Do You Wake Up On Your Own, And Wonder Where You Are, You Live With All Your Faults

--"Slide", Goo Goo Dolls

For as long as I've been listening to Rilo Kiley, which is a considerable length, there is one song I have never heard played live despite numerous requests to do just that. "Glendora" remains the only song in their catalogue that categorically will never grace their fans' ears. Oh, sure, there are reports that they played it back in the day, back when they were first gathering momentum as a band, around 2000-2002. But you would be fortunate to find a fan who can count themselves among the company who attended these mythic shows. It's kind of like Woodstock; you'll get people who make the claim, but very few people honestly heard the deed.

And what's so evil about the song that the band would adopt such a steadfast policy against playing it? What exactly is all the hubbub about? Well, as far as I can tell, it relates a story or situation where a young woman who allows to be mistreated by the guy she is with repeatedly. She comes to him, is made to feel bad in some way, swears she's had enough, and then comes crawling back to him. Is the whole scandal regarding that this is a story ripped from Jenny's own life? Who's to say? All I know is that the band's official position is that they wrote the song when they were first learning the ropes about songcraft. Subtlety wasn't a forte nor a foremost concern in those days as, it's true, this song out of all their songs contains some of the most graphically uncomfortable situations that you'll ever hear (e.g. being talked into a threesome despite her insistence she doesn't want to do it, shitting on a person's face). There isn't a clear-cut answer as to whether the animosity towards the song is more personal or professional in nature.

If it is personal, though, I can understand why they would be hesitant to revisit the topic. Nobody likes dragging the skeletons out of their closet time and time again. At the time, they probably wrote the song as some kind of catharsis, a way of purging the demons that may have possessed over. But, with each passing year, the need to get it out of her system diminished. Maybe there simply ceased to be any reason to reopen old wounds again.

I know there's many a post here and many a short story I've written which details knowledge I never expected to last into perpetuity. Sometimes I forget what I write doesn't just eventually fade like so much ink. Sometimes I fool myself into believing that I'm making my chicken scratch into the sand. It's times where I go digging into my archives that I realize how much of my life I've spilled onto the tablet. At those moments I get the irresistible urge to take it all back. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to delete posts from three or four years ago for fear somebody might come upon them that I don't want coming into contact with them. At the point when I write them I might be fearless, but years later the propensity for anxiety at their discovery runs very high for me.

It's in those moments my solidarity for Jenny becomes clear. I understand why my thoughts may need to be written down... but very often I fail to see the need for people to read them.

In the end, though, I always leave them up--mostly because of the sense that anybody who may have wanted to read them has already done so. But it's also because I believe it's partly my duty to stand by my thoughts. Anything I may have once believed, anything I may have felt at one time was important, doesn't suddenly lose its value just because my opinion may have changed. There's value in seeing the kind of person I was when I wrote the thoughts down. There's value in ascertaining the journey I've taken from there to here. And there's value in being secure that I as a person have nothing to hide.


I cry, I cry, I cry, I cry
then I complain, come back for more,
do it again

I mean--yeah, it's a great song. Yeah, it would mean the world to their fans. But sometimes as an artist you have to make decisions about your art on a purely personal level rather than an artistic level. I respect Jenny and company for not comprising their opinion that playing the song would compromise their beliefs... just as I hope many you can respect my belief that if I've got something to say it is important to me for a reason, and will continue to be important to me even if the reason for doing so fades away.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers