In One of the Many Places You’re Not, I Am

being a personal essay and photos about the band Why? that was supposed to be a show review by Benjamin “Benny” Burwell St. Maur.

I’ve received a lot of great advice directly from Why?’s songwriter Yoni Wolf over the last few months. I mean, when I say “directly,” I mean, obviously, “indirectly”—through his songs—but directly in the sense that those songs have been broadcasting directly into my head pretty much non-stop for the last six months. And, okay, I guess you wouldn’t call it advice, necessarily, because it’s not so much that Yoni is sitting down and saying, “Look, man…” These lessons, these pieces of knowledge and wry wisdom, come from Yoni singing about his own life. But he just seems to know what he’s talking about, seems so trustworthy, like an old friend who’s gone through some weird shit and has come out of it with a bunch of great stories. It’s hard not to feel like there’s something you could learn from the guy.
.
Yoni goes, “I should cut down my caloric intake. I should go to sleep hungry and wake up with my guts knotted up, ears open like a burnt-down hut.” And I go, yeah, man, that seems right. You probably should do that, and I should probably do that too. Yoni tells me he keeps a tape recorder by his bedside table and I think that’s brilliant, why didn’t I think of that? Yoni goes, “I sleep on my back ‘cause it’s good for the spine and coffin rehearsal,” and the mixture of practicality, poetry and sheer morbidity in that statement astounds me every time. And when he sings about how he should “always be working on a suicide note,” I can’t help but think that seems reasonable. Because he’s absolutely right. It’s best to be prepared.

Let me clarify something, get the hard facts out of the way: I saw Why? play the hi-dive last week, Monday, September 29, with Restiform Bodies and Pictureplane. But there’s a slightly longer story leading up to that, a history involving these additional facts: one, I should have seen them ten days earlier, September 19, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and two, this show was a week and a half ago, and today is the first time I’ve been able to sit myself down and think about it properly enough to write a review. And, I’m going to warn you now, I’m using the term “review” pretty loosely here; I fully intended to write your standard “these are the songs they played, this is how they sounded, and this is how they looked on stage” kind of write-up. But I should have known it wouldn’t go quite that way. I’ve been too close to Yoni’s music recently, it’s been tied too tightly into my own mess of a life, to write objectively about the show as just something that happened that I watched. Honestly, I can’t remember much about the specifics of the show or the band’s performance. Mostly what I remember is, first, feeling absolutely elated that this person with whom I’ve felt such an abstract but undeniable connection (that kind of I’ve-never-met-you-but-I-could-swear-I-know-you bond) was in my city, in the same room, performing these songs that have been playing like a soundtrack through my life, and, second, feeling completely, hopelessly depressed as soon as I walked out the door.

I don’t want to go too much into my story here, but, to catch you up, in the last six months I’ve moved from Denver to Boston, back to Denver, back to Boston, and finally back to Denver (a distance of nearly 8,000 miles), broken up with my girlfriend, been homeless, been unemployed (still am), and have felt generally pretty rootless and apathetic to the existence of any kind of “real life” I might have been trying to lead before moving to Boston in the first place. I may as well, when asked about what’s been happening with me lately, just quote Kerouac directly from the opening paragraph of On the Road, and tell interested parties I’ve “just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.” Alternatively (and appropriately), I could just rattle off one of Yoni’s lyrics, say it with a sad long smile, a thumb hooked toward my chest, and make sure it’s still got rhyme and rhythm even when stolen and put to work for yours truly: “Thrashing like a pet bird caught in a jet stream, that’s me.”
.
It was while living in Boston that I rediscovered Why?’s life-changing full-length Elephant Eyelash (I say rediscovered because I had heard it, years ago, played for me by a friend; we even saw them, once, at a Halloween party, but somehow I have no recollection of the event, and so will still claim that the show up for review, here, was my first time seeing Why? perform). Something about the songs on the album seemed to perfectly explain how I was feeling at the time in Boston—lonely, friendless, lost, my head full of intimate details about people and places from what seemed like an entirely different life, maybe one I’d dreamed. I spent a few weeks wandering around in the drizzle and the heat, headphones on, exploring Boston (mostly by riding the T) with Eyelash as the soundtrack. Not long after I picked up this year’s Alopecia (which, I’ll go ahead and tell you, has been my hands-down pick for album of the year since it came out way back in March) and felt increasingly attached to this singer with a strange Midwestern accent who writes details into his songs with such dizzying (and sometimes alarming or embarrassing) clarity that occasionally—strange as this sounds—it was hard to remember if some little thing had actually happened to me, or if I’d heard it in a Why? song. I have some distinct memories of feeling aimless in Boston, exhausted and extinct, riding the red line between Harvard and Charles/MGH or Park Street, usually, and hearing Yoni sing lines like, “God put a song on my palm that you can’t read,” staring blankly across at the empty seat on the other side of the car, and thinking how perfect that sounds, how I could use that line, maybe, to explain to the girl in Boston, the one I’d moved there for, why it wasn’t working, even if I don’t believe in God. Many, too, were the times I felt profoundly disconnected from everything happening in my life when I’d turn it up loud during “Waterfalls,” trying to fix my face in a cold blank expression so as not to let something terrible burst through, something everyone on the train would surely notice, as the song gets big and Yoni shouts, “Your face never forgets a cry! Your face never forgets a cry, like trace remnants of acid in your spine.” I remember staring people straight in the eye while that song was playing in my head—only half realizing I was looking at someone at all—and wondering if anyone around me could tell how upset I was feeling, how distinctly certain I was at that moment that everything was fucked.
.
Appropriate, then, that I was riding the subway when I learned that I might have a chance to see Yoni and the band play live in Boston, an experience that surely would have been cathartic in some way, as close to them as I was feeling. “That band Why? you like is coming to Boston,” she said. I was going somewhere with the girl I’d broken up with, or would break up with. The timeline is unclear. I got excited. “Really?” “Yeah,” she said. “They’re coming to the MFA. I heard it’s already sold out, though.” I couldn’t believe that, and I couldn’t believe she had the scoop about it and I hadn’t heard a thing before then. Where did she hear that it was sold out? I was confused and disappointed.
.
Cut to months later, after I’d already moved back to Denver, lived on a married couple’s couch for a month, and then moved back to Boston (my motivation for doing so is another long story, and this is, ostensibly, a show review. No time for that now). I’d been thrown out of that same girl’s apartment, and was sleeping on the couch of another couple (this one unmarried). I was up late, having recently discovered the band The Dodos, excited to see they were coming to the Museum of Fine Arts, the same venue Why? had supposedly sold out. I bought a ticket—this was in August some time—to see The Dodos on October 2, and then, out of sudden curiosity (and a tiny kind of hope), I looked up the Why? show and, lo and behold, was able to buy a ticket.
.
Cut, again, to a month later, late August or early September, can’t remember exactly, when it became clear to me—after having worn out my hospitality on three different friends’ couches—that I couldn’t afford to stay in Boston. So it was back to Denver, which, if you’re following (I don’t blame you if you’re not), meant no Why? at the MFA on September 19. I had chased the idea of going to that show from rumors it was sold out to Denver to Boston to actually obtaining a ticket, and now it was not going to happen.
.
Well, fuck.
.
(If you’re particularly interested in the fate of that ticket, it did, at least, go to good use; I ended up selling it to a girl who had just moved from Los Angeles to Boston to attend Harvard, and we’ve actually become pretty good friends, so it wasn’t a total loss.)
.
My consolation prize was that I’d be able to see them in Denver, at least, ten days later than I was supposed to see them. In a way it was almost better; I’d chased them, listening obsessively to those two records all along, back across the country.

