Not To Feel So Jagged

Scared for SoCal but singing again

Hello. You’ve reach Time & Temperature.

Howdy, friends.

It’s a scary world out there—so many friends in peril in the Los Angeles area right now. Everything else seems frivolous in comparison, but in New York’s arctic Hudson Valley, the world seems mostly unchanged. Mostly. A close personal friend passed this week somewhat unexpectedly and our little community is reeling from her loss. I’m not ready to share anything more at the moment but at some point I’ll probably opine further. And now these terrible fires in my old hometown of LA, it just all feels like too much. I can’t even imagine what the folks there must be going through. My heart goes out to them.

I moved to LA in the second half of my 20’s. My first house was an extravagant flophouse in Benedict Canyon that I shared with nine other broke 20-somethings. It was a magical, hilarious time and place. In the immortal words of Randy Newman, I love LA.

One song I wrote in those canyons that separate Hollywood from the Valley is called “Jagged,” and has sat atop the list of songs I’d lost to my vocal cord injury. Now, almost a month removed from the surgery that extricated the large cyst on one vocal cord and lasered the small polyp off the other, I got permission from my excellent team of doctors and specialists to try singing again. They deemed my throat healed enough to use it for its intended purpose. I figured I’d share the results with y’all.

I had lost chunks of my range, some of the lowest and highest notes of my full voice register were unavailable to me these past 18 months or so, and most of my low falsetto, a range I had always made use of more than I realized. “Jagged” features, in the last line of each verse, a note I had been totally unable to hit before the surgery. When given permission today to sing again, I went straight to that song, to see if that elusive note might have come back to me. I recorded my first attempt, and while it isn’t perfect (my voice will still take weeks of rehab to get back under proper control), the parts of my range that I’d lost are back!

The other 97’s joined me in LA in 1999 to make a video for the song “Jagged.” Our friend Dante Harper directed a lovely, low-budget video around Los Angeles. Elektra Records had refused to pay for the video, and once we’d finished it MTV refused to air it due to momentary shots of roman candles firing off. Seriously. To this day, the only version I can find has the offending fireworks blurred out to try and appease the censors.

The years I spent living in LA inspired me to write some of my favorite songs, and allowed me to make some of my best friends. I will always feel a connection to that brilliant, frenetic city. And I know that once this terrifying tragedy passes, LA will rise and rebuild better than ever. I love you, LA.

I hope y’all are safe and sound and surrounded by loved ones.

And I hope to see you soon. And I can’t wait to sing for you again.

yrs,

Rhett