"face the void" is on YouTube!!

   Before we go any further with the merry-making, to the last piece this additional hint about breaking up the logjam intensified by calcified oldsters rooting about in the new technology: The impersonal is just as subjective as the personal.

  And with that I announce how I finally owned up to the Info Age myself today, posting an object on YouTube containing sound and 4 more than the requisite 1 visual image to qualify it as a video. "face the void" was written in 1987, recorded in 1997, and was considered complete. This was partly because the solo piano/vocal performance Joel and I caught for the Genital Soul CD pretty much articulated it for good and partly because I tend to feature other sentiments from my catalogue besides the tried and true abhorrence with society. Friends are like, "Oh, Sav, I don't know. I really like that song. It's right up there with Joy Division, or Warren Zevon in a less arch moment!"

   The dating of "face the void" is in the period details fleshing out the usual kind of timeless alienation a would-be John Savlove might use to qualify him as an open romantic. And by open I mean transparent, as in a guileless approach to life or a tendency to use "savlove" as my user name wherever. The link to the song: face the void. It's all behind me now, that particular abyss.

   So there I was taking up a page in the Powers Market guest book of North Bennington, Vermont. Drew a couple of faces, one of them thinking, "Gawd - since when did it become DARING and REVOLUTIONARY to be GENTLE and HONEST?!!" My friend Libby had just shown me the vulgar cartoons a boy/man had made to deface her entry a few days earlier.

   See, 1985, 1986, and 1987 - those were huge songwriting years for me. I wrote around 80 each of those years, and when I wasn't becoming them I was rehearsing them or taking a break from them. The deeds other people were doing as youngish adults in the late Eighties - they were more divorced from the melange of cornball ballads and spiritual discoveries I was making than I thought even then. It was enough that I eschewed synthesizers! I wasn't a folkie, a New Age relaxant, a punk, or an aesthete: I just always managed to find a way to apply those viewpoints and more to any given mood as I made my way from piano to cat litter box to country road and home again. It was my own little version of the Let It Be sessions, with me breaking into whatever I liked and spouting witticisms as if good friends were in the room.