Trusty and True

I have a long history with Damien Rice. He was only present in it in flesh for one evening, while I, on the other hand, have been present for much of my life, sometimes in spurts, but always prevailing. He is currently somewhere off the coast of Italy, sailing to ports and singing to those who come, and I am listening to him in the North Carolina mountains, reliving nights in Paris with the same song around me. Come let me love you, he hollers to me. “Come” is a theme in his music that makes me feel a part of it, like he has invited me personally to contribute my unashamed, impassioned voice to his, a girl in a jeep with three friends all made up of dirt and body odor after camping for days, and he, a boy rocking on a boat. Okay, I reply.

Come

Come alone

Come with fear

Come with love

Come however you are

Just come

“Trusty and True”

When I was four, I heard Damien Rice for the first time. In 2002, He had released his debut album “O,” recorded on an eight-track cassette recorder in his kitchen, bedroom, and outdoors, and overwhelmingly by word-of-mouth the flame of it turned into a wildfire with over 2.5 million copies sold. Songs like “Blower’s Daughter” and “Delicate” were all over the radio, but it was the song “Amie” that blossomed the devotion my cousins had for him. Three girls—the youngest 8 years older than me, the oldest sixteen years older—all strikingly beautiful. Any time I got with them was of course so exciting to me, and because my blonde hair matched theirs and my aunt’s, we often joked about how I looked more like their younger sister than my own red-headed mother’s daughter.

I loved being a part of anything with them—getting ready, finding Easter eggs, belting songs off of their beds. And the 6th track on his debut album, “Amie” found a prominent place in every karaoke session, because the middle cousin finally had a song with her name in it, with the same unusual spelling as hers. I wonder how many hundreds of times the moody love song wafted from her room to the others, the back arrow button worn on her cd player to replay the tune.

But I’m not a miracle

And you’re not a saint

Just another soldier

On the road to nowhere

“Amie”

At his core, Damien is a man who has used the same guitar for at least 15 years to express himself. That guitar has been his trusted partner for every tour and every show, as he scrapes it with his nails, boring holes into the base, breaking strings and yelling at it. With each strum and strike, it has only sung truer. And he shares his melodies like intimate secrets. You get the sense you are hearing his heart for exactly what it is, bruised, but beating; cut, but sewn. No pretenses or facades are felt.

Damien operates out of momentum. Everything is divulged at candlelight in a whisper when it starts, but it builds, builds, builds until you are screaming your insecurities off of the top of a bald mountain in North Carolina, unaware that you are freeing yourself from backstabbing thoughts. If you like the feeling of catharsis, you would like Damien. If you like guitar plucking played like the leaves change across a landscape spanning for miles—beautifully, without anyone telling them to, and always changing—then you would like Damien. If you like strings like the wind and tears, strange instruments, and lyrics that burn and soothe, uncover and console, convict and bare themselves, then you would like him.

God will forgive me

But I, I whip myself with scorn, scorn

“I Remember”

It feels irreverent to describe Damien Rice’s music. When we love something, anything, it goes against our very nature to attempt to explain why we do. Love is not a conclusion to write or a formula to describe. It is not a review of the content beholding our affection. It is emotional, powerful, and always, without fail, certainly nonsensical. There’s also the point that no one wants to have to convince others why they should also love something they are passionate about. You hope their soul just gets it like yours.

So, I hope you will listen to his music, for the magic is in the hearing. If you don’t connect to it, maybe you will connect to how I connect to it. That’s fine too. And very empathetic of you.

And why do you sing Hallelujah

If it means nothing to you

Why do you sing with me at all?

“Delicate”

Olivia and I waited on the street corner at midnight, our hands pushed into our jacket pockets, tightening our coats around our bodies. My mom texted to tell me that Dad was about to pull the truck around and to be ready, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from scanning all sides of the venue. “I just know he’s going to come out—that’s what he always does after his shows.”

Another text. And another. My father had work the next morning, and we had an hour drive home. He was anxious to begin the journey despite my intense begrudging and blatant opposition. I began to resolve myself to the fact that I wouldn’t meet him, that I wouldn’t hear him play on the street like an undiscovered gem, the brisk air stealing feeling from his hands and adding it to his voice. I took a final look at the entrance to the venue to bid a mental adieu to his name in the flashing lights and what could’ve been.

A man with dusty brown shaggy hair in a navy overcoat with gold buttons in two rows down his chest stood under the lights that beheld his own name. “Oh, oh my goodness,” I smacked Olivia’s arm. “He’s right there, Olivia!” He breathed into his hands, “Damien’s right there.”

