TRIFECTIC

PATCH ERA 1: TRIFECTIC

July 15, 2010 -- I get a call while on my way to practice by the current drummer in the band. He's stressing out about all the material he needs to learn by July 30th for our On Veins and Nothing launch. I say "Just ride it out, it'll get easier." At the actual practice, it seems like everything is falling apart. Paul has an impromptu appointment out in the boonies of Wisconsin, Greg's car breaks down, and the drummer is trying to prevent himself from having a nervous breakdown.

Talking with the drummer, I tell him exactly what I need from him if he's going to be in PATCH. Someone who will tour, say yes to 75% of the gigs I ask them to do, someone who can practice at least nine hours a week if need be. He says he can't do any of those. As he is saying this, I know that he is out. He could keep going for another two weeks for the show, but I don't feel up to the stress of the possibility of him not knowing the material due to his stress, our stress, etc. It isn't going to work. As he is talking, I'm already formulating answers to the post-drummer dilemma. We agree it's for the best for him to quit then and there. We stay friends, I call my girlfriend to spit and spew and vent for 15 minutes (it's necessary, that process), and then sit down at my drumset and write one line down on the first sheet of a blank notebook:

"All these lines mocking the marks of my life . . ."

Feeling angry, sad, frustrated, I look at that line for a good five minutes in the practice space, notebook sitting on my snare. I call Greg. He picks up. I tell him, "No On Veins and Nothing, the project's changed to something between the three of us." Greg casually says "Okay!" Paul says the same thing a few days later.

12 people have come and gone in Patch Live in the past 9 months. That's a heinous amount. There is only one chance left to do this, or else a bullet to the brain seemed plausible . . . at least, in terms of doing Patch Live. I can't take another failed attempt at going live.

I go home, sit down in front of my computer, turn my phone off, and jot down notes . . .

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I came up seven songs that night. Random melodies and beats came to me. I committed them all to memory. When you're in a state of desperate anger you become more creative and are able to retain your findings easier. Seven songs. Three people in Patch. Three stories.

The subject matter was easy to figure out: my frustration with Patch Live. On Veins is about a broken heart. Trifectic was about a broken dream. And about the fight to make that dream a reality.

A. TRI

1. Preclusion

The significance of the word Preclusion is a big one for me and for a lot of my close friends. They make fun of me for using this word in the context of what it truly stands for. In my old band Citizens Banned, I always said Preclusion was the era of the band before we made it big. It was a prologue to success, but we were being successful in playing out, reaching for the dream. So it was a conclusion to the true pre-success era of the band. But things never worked out. The band fell apart.

The same thing happened in Patch back in February. I lost guitarists, bassists. I called the era Preclusion, writing material related to Schematics, our first EP, and a new sound. But that fizzled out pretty quickly with the loss of yet another bassist. Preclusion is basically my hope for a dream that always ends poorly, usually by the faults of others, and it affects me in a major way. I felt that I was at the end of my rope July 15th. Fuck, this song was going to be all about the "Try, Try Again" game I had been playing since Day 1 of Patch. We are three now (TRI), tried and beaten. But I realized we were the true bones making up the band all along.

2. Acknowledgements

The most literal song I've ever written. A basic BANG BANG BANG drop D shredder of anger and outright dark energy. Still reeling from the previous night, I got this one out in a matter of minutes. It's about everyone and no one, people that have been in Patch, and people in general. Sometimes I think of actual individuals while I sing it, other times it's about made up people. I've basically always said "What? You're leaving the band? Sigh . . . okay . . . we tried. Yeah, we're cool." Where did all the negative energy of those 12 foiled experiences go, piled together for nine continuous months within my brain? This song. No offense to those people. It was necessary. And it's only fair.



B. inFECtion

3. Whisper a Scream

I work with a child at my day job who most likely has autism, or a severe speech impediment. There's a small window within language development before seven years old where one could get help in order to find a way to bypass the impediment and develop normally. When this child started at our school, he was hopeless. Something was definitely wrong with him, but he was such a sweet child. I fell in love with him. My coworker and I tried to talk to his parents, but they were in complete denial. "Oh he's like that because we speak Spanish at home." Wrong! Did you know that you can actually learn every language on this green Earth and not have one impede on another before the age of 7? You could literally speak fluently in EVERY language if you wanted to before the language development peak at 7.

We were basically trying to rush the process with his parents to have him taken to therapy, maybe get diagnosed for early autism. But they wouldn't have it. Today, he's five years old, but he talks worse than his 26 month old sister (who is actually excelling in speech and is advanced for her age, ironically). His parents still haven't figured it out.

This song is my call out to him and his parents. I want him to figure out that there's something holding him back, and that he should be the one to scream to his parents, if even a tiny iota of a scream. A whisper, even. Before it's too late. C'mon! You can do it! Pleeeeeeeaseeeee . . . .

4. Silent Cache

Here I began branching off, creating a semi-fictional character who is beaten down by the world he lives in. He finds a way out in the end, but only after he's had to endure countless amounts of pain and failure for not getting the help he needed early in his life. He's a mute man, someone who can't speak for himself, even though he'd like to. He figures out a new way to exist that none of us could even fathom. Even my own call to him was detrimental. I get a little negative at our staff meetings when we discuss children's illnesses. Everyone has their fingers in the honeypot, too many cooks in the kitchen. Makes me uncomfortable. Too many opinions. That goes for anything in the world. Issues: there are too many sides, too many people get offended. Basically, this character can't give his opinion, he keeps it to himself (because he can't speak it), and finds a way out of the society we all seem to hate and bitch about whenever we can because he doesn't use his voice. He actually acts on something . . . when all we do is talk talk talk, never walking the walk. Maybe this child has an advantage over the rest of us . . .

5. An Act of 3

From the point of view of the character. It's about how he came to his new way of life and thinking. He goes on a mental rampage, killing everything in his head that stifled his potential to be somebody within society. He kills his political affiliations and starts from scratch on a new way of thinking about the world. He kills the doctors who told him he was autistic when it was too late. He's normal, just not in the same way. He kills his parents, who waited too long. This is all within his head (I think), and in the end he becomes someone new and prosperous. Does he commit suicide? The lyrics make it plausible, but I wasn't really going for that. It's kind of open ended.

This character is a personification of my struggle to speak in art, using an individual influenced by a real live boy that I work with to tell the story.


C. T:I:C

6. Here Again

Bringing the previous stories together into one mishmash ending, I take the styles of TRI (a progressive grunge sound) and inFECtion (a bluesy, folk sound) and put them into a jazzy blues grunge hodge podge (TrIfeC: TIC). Here Again and The Private Collective take place during a war. In my mind I tend to think WWII, but it could be any time, really. The war: one man's quest to become a man. To lose his youth and claim his dream, his career goals.

Here Again is youth personified as a female lover, pining for her soldier who has fled across the ocean of chance to the final confrontation of becoming an adult. She remembers how they met and how she knows she'll never see him again. She wonders if he ever thinks of her, if he'll ever send correspondence, tell her of his existence.

7. The Private Collective

The man questing for his adult status. He's fighting on a beach with untold amounts of other people questing for their dreams to be met. With the amount of laziness abound in this world and how people don't meet their potential, either by others fucking them over or by their own lack of ambition, I feel so few people ever truly become Adults, or successful dreamcatchers. A bunker, symbolizing the one true goal, shoots down all of these people in a sea of blood and gore. The man gets shot in the heart at one point (a nod to On Veins and Nothing, the next era in PATCH, and also one of the truest ways to make me stop dead in my ambitions -- I have a few demons I need help sifting out of me, let's just put it that way), and uses this against them. He takes it as his new strength and overtakes the bunker. But no one is inside when he reaches it. He sees fleets from the same enemy coming to shoot down what is now HIS bunker, and he mans the gun that was trying to shoot him down only moments before to protect his new status as a successful human being.

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By finally performing Patch to a live audience, I truly feel like I've reached that bunker. Hence, why it is the last song. But now I feel like I need to protect it, keep going. The first line of Trifectic: "All these lines mocking the marks of my life" and the last line "We're not boys anymore" symbolize the growth of nine months and beyond. I've become somewhat hardened by my attempts to make Patch a reality. More confrontational, unafraid to stand up for myself. Mature is most likely the right word for it, and I do feel like that. But Patch is far from a mature enterprise, meaning it doesn't play with adult rules and guidelines. It's about as crazy and loud as you can imagine music being. We are in touch with our youth, sending correspondence, but taking action to make things happen. In a world where 85% just let life slip by after college, this is the story of overcoming that obstacle and taking matters in one's own hands.

PK