On Being a Loud Creature

Someone told me a while back that when I sing loudly in social situations it bothers other people. This was not a nice thing to say, especially since I had revealed to this person that I'd been having panic attacks this year, and he knew I'd been having trouble working with music this year. I ended up deciding that generally, I don't think it's true and that I trust people to tell me to shut up if I'm making them unhappy with my music.

The other thing is that I've decided to own my loudness. It's a part of who I am, and something that came as a direct result of that loudness is Bike Party, and that is far more powerful than one person telling me I'm annoying for being too loud. I'm wicked proud of Bike Party, it has it's faults, but the east bay has not seen anything it's equal and it's changing this town. Critical Mass in Berkeley only ever reached a couple hundred people, and we had over 500 riders the last few months. It's something special and I am not sure it would have the same vibe if I wasn't obnoxiously outgoing and loud about it.

Now, this part of the blog has nothing to do really about being loud, but I want to post it anyways. About two months ago I had listened to some music by an artist by the name of Ben Howard, a surfer from the UK gone to music, along the lines of Jack Johnson, but with that perpetual UK foggy feel to his work. I didn't give it much thought, I think I liked it but didn't really explore it much more than listening to the one song. Today there's a video going around of Danny Macaskill riding around an abandoned industrial complex:



He uses Ben Howard's song, The Wolves, which is just lovely. So I wandered around YouTube watching the best of his videos, and needless to say, I'm kind of in love. Here, you listen. It's reminding me of Big Sur.