The Way You Talk to God Won’t Keep You Warm
Devin Kelly on first words, sound in silence, and making music with Chris Johns of Stay Inside.
I. Verse
They are tall — imposing even from where I’m standing behind the bar, fiddling with a beer as I watch them perform. They sing with a kind of wrenching tenderness, which is something I love about bodies. How they are capable of so much depth under all that skin.
I am at the launch for my book In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen, listening to Chris Johns and his bandmate Bartees — the two of them with their guitars comprise half of Chris’s band Stay Inside — playing a beautiful and intimate solo set. Together they have the melodic tightness that only comes from learning to breathe with and for each other. That is, I think, what a band is. An act of collective breathing. Because so much of music is breath, and without breath, there is no sound. There is just an ache, and its gathering.
Chris plays for the crowd of a few dozen people. His hair is long and spools down to his shoulders and has always reminded me of something biblical, the kind of hair you use to wash another’s feet. He closes his eyes as he sings, as he often does, and plays gracelessly, with so much perceived effort. Most people don’t do this. During the great music documentary The Last Waltz, Eric Clapton rips an unbelievably unruly solo while smiling and shaking his head from side to side like his dog just shat on your lawn and he’s not going to pick it up. Chris is the opposite, the Robbie Robertson to Eric Clapton, a face so screwed up in song it looks like it is being shredded by an invisible hand. I gravitate toward this. I love emotion rendering itself into the physical.
II. Chorus
From the balcony where we first meet and play you can see the steeple of a church, and sometimes the moon hangs right atop the cross. Chris brings his guitar outside, a few stories above Greenpoint, and I bring my keyboards. I climb up the stairs with a six pack, and a poem just written on the train. We each pop a bottle open and he asks to hear what I wrote before we play. We drink beer and share some cigarettes. The light hangs a little longer on summer evenings, unwilling to leave, and on these nights, it rusts the brick buildings until they wear light orange sweaters like old aluminum cans.
I sometimes feel like that was long ago but it really wasn’t. Chris’s hair is the same, a little longer or shorter, who knows. He sings with the same yearning and I’m reminded of how he always used to have a lyric for everything. A few seconds into some riff the two of us would stumble into, there’d be his voice, hushed like it wasn’t his. Later, when I step in front of a microphone and read to the same people who had just listened to Stay Inside, I see Chris in the crowd and it feels the same, as natural, as fleeting. Bar as bedroom. Bar as balcony. I know my poems are different than before. I don’t know if they’re better or worse. But they come from that same desire that I sat with in the evening light with him. You don’t make answers out of what you have. You make questions. You sing them.
III. Verse
I almost re-titled my book The Way You Talk to God Won’t Keep You Warm,after listening to Chris and Stay Inside’s first demo track in late 2016. “You said you’re sick of the space between your fingers and your heart,” Chris sings in that song, and it’s a line, even now, as I watch the people watching him, that I wish I wrote.
There beside the bar, I try to will into their minds the same joy I feel, standing here, mindlessly peeling a label off a beer as my old bandmate performs in this way that is both better and in no way different than how I came to know him. It’s hard to articulate what it feels like to be older and in the same place but not. To be in a bar that feels like an old room. Friendship is capable of this. It transforms the space you’re in into another. Memory does this too. But memory doing this alone is called nostalgia. Two memories doing this together, taking this beer I sip and tipping it into another one, outside, the sun shining through it as it sits next to Chris playing the guitar — that transcends.
In the summer of 2013 I had just finished college and I wanted to play music forever. I owned three keyboards I had bought in various degrees of “used” off of varying degrees of strange and even stranger strangers on Craigslist. Most days, I’d loop some syncopated chords on one keyboard while a drumbeat trickled underneath and then play melodies over it all. I could go for hours, riffing and non-riffing. Eventually, though, I got tired. There’s only so much improvisation one person can do, and often, what we create alone turns back to remind us that we are, in fact, alone.
