Uploaded August 2008 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
timeriksen.net
I wrote this 23 years ago almost to the day. It was one of the last songs I wrote before deciding that I needed to build a deeper musical foundation and get a handle on what I was talking about before writing more. I'd only been studying Carnatic music for a year or so, and was only toying with shape-note music (looking through books, listening to the occasional recording). This song keeps coming back to me though. Initially it was one of many incongruous moments in "Stands for Nothing's" nominally hardcore punk sets, with Max Bovine on bass and brother Benny on drums (I think he was a whopping 12 years old by that time). It had a brief incarnation as a Cordelia's Dad song ca. 1994, and we even recorded it at some point, but it didn't really suit the band. The sound of cicadas is one of the most potent I know. October in New England is somehow easier to deal with than August.
I'm home for a couple days before heading to the Jaroslav Sacred Music Festival in southeastern Poland. I'll probably post something from there next.
P.s. someone asked for lyrics:
"Window- why now is the moon not the color of blood- not the color of blood but of moth wings?
I remember the dusty sound of Autumn insects at my screen scratching to come in. Window...
In December the snow knocks the sound from the air, and like mulch it lies. Through it I smell the last October cricket fermenting into the Spring.
Why now is the moon not the color of dust but of embers? And why now in August does music mean nothing, when buried in insects I sing along with them, every one of us alone?
Window...."
timeriksen.net
I wrote this 23 years ago almost to the day. It was one of the last songs I wrote before deciding that I needed to build a deeper musical foundation and get a handle on what I was talking about before writing more. I'd only been studying Carnatic music for a year or so, and was only toying with shape-note music (looking through books, listening to the occasional recording). This song keeps coming back to me though. Initially it was one of many incongruous moments in "Stands for Nothing's" nominally hardcore punk sets, with Max Bovine on bass and brother Benny on drums (I think he was a whopping 12 years old by that time). It had a brief incarnation as a Cordelia's Dad song ca. 1994, and we even recorded it at some point, but it didn't really suit the band. The sound of cicadas is one of the most potent I know. October in New England is somehow easier to deal with than August.
I'm home for a couple days before heading to the Jaroslav Sacred Music Festival in southeastern Poland. I'll probably post something from there next.
P.s. someone asked for lyrics:
"Window- why now is the moon not the color of blood- not the color of blood but of moth wings?
I remember the dusty sound of Autumn insects at my screen scratching to come in. Window...
In December the snow knocks the sound from the air, and like mulch it lies. Through it I smell the last October cricket fermenting into the Spring.
Why now is the moon not the color of dust but of embers? And why now in August does music mean nothing, when buried in insects I sing along with them, every one of us alone?
Window...."
