THE BREATHE IN, BREATHE OUT

 What is The Breathe In Breathe Out and why should I care?

          Is it the eponymous title of a Bush tribute band who’s namesake was inspired by their ’96 hit “Machinehead” which features singer, Gavin Rossdale, belting out the words in question (Breathe-in-Breathe-Out) with post-grunge grunt relish?

        No. NO. NOOO! More Morrison than Rossdale. The first show James and Kin (né Andrew) played together included a set that consisted of the entirety of Astral Weeks. Without a name for the project, they decide to bill the gig as The Breathe In Breathe Out, taking a line from “Beside You” - “Past the brazen footsteps of the silence easy / You breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out,  you breathe in, you breathe out, and you’re high.” After adding the definitive article “the”, voila, The Breathe In, Breathe Out. 

      Given the nature of bands, so many musicians coming and going like the inhalations and exhalations of the lungs, the boys saw the name as good commentary and kept it. 

What do The Breathe In, Breathe Out sound like?

        Psychedelic, garage music that delights in the dark arts. For more information, listen to a song to two and infer with your ears. 

What is Lungs?

        A three song EP (Extended Play) featuring Kin Sullivan, James Cox, Phil Yochum, and Javi Jones and recorded by Zach Yokel and Joel Woodcock.

How about some specifics? 

       “Ghost Cigarettes” was born of three things, The Litton Apartments, a pleasure drop-off, and the death of Matt Cheswick, a childhood friend. Our time at Litton was abysmal. All around us were people struggling to maintain. Families of six in two bedroom apartments, dice games in the hallway; there was a paraplegic neighbor with a pair of listless eyes… a whole company of hard tales. Paradoxically, I never felt more with purpose since moving to Nashville. James and I were writing and writing and drinking and writing. At the same time, my pleasure-seeking had started to wither. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still guilty of vanity and womanizing, but a couple episode with desperate partners and single mothers forced me to question what pleasure for pleasure’s sake really is and I think that cynicism shows in “Ghost Cigarettes”. Moreover, Matt’s unexpected death the year prior had started to take its pernicious effect. The effect was twofold: it served as a definitive symbol for the closing of my childhood, Matt was one of the last portals, and it was my first tangible experience of fatal randomness. One moment your walking across the street, the next your head is caved in under a tire. How do you reconcile that? What is the significance of existence in light of that? Those are some of the agitations I’m working through when I sing that song. I’m frustrated by the fact that we die, often laughably, and while we live we spend our days always laughably. 

       “Belle Buttons” on the other hand is just madcap zaniness. Two winters ago I was sewing a bunch of whos-its and whats-its, bells and buttons to this corduroy jacket I’ve had since high school. When I’d go out, all these girls I met would call me Buttons, so I imagined that Buttons was my last name and that I had this lesbian, older sister named Belle in my life who was sort of like a mythic figure to me. She was a real eccentric hell raiser who spent her nights in an abandoned subway station and just lived life as her own woman, day by day, tightrope walking the dividing line between nirvana and a blackhole. So yeah, it’s supposed to be a silly song.

        “Honey Guzzler”, on the third hand, is grabbing at air in a very manic way. The lyrics are aimed directly at me. I am the Honey Guzzler, at least, this meat jacket, mind cap named Andrew Sullivan that likes to traipse around as Kin is. The singer of the song changes from verse to verse, sometimes from line to line. They’re all thought forms inside my head that have clustered into pseudo-beings - there’s the soother, the pleader, the ecstatic, the dissector, and the pitiless judge. They’re all up there vying for my mental faculties. When this song is performed, I’m throwing up the specimen of myself for them to have their way with. They are a nexus of bees that sweeten me up and sting me alive, ingenuously keeping me awake.  

          I don’t have schizophrenia. I have The Breathe, Breathe Out. Like everything that still lives.