In the fall of 1999, I got an email through my website. A seventeen year old girl surfing the net stumbled upon me and decided to write a letter. She wrote, “My point being, i would like to know if we could keep in touch, kind of an e-mail pen pal. I know, I know it sounds gay, but i would just like to hear more about you.” Christy Lyn Eversoll lived in a small town called Petersburg in southern Indiana, the landscape I imagined not unlike my hometown in the sticks, Phoenix, NY. Trailer homes, yards littered with debris, biker speed, big trucks blasting by on the solitary highway, and a twisted old river running through a town that died in the early 20th century. She sent a scan of her high school portrait, and poems every few days. They were classic young girl poems, mortifying stuff, yet they weren’t terrible. They all had a twist in there, either describing some unexpected scene or using a word that doesn’t exist. I caught a glimpse into an open innocent soul of a girl that was growing up fast.
I’d just made the London Payne CD, making London Pain’s poems into songs, and my keyboardist Khoi-San said I should make Christy’s poems into an album too. Excellent idea, so I compiled the best of hers along with some others I found online (that might have appeared as slightly creepy, trolling for poems on girl-centric websites) and a couple of poems from friends that dug up some old gems for me. I put the songs together one week, and recorded it the next week, playing everything myself. “Love Blindness” is a good example of the conflict of sexual desire and really having no clue what it means. She wants to touch, hold, and kiss, but at the same time cannot bear the thought, much less dare actually act upon that desire. I found it at the time to be a little humorous but not completely so. With the tender music and my highest falsetto, I wanted to get inside her head and come out with something that sounded like a unicorn turning a radio dial in 1972 on a snow day off from school.
1 Comment
Dan Matovina
8/14/2013 03:05:34 pm
I enjoyed that whole CD, Chris. Very entertaining lyrics and great melodies. "I sit all day eating triskets, salsa .... listening to Sheryl, Alannis, Eliott ..."
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CvSChris von Sneidern is a musical artist living in San Francisco. Archives
July 2022
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