Like a concert-goer himself, Damien Rice exited the front doors of the venue beholding his name in lights, breathing warmth into his hands not 15 minutes after his encore.

Where love has eyes and is not blind

“I Don’t Wanna Change You”

In 2006, he disappeared for eight years, moving off the map to Iceland, spending time in hot springs and seeking not to be known for his curated musical image, but for what he chose to present in person. As I sit here writing this in a journal that I didn’t realize was graph paper until it was too late, five layers on top, two below, two pairs of socks and a beanie on, staring at miles of mountains unadulterated by civilization, I feel like I get it in part. I am alone on the side of a bald mountain. I’ve used my underwear as toilet paper after peeing on a trail meters from strangers. My hands are at that place of cold where they move like sloths—small sleepy finger sloths just waking from a deep winter’s nap. I feel like I get it a little.

But also, how utterly absurd. And admirable (we’ll get to that), but also, absurd.

It takes a lot to know a man It takes a lot to understand The warrior, the sage The little boy enraged

“It Takes a Lot to Know a Man”

3rd miss: in which I showcase the anti-thesis of serendipity in reverse order, because time is not linear, or really, that important. Things have a habit of being a pattern or theme more than a stage. (heads-up: it could be argued the serendipity happens later, and even, in the absence of it.):

Picture this: two Americans listening to a Swedish musician outside of an Irish pub in Paris, a Japanese group of tourists on one side and a German family on the other. My dream essentially.

The summer after junior year of high school, my mother and I took a girls’ trip to Paris after saving for a year. She is fluent in French, though she would undoubtedly humbly proclaim herself as “rusty” or respond to “Parlez-vous francais?” with “un petit peu.” A little. We stayed in a tiny apartment, took our time at cafes, and received poetry from men on typewriters outside of bookstores. We ventured into an artistic area recognized for its white basilica high atop a hill, Montmartre, where I learned that I shut down in intensely crowded, over-photographed, commercialized settings—i.e. tourist locations. Madame, madame, quatre euros. Pour vouz, trois euros. Trois euros ou deux pour cinq euros.

After finding ourselves wandering lost streets where the artists hid, I sat for a charcoal portrait as a Frenchman studied and detailed the aspects of my appearance, strangers stopping to watch his interpretation of me. Any compliment to his skill, the precision of his hand, felt like a compliment to my own beauty, and I began to breath again. My mother, a lover of art beyond my own understanding, stopped to survey the surrounding paintings, photographs, everything, with a tranquil slow step.

As dusk fell into the city, a voice crept through the crowds, up the many stairs of the basilica, past the street vendors of selfie sticks and keychains and tumbled gracefully into my mother’s and my ears. We followed it, finding a man in his twenties, eyes shut, face tight with conviction, hands unwatched, creeping up and down the neck of his acoustic guitar rapidly. We sat without needing to discuss it.

Come let me love you, he sang bravely into the mic, his voice reaching soprano interpretations through chaotic and raw scream of the melody between lines. Come let me love you,his voice sinking back into a lower register and building with intensity, one of the Germans dropping euros into a pitcher on a wooden stool in front of him. His yellow hair fell from behind his ears, strands in his eyes and touching his shoulders. I was gone.

“You know Damien Rice?” I heard myself say, already my phone recording his humble performance.

“You could not of asked me a better question. You could have asked me if I was Brad Pitt, and I wouldn’t be as excited as I am about that question.” And he fell into “I Don’t Want to Change You,” one of the singles from Damien’s third album, released after he submerged from his extremely private life. This musician, this man bearing his soul in the cacophony of camera shutters and salespeople and chattering of massive crowds only meters up the hill, got it. And he continued to, song after song.

“Blower’s Daughter?” he asked outside of the microphone. And so it is,he began to sing to me.

I can’t keep my eyes off of you, I sang back.

“Ah she knows it!” I can’t take my eyes off of you. I can’t take my mind off of you. I was 17 (had lied about being 18), and I was falling. I was falling through Damien, for him, with him. It was giddy. It was fun. It was a moment filed into late night reminiscings with hope and longing, the voice memo made into a cd repeating back the songs, the conversation we had as my mother went to the bathroom and took ages to get the check, when he invited me to go to Damien Rice’s concert in Paris the next week, sharing how his sister was a musician too and was getting him backstage before the show to meet him.

