Estranged 2001

Twenty-three years old with a head full of dreams and a bold naivety, I crammed my car with musical instruments and hit Highway 101 to make my way back home to Los Angeles. I was full force in the creative flow at that point, and my mission was to go music or go bust. 

Having just spent four years in Santa Cruz, my first time away from home was an experience of prolonged loneliness and emptiness that sharpened my senses for creating. The new surroundings, the culture of eccentricities, and the solitude in nature spurred me to ‘let go of the wheel’ so the music could write itself and pass through me. Timelessness and a creative high unlike anything else I’d ever experienced had become the new norm. Now it was time to take it to the next level. It was time to go home. 

A few years earlier, my family moved across the continent as far away from me as possible. It hadn’t really hit me when I was up in Santa Cruz. But all of a sudden there I was, back home in LA, alone. A homecoming to no one. 

What does ‘home’ mean when you’ve nobody to share it with? I wasn’t exactly sure. My dog was riding shotgun with me, after all. I’d be ok so long as I had my music and enough kibble to fill his doggie bowl. So, together we wandered the urban wilderness, immersed in the visceral onslaught of beauty and tragedy that is the Los Angeles underbelly.  

Being back in the city awakened my inner child’s sense of wonder and play. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. There wasn’t much innocence left in me to test. What I needed more than anything was to reconnect to that incorruptible pure self deep inside me and be my own best friend. In those days, that meant fueling up with a caffeinated nicotine frenzy and spending every waking moment possible creating music. 

To pay the least amount of cash in rent, I subletted my apartment and moved into a walk-in closet. Somehow the space barely fit a twin mattress, a computer desk, and a few guitars. Enfolding me like the walls of a cave, that tiny room morphed my consciousness into a trance-induced fugue, blurring the lines of reality and imagination. In this state of being, I wrote and recorded the songs that would later become the album Estranged. 

During that time, I was seeped in an alternative universe of daily living. Eventually, I reconnected with my childhood friends, but while everybody from my old crew was building their careers and relationships, I plunged myself further into a creative unknown. It was the summer of 2001, my first time recording music into a computer. If art was my drug, I was chasing the dragon like there was no tomorrow. 

It’s been 25 years since I made Estranged. How does a quarter century change one’s perspective on something created when they were so much younger, almost like a different person? Looking back at the new beginning I was carving out for myself in those days long ago, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps these songs are about purging the illusions we cling to from our past, like chainsawing your way through a romanticized idea of ‘home’. 

It’s a strange sensation to sever the umbilical cord that connected you to everything you chose to leave behind. There’s a dissociative element to it. Echoing throughout Estranged are the themes of isolation, disillusionment, and nihilism. But there’s also the adventure and heartbreak that are inseparable from the journey of finding yourself as a young, independent individual in the world. And in a way, these songs capture the last few moments of decadence and idealism, before life as we all knew it was shattered forever. 

A couple of months after I returned home to Los Angeles, 9/11 happened. Like the experiences of my parent’s generation when Martin Luther King and the Kennedys were assassinated, everyone old enough to remember that morning can tell you exactly what they were doing when they found out about the planes. My girlfriend at the time woke me up and said, “Something’s happened. It’s on the news.” I stumbled to the TV right as the second plane hit the Twin Towers, and instantly felt the dread as everyone in our country simultaneously realized this was no freak acccident. We were under attack. 

In the weeks and months that followed, my friends in New York processed their ash-laden horrors over marathon long distance phone calls. The shock and awe and terror of it all was indescribable. At the time, none of us could comprehend how the world would end up changing, and the collective trauma made its way deep into the psyche and the marrow of our bones. 

Music has always been my safe haven amidst the reality of life’s darkest days. Art brings light to the darkness. In this sense, I believe that creating art is a sacred, spiritual act. No matter how intense the horrors of the world are raging around you, through the hypnotic calm of creating art, you can still touch beauty. 

Today it feels like our society’s becoming increasingly estranged from a sense of connection—a connection to place, purpose, each other, and even ourselves. It’s as if we’re being disembodied slowly in real time, so subtle we almost don’t notice, but it’s there. We feel it as an unnerving itch when we try to sleep at night. We try to swat it away as if it’s a mosquito that keeps circling us to feed again and again, injecting its anesthetic into our blood stream so we don’t feel the parasitic drain on our souls. 

When we immerse ourselves into this feeling of estrangement, something shifts. In this state we find ourselves tested in a dark age where interpersonal connection, independent thought, and the freedom of the human spirit are at risk of eroding away, maybe forever as more and more of us embrace a machine-like existence. Too easily, we can drift into a doom scroll or rage on a fear-infused media bender. We can numb out completely as shells of our former selves or have a bot do our thinking for us. 

But this is still a choice. 

We can also choose to make our way together through the darkness of the times. As humans who create art and live messily and make love passionately, we can choose to build something beautifully broken from the pieces of what we hang our hope on. These are the sails of our love’s imperfect vessels. Maybe, just maybe, they will bring us home.

—JMM