This is a soundtrack for those moments when you’re stuck in limbo with just your impotent rage to keep you company. When you’re pacing back and forth on the same street corner. When you’re caught without an umbrella and you just soak it all in. When its pitch black outside and it suits you just fine.

This is an internal monologue for when the bad guys leave you in a pit of snakes. When you’ve got no traction and you’ve got to claw your way up. When life doesn’t bother to give you lemons. When it just squeezes you dry. When the hand of fate presses you down into your lowest possible moment. The one that comes right before the revelation that you either have to make a change or be changed.

This too will pass, but you’re the one who’s stuck with the mess it leaves behind.

This is your pain in black in white, emphasis on the black, on the Rembrandt lighting, on the shadows it casts. This is the alley where they catch you. Where you make your last stand. Where fedoras are helmets and trench coats are security blankets. Where you’re puzzled but never quite defeated. You’re an artist with a brush up your sleeve. It’s time for you to make some outlines on the sidewalk.

This audio short is about that film noir attitude seeping into our lives, empowering us to stand up to each and every son-of-a-bitch that comes our way. This is the first of my audio shorts to get its own score, a haunting piano melody, infused with synths and a subtle beat. The piece needed this haunting soundtrack to bring you to that dark alley, where you’re surrounded by thugs. Pain and its henchmen, here to collect their debt.

Pain has already made such an awful mess of our lives. Let’s make a mess of it.

Curbside Noir

Waiting for my ride on a curbside in the rain
Something tall and dark, pacing the sidewalk
Going rotten from a gut instinct
Trying to rationalize all the butterflies away
The names, faces, contexts
Predators making passes at my back
I’m sharpening my wit
Just in case I have to stab someone with it

Something’s going to happen I can feel it
Like I’m moving up the slope of a roller coaster
Staring at the ground beyond the tracks
My bones rattling with the tow chain
This is what happens when you let the tension mount
When you don’t know, don’t say what you want
When you stick your head in the lions mouth
Just for a change of scenery

My driver, my waning trust is late
My ulcer and growing fears are all on time
I need to get back to where the tension lives
I need to be done with this
It’s like waiting to throw up
You can taste it climbing up your throat
And that nasty mounting feeling
Is all that you are until you can push it over the edge

There are people that need to be told off
And I can’t get to them yet
Snakes slithering down the branches
Whispering schemes into innocent ears
Turning fear into anger
Desire into entitlement
Kindness into weakness
Vulnerability into malleability

Cars pass in monochrome blurs
Colors canceled out by headlights
Cup my fingers together in the shape of a “C”
Making an umbrella for a fresh cigarette
I’m fine tuning all my bad habits
Seduced by theories that play out like plot twists
Trying so hard to think like someone else
Becoming more and more like myself