Portland, OR – “The Ghosts of Songs” – St. Johns – October 13, 1999

The drive to Portland took longer than expected on account of a full roster of interviews we’d lined up. I set a reminder 15 minutes prior to each call and tapped Delucchi when an alarm would sound, leaving it up to him to find a rest area equipped with a pay phone. Occasionally, it was easy — a payphone just materialized out of thin air. More often, it was a wild dash to the nearest exit, sometimes as much as 40 miles away, and beggars couldn’t be choosers. Some of the places I did my interviews from were borderline dangerous.

I did a radio interview inside a bar called “The Point of Rocks” in Wyoming, where two men (one with no teeth) stared hungrily at me the whole time, a fly buzzed, motorcycles pulled up and pulled away, a red sign read “SANDWICHES: HAMBURGER,” an overweight, freckled waitress laughed so hard she splashed whisky all over her swollen hand, a dog panted its way through old age and I hung on to the phone, to the voice at the other end as though I might need to ask it to hang up and call 911 on my behalf at any point.

The folks at St. John’s were sweet and slightly overly enthusiastic to have us there. We ate cobb salad, drank October ale and picked at a hummus platter before sound check. The venue was once a church. It was appropriately infused with candlelight, tear-drop chandeliers and warm tapestries. But somewhat out of place were the Halloween-inspired spider webs (creatively recycled, they told us, from last year’s discarded Santa beards) and the audience of lifeless dear heads mounted on walls. I could have sworn that some of them sang along with the songs and bopped their heads to the beat of Brian’s thud. But every time I looked up at them, they played dead.

Some nights, like last night, I can feel the spirits of my songs possess my soul. They enter and move me to execute their will, the way a character might haunt an actor playing a role. I feel them like a saltwater tickle in my chest. They fill my facial expressions and use my gestures to deliver their message. When a song ends they drift away like distracted children. I like to think they watch the rest of the show from shadows beneath people’s chairs and stealthily move into places where the audience has let the lights go down in their hearts. I imagine the ghosts of my songs working behind the scenes to open windows and doors and new avenues into people’s minds — allowing fresh possibilities into their souls. That’s what songs do best.