There was my sensitivity for whatever reason there was the fact that your loving parents would say, “we love you no matter what, but you can’t be this this can’t happen you gotta change you gotta figure out a way for that. You’re just standing there and you’re thinking, “they’re talking about me.” There was a group of like 100 people there, and you know, I was deep into knowing that I was gay, and not able to talk about it or deal with it in any way whatsoever, and I remembered one of the scenarios that came up was that/turns out your roommate was gay… that was one of the worst things that could possibly happen to you, and the whole room of all these people were just howling with laughter. There was an after-graduation party at one of the houses, and I remembered them talking about worst case scenarios for your first year at college. You’re already getting the message from hearing people talk, that these types of people… are, you know, that’s pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you. In therapy over the years, you do a lot of thinking about that, “why did I react this way to this?” “why couldn’t I just say to everybody, screw you, this is who I am, and if you don’t like it, you know what (shrugs).” When you’re a kid, that doesn’t even occur to you, you don’t even know what you’re dealing with yet. You know, we don’t want you here, and there isn’t a place for you, and either you need to change, or die, or go away.” When I talked about it in my song “Marz”, part of the longing of “Marz” is that I knew there wasn’t going to be a sweet sixteen, a guy/that I would be able to meet and go to the cinema with, and then go to the sweets shop or the soda fountain afterwards and sit there, because, you know, we would be driven out. I never really figured out how to live, like you were supposed to – that is to say, in quotation and air quotes, you know, “like you were supposed to”… I got distracted by the whole sexuality issue in a big way, to the extent that, you know, I sort of felt like, the message that I was getting was that, “there’s a place for people like you in the society. Maybe it’s wanting to not know all the things that you have to learn, you know, throughout the course of your life, but I suppose, you know, there’s all the metaphors of renewal in there as well. It’s (The feeling his songs conjure up) like an overwhelming yearning for simplicity and innocence, you know. So I had to figure out a way to talk about that in the song. When the snow would start to melt, and those first little patches of green would start to peek up, the fragrance and the scent and the smell of that earth it’s been hibernating under that snow all winter – I can still smell it, like I’m there, you know. When it came to spring, we would play a little game, you know, it was sort of an unspoken thing of who could find the first little patch of green, peeking up through the snow, because that meant it was gonna get warm again, and you know we were all excited for the summer at the end of school. You know, that was a huge event, and then when it did stick, you know it would accumulate and then it would be there until spring, all the way through, always. We had these incredible winters, and it will start to snow in October, and we would always be looking out the school’s windows to see if it was gonna stick. On his songs from the “Boy from Michigan”: “Those first 3 tracks are about some of the things that happened to me, things that I noticed, things that really moved me, when I was growing up in Michigan, and I tend to romanticize that period quite a bit, and for good reason. I’ve been a huge consumer of music my whole life, collecting albums and getting what I could, during the times that my parents were saying, “you know, you could only listen to Christian music, or whatever”, so you’d have to smuggle things into the house.” “I guess it’s (music) always been sort of a survival thing for me, it gives me great joy, and carries me through difficult periods and makes me feel understood, which is huge in this world – I’m sure anybody can attest to that. Ahead of and in celebrating of Pride Month… Transcribing an interview that sort of moves me in a way…Īs transcribed from a BBC Radio 6 program titled “Journeys in Sound”, hosted by DJ Nenome.
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