stop in my car stereos at the time of its' release. I had it copied on a C-cassette. Remember that vintage format, anyone? (Yes, I'm THAT old...) With this particular AIC song I fell in love much later, as it was the title track on the band's comeback album, released in 2009 with the new singer William DuWall. First, I kinda hesitated to give this new AIC line-up any chances, but it turned out to be pretty damn good. Obviously, nothing can top the impact, that the Laney Staley-fronted AIC made with their Dirt-album in 1992. At the time of its' release, that album was a full-blown mindfuck! In retrospect, the year 1992 seems to have been pretty kick-ass, in terms of album releases:

Alice in Chains: Dirt

Rage Against The Machine: Rage Against The Machine

R.E.M.: Automatic for the People

Pantera: Vulgar Display of Power

Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes

Faith No More: Angel Dust

Dream Theater: Images and Words

Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85-92

Prince & The New Power Generation: (Love Symbol Album)

Stereo MC's: Connected

Tom Waits: Bone Machine

Sade: Love Deluxe

The Prodigy: Experience

Megadeth: Countdown to Extinction

Eric B. & Rakim: Don't Sweat the Technique

The Orb: U.F.Orb

k.d.Lang: Ingenue

Suzanne Vega: 99.9 Fº

Stone Temple Pilots: Core

Curve: Doppelganger

Nick Cave: Henry's Dream

Neneh Cherry: Homebrew

Maybe I should choose something less obvious? At least, it would make this challenge less arduous for me, because it's evident that making a choice between two particularly dear songs from the past is nothing short of impossible. When in doubt, go for the dark horse! So, here goes: my choice for the song with the colour black in the title is:

Bonobo: Black Sands

Being something of a jazz aficionado, despite not really possessing any of the musical prowess to actually play jazz myself, it was love at first soundbite, when I chanced to hear the title track from Bonobo's 2010 album Black Sands on Bassoradio's morning special back in the day. Bonobo is the musical alias of British DJ-producer-musician Simon Green. His career spawns from the 90's trip hop aesthetics, with heavy influences of jazz and world music. Spicing up electronic beats with raw jazz samples, or even live musicians, was the thing to do, somewhere along the mid-90's. I guess it all started with a few insightful hip-hop artists layering their ghetto stompers with the occassional hardbop jazz sample back in the late 80's. For a short period, acid jazz was the coolest shit ever in the early 90's. In a somewhat natural chain of events, jazz eventually made its way to the brand new genres that evolved around the middle of the decade, trip hop and jungle, too.

That's how I got sucked into the all-consuming whirlpool of this abominable voodoo music – jazz. It's a wonder no-one has come up with a gateway theory yet, regarding the highly addictive nature of jazz music. It usually starts with small doses: an occassional jazz sample is slipped in the hip-hop track, or the breakdown section of a rock song is ornamented with a brief, improvised saxophone lead. Then you find yourself craving for more, and start delving into the depths of acid jazz, nu jazz, or whatever new genre that has incorporated jazz as an inherent element in its' aesthetic toolkit. After this honeymoon period, that might spawn over years and years, you eventually catch yourself red-handed, holding a genuine jazz album in your hands at the local record store, probably the usual entry-level drug-of-choice jazz classic: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. It has been awarded the title of the greatest jazz album of all time – and for a reason, too. Multiple times. Then you're hooked. Next thing you know, you'll be blasting John Coltrane at a family reunion, with your beloved relatives giving you the dead-eyed stare, doubting the state of your mental well-being. Long story short: you simply cannot go wrong with a mellow waltz rhythm that's punctuated with the organic groove of a flesh-and-blood jazz drummer, and topped with hauntingly beautiful brass harmony.

Next up: the colour blue...

Again, I could go for something utterly obvious, like the song titled Blue by A Perfect Circle. Those lucky few, who know me in person, should be well aware of the fact, that I'm quite a diehard fanboy of the band. I was lucky enough to see the band's live performance a few years back, when they paid Finland a visit. Nevertheless, I think I can come up with something more unexpected.

Just let me think for a sec...

Remember the band Europe? Of course you do! (Unless you were born yesterday, like some, eww, millennial!) I think it would've required some exceptional measures in the noble art of cutting contact with the external world to not have been exposed to the band's 1986 megahit Final Countdown, during the past 34 years. (Fuck! Do I feel old yet?!?) BUT...before you dismiss the band as yet another hair-metal has-been, check out this song:

Europe: Not Supposed To Sing The Blues

It's pretty damn hard to believe it's a song by the same band that's responsible for that Final Countdown atrocity. To be honest, that particular throwback 80's hard rock ear-worm wouldn't probably get under my skin in such a thoroughly repulsive fashion, had I not performed the song countless times myself. It was quite an essential part of the live repertoire of the party band, that I toured with cirka 2004-2008. The modus operandi of this covers-only band was to play the most annoying 80's megahits, with the lyrics translated in Finnish with a liberal amount of tongue-in-cheek references to gay erotica. (On a side note, the band was actually quite popular in certain small regions, despite this dubious approach and the substantially high level of bad taste incorporated in the lyrics and live performances. We even ended up playing in a genuine gay wedding once. The humour of the band was, after all, benevolent albeit a bit harsh, at least in the context of these politically correct times...)

The song Not Supposed to Sing the Blues was released in 2012. It's pretty evident, that during this 26-year-period, following the release of Final Countdown, Europe managed to grow some serious balls, hidden somewhere below my musical radar. The oriental sounding motif, played with some cool mellotron string patch in the refrain before the chorus, has a nice Led Zeppelin-esque feel to it. You can't really go wrong with a slowed-down hard rock blues that is sugar-coated with a grain of Kashmir-strings, now can you?

Next up: white...

What first comes to mind? Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum, and Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, obviously. You see, I had both of these tracks in vinyl format, way back in the early 90's, when I was going through my ”moustache prog from the 70's”-phase. (Although, this particular Procol Harum song was actually released in 1968, and the Moody Blues song in 1967 – but, in order to be consistent and thorough, I had to dig deeper, to the roots of the prog...to the very dinosaur fossils)

I could throw in White Room by Cream, too. I used to listen to these particular tracks A LOT! In the age of vinyl, conducting a music marathon themed around, say, 60's and 70's ”moustache music”, was actually quite a laborous ritual. Every 25 minutes, or so, I had to flip the side of the record. Shuffling songs totally at random was simply a no-go-zone. Nowadays, it's so easy to compile a lengthy set of personal favorites in Spotify, WinAmp, iTunes, or whatever the fuck application you'd prefer, and just hit the randomize-button...fucking millennials, they have it SO easy. They have no idea of the struggle.

That's why we had those vintage C-cassettes: to copy that very special selection of songs, compiled with tender love and care, onto a format, that didn't require you to be on a constant lookout for when the album side was closing to an end. Besides, before the onslaught of cd-players, those vintage C-cassettes were the only way to impress people with either your refined taste in music, or with the lack of it, while you were occupied with the gentle art of pussy racing, driving around downtown in your awkwardly tuned-up mirthmobile, every goddamn Friday night.

I could pick White Wedding by Billy Idol, too...

It was one of those 80's hits that I used to play with the ”covers only”-party band.

Nah...

I think I will have to choose between Aisles of White by the Aussie soft-prog band the Butterfly Effect, and The Heart of a Cold White Land by the Finnish doomsters Swallow the Sun.

My beloved wife introduced me to Aussie prog, some 10 years ago. The gateway drug, I think, was Karnivool with their music video for All I Know. One day, when I was coming home from work, I caught my wife watching this particular video in YouTube. A little bit later, she unearthed a shitload of Aussie bands in Spotify. I guess she must've been hitting that ”similar artists”-link quite relentlessly. The Butterfly Effect was one of those magnificent bands she discovered. I remember hearing the song In A Memory for the first time. It struck a chord with me, in such a profound way, that I felt compelled to order the album Imago ASAP from some Australian music webstore. At the time, the back catalogue of the Butterfly Effect wasn't available in Finland. I don't know, if it's available even now, because the band is no longer active, I think. Aisles of White is the track #2 on that album, released in 2006. The band released one more kick-ass album in 2008, titled Final Conversation of Kings, and then I don't know what the hell happened.

Swallow the Sun is a bit doomish Finnish metal band, and I'm not really sure, when I actually found the band's music. I think I had their debut album The Morning Never Came (2003) in my cd-rack for years, but it wasn't until 2012, with the release of the magnificent Emerald Forest and the Blackbird album, that I truly fell in love with the band. It took me some five years to actually haul my ass to their gig for the first time. Every single time, when I found out that they were touring nearby, I was too busy with some utterly meaningless work-related bullshit to make it. Finally, in 2017 it happened. I had managed to get rid of my soul-sucking job, although due to a pretty hardcore reason (a brain tumour), so when I found out that Swallow the Sun was performing in Helsinki, in the legendary rock venue Tavastia, I definitely made sure that I was there – and fuck me sideways! It was indeed one of the best live performances that I have ever experienced, hands down!

In 2015, Swallow the Sun released a monolithic triple album Songs From the North, and this particular track, The Heart of a Cold White Land, is on the disc II, that is focused on the beauty side of the band's doom palette.

Swallow the Sun: The Heart of a Cold White Land

Next up: Red

Sielun Veljet was one of the most iconic Finnish rock bands in the 80's. The band released only a couple of albums with lyrics in English, of which the 1989 release Softwood Music Under Slow Pillars was the only one with the songs originally written in English. There was some other attempts to gain international fame and fortune, but in those cases, the songs were merely English translations of their most beloved hit songs, initially written in Finnish. This particular album was planned for international release – but the label executives were pretty disappointed, to say the least, when the band came up with an album full of acoustic psychedelia. It was released only in Finland and Sweden. The artwork on the album cover is actually a painting by a Peruvian artist Pablo Amaringo, depicting the shamanic ayahuasca ritual. Listening through this album in one go is somewhat similar experience, I would guess: a rewarding journey into the depths of the human psyche, albeit potentially exhausting, especially if you're not exactly in the proper mindset to begin with.

Well, ever since I got exposed to the oriental psychedelia of, say, Jimi Hendrix, Kingston Wall, and the like, I seem to have acquired a taste for this kind of weird and druggy, over-the-top freeform musical expression.

Sielun Veljet: Hey-Ho, Red Banana

Ok, then...What next?

What other colours are there, anyway? The three primary colours are: red, yellow and blue. All the other colours can be derived from these three fuckers. To be precise, I think black does not actually qualify as a colour... So, I've got most of these covered already. Of course, in order to pick some hairs, printers actually use magenta, yellow and cyan as their primary colours – and black, obviously. I can't recall a single song with ”magenta” or ”cyan” in the title, though. I could come up with a band or two, with these colours in the band name, such as Magenta Skycode, or Cyan Velvet Project, but song titles?

Nada.

Maybe, if I combed through my post-rock and soundtrack archives, I could come up with some epic 15-minute instrumental with either cyan or magenta mentioned in the lengthy piece of contemporary literature, that is supposed to be the title of the song...but I guess those tracks would not exactly mean worlds to me, as I clearly cannot remember them now. If something comes to mind, while I'm writing down this epistle, I'll address that particular colour and song, accordingly. Now, I shall get on with this challenge journal, onto the next ”normal”, everyday colour...

Which is?

The colour green.

Having played keyboards in a dubious number of proggy bands, with the tonal preferences leaning heavily toward everything vintage, I might as well pick a mellow Hammond-organ classic, such as Green Onions by Booker T. & the MG's, or a vintage synth classic from THE motion picture soundtrack album of all time: Memories of Green by Vangelis, from the timeless Blade Runner soundtrack.

But I won't...

It wasn't actually easy to come up with that many titles with the colour green mentioned. Excluding these two aforementioned classics, I could barely come up with four! As much as I like the desert rock stonerism of Kuyss, the song Green Machine is not my personal favourite in their back catalogue. So that narrows my options to three. The problem is that two of these songs seem to defy the laws of quantum physics: they both take a firm stranglehold on my soul, and throw it casually down the dark and dangerous alleys of nostalgia.

In the midst of 90's acid jazz boom, I had a peculiar habit of buying compilation cd's at random, if the heading on the cover somehow suggested that the contents of the cd had anything to do with this particular genre of music. By impulse-buying music I discovered a lot of gems, like the song Apple Green by Mother Earth. The band was an English acid jazz outfit, virtually unheard of in Finland, despite the tidal wave of acid jazz washing over also these rural perimeters. If Jamiroquai, the Brand New Heavies et al. rub you the right way, you definitely need to check this band out. I can still remember clearly, as if it happened yesterday, how I picked this acid jazz compilation from the vaults of the local record store that no longer exists.

