ALBUMS // Merce Lemon – Ride Every Day
Post by Misha
I used to feel very allergic to writing things in pen, even in a private notebook or journal. I hated having to cross things out, to admit that I was wrong, even (or maybe especially) to myself.
In creative endeavors, this instinct has its pros and cons but it is mostly more trouble than its worth. For one thing, the search for the perfect word can take the better part of ten minutes, which is bad on its own but especially galling when you consider the portion of that time I spend skating around all the perfectly good enough words that offer themselves up in the meantime – all out of fear of having to come back later, tail between legs, to swap out the perfectly good word for a marginally better one. The bigger-picture consequence is that a lot of the stuff I make never gets out into the world at all. I like it, I’m theoretically proud of it, but it ends up being held hostage forever by a few stubbornly awkward sentences.
The irony these days is that I make my living as a video editor, which means I have to beat this instinct out of myself on a daily basis in order to meet deadlines and address client notes (which are always numerous and confounding, no matter how much time I spend nudging a clip one frame forward or back, or agonizing over the font size for the titles). In the interest of self-preservation, I’ve mostly surgically removed my ego from my work. I know how to mechanize the creative process for efficiency. I’ve learned when “good” can and should stand in for “finished”.
But still, there’s a difference between the pride you take in what you are paid to do and what you do because it gives you joy. It’s much harder to send my passion projects off into the world without feeling really capital-F-Finished with them. Running a blog is a helpful exercise in this regard since the pressure to create at a clip steady enough to maintain the relevance of this project tends to keep the paralysis of perfectionism at least a little bit in check. But still. I cringe every time I go back over an old post and find a superfluous sentence, or out of place word. It’s maddening how much easier it becomes to see what’s wrong and how to fix it once it’s too late to do so.
Anyway, at some point in my early twenties I started using pens in all my notebooks. At first, the relative permanence of ink on paper made me squirm. I was too hesitant to write my ideas out until they were fully formed, using a careful cursive my fifth grade teacher would be proud of. But after a while this became untenably stifling. I lost the cursive to my native chicken scratch. I started to cross things out when I didn’t like how they looked back at me from the page. And then I started to love how that felt – the sensation of looking out at a jumble of thoughts escaped from mind onto page and saying decisively – no! Gutting them with a few scribbled strokes and admiring the mangled results, a hastily redacted letter from me to the kind of writer I’d like to be someday.
I sometimes flip back through old notebooks, not to read old entries but to appreciate the aesthetic of working through ideas in real time. The stray doodles and arrows and improvised editorial symbols, the coffee stains, the dogeared pages, the barely legible 3am poetry. There’s a heat to it.
When Merce Lemon sings, “Do you see this, it is rough” I imagine it as something related to all of this. A kind of defiant pride in the imperfection of the process. Genuine love for rough edges, and an admirable willingness to show them to others. To not keep them hidden away until they’ve been worn down by the sands of endless edits. To declare one’s self unfinished and then to invite an audience in anyway. To recognize that life itself is iterative and allow for beauty in all iterations, not just the ones shaped by an unforgiving eye and polished in fear. It’s a special kind of generosity.
Ride Every Day is a reissue of Merce Lemon’s first two releases, along with several bonus tracks. Tracks 1-10, including ‘Do You See This It Is Rough’, are taken from her album Ideal For A Light Flow With Your Body. The original album cover for that record is a photo of the artist as a young girl (maybe age 11 or 12?) playing electric guitar in what looks to be an elementary school band room. The photo catches her mid-laugh, looking joyful in a very pure way. It captures the excitement of finding one’s passions, and the innocence of that discovery, before the importance of being “good enough” at something dethrones the importance of simply loving it.
From the first line of the album, Merce Lemon distills the power of stripped down songs with hiss and buzz into a truth even more universal than adolescent heartbreak or loneliness.
What I mean is, ‘Do You See This It Is Rough’ is the first song on the album, and it sets the tone for everything that follows, which is in many ways a familiar, if especially beautiful, manifestation of bedroom recorded intimacy. What sets this record apart, though (for me anyway), is that first song, which acts as a thesis statement and instructional framework with which to listen to the rest of the album. Pay careful attention to the roughness. Pause to appreciate the moments spent on the growing edge of the verse. They are fleeting and important.
Buy Ride Every Day via Crafted Sounds here.