Swim for the music that saves you

There are a handful of people in the world who will understand where I’m coming from with this and far more who can never fully understand because they will never experience it. But the truth is of all the artistic mediums available to us, music is the one with the most power. It is a select few who are overcome by emotion at the sight of a painting or sculpture. A few more have a similar reaction to poetry or fiction. But music… how many people have you met in your life who admit to crying over a sad love song? My guess is that even if you haven’t kept count, the number would be quite high. Somewhere around 70ish, maybe 80% of everyone you’ve met has had some kind of emotional reaction to a song at some point in their life. Most of the remaining few are passive listeners who consider music to be trivial or “background noise” and have never formed the attachment.

Several years ago, I was in a relationship. It was an intense hurricane of a relationship so the only way it could have possibly ended was in an intense hurricane of a break up. The Reader’s Digest version is that I was numb. For a long time. Friends have admitted to worrying that I would go to sleep one night and not wake up, that the heartbreak would put so much stress on my body that it would simply shut down. Because the thing about being numb is that you know there should be pain but you don’t feel it. When you don’t feel it, you don’t express it. When you don’t express it, it eats away at you without you even knowing it.

But the thing that pulled me out of it, what made me start to feel again, was music. Because so much of that intense hurricane of a relationship was centered around music, I had to start over from scratch, finding new bands, new music. Some of what had been mine before remained mine without memories of what I had lost and I clung to those songs with everything I had. I also took on a quest to build a completely new library.

Most integral in my healing process were Kill Hannah, Dashboard Confessional, AFI and Something Corporate. The music, the lyrics, the way they made me feel…that they made me feel… became, and still is, so much more important to me than I could ever completely explain. This is where the handful of people who understand come in. If you’ve been there, if you’ve seen the power of music to heal, then you know what I’m talking about. Until you go through it, you can process the stories of people like me as we talk passionately about our saving grace and you won’t judge us for being melodramatic and you can nod your head and say you understand but I think it really is something that is better understood with the heart, not the mind. And the best way to understand with your heart is to FEEL something is true, not just know it.

While there were four main bands I feel were responsible for repairing my broken heart, today I got the words “Swim for the music that saves you” tattooed on my chest. Something Corporate broke up shortly after everything I went through. Their leader, Andrew McMahon, was diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukemia (which he has since conquered) and through that started the Dear Jack Foundation and the band Jack’s Mannequin. Jack’s Mannequin’s second album, the Glass Passenger, featured a song called Swim, which is all about not letting life get the best of you. “Just keep your head above.” Keep swimming, don’t drown in your struggles, in you pain, in life. It all rang so true to me. All too often I have said I feel like I am drowning in whatever crap I’m experiencing at the moment. Sometimes real problems like bills, other times my own invented problems like lack of creativity. So the message of just keep your head above and swim has become something I go to whenever I need comfort or inspiration or just want to hear something beautiful. And because it is always music that I turn to, because it was music that pulled me from the darkness, “Swim for the music that saves you,” seemed like the best bet for a tattoo to pay tribute to Andrew McMahon who has been so important and so inspirational throughout the past 11 years.

I toyed with the line, “Just keep your head above, swim” but then I finally had the chance to see Andrew play live (I’ve had dozens of opportunities between Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin but sometimes life gets in the way) over this past weekend (March 29, 2013) and the tidal wave of emotion that I went through, sobbing my way through some of the more important songs, I knew it couldn’t be anything except what I finally ended up with. I waited outside the venue after the show with a couple dozen other fans for nearly an hour. Just as I was giving up a line formed for autographs. I got my ticket signed and asked if he would please write swim on the other side so that I could use it for a tattoo. Now it’s on my skin and I will always have that message with me. “Swim for the music that saves you, when you’re not so sure you’ll survive.”

My ticket stub with Andrew McMahon’s writing on the back.

The resulting tattoo. Simple, no frills, just the perfect message.

