From A Spark To A Song –
Turn The Dirt Over

There are some words and sonic tones that are so honest they profoundly touch your heart and soul, moving you in such a pure way that they unfold old bonded and repudiated emotions from your most secret place… that forbidden space where painful memories and unforgiving souvenirs remain hidden from your heart and are strangers to your soul, forgotten sentiments from which unexpectedly emerge a brand new realm of pure and genuine feelings, that even the deepest of all denied senses could be vindicated, set free and consumed… Redeemed and released in a real sacramental reconciliation with guilts from the past, the shame of our self-refusal heartfelt present and the quasi-absence of faith in any future absolution as if the implacable nature of time was slowly losing its firm grip on our long-gone forsaken dreams. As if the illusionary shadows of our self-condemned stoicism and self-imposed fatalism was suddenly etiolated by an invitation to open up the shutters and see the blooming lights. As if, somehow, we were ready to acknowledge the nature of the invisible and embrace its unique palette of luminescent colors feeding the incarnation of a new blossoming morning, rising up from our self-conscious spiritual death, undeservingly absolved from our faithlessness and unbelief. Imperfect in every possible way but still completely sanctified; therefore, free…

The spiritual notion of forgiveness, redemption, absolution and freedom have always been, for many reasons, a meditating and musing concept that has embalmed my thoughts and absorbed my reflections for pretty much all my life. I guess the impact of having to secretly survive a childhood rape is a major one of them and my subsequent self-destructive way to live my young adult life is an important one among the others. I have always been fascinated by people who found inner peace or who were able to live according to some degree of personal plenitude. Between my father’s severe alcohol problem and my mother’s desperate attempt to offer me some affective stability, I didn’t have much to look up to growing up. Moving from cheap apartment to cheap apartment, I didn’t have much to hope for either. Bitter silence became a friend and a raging fatalist companion. So I grew up looking, searching and digging for more, willing to listen, only to meet more “love” charlatans, trying to emulate compassionate serenity by displaying some religious masquerade, than anybody else. Deception being the first step towards resignation, I ultimately thought I saw it all, heard it all. I renounced and gave up, accepting that whatever I was looking for, I would never find it anyway. This would ultimately result in never experiencing inner peace and never living anything close to that degree of plenitude I had always been longing for.

I would never find anything that might offer my sufferings any relief from all that bitterness and all that rage I was vividly growing inside. And it grew, just as I grew. Learning that time remains in suspension when you want to burn your heart and soul to the ground, I decided quite reluctantly to accept the things I would never have control on and decided quite willingly to hide everything else so deeply inside that I would – or hoped I would – ultimately forget. I wasn’t free, far from it. Pretty beaten up, barely alive… but it was life. Life as I always knew it. Interrupted. As for all the seasons that followed, they seemed to be as numerous as the different life turns that I lived thereafter. Until I found myself leading an international band which became the perfect alibi for someone who had lost himself a long time ago.

From as far as I can remember, I always read. I always had a book in my hands. I had always been attracted by words, their different sonorities, their vivid colors, their multiple scents, their ability to redefine the world and therefore its history, as much as I have always been attracted by their faculty to give life to a place you had never seen before and by their capacity to let you embody feelings you kept refusing yourself to admit and live. Which I guess for a kid who witnessed parental suicidal attempts and thought that domestic violence was a norm, was the perfect way to create for himself an emotionally safe place to hide. Words had that capacity.

No surprise that for me, for every artist who really touched my heart and soul, everything started with a word (an album title), an emotional scenery (an album artwork) and a vision (a song). Even if I don’t quite remember how I discovered the band “Sea Wolf”, I do remember clearly that it was the name of the band that captured my imagination. It led me right back to one of my all time favorite author, the American social activist Jack London, whose book “The Sea Wolf” remained one of his most famous. Whose books “White Fang” and “The Call Of The Wild” had not only marked my childhood, but greatly inspired me to keep going on regardless of the violent and apathetic life I had to grow up in as a kid. So when I saw the name “Sea Wolf”, I immediately wanted to hear what that artist was really about. What I found was quite incredible, but what I felt was quite surprising, since Alex Brown Church (Sea Wolf’s songwriter) reference to spiritual themes and imageries were really compelling to me… it was October 2007 when I first heard Sea Wolf’s full length debut album “Leaves In The River”. That was pretty much around the same time I got back from a European tour with Your Favorite Enemies and only a few weeks before my life, as I had managed to build it thus far, collapsed on its own illusionary self, leaving me with a broken heart, the betrayal of one of my dearest friends and quite an emotional bleakness and some kind of spiritual slow agonizing break down.

