#milkeyedmender

my old blog was milkeyedmender, previously known as nicebf lol

are you building a cat army?

Hey guys,

I need your help. I'm trying to get the word out about the fundraising page for my novel. As you may know, I'm flat broke. I'm trying to crowd-source funds to buy the ISBN necessary to publish my book and to pay Tom for the awesome cover art he did. 

Would you guys mind terribly posting a link about my pubslush page to your tumblr? I know it's a big ask, but I really need the help. The website is 100% safe and legit. I've already raised $45 but I need at least $455 more to actually fund everything. Even if a bunch of people donate just $2 it'd help. Can you help me spread the word? I'd greatly appreciate it! 

The link is heirofveridis.pubslush.com

Time & Place: Joanna Newsom The Milk-Eyed Mender

(I’ve been slacking on updating my Tumblr, so I figured I’d start to regularly ruminate on some of my favorite records and the memory associations I have with them. This is the first post in what will hopefully be an ongoing segment)

I didn’t know anything about Joanna Newsom when I snagged The Milk-Eyed Mender off of a friend’s computer. I only knew that some people with reputable tastes had recommended her album. It was spring 2005, and I gave it a first listen during a These Arms Are Snakes tour while I was behind the wheel. It grabbed everyone’s attention, but I couldn’t say that I actually liked it. Her voice was so strange. And I wasn’t aware at the time that she was a harpist; I assumed that it was some strangely tuned guitar, which kind of irked me as I assumed that the idiosyncratic style of guitar playing was her whole appeal. I thought she was going to be some sort of somber songwriter along the lines of Cat Power. This seemed more like some Kaki King showboating. I was not impressed.

That was a long, brutal tour. We did a month in the U.S. supporting a band I’d rather not mention. The tour ended in Florida and we drove up to the Northeast to catch a train from Philly to Newark, where we flew to Europe for our first overseas tour. The tour was a financial flop. By the end, we were over $10,000 in debt. We flew back into Newark with enough Euros to cover the gas money to drive all the way from the East Coast back to Seattle.

It was depressing. We had left in March thinking we’d come home with enough money to get through the summer. We came home in June without a dime to our name. I didn’t even have a job to go back to. It was a dark time.

A few days after getting home, Reno and I went out to a cabin on Anderson Island owned by one of his coworker’s families. We borrowed a car to get out there. It was the only vacation we could afford, because it only cost us gas money and the cost of the ferry. The first morning we were there I went jogging and gave Joanna Newsom another shot. It sounded very different in headphones as opposed to the crappy van stereo. I still have a very vivid memory of the first time I heard “Sadie”—jogging past old mailboxes on the gravel shoulder of a rural road. It was a very powerful song, one of those pieces where the lyrics shine through on the very first listen and you know exactly what the artist is talking about. In this case, Newsom was dealing with the death of a family pet, but on a broader scale, it was about dealing with loss and remembering to appreciate what you have while you still have it.