Ghostbusterbuster's Playlist

My name is Adrian. This isn't my legal name. I have an appointment to change it at the courthouse in two weeks. I was a prolific songwriter in my childhood. I continued writing songs in my adulthood but nowhere near as much. I was a teenager between the years 1989 and 1995. When I was thirteen I was still listening to oldies on the radio but gradually started picking up on pop as a result of flipping through the stations on my own when the airspace wasn't occupied by my parents or siblings. I lived in Chicago and the station I eventually stumbled into and hung out with mostly at that time was Q101, the alternative rock station. I still flipped over for a fix of oldies and also fell into spells with the hiphop stations B96 and Z95, which was also simultaneously mainly a rock station where I'd hear stuff like Guns N Roses and David Lee Roth. I was also a fan of programs on NPR. My tastes were fairly eclectic. One day I stumbled into a dirty damaged NWA cassette on the sidewalk in my neighborhood and got into rap too. My folks hated it. An interesting thing that happened while listening to the alt. stations was hearing my own songs, which progressively occurred with greater frequency in passing time. I would point out that a song playing on the radio was mine but my folks dismissed or ignored the sentiment and these experiences just became distant echoes. Sometimes though, I liked the songs and they'd become my favorite songs, and many of my favorite songs were my own songs. It was strange I guess but this is how it was. When I got to high school, I became aware that an underground cult following of some description was following me around so I delivered more songs through them until I dropped out of high school and ran away from home, continuing to write songs from Ann Arbor Michigan. When I wrote songs, I signed them with the names of the artists I wanted them to go to instead of my own and to this day have been formally credited with nothing since my identity has remained largely undisclosed. Things happened this way because I was raised by criminals, but I myself am not a criminal. I'm just a songwriter who wrote a lot of songs you might have heard. I recently began logging original author memoirs connected to these songs which are collecting in a working autobiography draft and also on a YouTube channel. If I posted them here, the word count would grossly exceed the entry quota. I'll share one lyric backstory here with you, though. Just one. This is the backstory to Stay Gold, released by and currently formally credited to First Aid Kit.