So one day I went on Craigslist again, this time to the personals, the postings from people looking for a band to play with, looking for someone to join their band. It was then that I found a post by a guy named Chris Johns out in Brooklyn. He said he wanted to start a band. He linked to some of his solo, post-rocky music. I emailed him right away, this long, emotional, manifesto-like treatise from an earnest twenty-two year old me: how he wanted to move people through music, have them feel what he felt when he loved something fiercely, that deep and silent feeling of having no room left in your body for anything else but this, this, this — call it wonder or call it the vowels inside wonder. I am surprised now that this earnest twenty-two year old did not scare Chris. But Chris emailed him back, and the next week he was on the subway to Brooklyn, juggling three keyboards as he hopped from train to train.
IV. Chorus
From the balcony where we first meet and play you can see into other people’s bedrooms. As it grows dark, their windows glow like yellow moons descended from space and sky. You don’t have much of either in New York City. We pay to practice deep in Brooklyn, at a converted warehouse known as the Sweatshop, where a seemingly infinite number of rooms twist into the building’s center. You can smoke inside, and we light cigarettes in hallways where we can’t hear ourselves even with the semi-soundproofed walls. It’s always better when we return to the balcony, beginning in the light, where nothing surrounds us and we can see almost entirely sky. There, the notes don’t echo. They hang for a second before moving out, beyond the piled cans of beer, above the balcony wall, over Brooklyn. It doesn’t matter if people can hear us or not, if they care to hear us or not, if they like what they hear or not, because the price you pay for space in this city is filled with so many competing agendas. People want to like what you bring to their space. They want you to bring people to their space. They want the people’s enjoyment, which translates to time spent in the space, which often translates to money spent there, too. I can’t compete in spaces like that. My hands sweat all over the keys. I lose the melody, botch the time. But here, under sky, I let the notes hang because I can, watching Chris’s fingers move along the fret.
V. Bridge
There’s a scene between live cuts in The Last Waltz where The Band’s lanky, awkward-armed bassist, Rick Danko, leads Martin Scorsese through Shangri-La. In what is ostensibly a so what are you going to do now scene, Danko sits Scorsese down and leans forward to turn up a new song of his, “Sip the Wine.” It begins with Danko’s reaching and tender voice crooning, “I want to lay down beside you” over a soft, waltzing arrangement. It wrecks me every time, how Danko leans back and almost immediately, because of the downward tilt of his hat, becomes consumed in shadow, how Scorsese moans almost imperceptibly. You might miss it the first time.
“Thought you’d be tired of this by now,” Chris sings, and I know I’ll never be, mostly because, in the past few years, after we stopped playing together as a band, I’d come over to his apartment and he’d play me something recent and I’d hear his voice and how he accessed some deeper note he could not reach before. And it was not because he reached harder, but because he lived his reaching. He lived it day and night.
He sings in front of me now and it carries the kind of trenchant sorrowful familiarity that comes only when you get to know an artist as they do their work. He sings and the bar becomes a bedroom and there is Chris, sitting there and reaching for a long time until whatever arm has existed and still exists inside his mouth grows another inch deeper to find what was and wasn’t there before.
Those nights, Chris would lean forward as he played me something his new band recorded and edit it as it went along, pausing the song to change an instrument’s gain, the EQ, something I didn’t understand. And then he’d play it back and I’d always remark that everything sounded better than anything I heard of his before, but that seemed like such a dumb thing to say. How do you say to someone you are doing it, you really are without just saying you are doing it, you really are.
VI. Verse
One of our earlier songs, “Flerb,” had a line, “I hate these things I say,” which I think of almost every time I stand in front of an audience to read, like I am now, the microphone damp from a whole night of other people’s words. It’s lonely up here, reading poems. Even to friends. Even to an audience composed in part of poets. I miss it all the time, playing in a band. I miss it even when my loneliness is something someone else can listen to. I miss it because it feels selfish to be up here alone. There is a silence that turns two people into a band and then there is a silence that turns a few dozen into an audience. Two people making music together, improvising on the spot — I think its beauty has something to do with that first silence.
