// Letters to YVYNYL //

The Duskwhales - Today

 / This project is an important one. It’s about cancer, and if you know of anyone who’s going through the anxiety and body-breaking experience of going through its treatment, these songs by Chris Baker will ring true. He sent me these recordings last year and while I’ve listened to his songs a dozen times myself, I haven’t pushed through to share it out yet. I’m jumping over that hurdle right here and now. I will wait no longer. For the honesty and bravery of Chris’s letter. And great news, he just tweet’d that he is in the studio again! Read on…

Hi Mark,

I was diagnosed with Stage-2 testicular cancer in October 2017 and had surgery the day before my 24th birthday. I found out a month later that cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, so I had to undergo three months of intense chemotherapy. I was unsure what to expect going into it. The strangest part for me was it felt like every day some new symptom would kick in. One day,
I’d feel super dehydrated, the next I’d have terrible stomach pains and my ears would be ringing. Then there was insomnia. Back pain. Acid reflux. Shortness of breath. Weird metallic tastes in my mouth. Some days I was so tired I could hardly move. Did I mention my eyebrows were falling out? It really felt like I was just pulling a lever waiting for some bizarre new change to befall me.

Today will be the death of me. As the side effects of the drugs continued piling up, I was constantly looking for new things to distract myself from the ever-evolving ways that my body was falling apart. Whether it was listening to podcasts, watching countless hours of BBC nature documentaries, or starting an online petition to get the new Star Wars movie streamed in hospitals. 

My favorite distraction (though I didn’t always have the energy for it) was writing and recording music. Songwriting can be very cathartic and a great way to encapsulate memories and emotions, both positive and negative. In the spring of 2018, I wrote and recorded an EP called Hospital Dreams that detailed my experience going through cancer treatment. The title track from the EP I actually wrote in the hospital one night when I was having particularly bad insomnia. The song started out as a weird poem to catalog some of the aforementioned symptoms I was experiencing, which I set to a simple melody and turned into this hypnotic sort of mantra:

I am dripping slowly from a plastic bag
Waiting to absorb another poison
I am taking liquids to relieve myself
Hoping to retain a second cycle
Oh well I lost another night of sleep
Oh well I found another needle

Fast forward a few months, I’ve now finished chemo and received the news that I’m officially in remission. My band The Duskwhales has started playing more and we even teamed up with a non-profit organization called Cancer Can Rock that sponsors artists with cancer to go into the studio to record a song for free. 

The song we chose was “Fight Back,” which is a tribute to the great support team I had during my bout with cancer.

If you can’t fight back, then I’ll fight back for you.

My bandmates, Seth and Brian, were extremely supportive during this strange, difficult time and even went as far as shaving their heads when I lost my hair. I still think I pulled off the egghead look the best, but I give them props for going bald during the winter along with me.

Our latest single “Today” was released on the one-year anniversary of my remission from cancer and harkens back to the early days of my treatment when every day felt like a new death. With musical nods to The Monkees, The Beatles, and The Turtles, “Today” is an upbeat, albeit not-so-subtle reminder of our own mortality. Our new Take It Back EP it out now.

Thanks for reading! Fight Cancer. Make Music. Live life with no regrets.

Chris

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