(Originally Published on The Huffington Post – 1/2/2012)

The first 12 years of my career were spent writing songs about loss and longing, so in some way I suppose I owe the fact that you are even reading this on The Huffington Post to my own unhappiness. Historically, I have felt most at home in heartbreak, both in art and in life. It’s largely what I knew growing up, so everything else felt foreign and wrong as an adult. For years, people being kind to me felt painful. I was terrified of anyone actually knowing me. It’s pretty fucked-up — and I still struggle with this. It’s a jagged part of my makeup that I will most likely be working on for the rest of my days.

I first learned about how sad the world can be when I was 7 years old, courtesy of a much older family “friend” who just couldn’t keep his hands off me. I won’t get into the specifics around the abuse suffered, but it was ongoing and horrible and went undetected for many years. The scars from this experience in my formative days have done just that: they formed me. They changed who I was and how I looked at the world, and they altered my sense of self at its core. All of this was complicated by the fact that I also happened to be a gay man born into a fundamentalist Christian home. It was a perfect storm for me to go completely apeshit, which I did.

I began experimenting with drugs and music around the same time, both before my 11th birthday. By 14 I was a full-blown, cigarette-smoking, drug-addicted alcoholic with headphones and a notebook who fancied himself a singer-songwriter. Those same old scars now rooted me on as I built an impenetrable wall of sadness and sound around myself. They gave me words and melodies to purge the feelings that could not be killed chemically, and I began seriously writing and recording music when I was 17. Those first songs would become my debut record, GLEE, which was released in 2000. At the time of its initial release, nobody knew what I was trying to do. I recall a lot of head scratching and people being really uncomfortable with the lyrical content, mostly, so I decided to take a break and focused solely on partying my brains out for the next five years.

In 2006, prompted by more unfortunate heartbreak of the drugged-out variety, I Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everybody!

It’s October and I don’t know about you, but I’m turning 30 this month. I’m excited about this birthday over all other birthdays that I can remember. I am thinking this is maybe because I spent more than a few years thinking I would never reach this age due to the chemical tailspin I was in for 16 years. Most people who knew me in real life during this time had a similar feeling about my longevity, I’m sure. I am SO excited that I was wrong about this. I’m grateful that I have made it out of that waking nightmare alive and am pleased as punch to be here with all of you now, healthy and humbled with both feet planted firmly on the GROUND.

I figured I’d give away a song that fits in with the theme this week…

“The Dotted Line” is Track 13 on my new record (the final track) and was written while I was in a rehab center during the first part of 2008 finally getting my shit together. I put it last on the record because it felt to me like a little burst of hope at the tail end of documenting a rather difficult journey. It’s about picking up the broken pieces and putting them back together and, ultimately, letting go.

I hope you all find yourselves in a place of truth in your own experiences, whatever your truths may be…however wonderful or painful, forgettable or memorable. This is one piece of mine. Thanks for letting me share it with you.

🙂

xo
LL