So why did I leave the venue that night feeling so let down? Well, it certainly had something to do with the come-down you experience after spending a long time feeling excited about something, anticipating an experience you know will be life-changing. After it’s happened it’s hard not to wonder, “Where do I go from here?”
.
But here’s what really got me: it was that feeling of being so emotionally connected to these songs and the disconnect that came with realizing that Yoni doesn’t know me, these songs weren’t written about me, and, very likely, half the people in that room probably felt connected in just the same way. There is a gap between the artist and the audience that I wasn’t aware of—hadn’t considered—until I walked in the door and saw Yoni and his brother Josiah and Doug standing around the pool table in the back. They were real people, and I was a stranger. I was certain I’d show up and somehow Yoni would spot me and would just be able to see that we’d connected over something, would be able to feel that I’d experienced something so intensely personal connected to his songs. I was expecting that he should have felt it, like something moving backward through the record, from my life, through his songs, into his brain, so that when I walked in the door he’d shout, from across the room, “It’s you! You’re the one!” And we’d feel as if we knew each other, and I’d tell him stories about Why? within the context of my life. And he’d be interested, right, because it’s his band, and why does he do what he does if not to say something, to affect people, to give them something to which they can connect?

But it doesn’t—can’t—work that way. There were a lot of people at that show—the fullest I’ve ever seen the hi-dive—and I’m sure each person there has a story of their own, about how he fell in love with a girl while singing along together to the part about White Castle in “Gemini (Birthday Song)” or how she drove alone across the country at night listening to “Simeon’s Dilemma” and felt like it was about the boy back in Nashville, who else could it have been about? or how “By Torpedo or Crohn’s” is the saddest and truest song he’s ever heard and it’s funny, too, because I noticed, Yoni, that you mentioned working at Wild Oats and throwing up behind Whole Foods and I worked both places and it’s just so strange how strongly I feel I know you—!
.
That’s how, when I found myself standing right next to Yoni while Restiform Bodies was on stage, all I could manage to say to him was,
“Hey, your shoes are amazing.”
“Oh, thanks,” said he.
“What are those?”
“It’s a brand called Keep,” said he.
“Keep?”
“Yeah,” said he.
“Oh, awesome.”
“Hey, I’m gonna go say hi to a friend of mine,” said he.
“Oh, okay, cool.”

After the show I managed to snap a polaroid on stage with him, shake his hand, tell him it was a great show. I hung around the merch table for a few minutes and talked to his brother, the band’s percussionist, Josiah, got a polaroid with him, had him sign it. Bought a record. And that was it. No “Hey, you guys really helped me get through a weird time in Boston”; no “Your music has really changed my life, and I know you probably hear that a lot, but I mean it.” Just some pleasantries, an awkward conversation with a girl by the merch table asking me about my photos, and then I’m out the door, onto Broadway, turn down Ellsworth toward the car, walk by the band’s tour van, consider for a minute scribbling a note to the band to the effect of one of the omitted personal admissions above, decide against it, shaking my head, get into the car, and drive home, feeling, the whole way, like I’d crashed into something. This is what I’d been looking forward to, this was the night that was supposed to change my life, where everything was supposed to make sense, and all I could do was turn over and over in my head the feeling that I had absolutely no idea what to do with my life and repeat Yoni’s words to myself as if I’d wrote them: “My fear of the bear at Showbiz Pizza when I was six was overwhelming and not dissimilar to this” and just let that last ‘s’ hiss, like radio static, lingering until the next line in the song comes around.