There was a girl in another classroom when I was in my second year of fifth grade at Trinity Lutheran, she was in fourth grade, and I went into her classroom to get a fresh pencil from the principal who was frequently baffled and irritated by my habit of using a pencil all the way down to the eraser with no yellow remaining, just the pencil tip coming from the metal eraser holding ring. Standard number 2 pencils aren't yellow though, they're a kind of gold or maize color. I went in there to get it because he was the teacher in that classroom and he issued them to me from his desk as I was permitted to report to him when my last pencil was short. And I saw this girl in his classroom and looked her in the eye and made a connection, and we later spoke with each other outside. I don't have the energy to get into that conversation at the moment but this song was written for her. I don't know how First Aid Kit got it and I didn't even remember that I did this until yesterday. Today is Tuesday April 23 2019. I don't remember her name but if I had one wish that would be it. To remember her name. I'm not a wishful person, though, and this is not my wish. It'll either happen or it won't. The girl and I were introduced by the principal who came to me and informed me that she wanted to talk to me and I was initially concerned about this on account of my monarch influenced dissociative condition at that time which I was full aware of and expressed to him. "I'll mediate," he said, "I'm your principal and the pastor of this church." "Okay." I said. So the school day ends and I'm walking down the sidewalk towards the Reese Park administrative building when she comes chasing after me, asking me where I'm going. I go to this building after school and wait there to be picked up and brought home in three hours, I said. I'd forgotten everything that happened during the school day already and shifted into a different mode and she didn't know this and had no idea who she was talking to. I remembered that I saw a girl that day, but I'd already forgotten her name and I figured maybe we'd see each other again the next day and wasn't expecting her to follow me off the school property into my personal realm. She was a tiny cute innocent short haired brunette with no malice in her eyes and along with my terminal attraction to her I was rushing and completely hazed by her chattering while at the same time at my wit's end with my personal situation and now in a position where I had to figure out what to do with her, determined, however, to find a way to reach her, as I'd decided that this was vitally important to both of us. So I picked her up and threw her. The plan wasn't to hurt her, I threw her into the grass, over to my right, and she tumbled and sat up, startled and calling after me because I was actually walking away. "Why did you do that?!? You better have a good explanation I'm scratched come back here you cut me when I fell! What's wrong with you! Tell me!" I realized at this point I didn't have an option but to turn around and talk to her. I sat down in front of her with maybe about ten feet of space between us. "I wanted your attention." I said. "Show me the cut, I'm sorry." she showed me, it was superficial, but I was still visibly emotionally phased at the sight of it. "I'll be fine," she said, "tell me why." "I'm trying to protect you from the monarchs." 'I know what that means," she said, "tell me why." "When school ends," I said, "I walk to this building and wait three hours for a psychopath that assaults me from that point forward all the way until I step foot back into school the next morning, but in this case it's Friday so we're looking at about sixty five hours here. This isn't your problem, but now we've met and you walked off the radar of the school and into a dangerous place. When we go back there we're protected to some extent by the staff and their internal structure, but only so long as we're there and even then I'm still under attack, which means we all are, and you don't know who else in there is dealing with these kinds of issues and who might be a target to hidden agendas lurking in the peripherals, and prayer doesn't solve the kind of problems were talking about here or I wouldn't be in this situation so I wanted to be able to see you directly eye to eye to share insight you might not already have about how desire opens you to attack and permits the monarchs to program you to do their bidding. Does the name Sandy Hook mean anything to you?" She showed an inquisitive expression. "It's an elementary school that fell victim to a psychopath who walked in and killed six teachers, twenty children, then himself.. after shooting his mom.. back home." "When did this happen?" "In the future... nevermind, I'm just trying to.." "Stop," she said, "I can get our parents to make arrangements to let us see each other, we can be friends.. we can be best friends.. please... that's what we want right? You want me, right? You called me, come on." "Of course it is," I said, "of course I do, of course all this makes me excited and aroused and emotional, but look it won't work, it'll all get polluted and we'll fall out at best with someone getting hurt in the process at worst. I know you chased me out here with Eric's permission but I'm an angry psycho out here by necessity of survival. When I'm old enough to get out of here, I'll remember you and by that time you'll be someone else but I wanted you to see here where I'm at because I think it's fair. People say words to each other like I love you or whatever words they are saying but their immaturity leaves them impatient and incapable of seeing each other eye to eye and hearing each other's needs so they're just throwing the person, just people throwing each other, out there, with their dishonesty, but you're honest and I want it to stay that way. You know, like Eric and his pencils. He takes my crazy midget pencils away, hands me new ones, and says "Stay gold." I hate gold, and I told him that, but I understand. He's a good man, I can't think of anything bad about him at all." "I want to know you," she said, "what do you do on your personal time. "I'm a songwriter." I said, and then I just started singing this song for her. "The sun shone high those few summer days... Left us in a soft, wide eyed haze... It shone like gold... It shone like gold... But just as the moon, it shines straight... So dawn goes down today.. No gold can stay... No gold can stay..." I turned my head and made a voice projection gesticulation with my hand, and yelled out the chorus off in a distant direction. "What if our hard work ends in despair, what if the road won't take me there, oh I wish, for once, we could stay gold. What if to love and be loved's not enough, what if I fall and can't bear to get up, oh I wish, for once, we could stay gold..." "Stop," she said, "you're freaking that guy out." There was some dude standing down the block, he walked past us earlier and she turned to him and said "it's alright". "Sorry..." I said, "I'll write it down and give it to Eric for you." She was staring directly at me and studying me hard the whole time, hunting the key to my soul, or maybe the Sphinx, hoping maybe it was the same key, so I said "You have it. Give it to me and I'll give it back to you." She was an educated Lutheran fourth grader that knew exactly what all this meant and did it. There was nothing else to say and we stood there still for a moment watching each other glow and cry until she finally reluctantly turned and headed back to the school. On Monday morning I hunted Eric down and handed him a piece of notebook paper with this song written on it. On the bottom it said First Aid Kit, Stockholm, and was dated. I don't remember if my own name was on it but probably not. This is for Crystal, I said. Her name was Crystal. He said she told him what happened, he forgave me, would pray for me, and would marry us. "That's impossible.", I remember thinking to myself, "I'm in a cult." and making a conscious effort not to broadcast this. "Thank you," I said out loud, "I'll take that into context." "Stay gold.", he said. "Stay gold." , I echoed. His last name was Schaumberg. Eric Schaumberg. “I'll get you out of that cult.” He said, as if he heard my thoughts audibly but didn't understand the meaning of the word cult.

In context to the timeframe of this backstory, I was not technically a teenager yet. I was obviously much older, in fact. But I mentioned in our conversation that my primary target demographic when I write songs is angsty teens because anxiety is poison to both the body and a society at large notorious for destroying unprepared and unsupported teenagers, so I wrote these songs, you see, as an extension of support, and my observations of any indication that this essentially makes any difference, when it occurs, disregarding my identity and ego, is what keeps me walking. There isn't any price I can put on you, I told her, or any human being for that matter. The internal discipline offered by my shared thoughts in my songs is what matters, I said, and there isn't a dollar amount for that either. I knew about teenage music playlists and I knew at that time they were liable to just enable and perpetuate internal stigmas rather than offer solution so my output carried the intrinsic value of intent to resonate peace of mind. When any song I heard spoke to me, be it my own or someone else's, it was because it carried that element. And that's still how it is today.

See embedded video on this entry for backstory to Awesome Sound by Ween.