But I would be back home just days before then. Narrowly missing him again. My mind was aghast at how many times two ships could float past each other in a sea smothered in fog. That was the third time that year that I had come within grasp of hearing him perform live.

And so it is,

The shorter story,

No love, no glory

No hero in her sky

“Blower’s Daughter”

2nd miss: a montage

Same summer. Ireland. Organizing a sports camp for kids in the most impoverished neighborhood in Dublin. Lots of singing to ukuleles. Outrageous moments with cows followed by tearful laughter about eating burgers that night.Intimate, honest conversations on a dock in the mornings. Sharing showers. Living in a previously abandoned orphanage. Divulging my life story to a room of dozens of high schoolers. An Irish boy, Daniel was his name, telling me he never knew someone had felt the things he had. He had a very similar relationship with his brother as I did with mine. Worship around a bonfire. Trivia. Aggressive games of both the sport and card variety. Walks around a secluded lake to decompress tension. Weepy goodbyes. Surprise re-meeting in Dublin the next day. My largest panic attack. Dancing. More tears.

Meanwhile, Damien was playing in shows in venues across Ireland, his home country. Days before or after, I don’t remember, he was in Dublin where I was. He had been a sanctuary for a year, a friend for 13, and we were in the same city. The two ships swallowed by clouds,one of them not realizing they didn't have the whole sea to himself.

What I am to you is not what you mean to me

You give me miles and miles of mountains

And I'll ask for the sea

“Volcano” 

A brief intermission in the misses to question Damien Rice’s mental state—troubled:

After the wildfire-like success of “O,” Damien Rice’s record label was pushing for more and more of everything—money, appearances, popularity. Performances were scheduled across talk shows non-stop. Britney Spears and Glenn Close were showing up to his gigs. He had all the makings of great fame in the music world, and one that could last album after album. Everyone could see it.

Damien freaked.

He shaved half of his head in protest of his record label trying to make his record a hit. He refused to do more than three appearances a week, an unheard of demand by new artists. He could not bear to make radio versions of his songs. He wore string and old rope as a belt to keep his ratty trousers up. He was scheduled for the David Letterman show, didn’t get to go on because Bruce Willis talked too long, and had no idea who David Letterman was. His band started to fall apart, tensions rising. His romantic and musical relationship with Lisa Hannigan, who he met on a whim at a cafe and was a quintessential part of his first two albums, ended devastatingly. And then, he left, escaping to the closest planet earth has to offer—Iceland. Very few signs of life came from him for nearly a decade, no music was released. He became what some might call a recluse. Others, a man overwhelmed by his passion turning to commercial profit.

In an interview at least seven years later, he described the making of his second album as “Hell.” “Hell’s maybe an exaggeration. Here’s something I’ve gotten very clear about: I made it hell. I had lost the love. ‘People just want something from me now, they’re using me,’ these kind of thoughts.” He divulges that “the internal structure of the band started rattling, it spread out among the whole group. We’d come from this place of innocence, because we loved doing it, there was no money in it. Then with success came money, fancier hotels, people’s expectations started to rise… so that rattled the whole thing as well.”

This is surely not uncommon. I don’t need to find a research article to know that with success comes pressure, and with pressure things often begin to crumble, especially if not prepared for the weight they are now forced to suddenly handle. This was the case for Damien, as it is for many artists.

I wonder less why this happens, and more, how it could not? If what we do to escape, to express, to expose, to unwind turns to what we do because we are told we must—the iron is hot! We can’t lose steam! Produce more! Talk to a stranger on air to millions about the intimacies of your life! We need more! More more!—then how could we not become trapped, detached, shielded, and anxious? It is amazing to me that this doesn’t happen more. It must be a fight, one requiring of sacrifices—whether production quality, funds, popularity, ease—to keep what is restful and yours while giving it to millions of others to do with it what they will.

I have tried but I don't fit Into this box you call a gift When I could be wild and free But god forbid, then you might envy me

“The Box”

1st (and final) miss, including the power of the brain to sing, a gallant return, and observing Damien Rice’s mental state—healthy:

The fluke of flukes. After my early experiences with Damien Rice as a kid dancing with my cousins and singing into mirrors while they painted my nails, I lost his music as I saw them less. For a decade, his words were lost melodies in my head, arising mysteriously and with no definable source. I would hum “The Blower’s Daughter” for years without rediscovering it, sing a single line from “Volcano” or “Coconut Skins” through middle school and high school without realizing my mind was trying to connect the lost memories of youth back to my heart.

