Here is a brief introduction to Hospice, as written in a recent email from Kush:
When you wrote “my musical taste has been a bit of a downer”, I thought of (what I consider) sad music: songs about heartbreak, drug addiction, and so forth. Here’s what I did NOT think of: an album called Hospice (!) about a depressed cancer patient at Sloan-Kettering! (Sloan-Kettering, huh? Now whos name-dropping, Karen?) However, while I can argue with you about such an album, I cant argue with Pitchfork, which according to the Wikipedia entry you linked, endorsed Hospice with their coveted Best New Music stamp. So I guess you win that one.
See, this is why I like Kush: he is fantastic at making me hipsters look ridiculous. Although to be fair, what good is cancer for if not made into a concept album about sarcoma originating in the femur?
Exactly.
I am seeing the Antlers in concert, fittingly I suppose, the day before I fly back to Los Angeles for another PET scan. I hate these scans, although in a physical sense, there’s not much to hate about them. The Nuclear Med folks are sweet (except for that one guy) and I’m usually too drugged up on Ativan to make a fuss. But I always feel like my life is perpetually running on a three-month lease, which is not only incredibly exhausting, but also keeping me from fully breaking even when comes to resuming life. More often than not, I’m usually writing someone a panicked email the night before as I try to contain what basically amounts to pure hysteria. From this exercise in emotional clusterfuckness, I have learned that there are about a million ways of saying the exact same thing, which is that I have so much to lose if it comes back positive.
That being said, Antlers are valiantly trying to take the title away from Leonard Cohen as the saddest fucking human beings ever. Sort of. Because Wake is something of an anomaly, which means it is both happy and terribly heartbreaking, which means it’s easier to take out of context, which inevitably means I’ve appropriated it for my own purposes. On paper, it is explicit: it is a song about caretakers and the toll illness takes on them. It is about the guilt that can only amass with not being able to save someone. It is about forgiveness.
But it is also about securing an unconditional faith in people, which is something I would’ve never considered before July 14, 2008. There is such a capacity for love and compassion in people, especially when the chips are down and shit is so, so wrong. It is about the kindness received despite the sharp abuse I was so eager to give out. It certainly doesn’t negate the accumulated actions you think unfairly perpetrated on to you, but it does carry an alarming amount of weight. Often times I wonder if this faith I have in you is the closest I will ever come to religion.
In the end, it is a song about letting people in.
In many ways, despite these three month leases I have on life or perhaps as a direct consequence of, I think I am one of the luckiest people I know.
