Well, eventhough I bought my tickets back in early June, the fact that I’ll be back in Stockholm on Tuesday finally feels “real”. My stay this time will be shorter, but I expect that I’ll have more fun since I’ll be staying with friends and not playing “tourist” as much as last time.
So what am I going to do while I’m there? I have no idea… and I don’t really even care… I just want to be back.
This has nothing to do with Sweden or anything but I thought it was funny so…
Back sometime in the early part of 2001, I was part of a goth-online-dating/social-network… I don’t even remember what it was called now. At the time I was really interested in meeting a goth girl… for obvious reasons. Anyway, I met a girl through that site (whose name I can’t remember either… (I want to say “Robin”, but whatever), she lived somewhere near El Dorado Hills (near Sacramento, CA). Her picture looked fake as fuck now that I think about it. It was a very grainy, professional looking picture of a woman near what looked like a castle, her back to the camera. It was very obscure and I wasn’t sure it was really even her, but she sounded cool and we talked a bunch through email and IM so I eventually agreed to meet up with her.
On the night we had arranged, I drove to her (actually, her parents’) house deep in the back roads of wherever the hell she lived. Shortly off of the freeway, the road to her place became unpaved, quite narrow, and very twisted. There were several times I was worried about wrecking, as her place was several miles down this road .Her house was fairly large with a small vineyard in front that her parents apparently owned. I remember seeing her for the first time as I walked to her front door; she was pretty overweight, and looked nothing like her “picture”. But, we still had a lot to talk about over dinner. She was supposedly a musician and the singer of a goth band. She went on telling me how all their equipment had recently been stolen, and how she might be leaving them and joining some other band and blah blah blah. I had told her to record some of her music for me prior to our meeting and as I left her house that night she gave me a cassette tape that had various goth music on it… and also a few songs by her “band”.
When I listened to the tape later there was one song in the selection of her “band’s” songs that I was totally in love with… but the recording was shit, like it had been dubbed many, many times. So I asked her about the song and if she had a cd copy of it. She never told me the name of the song, said that she had a cd “somewhere” but that she would have to find it and, again, blah blah blah. The song was really good… like REALLY fucking good… but I was never convinced that it was really her and her “band”. I never did get a better copy of the song and eventually she and I lost contact.
Fast forward to around 6 months ago when it was that I discovered a goth band, Claire Voyant (who happened to be from Sacramento)… There was a song on their latest album, Lustre, called “Into Oblivion” and the vocals in that song instantly reminded me of something I’d heard before. I had looked for their other albums but could never find any of them (for free anyways). So, today I was driving home from the grocery store and, being a little tired of listening to Kent, I popped in a cd that had Claire Voyant on it, and “Into Oblivion” came on. It finally clicked that the vocals reminded me of that song “Robin” had taped for me some 10 years ago, and they being from Sacramento made even more sense. I knew that all of their albums were on Amazon so I decided to sample some of the older songs. I was convinced “Robin’s” song would be among them…
I started with an album of theirs that was released around the time I met her… and the INSTANT the preview for track 4, titled “Everafter, began I knew it was the song. So fucking funny! This is a song I haven’t heard in at least 9 years, always wanted, that I got from a chick who I knew was lying to me about its origins… and 10 years later, I find it, as if I had just heard it yesterday. I immediately bought the cd.
As an aside, as I was listening to this song, it brought me back to that time which seems so very long ago now. I realized that I was so into this song at the time that I was inspired to write a song of my own in the same style. It is called “Drown”, and I wrote it in the early part of 2001.
Hejdå!
-j
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