Dear Steven Wilson...

36 days to go. I will be seeing you live, watching you perform and possibly meeting you in Boston in just 36 days. Am I excited? No. Terrified? Maybe just a little. Do I suffer from the delusion that I will have enough time to forge an everlasting bond of friendship with you? Not at all. At best, I will say "Hello" and "Thank you." Then you'll be gone, off to the pub with your friends, into the tour bus, onto the next show. That's how it goes. I have no expectations. I'm hardly a groupie. I'm too old for that shit.

However...and there's always a however.

Several of my friends - the ones who know how much your music means to me - have been asking: "What will you say to him if/when you meet him?" And I know I probably won't have the time to tell you everything I want to tell you in the way I'd want to tell you. Besides, I know me - I won't have the courage to say it anyway. I concoct all of these ridiculous, flowery declarations in my head - usually while I'm at work, or folding my laundry, or shaving my legs, or doing something else which is so banal and repetitive that my brain relaxes enough to risk a leisurely stroll through the garden of my emotions (barf) - but given the opportunity to actually say such things to another living human being without tripping over my own tangled tongue, stammering, blushing, blood pressure skyrocketing, making an ass out of myself? Yeah, right. Not happening.

So I'll tell you now and spare us both the time.

Thank you for your music. And when I say "thank you" I mean "thank you for getting it right." I've always felt a terrible disconnect between how the world presents itself and the way I truly feel about it. Your music has become a bridge for me, a way to fill the void. I can never really, fully express how I feel with mere words, despite the fact that I am a writer. Sometimes, there just aren't any words in any language that are capable of describing all of the constantly changing weather inside of me. The words you use in your lyrics cannot even translate the tides of sorrow and despair and hope that crash through me every second of every day. The words you choose are a palette upon which you paint with sound and color. They're a solid skeleton, a warp to weave upon. They're powerful, but they're flesh.  They can fade and be forgotten. But the music is the soul eternal.

I'm not a musical person. I always wanted to learn how to play a musical instrument, but I never succeeded. Reading music, understanding its structure...it's as indecipherable to me as advanced mathematics or hieroglyphics. But that's okay. Perhaps the less I know about its form, the more magical it will remain.I can't use correct terms to describe your music, but shall I tell you how the final guitar note that leads us to the end of Fadeaway tears at my heart, pulling it gently but firmly down a receding crystal highway into a starlit night that never ends? Would you understand what I meant if I said that the song Salvaging is an amber dust storm over red sand, burning and stinging the exposed flesh of the lost wanderer? The crescendo of The Watchmaker is a ruby red heart beating in the darkness, birthing a black shadow of rage that swallows all. Mellotron Scratch is a kodachrome photo, overexposed and stained with nicotine. Harmony Korine is an exploding kaleidoscope, an orgasm of glass. My Ashes reaches out with white jade hands and slowly, beautifully pulls me to drown beneath the water lilies. And Raider II, my favorite for so many dark and morbid and terrible reasons, is a descent into Hell, all topaz and dove grey and violently off balance, spinning sick and lustful down into the soft, wormy earth. I should have been given the gift of Synesthesia. I can see your music when I listen to it, sounds with colors, colors that shimmer and shudder and warp into sounds. I can taste the music: black absinthe, blue sugar, blood red honey, sickening and inebriating and addictive. But I'm only a writer after all. All I have are the limited amount of words created by our flawed life forms.

I can't say any of this to your face. There won't be time. And other people will be listening. And such things are never said aloud anyway. They're too fragile and they'll die in the common air between us. So when you meet a small, nondescript girl named Annie in the Boston spring, a girl with blue eyes and a locked tongue and a forgettable presence, just like a thousand other girls you'll meet and have already met, just remember what I wanted to tell you, and couldn't. Not in my common voice in a roomful of others. Not where everyone else can hear. Know that my words are not what you see, but what I usually hide from everyone else. They're just for you this time. I don't give my words to just anyone. No one appreciates words, just as too few notice the varying degrees of sound and the graduating shades of a thousand colors. But I saw yours - I saw every nuance, every wave, every particle of dust and every shift of shadow. I saw and heard and felt things you probably never intended, but that's what art does when it's true.

So here is my art. For you.
Thank you.

See you in 36 days.








PS - I promise I'm not a psycho stalker. ;)