(rich)"Man, that was great! we should record it!"

(me) - (laughs) you weren't recording?!

(Rich) "Right. We should record everything! Let's do it again."  

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-  Telephone conversation between Richard Patrick and August Bach, 2019

 

I'd spent years trying to find a way to adequately express the volume of the work that I have made over the past decade. The subject: LIFE. More specifically, my life. It's all very personal.

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Traditional methods left me cold. A coffee table book? A calendar on a wall? Everything was falling short.

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And then, one night, I was talking on the phone to an old friend who happens to be a solid musician: Rich Patrick. I've known Rich Since we were teenagers; we found common ground in our rebellion of the standard model of pretty much everything.  

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He was in his first band back then, and I would hang around when they practiced. Sometimes, Rich and I would hang out in his basement and experiment with sound. In one case, we made a song called mirrors which had me yelling into the pickups of a guitar because there wasn't a microphone handy. It was my first attempt at expressing myself that way. I wish there were still a copy.

Eventually, I had to move away (I got sent off to fucking military school), so we separated. I moved again after that, but we remained in contact, but like all things, storylines diverge,  LIFE goes on...

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The last time I had spoken to Rich was when he called me up to tell me that he was going on tour with Nine Inch Nails. Man, he was so excited. Being a musician was his dream life. I was happy to know that he was making it happen. He was riding the wave.   I knew it would be a while before we connected again, but I knew that we would- eventually.

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The years would pass, and as Rich was out there in the world touring and eventually forming his supergroups, I was finding my creative avenues. I'd become a painter, a sculptor, a writer, a photographer. I was constantly moving around; Changing shape as I learned to express myself as an artist.

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When, eventually, we did reconnect, it was in 2019. It had been 20  some years since we had last spoken. And, It was as if we had just talked yesterday. That dynamic was the same.

 

So we started talking every so often again, getting caught up after a long time of being out of range of each other and about everything else under the sun.

 

One night we were talking, and because my phone had decided to die completely, I was using my laptop with a cheap dangle mic instead. It seemed to work just fine. I was in Florida at the time, and he was in LA.

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The difference about this night was that he had brought his guitar and strummed around in the background while  I was breaking down a show. - Something about the melody that he played was pulling up a deep well of emotion and expression within me. So I started singing. Out loud.

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He encouraged me to continue.

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What came out was a story about a man being lost at sea in a storm. A man who knows that he will not make it back to his love, so he tried to relay the message to her over the radio. I know, it's a sad expression, but so authentic to what I was feeling about pretty much everything at the time, not as a sailor at sea - as a person in the world. So the story itself isn't a confession; its depth is—the depth of the sea of life.

 

Fortunately, Rich was totally into the evolving song, and after seeing that it was going somewhere, he recorded it.   

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A few hours later, a song showed up in my inbox, entitled LOST. It was the perfect title.

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The credit goes to Rich for pretty much everything with this song.   I can only take credit only for the lyrics...and maybe for having the courage to sing out loud when no one around me had any idea what I was doing that night. (he was in my ear). He mixed it. He figured out how to make a song over the phone. He sent it back. 

 

How cool is that?

 

So this became the second song we have spontaneously made together in this long life. To me, a bridge between those youthful, rebellious souls that we once were and the life-tested adults that we have become—both of us,  Artists to the last.

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A few months later, as I was beginning to work on this site, I realized that it was also the perfect way to express the work that I have been doing for all of these years. Not just because it was me singing along with my own pictures - and how many photographers get to have that - but because the song came about as an expression of the life that I have lived, connected with the very foundation where it all began so many years ago. A punk teenager with a whole life ahead of him.

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August Bach - December, 2021

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