And…. the song:

To Do List

So this past month I have been going to school. It’s not at all where I thought I would be this time last year (or 13ish, 14 months ago) when I was struggling to get my application materials together for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but mostly I think I’ve made a good decision. There are some things that have really frustrated me. I love to learn new things but I hate to struggle with learning them… yeah? Makes sense, right? Anyway, the “book larnin’” part has been super easy; I think out of 200-250 collective exam questions so far, I’ve missed 10? So that part is easy peasy. And some of the practical stuff hasn’t been terrible. I get pin curls and finger waves (retro styles! Victory rolls! Rockabilly! Wahey!) and braiding (hmmm I’ve been braiding hair since I was 16…ish… so I should have that under control, right?) and I think manicures and pedicures will be easy after a couple victims. But the ridiculous curling iron we are using is a nightmare, being short sucks… and of course a brief list of things that are directly related to my health and body type but none of that was the point of this story….

The point is the dollar signs. When I enrolled and signed my contract and whatnot, the owner/director of the school said their graduates rarely make less than $20-30k a year, and that’s the ones who “settle” for working in a mall chain like Cost Cutters or Great Clips. But that’s the bottom of the heap. So naturally, I start spending money I don’t have yet, banking on skills I have yet to master. Whatev. This is what I’ve come up with so far for a to do list with my new found (almost) wealth:

Travel with a band.
Someone with an awesome band (see previous posts for my musical definition of “awesome”) please hire me to be your private stylist. In 13 months I will know how to cut, color and style your hair, apply your make up….also give manicures, pedicures, wax your hair…. ummmmm Surely someone out there will have a need for these things. And (hopefully) I will be just as much a rockstar as you are.

Move to a city.
After all of that ^, or while the band is taking a break from touring, I will need something more like a home base. I’m most recently drawn to Chicago but they have this horrible thing there called winter and while we have that here too, it would be nice to live somewhere it didn’t exist for a while. Regardless, I plan to move to a major metropolitan area and work in or own my own super awesome salon where I will have awesome clients and make mucho dinero.

Travel.
Aside from “with a band,” I want to explore. One of those musical hero people I’ve mentioned on here before, Mat Devine, once offered a fan the advice that she needed to get on “the wrong bus,” follow it to the end of the line then get off and explore the new surroundings. Every couple of years (every year? Maybe that’s pushing things) I want to play Priceline roulette. Where can I go for $xxx round trip (fill in the xxx with whatever number is most affordable at the time, keeping in mind that I still have to eat and exploring will inevitably cost money – if nothing else, transportation, trains, buses, taxis…)? I am not a spontaneous person but I know a lot of that has to do with worrying about money. I’d love not to worry about money and just run away to somewhere random.

Write.
Definitely not abandoning this goal. I feel like my art will always be a part of me, regardless of what I choose as a “day job.” I mean, the ultimate goal of this new education is a “career” but who says a person can’t have two careers at the same time? And if someone does say that, why do we listen to what other people think about things that are none of their business anyway? But hopefully, with a legitimate career level income funding everything I can get some stuff out to the public and really start getting some attention…hopefully.

I guess that’s really all. I thought there was more but I really can’t think of what it might have been at this point. If you read all of this, thank you for listening to me ramble. If you didn’t, well then you’re not reading this so it really was a wasted sentence then, wasn’t it?

Don’t mind me….just complaining

In a previous post (here), I started to talk about feeling like no one really has any interest in my creative works and promised another rant for another day. Well, this is that day.

Eight years ago, I started my own literary magazine, online. “’Zine” technically since it was run on no budget and for no profit. It was all about science fiction, fantasy and horror stories and poetry, when I started, and as time went on progressed into “speculative fiction,” which is really just an easy way to say all of that other stuff plus anything that doesn’t easily fit into some other genre. For my readers and contributors, I defined it as anything that questions “why not?” or “why can’t this be true?” I set up an anthology to collect all of the reader submissions that had been sent in and set up a publishing company to represent said anthology.

Last year, I set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to support creation of a second anthology with free copies to all of the contributors as well as maybe a paper version of the magazine. I got $5. On the last day.

Somewhere in all of this mess, I read a book called Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities. What happened was… There were a few pretty serious incidents of hazing and of alcohol-related deaths at various fraternities and sororities around the country and these received a great deal of national media attention, in addition to MTV’s Fraternity Life and Sorority Life “reality” shows that were anything but real. In response, the National Panhellenic Council put all of its member organizations under a media blackout. No one involved with any of these organizations were allowed to speak to the press about anything, positive or negative. Alexandra Robbins found a way around this and went “under cover” as a sorority pledge and wrote a book about her experiences.