Then, in 2014, after eight years, Damien Rice released his third album.

With little warning, he returned from social wilderness with My Favorite Faded Fantasy. It all came rushing back. “I Don’t Want to Change You,” a single from the new album, stealthily found its way on my playlists. It was shortly after that I noticed the name of the singer and entered back into distant memories that teased me with the unsure qualities of their authenticity for years. Suddenly, I was meeting old friends through his albums, remembering distant verses and welcoming back bridges. I leapt back into the wildfire of O. I devoured 9, again. My Favorite Faded Fantasyplayed on repeat.

Damien said that it took him five years after 9to feel stable again, to not feel like he would “flip into a crazy wolf man.” He says that he “was resting, and once rested I challenged myself to do things that I was afraid of doing, to say things I was afraid of saying. Whatever I feared I pushed myself to experience. Once I faced those things I was afraid of, the fear disappeared. My list of fears was long and it took many years to tick off. One very simple thing, though very difficult to do, was saying sorry to someone.” And he began writing music again.

There is a negative connotation to retreating—the weaker member of war, the drug addict or alcoholic vanishing. the one who runs away. There is a positive connotation too—finding yourself, getting in touch with God, dedicating time to write a book in the mountains of Nowhere. It was the negative that brought about the positive for Damien. It was the caving in of the earth from the pressure of unwanted, controlled success that led him to attack fear instead of drowning in it. To fight for the rest and expression he found through music, rather than the profit. To say sorry to someone.

How often do we not know our limits until they are broken? Our boundaries until they are tested? Is there a way to venture into the flames of our passion without getting burned? Perhaps so, perhaps not.

But let it be so, that when we are charred or cracking, we still have the power to walk from the inflictor, escape to mend, and learn how to say sorry to someone. The change might not be permanent, but Iceland will still be there if we need it again later, if we need to learn how to play music again.

“The songs just fell out sitting in the kitchen” like they did all those years ago, a full decade.

After this return, my family had two options:

1. Die at how often I subjected them to listen to Damien Rice.

2. Totally fall back into him with me.

They chose 2. Though it may be more appropriate to presume there was never a choice on anyone’s part. He was the prodigal son that returned home.

Oh, and the miss? I toppled so head first back into his music for many months before I realized that at that same time he had a concert in Atlanta. I was streets over listening to his recordings, totally unaware that I could have been listening live. Fluke of flukes. A real bummer.

You can wait for ages

Watch your compost turn to coal

Time is contagious

Everybody's getting old

“Coconut Skins”

That same winter, after years of his music being the soundtrack to my life, I finally saw him in an intimate venue in Athens, Georgia. It had been over a decade since I had first heard him, several misses had taken place. But then, I saw him. I heard him live.

I stood 10 feet in front of him. I cried much of the night, my cheeks hurting from beaming so intensely for hours, my hands clenching Olivia’s beside me, my voice rising with the crowd around me to make choirs of his choruses. He switched from guitar to keyboard to harmonica to accordion on and on, and he played like he was in his kitchen.

I waited and waited for one song, “Trusty and True,” the bridge an anthem of welcome to all, crying “come” no matter your state. The song had become incredibly dear to me. It was the song I played on repeat when I felt anxiety in the car. I wept to it under the descending sun’s sky and I felt like less of a burden. Come however you are. It reminded me of Jesus.

“Alright, alright, I’m curious. What do you want to hear?” he asked the crowd after playing song after song of my childhood, of high school, of Paris, of Ireland, of falling in love at an Irish pub, of everything. People began shouting, everyone’s voice seeking to top the next. He hushed the crowd with a small hand. “I want to know what you have come here in hopes that I would play and maybe I will play it. No need to scream. I am listening.”

Trusty and True. Trusty and True. Trusty and True.

I don’t know if he heard me, and it was not until many songs later, but he played it. He played it with a squeezing and heaving box instrument I had never seen before and have never since again since. Damien. For real?I found myself laughing. This is the song you choose to get just the most funky with?But that was him. I still cried. I screamed.

Come, come along

Come with sorrows and songs

Come however you are

“Trusty and True”

I cannot entirely say what it is that makes some music or art or anything so dear to us, but I think a large part of love develops from connection and from understanding. My mother will see a piece of artwork, streaked is an array of colors, and with just the light melodic hum in her voice I can hear her falling in love. I might find it nice, or even beautiful, but she will just stare and stare, eyes flicking across every stroke, nothing else able to steal her attention. We are looking at the same thing, yet she connects to it in a personal and undefinable way. I see wall décor. She sees a masterpiece.