Mr. Big was a band everybody just loved to hate at the turn of the decace, when the gigantic hair-do's of the 80's started to flatten out, and flannel shirts were showing faint signs of becoming the next level shit in the never-ending quest for cool. At the time, I was an under-aged college drop-out, devoting my attention to the finer things of guitar playing techniques, instead of studying for a decent profession. I had received my first electric guitar from my parents in 1988, and for the following 5-6 years, I spent most of my time and energy in an attempt to unravel the secrets of how to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix. I listened to quite a lot of speed and thrash metal on the side, too. Y'know, bands such as Anthrax, Metallica, Slayer and Stone, which was quite a legendary Finnish speed metal band in the late 80's. My budding personal artistic expression was anyhow more influenced by legendary old timers, like Hendrix. I simply loathed all sorts of pyrotechnical wankery (with the exception of certain tracks by Steve Vai and Joe Satriani). Mr. Big's lead guitarist Paul Gilbert was famous for that very special blend of technical stuff, that I wasn't interested in, not in the slightest. So, I never really gave the band a chance. I think my misconception of the band's music as some kind of a shit-show of technical masturbation was due to some instructional videos hosted by Gilbert. After all, his fame as a highly skilled guitarist must have derived from his contributions to several guitar magazines and instructional videos, instead of his career in Mr. Big. So, everytime I heard the intro of, say, To Be With You, on my car radio, I simply had to change the channel. In order to do so, I had to manually rotate the tuning knob. Yes, my first car stereos were THAT vintage! What a time it was to be alive! Years later, with the maturity of age like with a fine wine, I finally listened to the worn-out hits of this horrid band only to find out that – bummer! - in terms of songwriting, those goddamn Mr.Big hits were actually not that bad at all. The song Green-Tinted Sixties Mind was released on the album Lean Into It in 1991. Now, everytime I am exposed to this particular song, I am instantly reminded of what a stuck-up elitistic music snob I used to be during those emotionally tumultuous times.

So, I could resort to the luck of the draw, but luckily I've got one more candidate to go.

Lonely the Brave is one of my most recent findings. It's an English alt.rock band from Cambridge, formed in 2008. I really don't know much about the band, just this one song titled The Blue, The Green. I was exposed to it while playing the music trivia game Songpop 2 with my mobile phone during the past two years, I think. The game is about guessing songs within the timeframe of a 15 second clip. Pretty addictive at first, actually. This 15-second-soundbite was enough to gain my full attention, so I had to check out the song in full, instantly. I cannot pinpoint what exactly it is, but this particular song has that vague feeling of ”something”, that draws me to listen to it, time and time again.

Lonely The Brave: The Blue, The Green

Next up: yellow.

I was first introduced to Frank Zappa's unique music in the late 80's, by my classmate Jussi, who kindly exposed me to the timeless classic Bobby Brown Goes Down. At the delicate age of 15, it was a pretty anticipated reaction that the explicit song lyrics would strike a chord. A few years later, as I was browsing through the vinyl section at the local second hand record store, I came across a pure treasure: the gatefold vinyl edition of Roxy & Elsewhere by Frank Zappa & The Mothers. In mint condition, too! Dropping the needle on the first groove on the black vinyl back home was like taking the first hit of some mind-altering illegal substance. My perception of reality changed in an instant – and there was no going back. Such an exciting mixture of fusion jazz, rock and harsh satire was sure to make me an addict. So, in no time at all I built up enough tolerance and moved onto semi-lethal dosages, and purchased the albums Hot Rats, Grand Wazoo and Apostophe('). The last one was released in the year, when I was born (1974), and it included the hilarious 4-part rock suite about the unfortunate adventures of an eskimo named Nanook. One part of the suite is titled: Don't Eat the Yellow Snow. Sound advice at the time of a global pandemic, that originated from some peculiar pathogen spillover event in China, don't cha think?

Frank Zappa: Don't Eat The Yellow Snow

Not many colours left, I think...

Next up: purple.

I was exposed to the music of Jimi Hendrix via a documentary on TV, when I was a rosy-cheeked 7th grader in junior high. It happened around the same time, when I got my first electic guitar. So, I guess it must have been written in the stars, or something. The universe simply wanted me to focus on the noble art of guitarism, instead of getting a college degree on psychopathological marketing or accounting (fuck no!). My first guitar was a cheap stratocaster-copy with a Williams-logo on it. In a way, it resembled the vintage Mellotron keyboard: it simply would refuse to keep in tune. One of the first songs that I learned, despite the frustrating limitations imposed by the crap tuners on the guitar, was Purple Haze by Hendrix. I had to learn it by ear. You see, back in the gloomy days of the late 80's, there just wasn't that many guitar tabs around. Not in Finland, anyway. Later I did find an instructional guitar playing manual at the local library, with a few pages dedicated to the art of Jimi Hendrix. Mainly, the only viable option to learn any contemporary rock song, or even any classic from the days long gone, was either to learn it by ear, or to resort to the occassional tabs provided by the international guitar magazines – if you were fortunate enough to spot these much-sought publications at your local bookstore. (These fuckin' millennials have it SO easy!) On the other hand, learning to play primarily by ear must have developed my improvisational skills a great deal, as an added bonus. Improvisation is not so much about throwing up some pre-programmed fancy gimmicks at any given chance, but actually LISTENING to what your fellow musicians are playing and responding accordingly.

Next up: grey.

I think it was my dear wife, once again, who first introduced me to the band Thrice, by playing the song Digital Sea from the band's double album Alchemy Index, a long, long time ago. The band's vocalist/guitarist Dustin Kensrue is one of those few singers, who are blessed with a distinctive voice that speaks, or to be more precise, sings volumes. He might not have the same gravitas like Mark Lanegan or Tom Waits, but nevertheless, he has the voice of a protagonist who's been to hell and back. Mark Lanegan sounds like he's got a season ticket, and Tom Waits sounds like he's the devil running the show – or, to put it in Waits' own words:

”Don't you know, there ain't no devil,

that's just God when he's drunk...”

 Tom Waits: Heartattack and Vine

Anyways, the lyrics in a Thrice song could be compiled of a list of phone numbers, or the decimals of Pi (like Kate Bush actually did), and it would still sound like a profound wisdom concerning the transformative journey of being fully human.

Thrice: The Grey

Last but not least, the colour: turquoise.

For years, I actually thought that Boards of Canada was indeed a Canadian outfit. Y'know, indie bands in particular come up with these band names that have some funny and ironic twist. Somewhere along the way, it finally dawned on me that this magnificent electronic duo is actually from Scotland. Well, of course it is! If my memory isn't playing any tricks on me now, I'm pretty sure that Soulsavers and Hidden Orchestra are Scottish, too. And they all have something in common. Each of these electronic outfits has an extraordinary and unique, boss-level prominance in the way they manage to capture emotion in their instrumentals.

Boards of Canada released a 5-minute electronic epic titled Turquoise Hexagon Sun on the album Music Has the Right to Children in 1998. The name of the song is actually a reference to the duo's recording studio Hexagon Sun. It makes it even more marvellous, that an instrumental track with a title deriving from something so mundane can touch your heartstrings so deeply. It's not that often, when an electronic instrumental with a hip-hop beat, glassy vintage synth motifs and deliberately lo-fi production paired with grainy samples, manage to do that. These Scottish bastards must've been onto something...

Well, that's pretty much all there was to the first day in this music challenge! I was supposed to pick one song, and I ended up writing a fucking novel about it...Tomorrow the plot shall thicken even more, when I introduce you to the theme of the day #2.

In the meanwhile, you can do yourself a favour and listen to:

Boards of Canada: Turquoise Hexagon Sun

Stay tuned! Cheers!

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: A Conversation With Lana Del Rey. On the eve of her fourth album, the pagan pop star sounds more content than ever. How did she get there? Interview by Alex Frank for Pitchfork. Famous artists are notoriously late, but when I arrive about 20 minutes early for an interview at Lana Del Rey’s Santa Monica studio, she is ready for me, offering a handshake and a smile. It is the week before her new album, ‘Lust For Life’, will be released, but she seems unhurried and relaxed; when I ask if she’s been busy in the leadup to such a big day, she says “no” with a laugh, as if she knows she probably should be. She is not dressed like the glammed-up mystic you see in music videos and photographs: her hair, long and brown, is tied functionally behind her neck, and she is in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, with cream canvas sneakers and white ankle socks on her feet. Right away, she invites me through a side door into the inner sanctum where her brooding songs are created. For Lana acolytes, this is a mythic place. She has recorded here since 2012’s ‘Born To Die’, her major label debut. It is a beautiful room filled with sun coming in from a skylight and two windows, the opposite of the average dank music studio. It looks a bit like how you’d expect Lana Del Rey’s workplace to look: vaguely and warmly retro, with dark wood cabinets and a mid-century-looking painting with interlacing geometric shapes hanging on the back wall. In the center of the room is a scratched-up leather club chair with a Tammy Wynette album cover facing it. (“I always have Tammy there,” she says of the country singer best known for her ode to everlasting devotion, “Stand by Your Man.”) This chair, and not the actual booth in the front of the room, is where Lana sits to record her vocals. “I get red light fever in the booth,” she says. She likes that the studio is by the beach, where she’ll sometimes go to listen to mixes of songs on her iPhone. The studio is owned and operated by Rick Nowels, her longtime producer. He has come down today to listen to the album with us, a pair of sunglasses firmly on his face. Nowels has more than 20 years on Lana, who is 32, and he inhabits something of an uncle role, making the songwriter a bit bashful when he sweetly refers to a ballad called “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing” as a “masterpiece” for its lyrical message about the importance of finding ways to have fun, even in the Trump era. Gearing up to record what would become ‘Born To Die’, Lana had met with a number of producers who all tried to tell her what she should or should not sound like, with some encouraging her to ditch the breathy vocal style that would become her signature. When she finally met Nowels, he didn’t want to change a thing. “I went through a hundred and eleven producers just to find someone who says ‘yes’ all the time,” she says. “Everyone is so obsessed with saying ‘no’—they break you down to build you up.” Lana is a studio junkie—’Lust For Life’ is her fourth album in about five years. She says a day that she works is better than a day that she doesn’t. Nowels tells me that even though the new album isn’t out yet, she’s already making new music. “If I get a great melody in my head, I know it’s a gift,” she says. As we sit down to listen to ‘Lust For Life’, she is clearly at home: Like a good host, she offers me her comfy leather singing chair and instead curls up on a blue velvet couch nearby. She has a familial rapport with not just Nowels, but engineers Dean Reid and Kieron Menzies, who she credits again and again for making her work better, and the four of them ruminate on mastering, making jokes about Lana’s perfectionism when it comes to the final cuts of her songs. The album, like all of her work, is fastidiously and emphatically Lana in its sound and atmosphere: a haze of lazy pacing and flowery melodies, conjuring a foreboding backdrop for lyrics about summer and antique celebrity icons and dangerous, dissatisfying relationships. Front and center in the mix is her voice, which has a crooner’s tone and an especially wide range, from deep and low to high and sharp. Most pop stars rely on reinvention to retain relevance, but her output is remarkably consistent. She says her main criteria is whether or not a song sounds like it will transport listeners to somewhere else in their minds. On each album, the skeleton remains more or less the same while she infuses her work with stylistic elements from different genres, from rap to rock to jazz. ‘Lust For Life’ draws from folk and hip-hop, two genres that she says she loves because they both privilege real storytelling. The new record is a departure in key ways, though. In the past, Lana has become famous for themes that are, at times, hopeless: toxic romance, violence, drug use, despair, aging, death. This isn’t to say every song she has ever recorded is a downer, or that she hasn’t displayed a knowing sense of humor about her reputation. But her relentless obsession with the dark arts is a reason why her fans love her with an almost religious fervor; she’s had issues with people breaking into her house. “They want to talk,” she says chillingly. Her menacing themes have also led to resistance at certain moments from larger audiences who, perhaps trained to think of pop music as a tool of empowerment and empathy, just can’t face her nihilism. While ‘Lust For Life’ certainly has its share of grim moments, it is not as much of an avalanche of gloom, and perhaps offers signposts to a happier future. At times, Lana even approaches uncomplicated joy, like on first single ‘Love.’ The album also contains some of her first songs that deal with a universe larger than the tangled intensity of one-on-one relationships—there are tracks intended to be balms and battle cries for trying times, which, like many Americans, she found herself fretting over constantly during the 2016 election campaign. And for the first time on any Lana album, she’s also opening the door to a number of guest vocalists: A$AP Rocky, Playboi Carti, the Weeknd, Stevie Nicks, and Sean Ono Lennon on a Beatles-referencing song called ‘Tomorrow Never Came.’ “I FaceTimed with Yoko, and she said it was her most favorite thing Sean’s ever done,” Lana says.

