// Letters to YVYNYL //

premiere: Harrison Caldeira - Higher

 / Music is, as many of us know, a true medicine, healing some of the most difficult problems life sends our way. I know a lot about this from personal experience myself, but it makes me happy to receive letters from folks who know the immediate value of music. Create it, listen to it, share it. Those vibrations are the ones that make the most challenging moments palpable, if not downright medicinal.

Dear Mark,

I have always known music. It has been my comfort. My peace. Sitting in the bathtub as a toddler, I would laugh with happiness, as my dad would sing The Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” on repeat. And I would request it every time. He would later inspire me to pick up a guitar myself at the age of twelve. It quickly became apart of my life. But I never realized how much it meant to me until it was taken away.

I’ve found that as you get older, it’s easier to let the world get inside your head. Having graduated high school, I figured I ought to put myself on a more “serious” path. I put music at the back of my mind for a while and decided to pursue an academic life at university, thinking that sooner or later I would find a suitable career.

But on February 14, 2011, everything changed. Late that night, I had a seizure and was hospitalized until morning. Six months later I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I decided to move back home and transferred to a local university in order to receive treatment closer to home. 

In December of that same year, shortly after having been diagnosed, I suffered a paralyzing relapse that debilitated my motor skills. Much of the strength and coordination in my hands, legs and feet was lost. I experienced problems with my speech, and I soon felt completely defeated. One day, my dad had asked me to pick up the guitar and play something for him. I’ll never forget the feeling I had as I strummed hopelessly and realized with agony, that I couldn’t play anymore. It was at that point that I discovered how important my relationship with music is.

I think that having experiences like these can either make or break you. Or both. After my diagnosis, I found myself in a really dark place, and I felt every minute of it. But my MS has given me much more than it can ever take away. It brought me exactly to where I need to be, where I’ve always needed to be—where my heart’s always been. I picked up the guitar, and I taught myself how to play, all over again. It was frustrating beyond words. And more than once I wanted to give up. But once in remission, I had a new perspective on what mattered in my life.

And a new determination. So I began to write. After I wrote my first album HIS·STORY, I left Canada to travel around Europe for a year. While I lived in France, it was difficult to communicate with people due to the language barrier. In these moments, I turned to songwriting to express myself. I took the Mumford and Sons approach to writing music. I wrote as many songs as I could, then from sixty or so songs, I chose my best six. When I came home, I recorded these songs at Splintered Wood Records. We were just two people for one big project, and I can’t thank him enough for the work he did.

Through endless re-recordings and re-writes, the final product came to be. I feel as if I’m always trying to get what I feel inside, out through music … it’s an impossible task, but I try to get as close as possible. I’m driven by that need to be truly venerable with myself and with my music.

Best,

H

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Q Curius - Donnybrook

/ You know it is honest when your friends take the time to go out of their way to put heart-felt effort into writing about your music, and send it out to the world (or in this case cultish publications like YVYNYL)! That’s love. Especially when your friend’s music is blossomly under appreciated.  

Hey there, Mark,

We’re writing to you on the road from Atlanta to Nashville (a section of the highway called Monteagle Mountain that Johnny Cash has a song about) and thought we would take an unconventional and hopefully acceptable method of sharing a few songs with you. Your blog has meant a lot to us over the years–far more than we can put in a sentence, so we’ll leave it at that (And this– the music you post makes and is making road trips much better).

We are two halves of a married couple– Megan, a musician herself, and Aaron, talent free (but he is dictating this and I am typing it so I can say he is the only one who thinks so). The song we want to share is called “Donnybrook” by Q Curius. By day, Q Curius goes by Forester McClatchey, and he is one of our dearest and tallest friends. All of Q Curius’s production is done by another friend, Joel Calvert. Q Curius knows we are sending this letter, but has not read it.

Forester has been rapping awhile under  monikers of varying levels of social acceptability such as Young Lincoln, Velocirapper, and Claptrap and the Girls. Thankfully, he settled on Q Curius: the coolest and actual name of a senator in Ancient Rome. As a graduate student in poetry, Forester compulsively expands his vocabulary, making him dependent on words  as big as him almost as much as he is dependent on insulin to live (he just wrote a jolly essay on being a Type 1 diabetic that you can read here).

The source for the track’s title is two-fold. Donnybrook is an Irish word meaning, effectively, an all-out brawl. The word came to mean more to us after a troop of aspiring poets named their off campus house the Donnybrook in the tiny rural Michigan town where we all went to college. The Donnybrook was famous for its piles of cigarettes and cans of cheap beer, its full length readings of G. K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, and most of all, its giant bonfires around which dozens of eager students would belt out Irish drinking songs and other spirituals in drunken unison.

Donnybrook the song deals with the kind of relationships that form and come apart during the time in your life when that is what you do on a Friday night. There is a simultaneous togetherness and loneliness to this sort of thing. Then, when it’s over, you have to negotiate how often you are willing to wallow in nostalgia over missing it.

After you spend any amount of time with Forester, you come away thinking, “How is he the way he is? And how can I get some of what he’s on? (Is it the insulin?)”. He is one of the most electric people anyone that has met him has ever met. With Q Curius, he and Joel seem to have captured this in song form. If you like Donnybrook, try out “Needles” or “Leaves” as well. It’s been one of those songs that colors a season of life. It is the spring of 2016 for us.

Thanks for all the music you’ve shared. Many of the songs we found first on your blog have become just like Needles or Leaves, defining season after season. And that’s been going on for, gosh, the last five years?

All best,

-Aaron and Megan Schepps

P.s. By the way, I don’t know if you hold this kind of sway with the band, but you should tell Grubby Little Hands to come a little bit southerly sometime. We can vouch for at least ten tickets in Atlanta.

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