Well, Folks, it’s hard to believe we’re approaching the Holidays again. I suppose putting out an LP and being point-person for a new admin system at work will do that to a body.
I’ll be putting one more EP out on Bandcamp before the end of the year: three original tracks and a cover. The way things have been going, it will likely come in right under the wire. The title will be Meeting in Air.
I’ll tell you up front that the EP was conceived from what is most likely a factual error. I read something that misled me to believe that Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lesbos” – which I remember bringing me great melodramatic enjoyment as a young teen and which still makes me smirk – was at least in part directed toward Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ one-time companion, and ultimately Hughes’ lover, Assia Wevill. It turns out that, while it was composed during Plath’s separation from Hughes and his progressing relationship with Wevill, the figure at whom Plath takes aim is actually one half of a couple she was visiting at the time with whom she did not get along. It is this figure she says she should “meet in air” – which, admittedly, is not nearly as intriguing to me as if she had said that to Wevill. Still, as with a lot of Plath, there is room for interpretation and self-projection; and regardless, I like the idea of telling a rival or foil that they and you should “meet in air”. Outside the context of “Lesbos”, this declaration can sound confrontational OR resignedly charitable, depending on one’s angle.
Personally, I like the concept of “meeting in air” as a springboard for imagining alternate outcomes. In my experience there are people we find ourselves alienated from by circumstance in a way that seems unavoidable. Sometimes these people seem, at least from afar, to have quite a lot in common with us, and the intervening distance is simply rooted in self-preservation. At times the commonality seems so strong as to appear uncanny, in which case the rift seems particularly unfortunate and may spur one to fantasize about what it would have been like if things had been different. At its core, this reflection on unfulfilled potential is what my EP will be about.
That said, on social media I’ve been describing the EP as dealing with a few “triangulated situations”. This is also true, informed as it was by Plath/Hughes/Wevill, (Patti) Smith/(Alan) Lanier /(Tom) Verlaine (Smith’s song about this, incidentally, has always struck me as ambiguous in a way that leaves room for queer re-interpretation), and my own run-in with a couple “flaming creatures” a long time ago.
The Sold Kingdom 
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