After listening to the album, Lana and I peel off to a small office on the other side of the studio for our interview. Before we begin, she pulls out her iPhone to record the conversation along with me, a defensive move she’s taken up after years of feeling manipulated and harangued by the media. When answering questions, she is at turns thoughtful and strident, seriously considering topics like her attempts at a brighter life and how Trump has affected her love of Americana, and also entirely unafraid to bat away questions she finds boring or irrelevant. At one point, she laughs so hard at a silly sidebar in our conversation that she has a coughing fit and has to take a break. She says she binge watches ‘The Bachelor,’ and that while all of her friends now call her Lana—not Elizabeth Grant, her birth name—her parents are the two people who do not. She is wry about the new song ‘Groupie Love,’ in which she writes herself not as the star but in the role of a worshipful devotee: “Old habits die hard—I still love a rock star.” When I ask her if she is bothered by TMZ dating rumors, which have recently speculated about her relationship with rapper G-Eazy, she gives an unexpectedly goading answer: “They’re usually true. Maybe where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Which is to say: She’s kinda regular, not the hardened artist we’ve heard in her songs, but someone, it would seem, who likes to hang out and chat about life and music. Talking about good times brings up memories of rough ones, and when the conversation veers towards rocky terrain, she reveals an artist-and a person-at a pivotal moment. — A few years ago you were singing lyrics like “I have nothing much to live for,” and now you’re smiling on the cover of ‘Lust For Life.’ How’d you get to a happier place? Lana Del Rey: I made personal commitments. — Commitments to what? LDR: Well, they’re personal. [laughs] I had some people in my life that made me a worse person. I was not sure if I could step out of that box of familiarity, which was having a lot of people around me who had a lot of problems and feeling like that was home base. Because it’s all I know. I spent my whole life reasoning with crazy people. I felt like everyone deserved a chance, but they don’t. Sometimes you just have to step away without saying anything. — Your past albums often presented a claustrophobic universe made up of just you and one other person, but all of a sudden it’s like you’ve got your eyes wide open and you’re looking at the world around you. Developmentally, I was in the same place for a very long time, and then it just took me longer than most people to be able to be more out there. Being more naturally shy, it’s taken stretching on my part to just continue to integrate into the local community, global community, to grow as a person. Also, getting really famous doesn’t help you grow with the community. It’s important to have your own life. It’s hard with how accessible things are. Hacking? E-mail is just a no for me. I do a lot to make sure I don’t feel trapped. — Your fans are famously obsessive. Do they ever cross the line? They fucking have. Someone stole both my cars. All the scary shit. I’ve had people in my house for sure, and I didn’t know they were there while I was there. I fucking called the police. I locked the door. Obviously, that’s the one in one-hundred-thousand people who’s crazy. But I [had a hard time sleeping] for a minute. — Fame can be isolating, but you are making a real effort to not let it be. It’s going to be isolating. Period. Unless you stretch past it. But it takes so much footwork. Getting over the uncomfortability of being the one person in the room who everyone recognizes. The last few years, I’m out all the time: clubs, bars, shows. For years I was more quietly in the mix, always through the back door, do not tell anyone I’m coming. And now I’ve relaxed into it where I’ll just show up. I don’t need a special ticket. I’ll just go sit wherever. It feels a little more like I’m myself again. — If you’re happier these days, what do you think when you hear an old lyric from an old record, like, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss,” from ‘Ultraviolence’? I don’t like it. I don’t. I don’t sing it. I sing ‘Ultraviolence’ but I don’t sing that line anymore. Having someone be aggressive in a relationship was the only relationship I knew. I’m not going to say that that [lyric] was 100 percent true, but I do feel comfortable saying what I was used to was a difficult, tumultuous relationship, and it wasn’t because of me. It didn’t come from my end. — Now you want to present a different face to the world on ‘Lust For Life’? No. I don’t care. I would just say I am different. And even being a little bit different makes me not want to sing that line. To me, it just was what it was. I deal with what’s in my lyric—you’re not dealing with it. I was annoyed when people would ask me about that lyric. Like, who are you? — Do you think you romanticize danger in your music? No. I don’t like it. It’s just the only thing [I’ve known]. So I’m trying to do a new thing. I never wrote better when I had a lot of turmoil going on. ‘Born To Die’ was already done before any of the shit hit the fan. When things are good, the music is better. I’m trying to change from the way I thought things were gonna be to what I feel like they could be, which is maybe just brighter. — But, even with some new perspectives, ‘Lust For Life’ is still very melancholy at moments. If you make sad music, which you’ve done for so long, does it necessarily mean you’re sad? Yeah. I think for most people, regardless of what they say, it’s probably a direct reflection of their inner world. With my first record, I didn’t feel upset. I felt very excited, and then I felt a little more confused. — After the release of ‘Born To Die,’ you faced a lot of criticism, partly around the issue of whether you were or were not authentic. Do you think of yourself as authentic? Of course. I’m always being myself. They don’t know what authentic is. If you think of all the music that came out until 2013, it was super straight and shiny. If that’s authentic to you, this is going to look like the opposite. I think that shit is stylized. Just because I do my hair big does not mean I’m a product. If anything, I’m doing my own hair, stuffing my own fucking stuffing in there if I have a beehive. Music was in a super weird place when I became known, and I didn’t really like any of it. — Did you ever feel like the criticism had a misogynistic bent? No. Women hated me. I know why. It’s because there were things I was saying that either they just couldn’t connect to or were maybe worried that, if they were in the same situation, it would put them in a vulnerable place. — You weren’t singing empowering things. No, I wasn’t. That wasn’t my angle. I didn’t really have an angle—that’s the thing. — Have you noticed that all songs on the radio are bummers now? That Lil Uzi Vert lyric—“All my friends are dead”—sounds almost like a Lana lyric. There’s been a major sonic shift culturally. I think I had a lot to do with that. I do. I hear a lot of music that sounds like those early records. It would be weird to say that it didn’t. I remember seven years ago I was trying to get a record deal, and people were like, “Are you kidding? These tunes? There’s zero market for this.” There was just such a long time where people had to fit into that pop box. — With all the flak you’ve received over the years, particularly after ‘Born To Die,’ some people would have thrown in the towel. But you doubled down and made an even more fucked up, almost hyper-Lana record with ‘Ultraviolence.’ I so double downed. [The early criticism] made me question myself- I didn’t know if it was always going to be that way. You can’t put out records if 90 percent of the reviews in places like the Times are going to be negative. That would be crazy. It would have made sense to step all the way back, but I was like, Let me put out three more records and see if I can just stand in the eye of the storm. Not shift too much. Let me just take some of the [production] off so you can hear things a little bit better; I thought people were maybe getting distracted. I did the same thing with ‘Honeymoon.’ Everyone around here heard it and was like, “It’s a cool record, but you know it’s not going to be on the radio, right?” And I was like, “Yeah. I told [record executive] Jimmy [Iovine] when I signed, ‘If you want to sign me, this is all it’s ever going to be.’” I was just so committed to making music because I believe in what I do. All I had to do was not quit. — So that ‘Ultraviolence’ woman who is so swept up in turmoil- is she still there on ‘Lust For Life’? We’ll see. That’s been my experience up until now, but, like, I’m trying. — Some of the sparer, really heartfelt songs on ‘Lust For Life’ reminded me of the ‘Ultraviolence’ song ‘Black Beauty.’ That’s a sad song. In that song—[sings] I keep my lips red like cherries in the spring/Darling, you can’t let everything seem so dark blue—that’s a girl who is still seeing the blue sky and a putting on a pop of color just for herself. But this [other] person—it was all black for them. And my world became inky with those overtones. [At this, Lana begins to cry, and we pause for a moment.] — What made you cry just now? In that moment, when I said “pop of color,” I was connected to that feeling of only being able to see a portion of the world in color. And when you feel that way, you can feel trapped. — Are you seeing the world in color now? [sighs] I don’t really know how to describe my perspective at the moment. — But you’re trying, and that’s what ‘Lust For Life’ is about? It’s not. I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know what it is. — Is the album a way of saying that you at least want to be happy? No. It’s just that something is happening. — What makes you happy? I’m really simple. I love nature. I like hikes. Being by the water- I don’t always get in. I love the elements. Playing an outdoor festival. Love that feeling. — What bums you out? Feeling like going backwards. — Is there a storyline to the album? Yeah. — What’s the story? You have to figure it out. — Just a few years ago you were saying you didn’t care about feminism, and now you are writing protest songs and meditations on war and peace. Because things have shifted culturally. It’s more appropriate now than under the Obama administration, where at least everyone I knew felt safe. It was a good time. We were on the up-and-up. Women started to feel less safe under this administration instantly. What if they take away Planned Parenthood? What if we can’t get birth control? Now, when people ask me those questions, I feel a little differently. The reason why I asked Stevie Nicks to be on the record is because she changes when her environment changes, and I’m like that as well. In ‘When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing,’ I wrote, “Boys, don’t make too much noise/Don’t try to be funny/Other people may not be understanding.” Like, Can you tone down your over-boisterous rhetoric that isn’t working? ‘God Bless America - And All the Beautiful Women in It’ is a little shoutout to the women and anyone else who doesn’t always feel safe walking down the street late at night. That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote, “Even when I’m alone I’m not lonely/I feel your arms around me.” It’s not always how I feel when I’m walking down the street, but sometimes in my music I try to write about a place that I’m going to get to. — Do you feel unsafe? I feel less safe than I did when Obama was president. When you have a leader at the top of the pyramid who is casually being loud and funny about things like that, it’s brought up character defects in people who already have the propensity to be violent towards women. I saw it right away in L.A. Walking down the street, people would just say things to you that I had never heard. When people asked me the feminist question before, I was like, “I’m not really experiencing personal discrimination as a woman. I feel like I’m doing well. I headline shows just like the Weeknd does. I got tons of women in my life, love women, support women.” I just felt like, Why don’t we talk about the music first? I can tell you that what I have done for women is tell my own story, and that’s all anyone can do. — Is it harder to be romantic about America when Trump is the nation’s biggest celebrity? It’s certainly uncomfortable. I definitely changed my visuals on my tour videos. I’m not going to have the American flag waving while I’m singing ‘Born To Die.’ It’s not going to happen. I’d rather have static. It’s a transitional period, and I’m super aware of that. I think it would be inappropriate to be in France with an American flag. It would feel weird to me now- it didn’t feel weird in 2013. All the guys in the studio—we didn’t know we were going to start walking in every day and talking about what was going on. We hadn’t ever done that before, but everyday during the election, you’d wake up and some new horrible thing was happening. Korea, with missiles suddenly being pointed at the western coast. With ‘When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing,’ I was posing a real question to myself: Could this be the end of an era? The fall of Rome? — Nostalgia can be really corny when it’s not done well, and you’re all about nostalgia. How do you try to get it right? I know I walk the line sometimes. [laughs] I saw comments that people said about my little ‘Coachella - Woodstock in my Mind’ song. I write that title and I’m like, OK, I know I went there. But I think it’s amazing. It’s on the nose. It’s so on the nose. But sometimes things just are what they are. I’m at Coachella for three days, and North Korea is pointing a missile at us, and I’m watching Father John Misty with my best friend, who’s his wife—that’s all I’m literally saying. It’s just like, Yeah, I’m a hipster. I know it. Got it. — You mentioned working with Stevie Nicks on this album, what was it like recording with her? She came in straight off a plane from her last show of like 60 cities, which I was actually supposed to open for. She had asked me, and I was like, “Oh my god.” But I couldn’t because I don’t want to do a 60-show tour. She flew through the door. Blond highlights, rose gold glasses, gold-tipped nails, rose gold lipstick, gold chains, gold rings, black on black on black. Very stylish. And meanwhile, I looked like a housewife of 15—flannel on flannel, because it was a cold night. And I was like, Why did I not dress up for Stevie Nicks? At the end of the track, she sings, then I sing, then she sings. I was kinda embarrassed. I was like, “I sound so little compared to you.” And she was like, “That’s good, you’re my little echo.” And I was like, Stevie called me her little echo. It’s a stupid little thing, but she was very nurturing in that way, and not belittling of the fact that I had a more breathy voice. Which I wasn’t even aware of until I was shoulder-to-shoulder on a track with someone with less air in their voice. I felt a little more exposed in that moment. But she was like, “That’s you. You just be you.” — Speaking of musical icons, can you tell me about performing at Kim and Kanye’s wedding party? It was a surprise for Kim. I hadn’t met her. I sang ‘Young And Beautiful,’ ‘Summertime Sadness,’ ‘Blue Jeans.’ Kanye requested ‘Young And Beautiful.’ The girls—the Kardashians—were so nice. There was only one front row, just them, right there. They were living for it. They started playing Kanye and Jay-Z records for the rest of the thing and it rained and everyone was just up dancing in the rain. I stayed for like 40 minutes and then I left. — People have made a big deal about that necklace you are selling that seems to have a coke spoon. Is it a coke spoon? Yeah. It’s funny. I have a flask and a lighter as well. I don’t do coke. — You’ve said in the past that you weren’t drinking either, and yet it turns up in your music. Do you drink now? No comment. — You sing about drugs and alcohol a lot. Not on this record. I well used to do a lot of drugs, but I actively don’t now. — What kind of drugs did you do? No comment. [laughs] But I think the coke spoon is kinda funny. I’m just like, Whatever. I don’t think it’s going to make anyone do coke. — Are you conscious of when you walk right up to a taboo in your work? Not really. That’s the one thing I don’t have my finger on. I am there, but there are times I don’t really know it. There’s certain stuff that I think is kinda dope that I know other people might be like, Okayyyyy. — Like singing about death? That’s real life though. Super real life. — You got a lot of shit for saying “I wish I was dead” to a journalist a few years ago. Fuck that guy, though. I didn’t think he would print it and make it the headline. I was having a really tough time. I had been on the road for a year. I was really struggling. I was just stupid, I was like, “I fucking want to die.” Maybe I meant it. I don’t really know. — Which of your albums is the most autobiographical? All of them. The last record- I listen to a song like ‘Terrence Loves You,’ and I just really feel for myself at the time. The person I’m singing about—[sings] You are what you are/I don’t matter to anyone—did I really just say I don’t matter to anyone? That’s fucking crazy. — Did you feel that way? I guess so. I sang it. — What makes you feel proud? My records. I love my records. I love them. I’m proud of the way I’ve put parts of my story into songs in ways that only I understand. In terms of my gauge of what’s good, it’s really just what I think. I have an internal framework that is the only thing I measure it by. My own opinion is really important to me. It starts and stops there.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: A Conversation With Lana Del Rey

On the eve of her fourth album, the pagan pop star sounds more content than ever. How did she get there?

