OXBOW: For Lovers + Other Strangers

Because there's an art to blowing it, badly.

“Listening to Neurosis always made me feeling like I was the girlfriend getting an angry letter from a boyfriend,” the German woman smiled, and then laughed. I neither smiled nor laughed since I was quite sure that this was not at all Neurosis’ intent and yet…

You can’t control which way your cats will run when you let them loose and so spiraling down an OXBOW hole I found the case curious that outside of an early review in NME wherein they pegged our primum mobile, as some “unspecified disaster,” it’s always chafed that no one understood our music and oeuvre as the music of romance.

Nick Cave? Sure. He’s gone on record having stated that he was a fan of writing love letters and, indeed, with a song called “Love Letters” if you had missed the first 30 years of his music making you had to have gotten that.

But us and, more specifically, me with the lyrics, it mystified me that this was not so readily apparent.

Even after we created “Love’s Holiday". It was a standalone, spin-off project, at first. Now? Now, it’s the next newest OXBOW record after Thin Black Duke. So “Love’s Holiday” becomes Love’s Holiday, and it was initially eight songs of sleepy satisfaction with having survived the shotgun straits and nights of Fuckfest, King of the Jews, Let Me Be a Woman, Serenade in Red, An Evil Heat, Love That’s Last, The Narcotic Story and Thin Black Duke.

“So you two are boyfriend and girlfriend? This is getting sexier by the minute!”

“Ummm…”

Eight songs, over and out. Then 12. Then 15. Then 17. And at the conclusion of having sung the 17th song in the studio, a surprise: “could you write lyrics for that other one we’ve been working on?” It was a Niko offer, a challenge, a request.

“Sure.”

Eighteen songs. Love’s Holiday. The countenance of love, and helpless surrender to it, and the terror that takes hold when you can’t get ahold of yourself, it or anything else. This would be understood as such. Finally.

And yet…

We sat around a dinner table in Belgium a few years ago. Pre-show. The organizers had invited us over to one of their houses. One of them was a woman and her younger son and daughter, about eight and nine years old. It was Belgium and, given my understanding of such things, they were Flemish. And with that came a kind of comfortably confrontational conversational thing.

Americans are typically way too polite to do this on first blush but we’re not typical Americans and so as their questions got more personal and probing I looked on it as a welcome opportunity to do what I’ve said I always do: not find anything that I wouldn’t discuss. Also I know what’s coming, and when I’ve answered their last question, I smile: because it’s MY turn.

So there was OXBOW, the woman, her children, the promoter and another man at the table.

“So how long have you two been together?” I nod at the woman and the man, who seems to be with her in whatever sense people usually understand that. He seemed to be younger than her by about 10 years, so curiosity: “I mean how long have you been married?”

“Oh. We’re not married!” She smiled. The promoter cleared his throat while the kids cleared the table and the other man glanced down with what seemed…nerves? The rest of OXBOW would have been giving me what you could call “the look” had I bothered to notice but I was IN.

“Oh. So how long were you together when you decided to have kids?”

I smelled nerves. I felt like Columbo.

“They’re not his kids,” she said, still smiling. Just a little less so.

“So you two are boyfriend and girlfriend? This is getting sexier by the minute!”

“Ummm…”

“The father’s cool with this arrangement?”

“He’s dead.” And there it was. A 100-foot-cliff dive into it. But I had to thrust to their parry. I mean they knew that already, and they had to know that I didn’t know. Words like “heedless” and now “headlong” come to mind as I double down.

“Oh. Well, that’s too bad. How’d he die?” I figured cancer. A car accident.

“Suicide.”

Most of you would have stopped by now, right? Yeah, well…

“So this was your rebound relationship after that?”

“No.”

“So you two were having a relationship before he killed himself?” The man was looking down at the table and was nervous. And chuckling. The woman had mercy. On me. Everyone, really. And explained. For whatever reason the affair had occurred prior to and the father of the two tow-headed kids milling about doing post-prandial clean up, offed himself. I wanted to know how he killed himself since that will tell you a lot about how much he wanted to kill himself but the vibe was heavy.

Checkmate heavy.

I answered the only way I could: “Oh.”

“Everybody ready for dessert?”

Mostly silent nods and murmurs of assent. The dessert was delicious.

Later, following them back to the venue, the rest of OXBOW voiced what felt like a collective head shaking and Greg, the drummer, asked “you just couldn’t stop, could you?”

I sighed. “Yeah: no….” And I couldn’t. Did he love her so much he killed himself? Did he hate her? Or just himself? Or the lover? And the kids? They say there’s never any one reason why people kill themselves, but what were the other reasons?

We rode the rest of the way in silence. When we got to the venue I started pulling clothing out of my bag and saw that the kids had made cards and presents for us. Something about how happy they were to have met us and how much fun they had and that they hoped to see us again. I choked back tears. Not of sadness, necessarily. Just of…everything.

So…for lovers of everything…have a HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! The other options are not even close to being equally awful.