Music Therapy

Photo Source: www.primaveraclub.com

It's not very often that I look to friends to see what they have been listening to. I have maybe 3 people in my life that I say, "Hey, tell me a different band to check out." I trust these people to clue me in to a sound I can't believe I've been missing out on.

Recently, one of these people told me to check out The Twilight Singers. The lead singer of The Afghan Whigs, Greg Dulli, began The Twilight Singers back in 1997. Originating in Cincinnati, the band now has 4 albums for our listening pleasure. My favorite track was instantly "Forty Dollars", from their most recent album Powder Burns released in 2006. Turns out Dulli was completely taken by drugs while writing it.

Photo Source: www.thetwilightsingers.com

On the band's website, Greg Dulli talks about some of his deepest emotions and his hardest times:

"I started on this album two years ago," Dulli recalls. "Up to that point, I had lived in a fucking drug haze for seven years. The two oldest songs on the record, ‘Forty Dollars' and ‘Dead To Rights,' were written in a complete fog of everyday drug abuse—to the point where I don't really even remember writing or playing them. I could probably never write those songs ever again. During most of the writing of this record, I was straightening myself out, getting my shit together, learning how to live unclouded."

In 2002, Dulli's best friend passed away from a heart attack due to drug abuse:

"Blackberry Belle was my requiem for Ted Demme," he says in hindsight. "When someone that close to you dies, something dies with them. The circumstances under which Teddy died could've taken me one of two ways. It could've cleaned me up and straightened me out, or it could've sent me deeper into the abyss, which is exactly where I went. I had a degree of guilt for living when someone else did not. Perhaps I wanted to see how much it would take for that to happen to me—to see if I was indestructible. I have that kind of ego."

Despite the abstraction involved, some tracks, like the wrenchingly epic comedown rocker "Bonnie Brae," remain based on very real people going through very traumatic moments; in "Bonnie Brae," it's the possibility that Dulli might lose yet another close friend to narcotics—or himself. "'Bonnie Brae' describes a specific event I observed that I'll never forget," he says. "I was cleansing myself of the badness, but was in close proximity to someone who was deep in it. That brought things into real focus: what happened to them could've very easily happened me. That was my first real meditation on the life I had been living."

Photo Source: www.brooklynrecord.com

Reading about some of the heartwrenching events in which Dulli has barely made it out alive, makes you want to listen to all of his songs. Like a book tells a story, The Twilight Singers tell a story, too. Both through words, but theirs with music, as well. I wonder what is going to happen next.

Sponsored by EnterTo.com the first REAL spam free email

Click Below to discover and share content from anywhere on the web

Music Amused

Music Therapy