Famous artists are notoriously late, but when I arrive about 20 minutes early for an interview at Lana Del Rey’s Santa Monica studio, she is ready for me, offering a handshake and a smile. It is the week before her new album, Lust for Life, will be released, but she seems unhurried and relaxed; when I ask if she’s been busy in the leadup to such a big day, she says “no” with a laugh, as if she knows she probably should be. She is not dressed like the glammed-up mystic you see in music videos and photographs: her hair, long and brown, is tied functionally behind her neck, and she is in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, with cream canvas sneakers and white ankle socks on her feet. Right away, she invites me through a side door into the inner sanctum where her brooding songs are created.

For Lana acolytes, this is a mythic place. She has recorded here since 2012’s Born to Die, her major label debut. It is a beautiful room filled with sun coming in from a skylight and two windows, the opposite of the average dank music studio. It looks a bit like how you’d expect Lana Del Rey’s workplace to look: vaguely and warmly retro, with dark wood cabinets and a mid-century-looking painting with interlacing geometric shapes hanging on the back wall. In the center of the room is a scratched-up leather club chair with a Tammy Wynette album cover facing it. (“I always have Tammy there,” she says of the country singer best known for her ode to everlasting devotion, “Stand by Your Man.”) This chair, and not the actual booth in the front of the room, is where Lana sits to record her vocals. “I get red light fever in the booth,” she says. She likes that the studio is by the beach, where she’ll sometimes go to listen to mixes of songs on her iPhone.

The studio is owned and operated by Rick Nowels, her longtime producer. He has come down today to listen to the album with us, a pair of sunglasses firmly on his face. Nowels has more than 20 years on Lana, who is 32, and he inhabits something of an uncle role, making the songwriter a bit bashful when he sweetly refers to a ballad called “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing” as a “masterpiece” for its lyrical message about the importance of finding ways to have fun, even in the Trump era. Gearing up to record what would become Born to Die, Lana had met with a number of producers who all tried to tell her what she should or should not sound like, with some encouraging her to ditch the breathy vocal style that would become her signature. When she finally met Nowels, he didn’t want to change a thing. “I went through a hundred and eleven producers just to find someone who says ‘yes’ all the time,” she says. “Everyone is so obsessed with saying ‘no’—they break you down to build you up.”

Lana is a studio junkie—Lust for Life is her fourth album in about five years. She says a day that she works is better than a day that she doesn’t. Nowels tells me that even though the new album isn’t out yet, she’s already making new music. “If I get a great melody in my head, I know it’s a gift,” she says. As we sit down to listen to Lust for Life, she is clearly at home: Like a good host, she offers me her comfy leather singing chair and instead curls up on a blue velvet couch nearby. She has a familial rapport with not just Nowels, but engineers Dean Reid and Kieron Menzies, who she credits again and again for making her work better, and the four of them ruminate on mastering, making jokes about Lana’s perfectionism when it comes to the final cuts of her songs.

The album, like all of her work, is fastidiously and emphatically Lana in its sound and atmosphere: a haze of lazy pacing and flowery melodies, conjuring a foreboding backdrop for lyrics about summer and antique celebrity icons and dangerous, dissatisfying relationships. Front and center in the mix is her voice, which has a crooner’s tone and an especially wide range, from deep and low to high and sharp. Most pop stars rely on reinvention to retain relevance, but her output is remarkably consistent. She says her main criteria is whether or not a song sounds like it will transport listeners to somewhere else in their minds. On each album, the skeleton remains more or less the same while she infuses her work with stylistic elements from different genres, from rap to rock to jazz. Lust for Life draws from folk and hip-hop, two genres that she says she loves because they both privilege real storytelling.

The new record is a departure in key ways, though. In the past, Lana has become famous for themes that are, at times, hopeless: toxic romance, violence, drug use, despair, aging, death. This isn’t to say every song she has ever recorded is a downer, or that she hasn’t displayed a knowing sense of humor about her reputation. But her relentless obsession with the dark arts is a reason why her fans love her with an almost religious fervor; she’s had issues with people breaking into her house. “They want to talk,” she says chillingly. Her menacing themes have also led to resistance at certain moments from larger audiences who, perhaps trained to think of pop music as a tool of empowerment and empathy, just can’t face her nihilism.

While Lust for Life certainly has its share of grim moments, it is not as much of an avalanche of gloom, and perhaps offers signposts to a happier future. At times, Lana even approaches uncomplicated joy, like on first single “Love.” The album also contains some of her first songs that deal with a universe larger than the tangled intensity of one-on-one relationships—there are tracks intended to be balms and battle cries for trying times, which, like many Americans, she found herself fretting over constantly during the 2016 election campaign. And for the first time on any Lana album, she’s also opening the door to a number of guest vocalists: A$AP Rocky, Playboi Carti, the Weeknd, Stevie Nicks, and Sean Ono Lennon on a Beatles-referencing song called “Tomorrow Never Came.” “I FaceTimed with Yoko, and she said it was her most favorite thing Sean’s ever done,” Lana says.

After listening to the album, Lana and I peel off to a small office on the other side of the studio for our interview. Before we begin, she pulls out her iPhone to record the conversation along with me, a defensive move she’s taken up after years of feeling manipulated and harangued by the media. When answering questions, she is at turns thoughtful and strident, seriously considering topics like her attempts at a brighter life and how Trump has affected her love of Americana, and also entirely unafraid to bat away questions she finds boring or irrelevant. At one point, she laughs so hard at a silly sidebar in our conversation that she has a coughing fit and has to take a break. She says she binge watches “The Bachelor,” and that while all of her friends now call her Lana—not Elizabeth Grant, her birth name—her parents are the two people who do not. She is wry about the new song “Groupie Love,” in which she writes herself not as the star but in the role of a worshipful devotee: “Old habits die hard—I still love a rock star.” When I ask her if she is bothered by TMZ dating rumors, which have recently speculated about her relationship with rapper G-Eazy, she gives an unexpectedly goading answer: “They’re usually true. Maybe where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

Which is to say: She’s kinda regular, not the hardened artist we’ve heard in her songs, but someone, it would seem, who likes to hang out and chat about life and music. Talking about good times brings up memories of rough ones, and when the conversation veers towards rocky terrain, she reveals an artist—and a person—at a pivotal moment.

Pitchfork: A few years ago you were singing lyrics like “I have nothing much to live for,” and now you’re smiling on the cover of Lust for Life. How’d you get to a happier place?

Lana Del Rey: I made personal commitments.

Commitments to what?

Well, they’re personal. [laughs] I had some people in my life that made me a worse person. I was not sure if I could step out of that box of familiarity, which was having a lot of people around me who had a lot of problems and feeling like that was home base. Because it’s all I know. I spent my whole life reasoning with crazy people. I felt like everyone deserved a chance, but they don’t. Sometimes you just have to step away without saying anything.

Your past albums often presented a claustrophobic universe made up of just you and one other person, but all of a sudden it’s like you’ve got your eyes wide open and you’re looking at the world around you.

Developmentally, I was in the same place for a very long time, and then it just took me longer than most people to be able to be more out there. Being more naturally shy, it’s taken stretching on my part to just continue to integrate into the local community, global community, to grow as a person. Also, getting really famous doesn’t help you grow with the community. It’s important to have your own life. It’s hard with how accessible things are. Hacking? Email is just a no for me. I do a lot to make sure I don’t feel trapped.

Your fans are famously obsessive. Do they ever cross the line?

They fucking have. Someone stole both my cars. All the scary shit. I’ve had people in my house for sure, and I didn’t know they were there while I was there. I fucking called the police. I locked the door. Obviously, that’s the one in one-hundred-thousand people who’s crazy. But I [had a hard time sleeping] for a minute.

Fame can be isolating, but you are making a real effort to not let it be.

It’s going to be isolating. Period. Unless you stretch past it. But it takes so much footwork. Getting over the uncomfortability of being the one person in the room who everyone recognizes. The last few years, I’m out all the time: clubs, bars, shows. For years I was more quietly in the mix, always through the back door, do not tell anyone I’m coming. And now I’ve relaxed into it where I’ll just show up. I don’t need a special ticket. I’ll just go sit wherever. It feels a little more like I’m myself again.

If you’re happier these days, what do you think when you hear an old lyric from an old record, like, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss,” from “Ultraviolence”?

I don’t like it. I don’t. I don’t sing it. I sing “Ultraviolence” but I don’t sing that line anymore. Having someone be aggressive in a relationship was the only relationship I knew. I’m not going to say that that [lyric] was 100 percent true, but I do feel comfortable saying what I was used to was a difficult, tumultuous relationship, and it wasn’t because of me. It didn’t come from my end.

Now you want to present a different face to the world on Lust for Life?

No. I don’t care. I would just say I am different. And even being a little bit different makes me not want to sing that line. To me, it just was what it was. I deal with what’s in my lyric—you’re not dealing with it. I was annoyed when people would ask me about that lyric. Like, who are you?

Do you think you romanticize danger in your music?

No. I don’t like it. It’s just the only thing [I’ve known]. So I’m trying to do a new thing. I never wrote better when I had a lot of turmoil going on. Born to Die was already done before any of the shit hit the fan. When things are good, the music is better. I’m trying to change from the way I thought things were gonna be to what I feel like they could be, which is maybe just brighter.  

But, even with some new perspectives, Lust for Life is still very melancholy at moments. If you make sad music, which you’ve done for so long, does it necessarily mean you’re sad?

Yeah. I think for most people, regardless of what they say, it’s probably a direct reflection of their inner world. With my first record, I didn’t feel upset. I felt very excited, and then I felt a little more confused.

After the release of Born to Die, you faced a lot of criticism, partly around the issue of whether you were or were not authentic. Do you think of yourself as authentic?

Of course. I’m always being myself. They don’t know what authentic is. If you think of all the music that came out until 2013, it was super straight and shiny. If that’s authentic to you, this is going to look like the opposite. I think that shit is stylized. Just because I do my hair big does not mean I’m a product. If anything, I’m doing my own hair, stuffing my own fucking stuffing in there if I have a beehive. Music was in a super weird place when I became known, and I didn’t really like any of it.

Did you ever feel like the criticism had a misogynistic bent?

No. Women hated me. I know why. It’s because there were things I was saying that either they just couldn’t connect to or were maybe worried that, if they were in the same situation, it would put them in a vulnerable place.

You weren’t singing empowering things.

No, I wasn’t. That wasn’t my angle. I didn’t really have an angle—that’s the thing.

Have you noticed that all songs on the radio are bummers now? That Lil Uzi Vert lyric—“All my friends are dead”—sounds almost like a Lana lyric.

There’s been a major sonic shift culturally. I think I had a lot to do with that. I do. I hear a lot of music that sounds like those early records. It would be weird to say that it didn’t. I remember seven years ago I was trying to get a record deal, and people were like, “Are you kidding? These tunes? There’s zero market for this.” There was just such a long time where people had to fit into that pop box.

With all the flak you’ve received over the years, particularly after Born to Die, some people would have thrown in the towel. But you doubled down and made an even more fucked up, almost hyper-Lana record with Ultraviolence.

I so double downed. [The early criticism] made me question myself—I didn’t know if it was always going to be that way. You can’t put out records if 90 percent of the reviews in places like the Times are going to be negative. That would be crazy. It would have made sense to step all the way back, but I was like, Let me put out three more records and see if I can just stand in the eye of the storm. Not shift too much. Let me just take some of the [production] off so you can hear things a little bit better; I thought people were maybe getting distracted. I did the same thing with Honeymoon. Everyone around here heard it and was like, “It’s a cool record, but you know it’s not going to be on the radio, right?” And I was like, “Yeah. I told [record executive] Jimmy [Iovine] when I signed, ‘If you want to sign me, this is all it’s ever going to be.’” I was just so committed to making music because I believe in what I do. All I had to do was not quit.

So that Ultraviolence woman who is so swept up in turmoil—is she still there on Lust for Life?

We’ll see. That’s been my experience up until now, but, like, I’m trying.

