My Eddie

Gee - can you tell I'm a fan?

He sang with a band called Moist in the 1990s. I saw their video for “Silver” on Muchmusic and immediately thought, Who is that? He stood out – his voice, his presence, his black hair and exotic eyes. He lived and breathed the awful torment of that fabulous lyric and I was absolutely enthralled.

His name is David Usher.

Moist didn’t survive, though they put out enough hits to make a compilation titled “Machine Punch Through” which showcases his voice. I almost regret buying none of their albums, except that David went solo and continues recording to this day. His eighth album came out last October. I didn’t bother to wait for amazon to ship it. I bought it cold from HMV.

You’d think from his lyrics that he’s the gloomiest, angriest, most messed-up man on the planet, but I believe he’s actually a pretty happy guy. Though his songs may be rife with rage and corruption, the music is hardly discordant. Much of it is quite beautiful, unplugged and featuring the occasional cello riff (?!) I hardly ever hear him on the radio out here; he gets more air time in Montreal, where he’s based, and he does show up in entertainment news around an album’s release. Last winter, when “Songs From the Last Day on Earth” came out, I caught a clip of him talking a) about the album’s cheerful title, and b) about his other life as a techno-geek developing social media software currently in use by two western Canadian NHL teams and his work with Amnesty International and McGill University. Make no mistake. This guy is the son of an Oxford economics professor and an artist, and has a degree in political science. He’s a smart man.

His voice soars from breathy lullaby to impassioned howl in one long note. He can pour so much feeling into a single word that my skin responds with goosebumps. He’s one of the rare few whose work I will buy unheard. The joy for me is in discovering new gems in the jewel box.

I wonder sometimes why his music calls to me so strongly. I used to razz Laura about playing Pearl Jam during my massage appointments, but I learned to appreciate Eddie Vedder’s gift for making art of apocalyptic emotion. One song (I never knew the title) was a cheery toe-tapper that turned out to be a condemned man’s countdown to the noose, and danged if that didn’t beat all. “Good old Ed,” I remarked dryly, “always the happy-go-lucky optimist.” And Laura loosed her throaty smoke-and-whiskey laugh. The day I learned she was ill, the first song on David’s new album flared to mind and looped me into scattering stars for her across my office bulletin board.

Here at the end of the world, I can still see the stars.

Then it hit me. David Usher is my Eddie Vedder.

(Ru note - This post was scheduled last weekend for uploading today. It turns out to be an strange coincidence. Pearl Jam is playing Vancouver on December 4. I got the pre-sale notification yesterday and my first thought was: Laura would love to be there! Silly me. She now has an all access pass. Yes, I miss her, but after the initial reminder of loss, the smiles returned with the memories. As Theodore Geisel once said, "Don't cry because it's over; smile because it happened.")

Just Breathe

A friend passed away last week. I only heard today, but the weird thing is that I’d been thinking about her all weekend, wanting to call and see how she and wifey were doing, to let them know I was sending good energy … to no avail, it seems. The chances of surviving pancreatic cancer once it’s spread to the liver are pretty slim. She was diagnosed in January and two months later, the call happens.

How can it be a shock when it’s not really a surprise?

She was my massage therapist, but you can’t spend an hour each month for years with someone and not discover common ground and share stories and become familiar enough to grow fond of each other. She made me laugh. Oh, she made me laugh. She’d play Eddie Vedder and his ukulele during our sessions; she was a huge Pearl Jam fan and Ed was her man. I learned a lot about him from her. I learned a lot of things. We talked about energy and music and universal cycles and TV shows and family and I will miss her. She was brave and funny and she shot from the hip. She loved her wife and her adopted family, and she meant a lot to a lot of people. I bet she’d have meant a lot to Eddie, too. She wanted to be his massage therapist, after all. Everyone needs a good masssage therapist.

I’ll miss her for more than the massages, though. I’ll miss the stories of following PJ on tour and tracking Ed to ground in Seattle (she never met him … but she did see his house from afar!) I’m grateful to have known her, and for all that I don’t understand why she had to go when there finally seemed like nothing but open road before her, I have to believe that strength will come from surviving her loss. She’s fine. I know that for a fact. It’s the void left behind that I don’t understand, especially after all she and her wife had been through over the past years.

I’ll never be a Pearl Jam fan, but because of her, I have a favourite song. Ironically or perhaps appropriately, it’s called “Just Breathe”. For the rest of my life, whenever I hear Ed’s earthy growl or his unearthly wail, I will remember Laura.

Please tell someone that you love them. It’s more important than you think.