Vol. 5 - Richard Dawson, Cometeer
Vol. 5 - Richard Dawson, Cometeer
My holiday travel plans were unexpectedly extended, thanks to Southwest. Luckily I still have my luggage, a song, and a cup :)
Hello friends! I hope you’ve had a wonderful week and I wish you all a happy new year! Thanks for opening this lil newsletter of mine.
I started A Song and A Cup to keep up a weekly writing practice and to challenge myself to write about the things I hear, smell, and taste. Sensory experiences are often “you had to be there” moments, better experienced than told, but it’s such a good exercise to try and use words to describe them. I hope this inspires you to go out into the world, listen deeply, taste intentionally, and talk about it all out loud. Cuz it’s just plain FUN! :-)
A Song - Thicker Than Water, Richard Dawson
As we made our final descent into BWI on Christmas Eve, I queued up NPR Music’s New Music Friday to see if I could find anything worth sharing. After a sweet new Carole King-ish song from Weyes Blood (runner-up for this week’s newsletter), I heard 11 seconds of faintly dissonant guitar strumming. I turned up the volume in my headphones before a gallivanting brushed kit came rushing in, the lightly strained falsetto of Richard Dawson filling my ears.
The first line of the song reads like a pull quote from a local newspaper: “At the end I didn't really comprehend / That I was saying goodbye / For the last time to all my friends and family / My only thought was flight from the mines.”
I closed my eyes and let my imagination bring me to a secret carriage ride from a dark mine to the medieval English countryside, trotting past manicured farm hills and milky white cows. I was a young stowaway, hooded and carrying a load like the character on the album cover. Or maybe I was a piece in a fantasy board game, like the ones my friend Jack loves to play.
As we saddle on, a meaty and twangy guitar lilts playfully with a peculiar vocal melody (I am vaguely reminded of Dawes) while the bass plays supportive chords and occasional licks (evoking Austin-based friends of the newsletter, Large Brush Collection). A plucked harp adds a bit of color to the storybook landscape. The lyrics are cryptic on first listen, but upon later googling actually depict a scene from a post-apocalyptic future. This seems to be Dawson’s thing; he builds worlds through baroque-ish folk music, like a minstrel in a damp stone tavern.
After traveling for days, the narrator finds himself in the ruins of a great city. On cue, the arrangement makes way for a choir of triumphant voices who proclaim in remembrance “Their laughter resounds from the shells of / Every shop, every pub, every school, every home”.
In the next scene, the narrator discovers the bodies of his parents floating in a Matrix-like contraption alongside that of his dog… and his OWN! This part is particularly haunting, not just because of the big “a-ha” moment, but also because Dawson holds the note on “own”, past its comfy spot in the verse and into the next part of the song. The tone is unchanging but quickly falls into dissonance as the rest song keeps trucking forward. Kind of like how a death (or an epiphany) can feel like a giant pause, even as the world keeps on spinning.
After weeks of oscillating between Christmas songs and my usual playlists, Richard Dawson pulled me out of a musical rut. I am once again reminded that music is expansive, illustrative, and that making things is the most human thing we can do.
A Cup - Coltrane, Red Bay Coffee, Cometeer
Spoiled and worried that my dad wouldn’t have any good coffee beans (or the equipment to brew them), I shipped a few boxes of Cometeer to my childhood home before my weekend arrival.
For those of y’all who aren’t hip to the self-proclaimed “best coffee ever”, Cometeer offers flash-frozen pods of concentrated brews, sourced and roasted by specialty coffee companies. The capsules are shipped on dry ice (SO COOL) and should be stored in the freezer. When you want a cup of coffee, all you have to do is pick out a pod, melt it, and add it to hot water, cold water, milk, or whatever you want (dirty chai???). Viola! Specialty coffee and ya didn’t even have to buy a scale.
I was skeptical at first, but I must admit that Cometeer is very, very good. It’s kind of a genius idea when you think about it; capsules are prepared at optimal extraction and a concentrated strength, like a ready-to-drink espresso, so you can get as creative as you want with your morning coffee with little to no hassle. The packaging is sleek (extremely important), and they boast an impressive roster of roasters from around the country (plus UK-based Square Mile).
This is not an ad, so allow me to make an important distinction; Cometeer is a tech company providing a coffee service. They pioneered a technique for flash-freezing coffee at optimal extraction, branded the shit out of it, and got all the right coffee people on board. Unfortunately, in classic tech company fashion, they recently laid off a pretty portion of their employees right before the holiday season. I must admit I don’t know much more about the story than that, but I do feel it is worth mentioning.
Anyway, we ordered the 32-pack of medium-dark roasts and got Klatch Coffee’s WBC blend, Onyx Coffee’s Southern Weather, Equator’s Mocha Java, and the crowd-favorite by far, Red Bay Coffee’s Coltrane. I remember visiting Red Bay’s cafe in the Ferry Building in San Francisco and being super impressed. Their frozen pod was equally impressive.
My dad and I drank it americano-style, diluted with 8 ounces of hot water and black. In the car on the way to my uncle’s house on Christmas Eve, we passed around our paper cups so everyone could try a sip. My brother, Will, and even my notoriously picky sister all agreed it was smooth and tasty, even without milk or sugar. Because it was so easy to make, we found ourselves sipping Cometeer well into the afternoon each day. Our supplies dwindled.
Late afternoon on Monday, as Will and I packed our bags for our 10:25 p.m. scheduled flight, we got a notification that it’d been canceled, along with basically every other Southwest flight leaving BWI for the next three days. We scrambled (though I really think we handled it quite well) to find a way home to Austin. Will found a nonstop flight out of Dulles for Tuesday afternoon, which inspired a fun little impromptu DC trip. I decided to stay until Thursday to attend a relative’s funeral.
The morning of the service, I brewed myself the last capsule of Coltrane. I forgot to stir, so the first few sips were a bit watery. I could taste coffee and maybe a bit of dark chocolate, but I was so tired, not in the mood to dissect my coffee, wearing the same pajamas I’d been wearing for the last five days, my hair unwashed, my workouts skipped, wondering if I could wear jeans to a funeral.
I sipped between bites of eggs and toast. Our family pit bull begged at my feet. The morning light spilled from the kitchen window onto the dirty tablecloth. My dad had already left for work, my sister was away at her new place in Monkton, and my brother was asleep in the room down the hall. I was alone, like so many mornings and afternoons growing up, at the dining room table. In the quiet, I started to think I hadn’t done enough; like I should’ve had deeper conversations with my family while I was home or I should have been funnier or more positive or more kind; like I’m so full of myself for moving to Austin and my friends and cousins are all having babies and buying houses and my grandma wants me to move back and am I wasting my time? Am I going the right way? Can I confidently go in the direction of my dreams, or is it all just ego, ego? I’m overthinking again, I’m making it all so complicated and I’m always so negative and never enough until the soft pluminess of my cold coffee cuts through the noise and I swig the last of it, sweet and strong for lack of stirring, set my mug in the sink, and go to wash my face.