It struck me when discussing this song with some friends that we tend to unconsciously conflate the future with eternity. When this future becomes the past, we are left with a strange and poignant disconnect. I don’t quite have the words to describe it. The moment passes from future to past and the eternity eludes our grasp. 

This conflation and its aftermath can be seen particularly clearly in the progress of technology. Technology that once seemed nearly magical comes in time to seem almost laughably crude.

For me this well-known transition has had a particular emotional force, because my Dad worked for IBM for as long as I knew him, fixing mainframe computers out of their office in Providence, RI. He participated in the future, and then, just before the technological revolutions that made that future ubiquitous, he died. In dying, he passed into the past. Soon after, he was joined by the technology he had spent his adult life repairing.

In the years following his death he returned to me often in dreams. The first time was in the week after he died. It was simple and direct: he had returned home to clean out the clothes from his dresser. As years went by, my dreaming mind had to stretch further to explain why I hadn’t seen him for so long. Once he had another family in Australia. Once he had been in prison. During one visit he explained that he spent his time in the afterlife around a card table with three friends, playing UNO. It was a sort of post-mortem therapy. I asked him then if he would be reborn and he replied, “Not yet.”

I tell you all this as a way of introducing this video I made for a song I wrote following one such paternal dream visitation, which occurred back around 2016, when I was staying in the guest house of Dr John Haines. I woke up that morning and wrote the dream into a single verse that made me laugh. It seemed like a novelty song fragment, but I realized in the afternoon that it was more than that.

DIAL UP

TM SHAW: words & music, vocal, guitars, piano
CHRISTINA FOREVER: guitar, backing vocal
DAVID JACOBS-STRAIN: bass, mixing