Love, Songs

The amber scotch glasses slip out of our relaxed hands, with the ice melting and the sun setting, because that’s what happens.

We’re on the roof of a beach house in a neighborhood called Croatan, a Native American word for “town talk”. We’re talking, appropriately, waiting for the July 4th fireworks high above the sand where Ben will make a marriage proposal. His brother, Paul, tells me he’s “throwing rock” soon too. Diamonds are in the air.

Pharrell used to live next door. Yeh. That Pharrell. Everybody in Virginia Beach knows him for putting us on the map as the “New Motown” (as nicknamed by New York Times) . Well, everybody knows him except for Ben and Paul’s mother, who used to make small talk with him like he was a normal neighbor. “Good morning, Pharrell”. I like to imagine that he’d sing a falsetto verse back to her about the weather or something, bust out in a freestyle verse about who mows her lawn, but he probably just replied simply. “Hi, Linda”.

Missy Elliott is from VA too. I like to imagine bumping in to her at my 7-11 or something. A pretentious music reviewer, who later receives a bootleg MP3 copy of our conversation on voicemail, would sprinkle his 4.5 star rating with words like: “A Big Bite of… women’s liberation with fluorescent flavor.. slurpees… herpes ….Cleopatra complexes, a documentarian and a crunkdified Chaucer”.

Missy’s new album dropped on July 5th this year. “The Cookbook”. It blips and bleeps with the usual inspiration of Timbaland’s production. Great musicians often harness the ambient noises of their surroundings to make music. Thelonious Monk used to hear the train tracks and church bells of New York and synthesized them into his jazz masterpieces. I like to think that Timbaland (who doesn’t even know how to read music) the Neptunes, all these VA cats make their sonic soundscapes sampled with the F-15’s breaking the sound barrier above our heads by the Norfolk Naval base, or the waves crashing against the beach piers, the summer fireworks, or the diamonds in the air. Virginia is for lovers.

Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens album came out on July 5th too. He’s making an album about all 50 states in the union. He’s done Michigan already. Now, he’s on to Illinois. Come on feel the Illinoise. He carries around a portable 8-track and writes about what he sees and experiences… NPR wanted to find out how he makes these stories into songs. They wanted to study him, so they gave him a topic- The Ivory Billed Woodpecker, the Lord God bird. The bird that was thought to be extinct. Like it was even a challenge. This is the man that can write sweeping symphonies about the Sear’s Tower.

I was in Chicago, Illinois for Paul’s wedding this weekend. My parents and I took the architectural boat tour the afternoon before the wedding. The beats of the river a time signature and the buildings soaring like Sufjan’s scales. The city sings a song. There’ll be a hot time in old town tonight. Missy yells “Fire”. And Paul, he smashes the glass, as is Jewish tradition, “your love will multiply like the thousands of pieces”, because that’s what happens.