Music is the same. Many of us have artists and bands that are absolutely sacred to us. We want others to view them the way we do, see their wonder and glory. Yet, the connection you feel towards something cannot be forced on others. A true lasting tether is deeply rooted, not thrown seed in a desert hoping to be fertile earth. And anyway, who can top your love? Yours is the highest. It would be a dishonor to explain it. At least that’s how it feels.

When you connect to an emotion, a line, a voice crack, a building of strings or a quiet whispered note, you cannot imagine anyone else feeling the way you do. And perhaps no one does, even if they feel understood from the same song. It is in seeing ourselves in something else that we connect, that we fall in love.

He is no prophet, no guru, no counselor. He didn’t mean for it to happen—but it remains to be true. I see myself more clearly, know what makes me feel exposed, have learned what I must shout to feel free, because of Damien Rice’s music.

It takes a lot know a woman A lot to comprehend what's coming The mother and the child The muse and the beguiled

“It Takes a Lot to Know a Man”

And after hours of losing my voice, there he was, alone and under his name outside of the venue.

I walked up before I could think about it. “Damien,” he turned to see me approaching with speed. “Can I please embrace you?” These are real words. He chuckled as I launched myself into his arms. “Your music has meant so much to me, so much.” I said, feeling his hair, once shaved and rebellious, on my neck.

Always a private man, he didn’t pose for pictures, but would rather talk face to face to those around him. And suddenly, there were quite a few people around, one person after the other sharing how his music had impacted their lives. One young man, stocky with dark hair and quivering as he spoke said “Man, your music has inspired to write my own. Seriously, seriously.”

“Will you sing some of it?” Damien responded with a small smile, looking the man in his eyes. The small crowd of fifteen or so flurried at the moment.

“What? Oh man, I’ve thrown it all away. It’s not good enough.”

Before he could finish, Damien started walking towards the entrance to the venue, “Wait just a second. Let me go grab my guitar. I would love for you to play us something.”

“I’ve thrown it all away,” the man said in shock before Damien came back, holding his trustiest partner in his hand, holes and all. He passed it over easily to the man.

He didn’t play his own music but for a few lines. Instead, he flipped the guitar, playing it upside down as he was left-handed, and he began to play Damien’s. And there, a small crew, no one shoving, many huddling in the cold, all sang Damien Rice’s music as he joined us unashamed and completely present.

It was my time to freak.

“Do you know if there is a place we can all sit together around here?” Damien said between songs. Another fan lifted their voice to suggest the rooftop bar over the venue, and before anyone could think we were all piling into elevators and sitting in a circle with him singing. His guitar was passed from person to person, mixing Damien’s music with anything anyone felt led to play. “Blackbird” by the Beatles was a welcome surprise.

It had only been twenty minutes or so before I had to leave, standing and walking away from where my bare feet were across from his. I can easily say it was one of the best and shortest moments of my life. It was unfinished, and I often look back to it and think about what other songs everyone sang together, the group probably thirty or forty people by the end. Strangers buying beer for Damien, then for each other.

He won’t remember me. He does not need to. It was for himself that he wrote. It was for himself that he strummed. It was for me to say thank you. It was for me to hug him, because he gave me Iceland. He gave me rest, he gave me escape, he returned lost aspects of myself totally unaware, even when cracked. Perhaps we can all do that for each other.

I made you laugh, I made you cry I made you open up your eyes Didn't I?

“The Greatest Bastard”

It has been four years of wondering, of his music weaving into my college life. Damien has dropped performances on talk shows since 2004. He doesn’t have to protest with hair anymore. He still wears tattered and ripped clothes held up by string. He uses the same guitar. Only now, he is doing it his way unashamedly.

“I’ve learned very, very, very clearly that money does not equal happiness or security either.” He just finished a tour sailing the coast of Italy and Spain, and now he has released six shows for the short “Places I’ve never Played Tour.” Only three of the places are in the United States, and I get the sense all of the them are just cities he wants to travel to. One of them is in New Orleans, five hours from my university. You know I will be there.

I will stay after to see if he still sits with people in bars and passes his guitar around. I will stay to the very end. I will go with my mom, and I will think of Paris. I will long for him to play “Trusty and True.” I will aim to be Iceland for others. I will smile, and I will cry, and he will continue to be a part of my story, no matter how many nights he joins me in it.

Come

Just come