Some of the sparer, really heartfelt songs on Lust for Life reminded me of the Ultraviolence song “Black Beauty.”

That’s a sad song. In that song—[sings] I keep my lips red like cherries in the spring/Darling, you can’t let everything seem so dark blue—that’s a girl who is still seeing the blue sky and a putting on a pop of color just for herself. But this [other] person—it was all black for them. And my world became inky with those overtones. [At this, Lana begins to cry, and we pause for a moment.]

What made you cry just now?

In that moment, when I said “pop of color,” I was connected to that feeling of only being able to see a portion of the world in color. And when you feel that way, you can feel trapped.

Are you seeing the world in color now?

[sighs] I don’t really know how to describe my perspective at the moment.

But you’re trying, and that’s what Lust for Life is about?

It’s not. I don’t know what it’s about. I don’t know what it is.

Is the album a way of saying that you at least want to be happy?

No. It’s just that something is happening.

What makes you happy?

I’m really simple. I love nature. I like hikes. Being by the water—I don’t always get in. I love the elements. Playing an outdoor festival. Love that feeling.

What bums you out?

Feeling like going backwards.

Is there a storyline to the album?

Yeah.

What’s the story?

You have to figure it out.

Just a few years ago you were saying you didn’t care about feminism, and now you are writing protest songs and meditations on war and peace.

Because things have shifted culturally. It’s more appropriate now than under the Obama administration, where at least everyone I knew felt safe. It was a good time. We were on the up-and-up.

Women started to feel less safe under this administration instantly. What if they take away Planned Parenthood? What if we can’t get birth control? Now, when people ask me those questions, I feel a little differently. The reason why I asked Stevie Nicks to be on the record is because she changes when her environment changes, and I’m like that as well.

In “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing,” I wrote, “Boys, don’t make too much noise/Don’t try to be funny/Other people may not be understanding.” Like, Can you tone down your over-boisterous rhetoric that isn’t working? “God Bless America - And All the Beautiful Women in It” is a little shoutout to the women and anyone else who doesn’t always feel safe walking down the street late at night. That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote, “Even when I’m alone I’m not lonely/I feel your arms around me.” It’s not always how I feel when I’m walking down the street, but sometimes in my music I try to write about a place that I’m going to get to.

Do you feel unsafe?

I feel less safe than I did when Obama was president. When you have a leader at the top of the pyramid who is casually being loud and funny about things like that, it’s brought up character defects in people who already have the propensity to be violent towards women. I saw it right away in L.A. Walking down the street, people would just say things to you that I had never heard.

When people asked me the feminist question before, I was like, “I’m not really experiencing personal discrimination as a woman. I feel like I’m doing well. I headline shows just like the Weeknd does. I got tons of women in my life, love women, support women.” I just felt like, Why don’t we talk about the music first? I can tell you that what I have done for women is tell my own story, and that’s all anyone can do.

Is it harder to be romantic about America when Trump is the nation’s biggest celebrity?

It’s certainly uncomfortable. I definitely changed my visuals on my tour videos. I’m not going to have the American flag waving while I’m singing “Born to Die.” It’s not going to happen. I’d rather have static. It’s a transitional period, and I’m super aware of that. I think it would be inappropriate to be in France with an American flag. It would feel weird to me now—it didn’t feel weird in 2013.

All the guys in the studio—we didn’t know we were going to start walking in every day and talking about what was going on. We hadn’t ever done that before, but everyday during the election, you’d wake up and some new horrible thing was happening. Korea, with missiles suddenly being pointed at the western coast. With “When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing,” I was posing a real question to myself: Could this be the end of an era? The fall of Rome?

Nostalgia can be really corny when it’s not done well, and you’re all about nostalgia. How do you try to get it right?

I know I walk the line sometimes. [laughs] I saw comments that people said about my little “Coachella - Woodstock in my Mind” song. I write that title and I’m like, OK, I know I went there. But I think it’s amazing. It’s on the nose. It’s so on the nose. But sometimes things just are what they are. I’m at Coachella for three days, and North Korea is pointing a missile at us, and I’m watching Father John Misty with my best friend, who’s his wife—that’s all I’m literally saying. It’s just like, Yeah, I’m a hipster. I know it. Got it.

You mentioned working with Stevie Nicks on this album, what was it like recording with her?

She came in straight off a plane from her last show of like 60 cities, which I was actually supposed to open for. She had asked me, and I was like, “Oh my god.” But I couldn’t because I don’t want to do a 60-show tour.

She flew through the door. Blond highlights, rose gold glasses, gold-tipped nails, rose gold lipstick, gold chains, gold rings, black on black on black. Very stylish. And meanwhile, I looked like a housewife of 15—flannel on flannel, because it was a cold night. And I was like, Why did I not dress up for Stevie Nicks?

At the end of the track, she sings, then I sing, then she sings. I was kinda embarrassed. I was like, “I sound so little compared to you.” And she was like, “That’s good, you’re my little echo.” And I was like, Stevie called me her little echo. It’s a stupid little thing, but she was very nurturing in that way, and not belittling of the fact that I had a more breathy voice. Which I wasn’t even aware of until I was shoulder-to-shoulder on a track with someone with less air in their voice. I felt a little more exposed in that moment. But she was like, “That’s you. You just be you.”

Speaking of musical icons, can you tell me about performing at Kim and Kanye’s wedding party?

It was a surprise for Kim. I hadn’t met her. I sang “Young and Beautiful,” “Summertime Sadness,” “Blue Jeans.” Kanye requested “Young and Beautiful.” The girls—the Kardashians—were so nice. There was only one front row, just them, right there. They were living for it. They started playing Kanye and Jay-Z records for the rest of the thing and it rained and everyone was just up dancing in the rain. I stayed for like 40 minutes and then I left.

People have made a big deal about that necklace you are selling that seems to have a coke spoon. Is it a coke spoon?

Yeah. It’s funny. I have a flask and a lighter as well. I don’t do coke.

You’ve said in the past that you weren’t drinking either, and yet it turns up in your music. Do you drink now?

No comment.  

You sing about drugs and alcohol a lot.

Not on this record. I well used to do a lot of drugs, but I actively don’t now.

What kind of drugs did you do?

No comment. [laughs] But I think the coke spoon is kinda funny. I’m just like, Whatever. I don’t think it’s going to make anyone do coke.

Are you conscious of when you walk right up to a taboo in your work?

Not really. That’s the one thing I don’t have my finger on. I am there, but there are times I don’t really know it. There’s certain stuff that I think is kinda dope that I know other people might be like, Okayyyyy.

Like singing about death?

That’s real life though. Super real life.

You got a lot of shit for saying “I wish I was dead” to a journalist a few years ago.

Fuck that guy, though. I didn’t think he would print it and make it the headline. I was having a really tough time. I had been on the road for a year. I was really struggling. I was just stupid, I was like, “I fucking want to die.” Maybe I meant it. I don’t really know.

Which of your albums is the most autobiographical?

All of them. The last record—I listen to a song like “Terrence Loves You,” and I just really feel for myself at the time. The person I’m singing about—[sings] You are what you are/I don’t matter to anyone—did I really just say I don’t matter to anyone? That’s fucking crazy.

Did you feel that way?

I guess so. I sang it.

What makes you feel proud?

My records. I love my records. I love them. I’m proud of the way I’ve put parts of my story into songs in ways that only I understand. In terms of my gauge of what’s good, it’s really just what I think. I have an internal framework that is the only thing I measure it by. My own opinion is really important to me. It starts and stops there.

http://pitchfork.com/features/interview/life-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness-a-conversation-with-lana-del-rey/

Weekend reading: I shopped til I dropped

What caught my eye this week.

I would have had this post to you much earlier on Friday, but for consumerism. You see I got totally distracted trying to get the best out of my new Sage Barista Express:

Real life: Messy.

Having done a barista training course a few years ago, I improbably fancied myself as pretty hot stuff with a coffee grinder.

I’ve enjoyed flat whites knocked out by a friend on this well-reviewed model many times, too.

But it turns out I didn’t know my friend as well as I thought I did!

I’ve discovered he’s great at making coffee – but perhaps more shockingly that he’s modest about it. (What other talents does he boast, I now wonder? Or rather does he not boast?)

Seriously, I know it takes a while to get the hang of DIY espressos on new kit, so I’m not too perturbed. It’s only eaten a couple of hours so far, and that includes washing the bits and bobs, figuring out how it fitted together, and collecting beans I spilled on the floor.

No, the other reason why I fell behind was because as soon this new toy finally arrived from Amazon, I went out for a three-hour hike around West London.

Did you sign for it, sir?

You see I’ve been in all week waiting for deliveries – and it drives me crazy.

I’m on edge all-day, until the deliveries do (or don’t) arrive.

A laid-back friend who doesn’t understand my hair-trigger control freak personality asked me what the big deal was.

“Imagine waiting all day to be slapped in the face,” I said. “You don’t know when it’s coming, but you will be slapped in the face. That’s me waiting for the door buzzer.”

It’s not even that I can’t do the social interaction bit. It’s worse: I usually talk the delivery person’s ear off. (A common failing among those of us who work from home.)

Rather it’s the waiting and uncertainty that kills me – and the unexpected and unscheduled state change.

Years before the Millennials I kept my mobile on silent always, for the same reason.

A totally unexpected phone call to my mobile feels like being tapped on the shoulder by a suddenly apparating supernatural nosy neighbour. I hate it.

Now at this point you’re either nodding along (a very few of you) or you’re aghast with incomprehension. Which is fine.

(I’ve said before when explaining why I invest actively and nearly everyone reading shouldn’t that I’m wired differently. I didn’t say it was easy!)

Economy class

Anyway, the reason I’m sharing these asides – and the rare from real-life picture above – is to give a quick update on my embrace of consumerism.

The story so far: You’ll remember I bought a flat, I still haven’t written up why, and I set about spending some of my 20-odd years of winnings (well, savings and winnings) to make it fancy.

This got off to a good start. I’ve always loved nice furnishings and so on – from afar. But by the middle of the hot summer I was bored of spending money.

I’d lost enthusiasm, I’d lost my girlfriend (she said she didn’t like my sudden interiors obsession, but perhaps she just didn’t like the sofa I finally selected?), and I’d lost (/spent) more money traded for matter than I’d spent on things in the previous two decades combined.

I didn’t even go crazy! It’s just that living like a graduate student even as your earnings multiply is pretty low-rent.

For most of that long era I used to opine to my more normally spendy friends that buying stuff only produced problems. Which in my experience was almost always true.

Stuff didn’t work, or you had to upgrade something else, or it broke, or you felt guilty, or you had to wait in for days to get it delivered, or you were worried it’d get nicked when finally you did get hold of it – or any one of a dozen other woes that people who buy stuff all the time think is just the way the world is.

Only two things hit the spot for me without fail when I splashed the cash. Black cabs – which I almost never took, and felt so luxurious in those pre-Uber days – and the first beer with two poppadoms and all the sauces and other gubbins.

Obviously I did a gazillion other things over the decades. I didn’t just taxi around London from curry house to curry house! And often it was money well spent.

But never reliably so.

Well, this whole flat buying and furnishing thing has proven my younger self right.

Through the keyhole

Don’t get me wrong. It’s coming along. It looks beautiful, to me if not my ex. I feel lucky to live among all these things I chose in my still-new flat, even knowing luck is only part of it.

But, oh! I guess I secretly thought the universe would notice The Investor Is Finally Throwing Money At The Problem and the rules would change. But they haven’t.

Stuff comes broken. Trades people don’t show up. Some of them are great, but some are – well – yet to find their true calling. Deliveries don’t arrive. I made a final push to finish my flat before Christmas, and caned the Black Friday offers. But only three of the seven resultant purchases that were scheduled for delivery have actually made it here so far. A new record of rubbishness.

Coffee machines are harder to use than you expected. Analine leather sofas stain if you sneeze near them. Complete automatic watering systems require add-ons to water completely. Your boiler is already up for a service – and that’ll be £100+ with VAT please.

I feel sometimes like Robinson Crusoe, finally back on the mainland after a long sabbatical away catching fresh fish with his hands and brushing his teeth with a fragrant root. I can confirm 2018 has a lot of gorgeous stuff on offer – but as we all know it comes at a price and doesn’t really solve anything.

Still happy I did it, but pleased I’m mostly buying things that will last.

Once I’m done the hedonic treadmill is going back into storage!