Needless to say, controversy sells so Pledged did not paint the most flattering of pictures. Neither did MTV. Or the alcohol poisoning deaths at CU-Boulder. So I decided to use my sparkly new, Library of Congress-registered publishing company to do something productive. I started asking anywhere and everywhere I could think of for sorority members, both active and alumnae, to submit their personal stories about what sorority sisterhood is really about. One of my own sisters, from another chapter, deleted my request from one place. I sent a letter to the presidents of the National Panhellenic Council and National Pan-Hellenic Conference, asking them to circulate the information to their member sororities. I got nothing.

The idea was to collect stories. Chicken Soup style stories, happy stories, sad stories, funny stories, anything to counteract the miserable image the media was spreading. I was planning to donate the proceeds from selling the books to a female-based charity that the contributors voted on. Susan G. Komen, Take Back the Night, V-Day, the Polaris Project, RAINN, something to benefit women since sororities are all about helping girls become women and helping women be successful. – Wow, that sounded like a commercial! Someone write that down and put it in a recruitment brochure! – Anyway… I talked to some of my own sisters about it and while they thought it was a great idea and supported me in it, they didn’t feel like they had anything to contribute. But to be ignored by the heads of the NPC and NPHC was discouraging. I didn’t know where else to go – outside of Craig’s List – to get serious, legitimate stories from real sorority members. Posting an ad on Craig’s List might get stories but how would I prove they were from real sorority members? I didn’t want to put together a bunch of made up crap and call it real, thus destroying my credibility and that of the book. So I put it away and haven’t really touched it in a couple of years.

I feel like I whore myself out as much as I can without being That Guy. I feel like I am constantly promoting myself – read this, look at this, listen to this, BUY THINGS AND GIVE ME YOUR MONEY!!!!! – but still not getting anywhere. I have decided in the last few weeks that I really want to start making jewelry in mass quantities to sell it. And then that miserable, critical little voice says, “You’re going to spend hundreds of dollars on tools and supplies and have hundreds of dollars worth of costume jewelry laying around collecting dust because no one will buy it.” So I just shop and don’t buy and feel sad and feel defeated and eat ice cream. And it’s like that with everything. I have a book that six people have bought in six years. I hosted a podcast show that 10 people listened to.

I don’t want to be rich or famous. Comfortably well off and recognized on the street would be cool. I just want to make art and have people like it well enough to want to own it…for money, not for free. And I really want to do some big project – like my sorority stories – that I can donate to charity. In addition to the other things I do.

I don’t know, anymore. I guess whatever. Complaining about it here isn’t going to make it any better. But now you know.

Gun Control

Disclaimer: The following is my opinion. No one else’s but my own. Well, some of you may agree with it, making it your opinion as well, but the point is, I speak completely and totally for myself. And I do it with sarcasm, flare and attitude befitting a person half my age. Not sorry. I have researched my points, as I always do in these situations but some arguments in this debate simply warrant nothing more than a raspberry from sixteen year old me in response.

Bullet point #1 – Banning guns won’t make them go away any more than banning cocaine.

WELL THEN by all means, let’s just make everything legal and available to everyone, regardless of criminal history or psychiatric health, because making things illegal doesn’t solve any problems ever. I honestly can’t put together a logical argument against this because it’s an illogical argument to begin with. So I resort to sarcasm, my weapon of choice.

Bullet point #2 – Banning guns is a violation of the Second Amendment

This, to me, is a very American way of thinking. Well, I mean, of course it is because the Second Amendment is a strictly American problem…. but first of all, no one is trying to ban guns. They are trying to ban guns which have no purpose in this world other than to kill humans. I mean, for real, how often are military personnel called upon, in the line of duty, to hunt big game? Or small game? Or squirrels? Military weapons are designed to kill humans, and as many humans as possible as quickly as possible. Yes. This is a defensive strategy. However, this is not a defensive strategy that needs to be employed in the average domestic civilian home. The next time your home is invaded by a platoon of thirty enemy soldiers we can talk about your need for an automatic or semi-automatic weapon that holds more than 10 bullets at a time. Until then… Until then, the Second Amendment doesn’t say a word about how many bullets a person has the right to load into their firearm or how many of those bullets they should be allowed to expel in a given period of time.

