The Ghosts of Beverly Drive
The third rail of this little pet project has been resisting the urge to flood the blog with posts about the two major disruptive forces in my 2015 - the death of my dad and the divorce that followed 10 days later. Both were years in the making, neither was a surprise, but they obviously made the greatest impact on the time before and after.
While this is admittedly a self-referential and borderline narcissistic project, it just feels too easy to focus solely on those events to give a false weight to the music that was the bizarre soundtrack to the summer. With more time and perspective, some will begin to pop up here when I have a handle on what was important and what wasn't.
That's the long way around to talking about The Ghosts of Beverly Drive which I stumbled upon in a typically roundabout way. The always interesting Song Exploder podcast was the spark as it dug into the story behind El Dorado. "The song El Dorado, like other songs on the record, was written in the wake of the divorce between the band's lead singer Ben Gibbard and actress Zooey Deschanel. In this episode, Ben talks about the metaphor of the city of El Dorado and how it fit the story he wanted to tell, about separation, unrealized dreams and Culver City."
Exploring the album, I found I liked Ghosts better and started listening to it as part of my workhorse playlist. Knowing the backstory of the album and where Gibbard was mentally as he wrote the songs, there were pieces I immediately latched onto. One of the odd things about music is the tendency to put a lot of stock into the lyrics as a makeshift gospel. While I treasure the lyrics that make me feel less alone or offer quiet reassurance that what I'm experiencing is normal, I lose a little more faith in any artist's omniscience with each new musical friend I make. Simply put, they aren't any closer to figuring things out than I am, but they're a lot better at tying those things to a chord structure.
The opening lines of Ghosts are:
If only you'd have known me before the accident
For with that grand collision came a grave consequence
Receptors overloaded, they burst and disconnect
'Til there was little feeling please work with what is left
In those lyrics is an oddly personal feeling for me. They outline where I assumed I'd be post-divorce and also a degree of the issues I caused for myself when I entered the dating pool. The self-projection as I started to gather my nerve centered around all the potential negatives I felt I'd be bringing to a new relationship. Like a critical used car buyer driving the price down, I could list them pretty easily a year ago: Divorced, custody schedules, dying father, uncertain financial future, countless issues with the frame and substructure that we can't even see yet.
The lyrical apologizing pretty closely matches every rocky interaction I had at that point. Some unlucky woman quite innocently asked about my kids and I went into a full, desperate and confusing defense of fatherhood. In retrospect, she was probably only asking my schedule. Instead, I had this internal narrative that mirrored the song - I know I used to be something, I hope you're able to make the best of the trash fire that is my life.
Slowly breaking away from the idea that the divorce itself made me irreparably damaged was one of the hardest things to come to terms with. Finding the upside in even the most basic acts - starting with merely surviving the summer - were the first quiet steps to coming back from the edge. I needed to get comfortable the idea of finding value in things I'd believed were marks against me. Apparently, I wasn't the only one.
The album that Ghosts appears on is Kintsugi and it's named after a Japanese pottery process. In it, gold is added to a lacquer to repair broken pottery, drawing attention to the cracks, chips and breaks in the material. It brings to mind the Hemingway quote about being "strong in the broken places" that litters self-help memes now. Owning the breaks and the perceived faults and drawing attention to them.
At the moment, I powered through the death of my father running concurrent with a divorce and having to patch together both things as I struggled to give my sons the lives I feel they deserve. Having to mourn the loss of what that was supposed to be, keep as much of the original as I could and creating something new for them that will be of value.
To continue the metaphor, it's rebuilding in a way that says, "Here are where things gave out, but I kept the good parts and they're still there. You can see them, highlighted in gold and better than I thought they would be. It's not broken, it's been salvaged and it's now more than the sum of its parts."
Ghosts is a helpful reminder of what the end game is. It's to press ahead, create, salvage, repair and do things not everyone thinks to do. It's to do things that not everyone can. Those specific lyrics remind me to pivot from expectations and move ahead in a way that when the details come up in the future, someone says, "Wait... You lost your dad, got divorced and still kept your sanity? You took trips with your kids and didn't skip a beat? Damn..."
In the most abstract way, I can just smile and show them the flaws and the places where the dam broke and tell them, "It wasn't a car wreck... It was a place that made room for beauty."