Note: Yes, it’s an expensive coffee machine (though one of the cheaper good ones). I’ve always liked a few quality things in life, I’ve just tended to get them cheaply. I saved about half my income for 20 years, so while the Frugal Police are welcome to give me a caution, keep in mind that I wrote the (racier) pages of the book you’re throwing at me. And beware Buffett’s Folly…

From Monevator

From the archive-ator: Death, infirmity, and investing – Monevator

News

Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view you can click to read the piece without being a paid subscriber. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing if you read them a lot!1

Here’s how much fund managers are paid [to lose to the market] – Institutional Investor

Houses prices down on fundamentals not Brexit, research suggests – ThisIsMoney

Property slump could cut number of affordable homes built by 25% – Guardian

UK migration: Fewer EU arrivals, but overall figure stays the same – BBC

Do you live in one of the happiest places in the UK? – ThisIsMoney

The inheritance tax mess, where richest pay a lower percentage rate – Simon Lambert

Products and services

UK rail fares to rise 3.1% in January – Guardian

Shawbrook tops table with a 1.65% one-year cash ISA rate – ThisIsMoney

Ratesetter will pay you £100 [and me a bonus] if you invest £1,000 for a year – Ratesetter

New breed of elite dating apps for wealthy singletons [Search result] – FT

Comment and opinion

How to own all tomorrow’s winning stocks – The Evidence-based Investor

John Bogle needn’t worry about index fund dominance – Pragmatic Capitalism

The proliferation of indices isn’t all it appears – Abnormal Returns

In praise of old jobs – Young (Mrs) FIGuy

Spend more: The most ignored piece of financial advice [Search result] – FT

How to retire forever on a big stash [US taxes/insurance] – Mr Money Mustache

FIRE Day! – Retirement Investing Today

You would not have invested with Warren Buffett – Behavioural Value Investor

Anti-FIRE: The YOLO train wreck edition – Simple Living in Somerset

Juggling six-figure margin debt [Don’t try this at home!] – Fire V London

The top 20 personal finance questions answered – Guardian

Morningstar gets into the finance-meets-food-pyramid game – Morningstar

Five things parenting and (active) investing share – The Value Perspective

What can we do about over-confidence? – Behavioural Investor

An attempt at estimating the true ‘global market portfolio’, including all the unlisted assets in the world [Research] – Alpha Architect

Brexit

Government finally admits UK will be worse off under all Brexits – New York Times

Leave voters statistically much likelier to believe conspiracy theories – Guardian

A Daily Mail EU scare story debunked [Again, people believe this crap] – Tom Pride

The French village that fears for its British community – BBC

Romania has lost 16% of its population to rest of EU in a decade – MSW via Twitter

Brexit TV Debate: A former Remainer will argue for her Brexit deal, a closet Leaver for a better deal or Remain. What a time to be alive! – BBC

I’d like to Exit from these homegrown cretins. Where do I vote? – BBC

Kindle book bargains

Why You? 101 Interview Questions You’ll Never Fear Again by James Reed – £1.99 on Kindle

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman – £1.99 on Kindle

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Maths Genius and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History by David Enrich – £1.99 on Kindle

Tiny Budget Cooking: Saving Money Never Tasted So Good by Limahl Asmall – £1.09 on Kindle

Off our beat

Internet: The end of the beginning [Video/Presentation] – Benedict Evans

Watch how just a few self-driving cars prevent traffic jams [Graphics] – Science

Nike and Boeing are paying sci-fi writers to predict their futures – Medium

Woman who names daughter ‘Abcde’ is upset when someone finds it funny – ABC News

A man actually ticked the US Visa form ‘Are You A Terrorist?’ box – via Twitter

Maps showing how we’re divided by more than Brexit [Funny, old-ish] – Ink Tank

And finally…

“Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.” – James Burke, Connections

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Weekend reading: I shopped til I dropped published first on https://justinbetreviews.weebly.com/

Today, I thought the ghost of my husband’s 1970 Dodge Charger was going to destroy my vehicle.

My car is fairly new. The model, make, and year are not important enough to be recorded; however, the colour is significant. Velvet red, the salesperson told me. I have always loved red, so I ordered it. Apparently, car manufacturers are colour blind, for when it arrived, I found I had spent a lot of money on disappointing maroon.

My first car, a gift from my German grandmother, was also maroon. Even back then, I disliked the hue. The vehicle was nameless because I don’t remember models, makes, and years. However, it was useful to me since it had the necessary four wheels. I forgave it for being old and big, and tolerated its costly gas tank and mechanical hiccups. It took me south to college in the States and then north across the continent to my first teaching job, far from any civilization I knew, to a small town in Newfoundland.

The town’s most eligible bachelor, appropriately nick-named the Fonz, had a 1970 Dodge Charger. Black, with gold accents, painstakingly repaired and painted, with special tires, apparently, and sidekick thrust mufflers, whatever those are. Everything else he did to it was car speak that I did not understand and did not care to learn. What I do remember is a ridiculously loud car.

Even the dazzling black and gold colour failed to impress me, especially when I heard he hosed it down not once, but twice a day. Every available female in town unabashedly vied for a ride in his chariot, but not me.

I was uninterested and unimpressed, by both the car and its driver.

Ironically, the Fonz wanted to date me, even after finding out I was appalled by the deafening sound of his sidekick thrust mufflers, did not appreciate the beauty of his car’s engine, and couldn’t care less about the coveted front passenger seat. I thought it was this very indifference that drew the owner of the black Charger to me, the new girl in town. He says he liked my lips and my calves.

I had no intentions of being courted by a twenty-six year old stud

who did not seem to have any intention of committing to any one girl,

and instead relished the attention and adoration of many.

He was not easily deterred.

He started inspecting my inherited car and offered free mechanical help, desperately needed since the car’s status often moved from ‘barely working’ to ‘definitely broken’. Since I had little money and substantial student loan debt, I accepted the assistance. I thought I could deflect the man’s pointed interest in more than my car.

He was smart, though, and started asking about my feelings and revealing his sensitive side. I saw that he genuinely cared about people, and most of all, he liked my music. Eventually, I became the only female in town who graced the passenger seat in the loud monstrosity he called a car.

I knew, though, that his attention was divided between his new flame (me) and his first love (his hot-rod). He thought a fun date would be to go to his driveway to wash his beloved charger, together. I emphatically refused! I did not care to give my competition any more attention than absolutely necessary.

Then came that fateful day in our relationship - the day when allegiances would be tested and truth revealed.

After all these years, telling this part of the story accurately is difficult, as our versions of The Event have always differed. Even during editing of this article, intense discussions occurred, complete with accident reconstruction using pens and pieces of paper to represent cars and roads.

He says I backed into the driver’s side of his car, destroying it.

I say I only damaged it, just on one side:  he could still drive it, after all.  Besides, with his great sensitivity, he should have noticed I was exhausted.  He should have known I would expect him to wait for me to back out first, like the gentleman he usually was.

He says he was waiting for the traffic to clear.

I say he should have realized I would be too tired to check my rear-view mirror.

In any case, when I backed up, my car ended up inside the charger.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, so I put my head on the steering wheel. I waited, somehow knowing that whatever happened next would determine my future with this man.

He appeared at my car window and told me, not kindly, to get my German tank out of the side of his car. That was all he said. He could have said more, but he did not.

Perhaps Cliff was a keeper.

After I extricated my more-durable vehicle from his charger, he drove away. I use the word drove because there is no word in the English language that can aptly describe the screech of spinning wheels hurtling from side to side and the showers of gravel splattering from the tires. The already loud engine reached a new decibel level and the speed was certainly above the posted limit.

Cliff told me later that he went to an empty parking lot and spun out his anger doing wheelies.

I thought, “Whatever. It’s just a car.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

While he was proof-reading this article, I asked Cliff if he thought this article would make people laugh. He replied that this story was not funny: it wasn’t funny then and it isn’t funny now.  I told him The Event was the only way I could have known that I was more important to him than his black and gold beast. He countered that he married me in retaliation. I thought he proposed because he liked my lips and calves. Whatever the reason, I was twenty-seven and accepted the proposal.

I’m not sure how we made our peace, but the charger was sold for a great loss and we drove my German monster until Cliff could no longer fix the plumes of exhaust that shrouded everyone when we stopped at a red light in an intersection. When pedestrians started holding coats over their heads to avoid breathing in the toxic fumes, we knew that this car, too, needed to go.

Now, after a lifetime of second-hand and new vehicles, none have managed to hold my husband’s heart like his dear Charger.

I think I am forgiven, but I do not feel vindicated. My husband does not understand.

The Charger ghost lives on.

I have tried to pay my debt to Cliff. I have accompanied him to view boring antique car lots and travelled hither and yon to view collectors’ cars housed in barns, sheds, and fields.

I even allowed him to restore a car motor: he keeps telling me the model, make and year, but I can never remember. I know it is not a Charger.

Somewhat patiently, I have endured Cliff’s detours so that he could see favourite old cars, sitting forlornly next to wire fences, waiting for someone to restore them to their former glory. Although I am sure he considers buying them all, I know that only one model, make, and year will seriously entice him to spend his money. I secretly breathe a sigh of relief when no 1970 Dodge Charger is found.

Perhaps I will not be free from the burden of the past until our driveway is graced with the presence of a black and gold Charger with sidekick thrust mufflers. I imagine that it would always be on display in the driveway, and that it would get hosed down, not once, or twice - but several times a day.

Today, I forgot that I had parked my maroon car behind his on the driveway. I feared revenge.

What if my husband was exhausted? What if he was so accustomed to my considerate behaviour of never parking behind him that he would not check his rear-view mirror? What if he thought my car would be in its usual spot, and out of habit, just opened the garage door and backed up into mine?

Would he tell me that it is just a car? Would he inform me that I finally got what I deserved?

It would be too late to remind him. The damage would be done.

I prepared myself, only to find my car perfectly intact.

He said it was nothing to do with sensitivity and everything to do with looking where you are going.

The ghastly ghost of the Charger lives on.

POSTSCRIPT

Cliff sent me this picture to show the way his rear-view lights actually looked.

I don't get it.  It isn't even black.

CREDITS

Cliff is actually the co-author of this article. Every time he read it for editing, he would make random comments that were so honest or funny that I had to include them.

Thank you, kids (Stephen and Julia) for helping with the revisions, for it is truly our family story. Sorry you were not around Michael:  you are still welcome to contribute.