Subsequently, to play devil’s advocate, knives, swords, slingshots, bows and arrows, rocks, beer bottles, baseball bats, golf clubs and forks are all possible “arms” as well (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arm, scroll down to definition 2 that says nothing about guns). The Second Amendment allows the “right to keep and bear arms” not “keep and bear firearms.” Which kind of makes your argument invalid and all that other stuff I said before unnecessary, but there it is.

Bullet point #3 – Hitler took guns away from the Austrians too.

Wow, really? Really? John Howard took guns away from the Australians and they seem to be doing okay for it, but you’re going to go with Hitler? Once again… there is no logic to be disputed here. Just fear mongering and hate. I can’t argue with that. Honestly, having read Australia’s gun laws, I think Obama’s “Nazi” gun control is too lenient. Sure, baby steps, fine but I am kind of in love with Australia’s regulations. Yeah, okay, I’m a flaming liberal, whatever (you should totally hear that in an insubordinate teenaged voice, and imagine me rolling my eyes as I say it), but if you are a law-abiding citizen with no real plans to harm other humans with your weaponry, rules and regulations really shouldn’t be an issue. There is no logical reason anyone should need to buy a gun on the spur of the moment; 28 days is perfectly reasonable, if you are a rational, logical thinking person who plans to use said gun for lawful purposes. Also, I see NOTHING wrong with being asked to prove why you need a sixth, seventh, twenty-eighth firearm to protect your home or livestock or to hunt for food. But, among other things, Americans have this weird mentality: “If it has proven successful (15 years is a pretty good time test, I think) in other countries, then we absolutely must avoid it like the gods damned plague because there is NO POSSIBLE WAY it could ever work here.”

Please excuse my sarcasm. Or don’t, whatever, I really don’t care what you do with my sarcasm. But it is the biggest reason I’ve avoided posting a response to this issue. Because some of the (my) opposition’s arguments are so blatantly absurd that sarcasm really is the only rebuttal. That and banging my head against a wall until either I pass out or the concussion makes their arguments start to sound sensible. Some of the arguments are logical, misguided and misinformed (the arguments about the Second Amendment, for example) but logical enough. Most…are not.

There are several more points I could cover here but I think these are the main ones and do well to share my opinions with everyone else. Feel free to comment. Flame me if you wish – I won’t respond if you do and will probably delete your comment but feel free to exercise your First Amendment right to call me a flaming liberal (there, I’ve done it twice, now, so it will really just make you look silly if you do it too) or whatever other name you dream up. Whatever, it’s out of my head now, I can move on.

Friends and friendships

Sometimes – most of the time – I feel like I am a terrible friend to people. I don’t know how to cope with emotional situations – my own or anyone else’s. I have no problem with someone coming to me to “cry on my shoulder,” but when they do – especially now where most of them do it online through emails and whatever – I don’t know what to do, what to say. I find myself relegated to “I’m sorry,” which is one of my least favorite sentences ever. Sometimes I say degrading things like “men suck,” or … well, that’s the only example I can think of at the moment. Regardless, I know those things aren’t helpful but it’s all I have.

I say “especially now” but I don’t really do so well in person either. I guess I do okay when someone comes to me specifically and literally cries on my shoulder (or lap or whatever). Then words aren’t as important. You can just rub their back or hair or whatever and let them cry it out and make Mojitos when they’re finished. But being part of a group where one person is upset and everyone else is comforting them, which I often am anymore, I feel awkward and don’t know how to do anything but sit by and feel helpless.

It’s not just about the emotional things either. Not completely. I feel like in order to keep a friendship growing, the friends need to converse on a regular basis but I don’t feel like I have anything to say. I will occasionally send someone a message just saying hi how are you but then I don’t know where to go with it from there, after they respond. And I dread the moment when they ask what did you do today? Because even if I didn’t sit on the couch working on a crochet project or staring at Facebook, even if I walked to Starbucks and had a cup of coffee while I read my book, it sounds like the dumbest thing imaginable and why would anyone want to hear about that?

