T.R.I.P. Through the Multiverse

Traveling along a long and lonely road with the guys, I can barely see for the sea and the sand in my eyes. Tears and dreams can indeed both blind a person to the life right before them, prisming vision kaleidoscopically into myriad other possibilities for what you could have become. Middle manager? Letter carrier? Scientist? Illustrator? Homeless? Crazy? How sane can it be to keep making noise in a world inundated with it? What are we doing here, man?

Something was not right with The Lights Out two years ago. We were as tight as ever, made the slickest, tightest, punchiest record imaginable and elevated our live show to tour-level execution for South By Southwest. We were ripe and rotting. I could feel it in my own conviction onstage, wondering how to believe hard enough to put it over. I could feel it in my conviction to put pen to paper. Were we excited enough to still endure walking four hundred pounds of gear down a flight of stairs at six at night, into Tim the van, onto the stage at some club, back into the van, and back up the stairs at three thirty in the morning? Were we getting anything across to anyone at all? And so forth. Every band has its time. Maybe ours had come to an end.

Except, we never really got to that point. Somewhere in the preparation for the band’s annual vacation to Burning Man, the true depth of Jesse’s tinkering compulsion began to reveal itself in the crazy light-up EL wire madness of our Border Patrol costumes, which even in that sea of lights, made everyone who saw us stop and say something nice. The visual edge is a lot, lot farther out there than black jeans and t-shirts, or even sequins and rhinestones. A more bedazzled and illuminated band began to take shape in my mind. Why not let the creative genius at this stuff just run wild? Jesse is the kind of guy who is easily bored, maybe this will hold his attention for awhile. Well, Jesse decided to take it on, to all of our eternal gratitude. But why look this way from now on? What’s the motivation?

Running in parallel to preparing for this trip, it began to blossom in my mind that we all exist, not just in a universe, but in a multiverse. I’d heard Brian Greene on NPR some months back on this subject and it caught my attention for being the second time I’d ever heard that word, the first being from Michael Moorcock’s “The Dragon in the Sword.” Unlike Moorcock’s fantasy flight, Greene argues there is mounting evidence that we really live in a multiverse, where every choice is taken, as originally posed in Dr. Hugh Everett’s Many-worlds interpretation. You are reading this now, but there is a you that stopped reading one second ago, and another one minute ago, and another who never started because you realized you were running late for that thing. Better hurry!

What this means is that any possible kaleidoscopic facet of an alternate reality you can concoct in your dreams (or nightmares) is literally true somewhere in the infinity of the multiverse, as long as it obeys the laws of physics. You’re never a god, but somewhere, a quantum offshoot you literally rules the earth as a pharaoh. Suddenly there was again an endless bounty of things to write about. Everything possible is true!

It’s dark in the space that separates this reality from the rest. You need a light to find your way through.

A new focus led to rediscovered joy in making music together, and we went back into the salt mines with willing hearts: two years of writing, rehearsing and tightening a new body of material, with Jesse building a void-shattering light element on top. A visual illustration of every moment of every song. If you’re going underground, really go. So we laid low, and waited. We still got after each other sometimes, but mostly we lined up. Finally, we began playing out a couple months ago, starting with a few warm-up, kick-the-tires shows in our beloved sister city of Worcester. The new, visually- and conceptually-enhanced The Lights Out is working as planned, and we’re finally ready to share it with the world at large, and Boston in particular. On May 22, we are pleased to take the stage at TT the Bear’s Place in Central Square. We are even more pleased to share this special bill with new friends City Rivals, good friends The Luxury and our especially simpatico friends Planetoid.

The Lights Out came unmoored from linear causality somewhere in the spring of 2012, when we were imbued with the power to travel among parallel realities in the multiverse, and the responsibility to report back and rock out. When we don the goggles and the gear, we are your dimensional pilots into alternate possibilities of reality, any of which could be true here as well. When we take the stage, we are in the space between possibilities with you, and who can say what will happen? Whatever it is, it will certainly rock.