Builder of Charger Model:  Darren Scarlett

Photos of Marilyn and Cliff :  JAR Photography

Photos of Charger that isn't black & Red Chevy Impala:  Source Unknown

Cliff as the Fonz:  Charisma Collegiate Yearbook, Springdale, Newfoundland

All Other Photos:  Clifford Newbury

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The rape

He was my brother. I was his little sister. My first memories of him were when i was 4 years old. He put me on the handle bars of his bannana bike and took me for a ride. He had barely been out of training wheels, but he was good on a bike. Mick was good at everything. I squealed the whole time. I had lots of rides on that bike after that, but was the first time. I was wearing a red dress. I remember that because it matched the color of the bike. I loved the wind blowing in my hair. Mick rode me down to gate ro the quary and then back to the house. I giggled as Mick helped me off the bike. My next memory of him was the day that he walked me to the bus stop because mama was sick. He was always so sweet to me and I adored him. At the bus stop he let me sit on his lap. My sister, Sara, was a year younger than me. We played continually. Sometimes we played with barbies and sometimes. we played house. If we were outside we played fort. Mick was great at outside play. He could make the best forts and come up with the best ideas. I was always an indian. I never minded being an Indian. Indians got to wear feathers and carry a bow and arrow. If it was summer, i wore my bathing suit and put a small towel in the bottoms to look like a loin cloth. Sara was usually an Indian too, but sometimes Mick made her the fair maiden. During the warmer months, we played outside. Mom would lock us out of the house. I don't remember being upset about that. I loved being outdoors. Sara got upset sometimes, and would hang on the door begging mama to let her in. We lived in the country, surrounded by woods and cow fields. Our house was small. It was a woodframe house that had seen better days. There were two bedrooms, one bathroom, a xining room with a huge oil stove for heating and big kitchen whose cabinets were barely post WW1. The floors throughout were beautiful golden pine. It was the one feature of the house that I appreciated as a kid. There were two bedrooms. One was very long and not at all like a bedroom. The other was a normal room. That room belonged to mama and daddy. The long room was where Mick, myself and Sara slept. As I got older I became intensely embarrassed about sharing a room with Mick, nut when I was younger, I kind of liked it. Mick hated it from the beginning. The beginning was when we moved in. I was probably 5 years old. Mick was 7. I don't know if being out in the country made it worthwhile to him in any way, but for me, I would have lived with 10 more kids in my bedroom in order to have the wonderful country to play in. Even though we were often kicked outside to play we were well taken care by mama. We had snacks provided and good lunches. I am sure that we were allowed in to potty, but we often peed in the woods. I never saw Mick pee, but one of the neighborhood boys, Johnny Chris talked Sara and I into peeing in front of him. He promised to pee for us too. Sara refused to pee. Mama kept us in dresses back then, so it was pretty easy to hike up my dress, pull my panties down and pee. I was't shy, then.or ever. Johnny made me hold up my dress so that he could see. That was a little hard. Then Johnny peed in front of Sara and me. He was only 3 years older than us but we thought he was an awful big boy. He was twice the size of Mick. He held his penis while he peed. Sara and I stared in facination and giggled. He wiggled his penis around and acted like he was going to pee on us. We ran away. We never did that again. Mostly because Johnny went and told his brother Jimmy. Jimmy and his friend followed Sara and me around, taunting us and calling us dirty. "Andrea pulled her panties down". I was ashamed then! Sara and I never talked about it, but I always knew that I had let her down. I think that she finally forgot it, afterall, Jimmy never made fun of her. I steered clear of Jimmy for a long time. Daddy wasn't around when I was younger. He was a big scary person that came into my life in the evenings. He sat in his big chair and drank beer. Mick would sit beside him like as if he were a man himself. I hated Mick for that. Pretending to be what he wasn't. Mama made Sara and me help in the kitchen. I hated kitchen chores then and I hate them now. Sara never minded. She liked heping mama, while I did everything that I could to escape. I felt outside of it all even at a young age. Sometime we sat around and played games. Clue was our favorite game, but we also played monopoly, and aggravation. Mick and Sara and I played cards by ourselves. I was never good enough to beat Mick, but I beat Sara every time. I didnt learn to let her win until I was a bit older. I didn't even feel bad when she cried. Mick started hunting with daddy when he 8 years old. I couldn't go. I never thought about the killing part of it. I threw a fit the first time that Mick went off with daddy. I stuffed my head in my pillow and cried. Sara came and cuddled with me. I was not consolible. Mama ignored me mostly and that hurt even worse i finally recovered and took off outside without Sara. I sat in the woods in my our fort and thought up all kninds of evil punishments. I imagined myself an indian and Mick a captured cowboy. I had him stripped down to his long Johns and tied to a stake. There was some satisfaction in that fantasy. The burning of that stake woth him on caused a sick feeling in my stomach so i let that part go. Mick came home that night proud as a damed peacock. I was so angry at him that i refused to listen to him. Daddy was pretty proud of hin too. Nick had shot at a rabbit. He had missed the rabbit so I didn't understand why daddy was so proud of him. I wasn't proud of him at all. Shooting at a helpless bunny! I told him so too. I said; "Mick Why'd you shoot at a bunny. He didnt do nothin to you." Mick scowled at me. But I think he was thinking about what I said. I was glad to put a damper on that adventure. Mick went every weekend from that day on intol hinting season was done. I cried a few more times, but mostly i spent the hours that he was away roasting hom in various heinous ways. My favorite was boiling tar. My stomach quickly hardened to the many ways of torturing Mick. One night, when he and daddy came home I was bwing particularly sputeful and I let it slip that Mick looked real good in pot of hot pine tar, and that as soon as i found some good feathers I was going to stick them all over him and up his privates. Daddy over heard me and asked me to repeat myself. I wouldnt do it. So he got out a bar of soap and cut a little piece of and stuck it in my mouth. I had to stand in a corner like that, with the soap between my teeth to keep it from touching my tongue. For those of youwho have never had a bar of soap in your mouth, it is hot on your tongue and it makes lots of spit in your mout which makes the soap foam and sting worse. I hated everybody that night. From that point on, daddy made little conments about how vindictive i was. I always figured him right. I wouldn't tell anyone but i did feel bad about my mean fantasies but I couldn't help myself. And then i would feel bad because I couldnt help myself. Sara in contrast to me was super sweet. She never got mad when I said hurtful things. Except the time that really did tie her up. I tied her up.amd i left her. Mick found her an hour later. I didn't think that it would take long for her to get out of my knots. But, i did leave her alone, tied to that big old cedar tree that we used to climb. She didn't speak to me for a whole day. Mick didn't speak to me for a week. No one ever told mama or daddy. I might have been grateful for that if I hadn't been so consumed with my own self and Mick's appaling treatment of me. Christmas was always special. Mama and daddy loved to surprise us. They always made us think that we weren't getting whatever it was that we wanted, and thenwe would get it. Our wishes weren't very grand. We didn't spend time in front of a TV set and when we did, commercials were not what they are today. I was on a high cloud when I got a beauty shop doll whith her own chair and curlers. Mick usually got cowboy stuff and cars. One year he got a train set. Daddy apent a lot of time settibg that trai setup for him. I don't remember Mick playing withot too much. I thought it was really boring after the first few times that I was allowed to run it. Sara always got baby dolls and stuffed animals. And then one christmas, things changed and we got clothes and record albums and perfume. Mick got his own gun. We never noticed the change because somehow we had changed too. Mama and daddy changed too. The christmas that I was in 8th grade daddy had an affair. We all knew about it because of the fights, and then daddy moved out. I didn't miss him, but Mick and Sara did. We didn't have a good christmas again after that. We got plenty of stuff, its just that nobodybwas happy anymore. Daddy would come and get us and take us someplace that usually bored us. He didn't hunt so much and Mick resented that. Mick was in 10th grade and daddy finally started hunting again. He had broken up with Helen and as he said, “his time was his own.” That was the year that Mick killed his first deer. I hated him for that amd i made him know it. There was a river near our home. We would race down to the river in the hot months as soon as we were finished with school. Mama had started working at Roses and daddy was rarely home until late. When were were still in grade school, mama had no idea that we went down to the river. We didn't swim so good back then, so we rarely got wet above our knees except when it was really hot and then we just sat in the shallow areas. One summer we met some kids that were a little older and they could swim. We followed them into the deeper areas. We all learned to swim that summer. The other kids swam in their underpants so that their moms wouldn't know that they had been in the river. We started doing the same, We never swam in our clothes after that. When i was about 10 years old, long after the peeing thing had died down, Johnny and Jimmy found us in the water in our underpants. Instead of making fun of us they joined us in the river. That summer 3 other kids joined us, the MacKenzie girls and Robert. Robert was queer. We didn't really know what that meant but that is what the boys called him so us girls called him that too. Sometimes we called him that to his face and he qould get mad and stoem offn but most of the time we were nice to him. Us girls kind if stayed off by ourselves because the boys were too rough. We giggled over the sight of 9f the boys in their BVDs. Sometimes their Penises stuck out like they had their finger in their underwear pointing with it. None of us girls had boobies but we still kept our arms folded over our chests or kept our bodies hid under water. If the boys made fun of us, i never heard it. Mick got a crush on Shawna MacKenzie. I hated that. He acted like a fool. Carrying on; doing stupid stunts in the water, and running up and down the river's beach. One day, he climbed a tree that was growing at the edge of the water and sort of walked and crawled out over the water on a fat limb. I screamed at him like a fool to get his stupid butt down. When he thought that he was out far enough, he jumped into the water. It made a huge splash. What a showoff he was! Then all of the boys were scrambling up the tree, except for Robert. Shawna MacKenzie jouned them. When she managed to make it up the tree, and jumped off successfully, I decided to give it a try. Getting up the tree in just my underpants was not the easiest thing to do. I got scrapped and rubbed by the bark. But I made it to the limb, and then i was afraid to go out on the limb. Jimmy started it. He started yelling "chicken liver, chicken liver"! Even Mick joined in. I had a choice, go back down the tree the same way i came up or jump into the water. The problem was, i had to walk out onto the limb. It was a fat limb; but it was pretty high off the water. It didn't get deep enough to jump for about 10 feet. I started walking, then I sat down and scooted out. The horrible bark hurt. When i go out far enough, I stood up and grabbed my nose and jumped. It was deep. I came up sputtering and flailing. Mick was there. He grabbed me and drug me by one hand to shallow water. I didnt go up the tree again. Shawna and Camille both managed it every now and then, but mostly we girls just watched. One daym, when we arrived at our spot someone had tied a big fat rope to a higher tree limb on the same tree. It had a knot at one end and you could jump onto it from the bank and swing out over the water. We all got very good at that. We stood, or sat on the knot and swung. Sometimes we dorpped into the water, and sometimes we landed gracefully back on the bank. About this time we girls started wearing swimsuits. Once in a.while we would find ourselves down at the water without a swimsuit and we would strip to our underwear which began to include first training bras and then real bras. The boys still swam in their BVDs. We became aware that the boys had done some growing of their own. They didn't seem shy and often tried to flash something at us. Robert was the odd boy out. He began spending more time with us girls. We became very fond of him even though we thought that he was queer. I had was not use to seeing Mick naked, and he certainly wasn't use to seeing Sara and me naked. We never talked about it the river and our freedom with our bodies. And as we became more aware of our differences we we became shyer about it. Underwear and bras were one thing, nudity was another. So it was surprising when we finally did get curious with each other. It began the winter that daddy left. Mama was working night hours. Mick was watching us. We had been playing house and having our normal games but I guess we got bored. Mick out of the blue suggested a game called strip tease. I knew what a strip tease was and so did Sara. But it brougjt a level if excitement to a very boring afternoon. Mick put a record on. We did understand the idea if a strip tease. He wanted to just watch, but I said that either we all do it or none of us do it. I wasn't getting burned on that one again. Mick went into the bedroom that we shared and Sara and I went into the bathroom. Sara and i stripped out of our clothes. We wiggled out of our jeans and scrunched our jeans and panties under our feet. Our tops pulled of easily, but we had to undo each other's bras. I was very nervous and more than a little exited. The mirror on the bathroom door showed two pre-pubescent girls cuddled close in the tight bathroon. When we were ready, Sara hollered out to Mick to go. Mick came running through the kitchen and dining room, and we ran in from the opposite direction. We ran around the house like monkeys let loose. I didnt really pay much attention to Mick but his naked white skin nearly glowed. His penis stuck straight out and bobbed a all over. Sara and I had a rightious giggle over that. Mick climbed on the table and paraded to the music. It was very titillating. I couldnt wait to join him. Sara sat down and said that she would be our audience. I went into the bedroom and wrapped a scarf around me and then ran out to the dining room. I jumped up on the table with Mick and paraded around just like he did, except i had the scarf to play with and make it like a real strip tease. Tge table was metal framed and a bit rickety. We are lucky we didn't break it, but we were quite small back then. We did strip teases like that until Mick and I really started developing. I don't recall when we actually stopped, but one day we didn't do it anymore. Maybe it was when daddy left. Lots of things changed then. I felt shame about the strip teases, but I still missed it when we stopped and so sometimes Sara and I would play strip tease but it wasnt exciting and we finally got bored with it and didn't do it anymore. I started riding horses. Maryanne Abernathy had a big fat pony. She lived about 3 farms down the road. One day she stopped at the house and hung out all day with her fat pony who only wanted to eat grass. I got a ride that day and then couldn't stop after that. We became best friends in the way that girls do when you each have something that the other would really like to have. She had a.fat pony and I had a cute brother. Well, she said he was cute. To me he was a red headed freaky looking aggravation who bossed me around all the time. Maryanne was suddenly at our house all the time. I didnt have to walk to the river anymore. We rode fat pony with Maryanne in front and me behind. As i got better at riding marryanneet me ride in front. We never walked. Fat pony loved to run, so we ran. Somerines other kids were at the river sometimes they weren't. If it was warm, we swam. If it was cold, we raced up and down the beach. That pony could fly! I was 14 the year I got my first kiss. Rodney Jones kissed me at his birthday party. It might have been the best kiss of my life. It went on for half the party. We were sitting in chairs in a room that had been cleared for dancing. No one was dancing. Someone turned out the lights. I think it was his older sister. His mom was there and everything, but no one seemed to care. As soon as the ligjts wet out Rodney kissed me. It was sweet and exciring and very erotic. It wasn't the first time I had been aroused, the strip tease had been like that and other things had been like it, but it was the first time thay I had had contact with another person that caused arousal. I was one long kiss that didnt end until the party ended. My lips were so swollen and numb, that I had trouble talking. That opened a door. From that point on, I wanted to kiss. I babysat for Janet Williams. She had problems with her husband. He was a cop and whenever they went out drinking he got rough with