Day 14 – “Cardboard Pants” – January 28, 2000

The suede pants I dropped off at the dry cleaners on Monday are no longer suede. They’re more cardboard than leather and I ask them why?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the owners say in unison.
“So why is the stain I brought them in for, still there?”
“Oh, that’s a catsup stain, that won’t come out of those pants,” They say laughing as though I’d asked them how to get to Mars by bus.
“OK,” I say calmly, “so why is the hemline all taken out and shredded like that?”
“It was that way when you brought them in,” they say as though they’d rehearsed their bit 100s of times. I pay them their $24 dollars and drive my cardboard pants to the studio in my Rav 4 Toyota feeling robbed as though someone stole my favorite memory and insisted it was theirs all along.

We finished guitar on “Forty Years” in the morning and moved on to “Dvoren,” which, after 5 hours, we decided we didn’t want guitar on. Despite our chaos and indecisiveness, I felt relaxed in the studio for the first time in ages. With a full night of sleep under my belt, I could’ve recorded forty more songs. But I could tell El Blanco was stressed. Every other word he uttered was followed by a deep, lonesome sigh. He cracked his neck every half an hour or so, cupping his skull and chin in his bony white hands and turning his head like it were a stuck jam jar lid. He admitted to wishing things (guitar) were moving along quicker but neither of us could legitimize picking up the pace. Speeding up the recording process means slowing down the mixing process. Being less finicky about guitar tones means not having the best track possible.

“We just have to let go of this whole time thing,” I suggested sitting cross-legged on the floor with one reassuring hand on his knee. The electronics buzzed a furious hum and a magenta mote of carpet swirled around my teal, velvet skirt. We stared at the ground like a developing picture in a dark room. Finally, Michael agreed we needed to loosen up our reigns on the calendar, cracked his neck again, and sighed.

In the late afternoon we worked the wah-wah pedal into “One Step,” a song about confronting fears; taking one step into the unknown, finding strength in weakness, and giving yourself to the abyss. When I wrote it, the image in my head was of Wile E. Coyote suspended in the air.
The roadrunner’s scratched a line in the dirt which he’s crossed over again and again until he realizes he’s been tricked into walking off a ledge and stands suspended in the air with no ground beneath him. But, curiously, he doesn’t fall until he realizes there’s no ground.

That cartoon taught me that falling, floating, and flying are all the same action; it’s the fear that “no ground” means “down” that makes me “fall.” But I don’t have to, and that’s what the song is about – taking one first step out into the middle of the air, into the mystery, letting go of the fear that makes “no ground” mean “fall” and, instead, deciding it means “fly.”

The song is a reminder to me to lose control, and in the chaos, find freedom.