Heartbreaking Bravery

The first time I saw Eric Slick, he was manning the kit for Dr. Dog on their Shame, Shame tour and delivered a set that more than made up for just missing the cut-off at a sold-out LCD Soundsystem show. To date, that set remains one of my favorite memories and a benchmark for the realization that sometimes taking left turns winds up producing really memorable moments.

While Slick remains behind the kit for Dr. Dog, I’ve come to know him more for his work in his incendiary punk-tinged basement pop project, Lithuania (whose Hardcore Friends was one of the records from last year that I find myself coming back to the most). An enviably versatile musician and a genuine person, his impact on the music community is immeasurable.

For all those reasons and several more, I’m thrilled to be presenting a piece from Slick for A Year’s Worth of Memories that focuses in on touring, two acts that have been featured on this site numerous times, turning 28, and learning to come to terms with some aspects of his life via cognitive behavioral therapy. Read it below and always acknowledge the things that make you want to keep fighting.

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As I write this, I’m currently suffering from a modicum of symptoms supposedly related to early Lyme’s Disease. If I make mistakes, it’s because my cognitive functions are limited. Forgive me!

2015

My 28th Year, The Year Of the Sheep. It was supposed to be a year of calm, but if I could offer you a window into my 2015 psyche, you’d see a tangled mess of wires engulfed in flames. There were times when I wanted to jump out of my skin from repulsion and excitement, a dichotomy that would become a warm blanket for my brain-addled nightmare. You see, the 28th year is often the beginning of one’s Saturn return in astrology. I felt as if I were living on that distant planet.

However, I’m not here to wallow in my past sadnesses and failures. I believe that you can rise above mistakes like a kind of animatronic phoenix rising from the CGI ashes. Here’s a list of things that saved my soul in 2015.

Touring with Lithuania

I have a tendency to read a lot of self-help books, even though I don’t absorb much from them. Being on tour with my band Lithuania helped in gaining some sort of empirical life experience. Dominic Angelella and Ricardo Lagomasino (my bandmates) gave me non-judgmental advice and listened as I complained about everything. They also delivered some of the best performances I’ve ever witnessed as a fellow band member.  On one particularly memorable night, I walked offstage at The Soda Bar in San Diego and began crying on a dumpster. Ricardo had empathy for me in this unraveled state, so we walked to a nearby windowless Pizza Hut and shared a gluey Personal Pan Pizza and more importantly, our feelings.

We released an album called Hardcore Friends on Lame-O Records and toured with Hop Along, mewithoutYou, and Beach Slang. The lyrics were hard to sing and some of the lines would become downright prophetic. I guess we all wept a lot on those tours. In fact, I could be well qualified to become a professor in Lachrymology (the study of crying), although I’d have to go back and listen to a lot of Tool albums. I’m forever grateful for Dom and Ricardo, and I know a lot of people who feel similarly.

Hop Along

Speaking of crying, have you ever seen Hop Along? I can compare it to a few other acts I’ve seen: Bjork, Charles Bradley, Neutral Milk Hotel, Stevie Wonder. There are those who take and those who give. Hop Along is not only a gift, it’s a treasure. They’ve always been unnecessarily kind to us. I hope we can be unnecessarily kind to them too. The lyric “None of this is gonna happen to me” still makes me feel an immense and indescribable yearning every time I hear it.

Hop Along for President, 2016.

Pile’s You’re Better Than This

During the darkest moments, I would put on the new Pile record and pretend to punch the ceiling of my car. I didn’t actually punch it because I didn’t want to hurt my hand. You understand. The track “Mr. Fish” would become an anthem, a song of disillusionment and disassociation. There were days when I could relate to the main character, Darryl Fish. He speaks of wrestling formless tenants beneath his bed sheets, and missing the feeling of the sun’s warmth on his arms. What i’m trying to say is, shit got dark. Pile helped me climb my way out of it. I would repeat the album title like a mantra.

Therapy

You can pretend to be Zen all you want. I did. I spent the majority of 2011-2015 believing I had my life figured out, meditating regularly and over-preaching to people in my life that probably didn’t want to hear it. The reality is that nobody has anything figured out. Life is this incredible, amorphous blob that spews out chaos after chaos. It can be harrowing to realize this, but it can also be the beginning of personal freedom.

I started cognitive behavioral therapy in March 2015 and had to go face to face with a lot of issues that I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with. I still go to therapy whenever I can. My musician friend Chris Cohen once told me that, “Life doesn’t get easier, you just get better at dealing with it.” He told me this in 2013, but it resonates now more than ever. So here’s to 2016.

-Eric Slick