I don’t believe in ghosts, but I swear I feel it buzz/ a voicemail from the nothing where something was…

For people who have been following my work, you might recognize this. It’s a new video for an older song. There are already a handful of different musical versions/remixes of this out there (including this one, produced by Big Cats, one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever been part of making), but I wanted to have an a capella version too.

You can tell this was shot a few years ago because (1) I don’t have a beard, which I feel like I’ve always had? And (2) I am performing this way too fast. Slow down!

Aside from the fairly straightforward content of the piece, it’s something I use in a lot of writing workshops because it’s… well, if I’m being honest, because it’s short and memorized—but also because it’s a demonstration of a tool we talk about a lot: concrete language. There’s concrete imagery throughout the piece (the water imagery, the cell phone vibrating, the stained glass, the physical feeling of laughing when you know you’re not supposed to, etc.), but specifically, I often use the first four bars as an example of starting a poem or song in a moment, as opposed to starting with an idea or statement.

As I try to always be careful to say, you don’t have to do that, and plenty of great songs and poems don’t do that. But I think opening with a scene/memory/”thing happening” (vs. opening with “here’s what I think about X!”) is a powerful tool, and I find it being used in a lot of writing that is meaningful to me.

I hope this piece can be useful to anyone else going through it. Here’s the full text:

RIVERBED

It’s hard to be the cool kid at a funeral
skinny black tie black shoes it’s a beautiful October afternoon
I watch a plane overhead
full of human beings who have no idea that you’re…
I guess life goes on, right? no offense
and now i’m trying not to laugh, which makes me want to laugh
and I don’t mean no disrespect as I step into this funeral home
like light through stained glass
like light through black holes, like light that faded ages ago
like my phone on airplane mode
like i don’t believe in ghosts, but I swear I feel it buzz
a voicemail from the nothing where something was
I’m still laughing; I can’t pretend like I’m not sad
it’s just that lack of touch is not the same as lack of contact
and that grim reaper isn’t that powerful
he can’t change the past and your impact is unstoppable
I don’t think you die when you die
I don’t think we really understand what it means to be alive
much less existence and much less time
we think that there’s no time, but maybe there’s no time
and maybe memory and prophecy are intertwined
maybe the present is a pixel in a much larger design
Like if the picture’s resolution is a trillion by a trillion
but the CPU display is only one by one
well then it’s easy to assume that there’s nothing but this room
in which we hide and not a whole universe outside
I don’t know if any of this makes sense
I don’t know if I should end it with an amen
I just know there’s a river in every raindrop
and a lot of raindrops in that riverbed
I said: I just know there’s a river in every raindrop
and a lot of raindrops in that riverbed