Sea Wolf’s songs “Black Dirt” and “The Cold, The Dark and The Silence” suddenly became the anthem of the obliteration of my young adult innocence. It would be the last time I said instinctively “forever” and wouldn’t measure the implication before offering myself. And just like that, as many years before, I had to secretly survive the sorrowful tragedy of my lost faith. This time, contrary to the silence I immerged myself into after being raped, I had to live exposed to the scrutiny of the public eye. Interrupted. Like all the seasons that followed. Again, life… as I always knew it. Same essence, different scenario. The artist I was became the man I hated being…

In the middle of a multitude, in charge by fatality and responsible by every means, I managed to survive my state of desperation, not without paying the high price of other people’s judgments and the self-flagellating vision of being a total failure in my own eyes… existing rather than living…

I didn’t expect tomorrow to be any better. I lost my will to know and my desire to see. And somehow, life seemed way easier as a living dead soul personifying some fulfilling happiness. I was a very successful young artist, but profoundly empty, incredibly blessed, but fatally hopeless. In many ways, I didn’t care much about anything at all, if only for the people around me, accepting to be blamed for stories I never wrote and willingly beaten by the shadows of the same old cowards. I didn’t fear to suffer. I was dead, I thought, so why bother to care. I was exhausted and recluse in sorrows. It was fall 2009 at the time, or so I believed, I was in fact so lost that I didn’t realize it was really spring 2010. But just like a clown you dust off from the closet in order to make him do his little performance for the sake of entertainment,, I kept doing what I was “called” to do and “expected” by others to keep doing. Confused, completely disoriented and severely ill, I was a repulsive ghost living in the immensity of a place where people weren’t able to reach out to me, if only some of them would have tried. I was sadly unreachable.

In fact, it seemed to me as if life only had one last fragile piece of light, shimmering for me to keep believing in emotional salvation. Only one left piece of glistening hope in the dryness of my slow suicide. A last soft and delicate breeze gently drifting on my desperate heart and soul to envision colors beyond the horizon of my own color blindness. All of them ironically incarnated by an old black Labrador dog named “Shadow”, a loyal companion keeping her commitment to look after her pretty fucked up master. I loved that dog. I adopted her when she was 5. She had been left to die by a family who had probably bigger problems to deal with or too little love left to care about her. I always loved the paradox of our similar existences. We had never been financially able nor stable enough for me to have a dog as a kid. Being an only child in a financially challenged and emotionally troubled family had never been easy. I immediately fell in love with “Shadow”. The most fabulous souvenirs I have in my life remain with her. A few years after, she died in my arms. She died in the cruelest of all ways… she fought for hours and as much as I prayed to save her, she had to go. I had to let her go. It was late winter in 2009 or early spring in 2010. I woke up around fall of 2010. What happened between that time remains completely absent from my memories. Pretty much as if I had let myself drown in water, I vanished in my own world and went completely missing from reality. Interrupted. Like all the seasons that followed. Again, life… as I always knew it. Until I found what was long forgotten and no longer looked for…

I awoke. Still confused but somehow uncannily aware, as if I was suddenly conscious of being awake. I didn’t say much as I’d been told to. One day. As if I left the night before. I simply sat at the table with everyone else. I didn’t notice the consternation of what seemed to me as natural behavior at the time. People saw me sitting there so many times, playing my role, just as everybody else, but I guess I didn’t look quite the same that time. I didn’t speak much since the loss of my dog Shadow. Some might have wondered if I would ever speak again. Oh, I did talk during that period of great darkness; duty of the clown in chief I suppose, but I never really said anything much. I mean, never said anything worth talking for. I was there, sitting. Silent. It was cold for July I thought. Well, not so much, as in fact, it was late September… I woke up looking for what was a long gone summer and wondered what was left of my own winter.

I was about to have a delicate surgery, another one. I spent most of my childhood in hospitals, and most of the rest of my life fighting with a weak immune system. So, another surgery, I thought. I didn’t even remember I had a cancerous tumor that needed to be removed. I guess I was too happy with the idea of dying of a natural cause when I received the diagnostic a few months before that I clearly didn’t give a shit about the tumor, news I had received supposedly a year prior to that operation. I didn’t blink. “Whatever”, I thought. “You can’t kill someone who’s been dead forever”, I laughed interiorly. “If only I was”, I whispered. Well, I obviously wasn’t. Especially on that cold morning of September. I was alive, somehow serene. Not at peace, serene, as if I was relieved, not to undergo a surgery, not about my health, not about the possible conception of literally dying, no, just relieved. As if it was time for me to wake up. As if for once, it made sense. I mean, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t bitter. I wasn’t in rage. I wasn’t empty. I was… simply. I was. As if realizing that, after all those years being broken for what I’ve lost and got ripped from, this actual state of denudation was a gain and not the tragedy by which I’ve been bonded by all my life. My raped childhood innocence, my desire to find peace, my girlfriend’s deceitfulness, my best friend’s betrayal, my career ambitions, my beloved dog’s death, my weak health, my future and so much more… All that, gone… dispossessed… free. From the serenity of losing everything to the redemption of letting go. For the first time in my life, deeply at peace for lack of better understanding or lack of a better explanation, I felt free to be. Ready to behave as such. Willing to assume the behaviours of being. Eager to share and commune by forgiving myself and others. Free. As the surgeon asked me if I was worried before proceeding to the complete anesthesia required for the surgery to remove my tumor, I simply smiled and peacefully said: “I’m not worried anymore, I’m ready”. The surgeon turned to the anesthetist and said: ” I’ve never seen someone so at peace”… Moments later, I fell asleep. Again, sleeping. Suspended in time. Interrupted. Like all the seasons that followed. Again, life… as I always knew it. But somehow, fulfilled in a total different way that I used to be; free.