I think any two people coming together have different needs for silence, different expectations of what can and should fill it, and different notions of when to stop filling in order to let the silence back in. It is only in silence that we hear ourselves, in others that we see ourselves. Chris, in reminding me who he is, reminds me who I am. And I remember sitting there with him, hearing him create, in just the same light, waiting for what happens when we found the pauses in the same way we found the note, when we filled up just what we had taken away, and when what we took away was replaced with some kind of tenderness by the other. I remember this, how it feels like what it must have felt like to be a child learning, for the very first time, how to speak. How quickly we forget how nearly everything we do is beautiful, and just beyond being beyond description. It is hard to say, but to have something is to half something.
VII. Chorus
From the balcony where we first meet and play you can picture a future that extends beyond it. Chris and I do this for months. Sitting outside on weeknights, our phones always recording, ready to capture whatever phrase or melody or mood appeared like the moon above us — quietly, without notice. And then there it was. Soon, we post our own ad on Craigslist and find another guitarist. Then another ad, a bassist. Then a drummer. We are Free Couch. We are World Memory Champion. We are finally Fake Chatter. We set up a Bandcamp, a Spotify account. We record demos of songs that begin on the balcony and end in the bedroom studio. Leonard. Spaghettification. Alsace and Lorraine. Saw Mill Parkway. Spare. HYHTN. We labor over some more than others. We practice too often, then not often enough. We meet at the Sweatshop and think how cool it is that this is New York City. We jam in rooms there. We listen to bands jam harder than us. We feel the walls shake. We bring our own beer. We smoke inside. We take long train rides home in different directions. We book shows at Cakeshop, Pianos, Pete’s Candy Store. We bring our gear in cabs. We buy our one free beer with our little drink ticket. We smoke cigarettes and wait. We play our music to more people than we think we would. We play to less. We play to old lovers and new ones. We think we are impressive. We think we sound bad. The keys are too high in the mix. The vocals too low. The drums in time, but nothing else with them. It goes on like this until it doesn’t.
VIII. Coda
After the book launch, we stand there on the corner of 91st and 2nd in a city that feels hard to know intimately and yet so easy to become intimate with. But I get the sense with Chris, standing as we have stood so many times before — on his balcony, outside bars, next to the stage door of a venue — that we are forever entwined in the replications of our experiences. That, because of something — friendship, art, the act of creation — we will always find the familiar in the other, no matter how far away I go from making music or how far away he strays from hearing poems. The city leans in like it does, each building tilting inward as it climbs, eavesdropping everywhere, from Brooklyn to Queens to downtown, as one band loads into the now-defunct Cakeshop and another band loads out. I know this feeling well, this softness of being observed.
I think, then, that there will perhaps forever be a debate about how we talk about making art. Some say such a process goes beyond naming. Some say it is entirely a discipline. Some say it is work. Some say it is so much that cannot be said. Some hold their secrets close and others write down their rules for you. Chris has shown me that there is a moment, perhaps, or a long string of moments, where you make the choice that your art and your life are one and the same. I don’t know if that comes to you. If you wake up one day and you are your art. I think, like love, which is often hard and blistery and surprising and raw and even ordinary in its lasting, that your practice of art is a choice, often in spite of so much that pushes against you. Love is like this, yes. You choose love even after that long night spent talking from the kitchen into the bed about if what you want and what they want are two distinct lines moving in two different directions, about if there is something called apart and if that is something you should be. You choose love after that tired and mostly-honest and feeling-tragic talk, because you still believe in what you live.
Art is like this, except that it is a conversation about love that exists within the self. And then a year later, or two, or three, you’re standing outside with someone who has helped you say yes to yourself and the world feels at least just a little easier to live within. You remember the evenings spent together in the light, and what it felt like to create something before any thought of that thing’s quality seeped in. To make without judgment. Or, at least, before it.
It is dark outside and we are older and better for it and worse. The light will leave, I know this, but it will come back. Some time had left and, I know this, it would not. Chris leaves, eventually, and I go inside and stay there for a little while, and then I leave too. The next day, in the light, both aching and not, we will step, I know this, back out.
Devin Kelly is an Interviews Editor for Full Stop and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the books Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (CCM). He works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.