her. One time I went overbto babysit and there was a busted alarm clock in the rrash. Janet told me that she had had enough and wben her Husband, Anthony had gone to sleep, she had busted rje clock over his head. I always had trouble visualizing that. It seemed to me that that much damage would cause someone to go to the hospital. Her kids were real sweet, i said a special prayer for them that night. Janet loaned me Led Zeppelin's album, the one with immigrant song on it. I loved music. If I liked something, i would play it into the ground. Janet had 2 horses, Amber and Spot. She let me ride Amber any rime that I wanted. Sometimes, if Anthony would watch the kids, we would ride together. Mostly though, I rode Amber with Maryanne and Fat pony. Janet also had a brother, Jason, who came to visit during the summer. He was 17 the summer that I was 13 and I had a huge crush on him. We rode together often with him riding spot and me riding Amber. The second time we rode together we went to the old mansion. We stopped at the little house that I always thought of as the caretakers house. The mansion was a pit in the ground, mostly. It was the ruins of civil war mansion that had burned. The little house was probably where the original inhabitants had to live after the war. Or maybe carpet baggers stole the property and lived there. Jason and I were sitting on a windowsill that should have had a window in it, but didn't. There weren't any windows, like as if the house had never been completed. Maybe it hadn't. So, we were sitting there and I started teasing him about something. Suddenly he was lunging for me, and I ran sqealing. I ran into 9 the house but I didn't get far because he caufht mw in the first interior room. He apun me around and kissed me. My arms went around him and he backed me up against the wall. I was already tall but Jason was about 6 foot. He pressed his body into me and mine pressed back into him. I don't know why we didn't stay like that forever. It was the best moment ever. I thougjt Rodney's kiss was the best but this was far better. I never stopped wanting kisses and a man's body pressed against me after that. We rode often and kissed often, but never as often as I wanted. I discovered that he was kissing Maryanne and Shawna. That embarrassed me a bit, and confused men but I couldn't stop letting him kiss me. He wwas so cute and si nice. The last time i kissed him, we had gone down to the river. We settled down under the trees. The leaves were very comfortable and sweet smelling. “” Jason kissed me and then he put his hand under my shirt and felt my boobies. His fingers worked under my bra. His fingers were roughn but it felt really good. He pulled his hand out and then he began unbuttoning my shirt. I helped with that. He tried to undo my bra, but he couldn't manage, so I did that part. And then my bare boobies were out. It felt so good. He put his mouth on me and sucked on them. And another door opened. I never stopped wanting a man's mouth on my nipples either. We were both a little over our heads into it when suddenly a fawn struggled by. Her foot was a bit mangled and she was limping. Jason tried to catch her but she ran off. After we gave up on catching her, we were settling back down in the leaves and there Shawna comes down the beach towards us. I pieced myself back together and smiled broadly at her as she came to sit with us. I knew that she had come ro find us. A week later Jason went back home and I went on with babysitting Janet's kids. I never stopped missing Jason. In some ways, he was the sweetest thing that ever happened to me. Maryanne and i began doing everything together. She got over her crush on my stupid brother. She developed a major crush on a kid that was in high school. Sara had begun hanging out with her own friends. She was a little ahead of me in some things, even though she was a year younger. She was going steady with Jimmy Smith, the same kid that we had peed in front of. I was still a little awkward around him, but Sara seemed just fine. Sara tried pot before I did. Jimmy taught her yo smoke it. Maryanne and I caught them out back by the cow pasture one evening after we got back from a ride to the beach on Fat pony. They were stoned and giggling and acting like idiots. Maryanne took the joint from Sara and put it to he lips and inhaled, blowing it out the way we did our cigarettes. Jimmy took it from her and showed her how to do it. He talked with all the air and smoke held inside his lungs. He handed the joint to me. I knew all about Marijuana. We had plenty of drug training in school. I was very curious and more than a little annoyed that Sara was smoking it before i had. So I copied what Jimmy had done. Then Maryanne got it right. We smoked 2 joints with Jimmy and Sara. Then things got a.little strange. I felt like I wasn't really in my body. Mom eventually sent Mick to find us. By that time the smoke had cleared. We walked or rather floated towards the house. Maryanne and I giggled over the stupidest stuff. We laughed over Sara and Jimmy holding hands and we laughed over the way Mick walked. When we reached the house, Maryanne and Jimmy left us, presumsbly to go home but i discovered later that she and Jimmy had gone off and made out with each other. I never told Sara about that. Partly because Jimmy made out with me too every time he got me alone. I followed Sara and Mick inside where mom had dinner waiting. I giggled all through dinner. Sara was being a little paranoid and kept trying to shut me up, but then she would start giggling too. If Mick had caught on, he never said. Mom left us to do the dishes and went off to her room. We didn't do the dishes so good. When I finally got my jammies, which consisted of one of dad's old t-shirts, on, I lay on my bed and floated. I fell asleep before the high wore off. For our first time getting high, Maryanne and I had gotten pretty high. I loved it and another door opened for me. From that point on, I wanted to get high and make out with boys. Tammy Merthers got high alot. She said so on the bus every day. She did smack. I didn't know what smack was then, and today I still have to look it up. I doubt that she really knew what she was talking about, but those kids really ran faster than we did. Tammy got caught behind the school giving a blow job to Terrence Williams. Jessie Jones and I hung out at school a lot. She brought her mother's pills to school and shared them with me. We took them and then slept through our classes. I didn't attend class much that year. I was off with whoever would cut class with me. I was high every day. Sometimes it was booze, sometimes it was whatever drugs were going around. I had sex for the first time fthat year. Jessie and I cut class one day. We met a kid that was 2 grades higher than us. We were still in 9th grade. His name was David Huck. He had been suspended for taking a bike chain to school durring a civil rights riot. We hung out at his house all day. The day after meeting him we went to his house. No one was home. Somehow we wound up on his parents big water bed. That was a cool thing. We sat on the bed and drank his dad's beer. We hadn't had much beer when he and Maryanne started kissing. I sat there trying to look cool with my beer. When David came up for air, he looked at me and then pulled me to him. He managed to get us to take our shirts off. Neither of us wore bras because almost no one did anymore. He played with our boobies and we let him while we drank our beer. He didn't try to do anything else. But we wrestled around and played tickle games for a while. Then Maryanne made me get ready to go because we had to catch the school bus back home. I didn't see David again for a long time. One night when I was over at my dad's he had invited a couple of marines over. One of them was very young. He was a cute guy, but he was missing a finger. He must have been bored with my dad because he and I wound up ouside sitting on my dad's car. Actually I was sitting on the car and he was leaning against it beside me. I was only 15, but I guess I could entertain a young man of 20 pretty easily. We were joking aroung and I was giggling at something he said and suddenly he leaned around and kissed me. We spent the next hour kissing with my legs wrapped around him. I never saw him again. He was sweet, but his missing finger was a little weird for me at the time. I don't think that he was into drugs either. By the time that I was 15, i didn't want to go out with anyone that was straight. I met another guy at my dad's. His name was Mike Simmons. He was 21. He was the cutest guy I had ever met. I think I fell in love the moment I met him. On our first date, my dad loaned him his mustang to take me out. We went to his friend's trailer and we got high. No one was home. We wound up with me on the couch and him on top of me. When he put his hand up my shirt and touched my boobie, I froze. I froze solid, i couldn't move. It took him a minute to realize that something was wrong. He asked me if I had ever done this before. I had, sort of, and I told him that I had never gone all the way. He kissed me some more and took my top off. He sucked on my boobies, but I was so nervous about displeasing him that I couldn't relax. It was always like that. Mike took me out every weekend after that. Sometimes he borrowed a buddies car. I would stand at the window and cry when he didn't come. My indoctrination into sex was a methodical thing for him. It didn't feel natural to me and I was often paralyzed with fear and some revulsion. Most often we were on a bed in someones house or trailer. Once in a while we were at my dad's house if he happened to be out of town. My dad was totally clueless. I don't know if he assumed I was a virgin or if he assumed that I was more worldly than I was. Probably the later, knowing my dad. He never had a clue that this 21 year old man was systematically raping me.l Sometimes we got high with people and sometimes we got high alone. It was just pot for me, but i watched him shoot something between his toes sometimes. Mike taught me how to touch him. He taught me how to hold his dick. He insisted that I call it a dick. I didn't want to call it anything. He sucked on my boobies, which he called tits. He was good at that and i liked it. He tried to teach me to enjoy having my clit sucked on. Only he called it something that I am still not comfortable saying. I barely understood that I had a clit. When his mighty efforts prooved fruitless and I hadn't achieved an orgasm, he told me to explore my body and figure out what worked. I eventually did that, but it took a very long time. Mike taught me how to give him a blow job. I didn't like doing that and I gagged often. I didn't complain because I thought that we wete engaged. I thought he loved me. He gave me a ring and he gave me his leather jacket. That leather jacket smelled like him. I turned 16. Past the statuatory rape age in NC. I didn't know that, and I certainly would not have thought that there was a connection. Sara and I were at my dad's house. We were watching his dog for him for the weekend. Mike showed up about 5 in the afternoon. We went to bed in my dad's room. We locked Sara out. He stripped sll of my clothes and his clothes off. I was very nervous because Sara kept asking what we were doing in there. I am sure that he tried to get me aroused, but it wasn't working for me. Finally he just got between my legs and he started to push his dick into me. I told him no. I told him no several times. He continued to push so hard and it hurt so bad, that I cried. In the end he came violently and then lay flat over top of me. I about suffocated. I just cried because I hurt. My feelings were hurt and my body was hurt. After he left, I called Maryanne and told her what I had done. A week later she lost her virginity to a boy that she didn't even know. Neither if us said that we had been forced a d I don't know if she was, but it was very likely. After that evening, mike "fucked" me all the time. I still had to suck his dick, but not as often. He still sucked my "tits" and my clit with as much vigor as ever and I liked it as much as ever, which means that I was never completely comfortable with him touching me like I had been with Jason or David. I was out of my league with Mike. He was too old and too experienced for me, in spite of my attempt to act all mature and sophisticated. One day, at the beginning of summer, he left me. He went back to his home, the one he had before joining the Marine corp. I didn't know he was leaving and I wasnt told that he was gone. A friend of his told me. He pittied me. I hated that. Still, I cried for a long time. And then, I hated men for an even longer time. I failed 9th grade.it was really easy to do. I didn't show up. Maryanne faied too. I cared on some level but it didnt really register. I was drinking and drugging a lot by that time. The experience with Mike was a factor. My mom and dad separating was factor. Me just being angry was a big factor. And then, there is also the part of me that loves adventure. I would have blasted into adulthood no maret what. Ibran away from my moms and chose ro live with my dad. He didn't care what I did. I started.going out with a series of different guys. I kept a list. I fucked every one of them. The ones that wanted more than sex, I thought weak and childish. I cut class one day in my second year of 9th grade by myself. I ran into David. We were walking back to his house and suddenly found ourselves making out. We fucked on the path. If someone had come along i don't know how much I would have cared. I think that david cared. But really, that was a sweet time for me. And then one day, i didn't want to do that anymore. I wanted to finish school and go to college. I left that life. By the time that I went to 10th grade I was hanging around a good crowd. I didn't want sex. I didn't want drugs. I still drank a.little from tome to time. I stayed with my dad. It was quieter there. Mick wasn't there. Mick had got just as angry as me and he had become really hard to be around. Sara came over and stayed with me sometimes. She didn't go off the deep end like Mick and I had. She was in the same grade as me. She was going out with a nice kid that was new to the school. And then one day, i went to mom's to hang out with Sara mostly, but Mick too. Mom was working. The house was really quiet. I walked into our bedroom. And there was Mick and Sara laying on separate beds talking. It was a sweet scene but I didn't want anything to do with it. One day Mick and I were alone at the house. We were drinking beer that mom's boyfriend had left in the fridge. We were in the kitchen i was leaning against the small kitxhen table, and we were a little tipsy. I don't know how the subject came up but Mick asked to see my tits. I thought about it. He was a year older than me, I am sure that he had already seen other girl's tits, besides, he was my brother. I said that to him. He said that he just wanted to see. Mick could be a pathetic begger when he really wanted something. He begged, and pleaded and said that it was just a peak.I was getting extreamly excited just discussing it, butn i am sure the beer played into it too. So I raised my shirt all of a sudden and flashed my braless tits to him. His face turned red. I always loved it when I had the upperhand with a guy. But seeing my big brother like that just undid me totally. God, his face, i woll always hold that as a best memory. Without anymore prompting, I slowly lifed my shirt and took it off. Mick didn't move. He was a deer in the headlights. My body was throbbing all over. I couldn't have stopped if it had occurred to me. It didn't occur to me. Mick croaked and then cleared his throat a bit and with a little more control he asked “”me shyly to take my pants off too. I did. I stood there, self conscious of my thick black pubic hair. He didn't move a muscle. He just looked at me with a very hungry look. His blue eyes looked black. He hadn't seen me naked since my strip tease with him several years prior. His body was still scrawny with a little bit of muscle developing in his middle area and shoulders. My body was full. My tits were big and round. My hips and butt were curvy, but not fat. He just stared. Finallyn I asked him if he was done looking. He very courageously asked if he could touch me. I wasnt sure how i felt about that. Suddenly, I didn't have a choice. Mick was across the room and grabbing for me. He sank his mouth onto my tits with a hunger that I had never seen in a guy. My body couldn't help but respond. I pressed my naked body into him. My pelvis meeting his hard penis through his pants. I pressed harder. His lips came up to meet mine. We were no longer brother and sister. We were more, but we were still brother and sister. It was exciting beyond belief. He pushed me onto the table, then yanked his shirt off. I didn't think about stopping until he started pulling his pants off. Suddenly his penis surrounded by all that red hair sobered me. His penis was big and red and hard. My hand went to it defensively. I could move this in several different directions or I could lose control. Mick didnt give me a chance ro shift the direcrion of things. He pinned me ro the table and as soon. as I opened my mouth to protest, his lips were on me. Then his penis pushed into me as his legs forced mine apart. I squirmed and protested louder. His lips locked on mine again and then he was inside me. It was a rape. But that was open to interpretation I suppose. I feel better saying it was rape, but It wasn't much force. I was so hot that my body was totally betraying me. He slammed into me so hard that i yelped. And again and again. He didn't come right away. And as he got more physical with his thrusts my body quivered and shook and I had my first vaginal orgasm. When he came, we clung to each other, our bodies so hot and sweaty that we were slippery together. Mick burried his head in my neck and cried. I cried too. We clung together for a long time. We ended with him gently petting my body all over in shear amazement. A Bj