For some of us, “Vague Souvenir” came as an old specter emerging from the past. After years of desolation, 2011 kept its promises, the very same old ones no one truly believed in anymore. But those true promises unfolded their blessings, and the time we all had together came as a wonderful benediction, in every single point of view. The idea of bringing back some shades of the past wasn’t truly what my band mates and team mates had in mind. “Why look back”, some said. “Why don’t we leave the dead bury their own dead, let’s move on”, added some. “We’re a rock band, Alex. We’ve been there, may the past be left out. Let it be, dude… it should rest in peace”. And so on… The loudest voices remained those who kept silent, clearly worried not so much for the band, but for me, for my heart and soul, the idea of losing me again being a difficult one to talk about. Since then, those years have always been taboo amongst us. And I knew, I knew how everyone was worried about me, knew all the sacrifices they did in order to support me. I knew it had nothing to do with the band or our career. We’ve been together for what seems like forever; we all know how to talk without saying anything and how to say without confessing a word. But as much as they worried about me, my heart and soul, as much as everyone feared seeing me drown in sorrows one more time, I knew, that if it was about me, for me, for my heart and for my soul, I knew I profoundly wanted that project to see the light. I wanted to embody such an intimate and personal project. To be. To behave. To assume. To share. To commune. To let freedom arise. And for that, I was envisioning a live recording session. Imperfect… real and honest… stripped down of all artificial elements defining nowadays musical clones. It needed to be done. And truly believed I needed to do it.

Breaking those taboos isn’t easy. But somehow, I managed to explain to the other members of the band and all the team partners that “Vague Souvenir” was as legitimate as it was relevant. That it wasn’t about making peace with the past; I might never be at peace with the past. That it wasn’t about forgiving and being forgiven; I might never understand the profound dimension of what it truly is to forgive and to be forgiven. That it wasn’t about revisiting dreadful emotions to turn them into bliss; I might never be free from dreadfulness. That it wasn’t about breaking the cycle of fatalistically existing rather than freely being; I might never know the true nature of freedom. Again, it was about sharing. It was about communion. It was not about what was supposedly making sense. For me it was, and for the first time in ages, it was instinctively saying “forever” without measuring the implication of offering myself. It was about living the moment.

It’s late September 2012, a few months after the official release of “Vague Souvenir”. It’s been an emotional journey to end the night for some of us and way beyond the colors of dawn for others…

I’m slowly getting affectively prepared for the production of our next musical project to be released in the upcoming year. But before, I’ve been asked to write about the songs on “Vague Souvenir”, for the special blog “From A Spark To A Song”, the reasons behind their choices, the stories beneath their incarnation, the insights and the untold stories. At first, I didn’t want to do it, for I believed the songs are part of a communion between each and every one of us. But if I finally accepted that invitation to write about the songs, it’s because there wasn’t any rules, any guidelines nor any limitations. I had the freedom to share on my own terms, as I just did for “Turn The Dirt Over”. A disoriented story without evident forms, without apparent cohesion. Because what led me to truly decide to incarnate this song was about the intimate involvement, the implication of the words, of the sounds, of the perfume it gave to both, of the vision it gave me, and how it led me to touch the invisible… I wanted to share that proximity.

Because just as the emotions “Turn The Dirt Over” blossomed from deep within, its soulful nature represents one of the most defining times of my life. An invitation “to come closer to the window frame”. As if there’s only one thing I can remember, barely but still, from the dark period of my breakdown that happened between late winter or early Spring of 2010 and late Fall of 2010, it is that I listened several times to Sea Wolf’s album “White Water, White Bloom”, which “Turn The Dirt Over” is part of…

As time goes by so fast, our memory is the best of all authors, as it possesses the ability to rewrite our own intimate world and its personal history, to change the sonorities of our souvenirs, to offer a different tint to well known colors, to redefine the perfumes of our familiar scents, to modify the vision of places where we thought we had founded homes, to condition the nature of our different touching sensations… And therefore, I know that, if I ever read this blog again, I might find that some of it doesn’t make sense at all. That I might have had all the dates mixed up, all the stories upside down and all the words twisted. But in the end, what’s truly left of it aren’t the words, as I discover that words aren’t the most precious things this story has to offer. No, what’s left of all those words is the freedom to be, to behave, to assume, to share and to commune. As we “open up the shutter, to see the moonlight on the snow”. As we see our lit reflections in the dark. A moment. Interrupted. Like all the seasons that followed. Again, life… as I always knew it. Imperfect in every possible way, but somehow redeemed by love. And therefore free.

*Some Jack London scholars and biographers do not agree on the authenticity of this last quote being actually from London himself, but since those words are reflecting how he always lived his life, I believe every word remains relevant, whoever might have written or said those words.