In the past couple of years, I have become a very conflicted person. I am confident in my abilities but don’t believe other people see them. Or see them as anything worth being confident about. I know that I am a good writer – I know I could be better – but I feel like that isn’t an important thing to be. I don’t know what caused this kind of self-doubt but I feel like it has affected the way I interact with other people. Like, I am a good writer and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, not really, but when someone asks, I almost feel like they are going to judge me when I tell them. So I just don’t. I had the LP Association, THE fanbase for Linkin Park, the group to whom Mike Shinoda leaked their newest album, tweet the link to my review of Living Things before I even knew it had gone live, and said it was a great review. I am insanely proud of that. I don’t think anyone else cares. So I don’t tell them.*

This seems to have derailed from why I feel like a bad friend to why I shut myself off from other people. Which I guess are two sides of the same coin. But the truth is I don’t know how to do things I think I used to be able to do. Like be friends with people. I have always been kind of a silent observer when I am part of large groups of people. It’s just part of being an art freak – watch people and get inspirations for creating art. But not since I was sixteen/seventeen years old have I felt so afraid of being unwanted, disliked and judged because I’m not doing things the way they should be done. I feel like I push people away without even knowing it. I feel like I am not worthy of being friends with some people or that I am friends with them for a short time and then they just kind of put me in a box marked acquaintances because I’m not friendly enough.

I don’t know if any of this makes any sense. It doesn’t really to me, why should it to any of you? I guess the sum of it is, I feel like I have recently lost a friend because I didn’t know what to say to them without coming off as dull or – worse – clingy. I have another friend who has been going through a lot of shit and I haven’t said one supportive thing to her – because I don’t know what that supportive thing is. “I’m sorry.” That’s all I’ve got for her. And there have been some other things too, with other people, that just as a whole, make me feel like I’m a terrible friend.

* There is more to this that goes off in a different direction, all about chasing dreams but I’ll get to that one later.

Here is MY Effing Resume…

I read another writer’s blog where he lamented the absurdity of the “standard” resume/CV format that outlines a whole bunch of facts and chronological bullet points but really doesn’t say anything about the applicant as a member of the human race. Which is essentially what the cover letter is supposed to do but I have seen that people either don’t understand that or are afraid to be informal in this formal application process.

Anyway, this writer put together his own resume, highlighting all of the points he thought were important. Some were career/background related, others were highly personal anecdotes. And I took his post (found here) as a challenge (as did a couple of my friends and I look forward to reading what they come up with when they get to that point) and have written my own version of his “effin resume” below:

1. I invest myself personally into everything I touch. It causes me to be intensely proud and leaves me open to injury. It makes me worry and it causes melodramatic levels of joy. It makes me spend too much time on projects and it frustrates me when other people are not as invested. This is a flaw and a strength, all wrapped up into one chaotic and sloppily wrapped package and I think it is necessary to my successes.

2. I am a thinker. My favorite word is why, even when the answer brings to light horrible emotions – sorrow, rage, pain – but those emotions are what leads me to the next thing which is…

3. I have more enormous ideas than I know what to do with. Some of them would change the world, some would just change my own world.

4. I have: made milkshakes, helped college students write better; written, reviewed, revised and interpreted legislation; designed websites, designed tee-shirts, managed retail workers, promoted bands and written words people have paid me for.

5. I have: visited cities I loved and it’s only made me want to visit more cities I will also love, seen a Broadway theatre from the stage, made friends all over the world, written more novel(lla)s than I have forgotten about, written a lot more words people haven’t paid me for, published my own book, registered my own publishing company with the Library of Congress, hosted an internet radio show and met people who never stop inspiring me.

6. I see stories of novelists boasting six figure months and freelance writers earning $60 thousand a year salaries and I want to join their elite club. Not because I want wealth and or fame but because I want to do things without thinking. I want to say, on Monday, “let’s go to India,” and touch down in Dubai on Friday.

7. I have never been the type to “eat my feelings,” but I do gravitate toward food for so many other things. I have found no better venue to beget the kinds of conversations that improve friendships and strengthen relationships than an otherwise empty diner in the wee hours of the morning. My college friends and I called it “going for coffee,” and while coffee was always included what that phrase really meant was relegating ourselves to a back booth in the nearby IHOP to spend several hours – and several pots of coffee – catching up on each other’s lives.

8. I “see” the world in a way that only a select few really ever get to experience. It encompasses everything from seeing the almost imperceptible differences in hues that others tend to miss or recognizing that just deboarding a plane and walking into the airport has a different energy in every different city and of course going into the city itself makes that energy even stronger. Maybe it’s being hyper sensitive, maybe it’s being an artist but I have met more people who are not like me than people who are.

