Letter From Home

On this last day of February

This was written by my great grandmother, Carrie Meloy, as put down in calligraphy by my grandmother Harriett, her daughter-in-law. It’s from her journals. Carrie was living on a ranch near Townsend, MT when she wrote it. I imagine winter on a ranch in central Montana in the 40s could be dreary stuff. When she says it “makes living a little bit harder,” I can only imagine what kind of hardships those might be. How would they compare to our February hardships in 2026? I doubt they had indoor plumbing, there on the ranch, and I bet it was very cold. I bet they had to go break up ice from the water in the water troughs and fetch wood for a woodstove in freezing temperatures. But even in the midst of what was likely very tough living, she managed to find beauty in the world. She saw reasons for persevering in the way the creek ran.

I, myself, am a little freaked out about the world right now and I’m trying my best to channel some of that February optimism. February 1942 was about as grim as it got in the world, Montana winters aside, though I don’t know how much of that news was filtering down to the Meloys on Greyson Creek. I’m sure they knew the broad strokes and it was probably pretty frightening. They were certainly not being assaulted day in and day out by endlessly unspooling news feeds and AI generated video slop made by an authoritarian, war-mongering president. But it may well have looked like the world was ending anyway.

“Or says it in fact to those who will listen…”

As always, I find solace and perseverance in books and music, in puttering around the kitchen and the farm. I was playing guitar yesterday when my fingers stumbled on to the riff from The Wedding Present’s “Octopussy.” If you don’t know the song, you owe it to yourself to listen:

Of course, having plucked out the riff, I had to have a go at playing the whole song myself. I had no idea, till recently, that the last line of the chorus was “You’ve become my family.” I always thought it was something like “funland” or “fumbling.” Like most of the lyrics on this very great record, they are buried in a slag-pile of lacerating guitars and thunderous drums. You never knew what David Gedge was singing about, but you knew it was something important. So when I looked up the lyrics and tried to sing, my Oregon-by-way-of-Montana accent just could not draw the same power from that word “family.” Sounded weird. Gedge is a Yorkshireman, I believe; The Wedding Present came together in Leeds. So when he sings “family,” it sounds like “fum-leh.”

Lande Hekt, who is from Exeter, England, does an admirable cover of the song. I wonder if she, too, couldn’t quite get her head around pronouncing that word as intended. I feel like she splits the diff in her version:

I hadn’t come back to that record, Seamonsters, for a while and it was lovely to return to it. I think I might’ve been seventeen when I first heard it. Someone gave me the cassette. I wore the thing out, I seem to remember. The sonic landscape it makes is so individual. I think, at seventeen, I was only starting to become aware of Steve Albini’s production, but seeing his name on the j-card (that’s what they are called!) answered a lot of questions. Here was a through line between a couple other beloved records of mine: The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, The Breeders’ Pod, and now this. But the drums, oh, the drums on Seamonsters were the thing I died for.

From what I’ve come to understand, drum production has as much to do with the player as the particular recording environment in which they were captured. I think they managed to get both things just right on this one. The drums sound cavernous, recorded in the concrete box that was Albini’s Pachyderm, and played by someone who sounds like they are bringing their sticks down from the very heavens at every snare strike. Even on a record that is absolutely saturated with overdriven guitar, they are the loudest thing in the mix — and it works so well.

I’ve also been listening to a Mark Kozelek live record from 2004. It’s not released; as far as I can tell, it’s only available as a YouTube playlist. I don’t know much about its story — it’s from a show at Great American Music Hall in SF; I learned about it from Eliza McLamb’s substack post:

Piece of shit

Kind of a bummer that a post called “piece of shit” should lead the reader to beautiful, incandescent music. Mark Kozelek, the singer/songwriter behind Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, is, by many accounts, a problematic person. Or, as McLamb has it, a piece of shit. But he does make gorgeous music. We’ve all had to figure out where we fall on the divide of separating the art from the artist — Morrissey, Evan Dando, Kozelek, the list goes on. Is there something defiant in appreciating an artist’s art despite their behavior? I don’t know. I have no answers. But I have been listening to this on repeat since I read Eliza’s piece and I don’t care who knows!

(Speaking of out-of-print, unstreamable music, here is very great 90s shoegaze titans Th’ Faith Healers’ debut record which, for reasons I cannot fathom, is unavailable elsewhere:)

Be like Greyson Creek! Do not give up or stop!

Till next time,

Colin