9. I am currently: a novelist a music reviewer, a columnist, an amateur photographer, a music promoter, single.

10. I eat junk food and drink things I “shouldn’t” but not to the extent that I see some other people doing these things. I am almost jealous of people who are able to cut the cookies or sodas out of their diet and lose weight. I, on the other hand, don’t see how cutting out one can of soda every two weeks or four cookies in one week is going to make a marked improvement on my diet.

11. I sing. I used to sing well, now I just sing. Everywhere. Except in the shower but everywhere else. In the car, in the kitchen, in the supermarket, in the mall. It doesn’t embarrass me when people catch me singing although I think it tends to embarrass the people I am with when I do it in more public places. But that’s not really my problem, I don’t think.

12. I was a terrible student, not because I wasn’t smart but because I was smarter than everyone else by leaps and bounds. I was tested for the Gifted and Talented program but didn’t ever “get in.” None of us did. We were never told why. I comfort myself by saying not enough of us passed the test to make the program efficient. I mean, it would be a little impractical to bring in a special teacher and implement a special curriculum for one or two students, right? So that’s the reason I created for myself since no one would give me a real one. I had one amazing teacher who understood all of that and I wish all teachers could be like him. He saw the world in that special way too.

13. When I was a kid, I spent every night after I was supposed to be in bed sleeping, gathering a “fire kit.” Basically a few sets of clothes, a couple of blankets and all of the toys and things I loved so I could save them if our house caught on fire. I didn’t know anyone who had lost a home to a fire, it was simply something I created on my own.

14. I am a big city kid, all the way down to my core. I have always lived in small towns (100,000 people was the biggest) and always dreamed of living somewhere bigger. When I was a teen it was Seattle, later Austin, now anywhere with suburbs and a skyline would probably make me happy.

15. Chicken pox are most contagious the day before the sores appear. My sores appeared the day after I had been at a music exhibition with kids from a dozen or two other schools. State wide epidemic, go me!

16. I have seen first hand the power of music. It can unite people who otherwise would not have known one another, it can make people happy, sad, angry, motivated, inspired, it can make people fall in or out of love, it can heal and harm and it can save lives. Its power can be felt in any language, by people of vastly differing backgrounds, cultures, faiths, with little or no translation. And I have met people who don’t understand all of that and I want nothing more than to help them because it is truly the most powerful artistic medium we have at our disposal.

Open letter to Kill Hannah and the Kill Hannah Kollective

It’s been eight years since some crazy act of fate led me to the song that saved my life. A group of relative unknowns out of Chicago had recently joined the Atlantic Records roster but in a bizarre twist I can’t help but think was meant to be, they never changed their label affiliation on their MySpace account from “unsigned” to “major label” so, even though it shouldn’t have, their song, Kennedy showed up on one of my searches for new, unsigned talent. It turned out to be exactly what I needed at the time.

But I’ve already told that story. This is something else.

In 2007 – two years later – I started getting private messages on MySpace, asking me to join the “Kill Hannah Kult.” I admit, the name was definitely off-putting, but more than that, I was already part of the AFI and Good Charlotte street teams and the last I’d heard of either of them (to this day) was the automated welcome emails. So joining another street team seemed a little silly. As they say, if I’d have known then, what I know now… If I’d have know the intense force that team would become I think I would have been honored to have been able to help build it.

Of course, that’s not possible, but I can be grateful for the time I’ve had with the Kollective (as it was later renamed). I’ve learned so much and been given the opportunity to lead a terrific team of dedicated promoters and fans. But more than that I have met some of the most amazing people. I have built friendships I can’t imagine life without. I brought three of my best friends in and have come away with two more, plus a handful of new surrogate brothers and sisters. These are people to whom I can take just about any problem to get advice or just a sympathetic ear. We share more than just the love of the music and group that brought us together. In many cases, we really are a family. We offer one another solace in times of struggle and pain, we rejoice in one another’s triumphs and we share all of the times in between.

Of course there are some of you for whom I have so much more gratitude to offer than this simple letter can possibly provide. But the biggest thank you goes to the band and the man who brought us all together. So to Kill Hannah and to Mat Devine, thank you. Without you and the music that you have given us over the years, we wouldn’t have each other.