The Island
A summertime dream becomes a wintertime song
We weren’t originally planning on going anywhere near Stonehaven when my girlfriend and I were plotting out the itinerary for last summer’s Scotland trip. But when it started to look like we couldn’t really do justice to the Western Isles with our allotted time, and my Scottish-born artist pal Mark Regester started raving to me about the unforgettable beauty of Dunnottar Castle (and the deliciousness of the mussels at Stonehaven’s Captain’s Table), our travel trajectory suddenly shifted eastward…
And I’m so glad it did. Not only did Dunnottar and the Captain’s Table mussels totally live up to Mark’s raves, but the two days and nights Shannon and I spent in Stonehaven and North Berwick (our other stop on the eastern coast) were among the most magical highlights of what was surely one of the happiest weeks of my entire life. The room we stayed in at The Ship Inn in Stonehaven may have been the tiniest (by far) of any of the hotel rooms on our trip, but everyone who worked there was incredibly nice, and you couldn’t beat the location — it was maybe a 40 minute walk along the coast from there to Dunnottar, and right upstairs from The Captain’s Table. Our third-floor room’s lone window also gave us a lovely view of Stonehaven’s tiny harbor.
Maybe it was the mussels I’d consumed at dinner or the scotch I’d consumed afterwards, or maybe it was the sound of the tide softly rolling back into the harbor while we slept, but I had a very strange and disturbing dream that night which has haunted me ever since. In the dream, I was a somewhat wealthy Scotsman of the 19th century, and I was consumed with grief and madness because the ship carrying my bride-to-be home to me had vanished without a trace. But in the dreams of my Scottish self (yes, we’re in dream-within-a-dream territory now), I could see that she was still alive and stranded on a small island off the coast of Scotland, one which was shrouded by some sort of curse that lured ships to their doom and prevented any survivors of the wrecks from ever leaving its shores. I knew that I had to try and find her, somehow, even if it meant meeting my own doom in in the process…
The dream was really vivid and intense, and bore no resemblance at all to the sort of scenarios and characters that my subconscious usually sends forth while I’m asleep. I distinctly remember waking up from it and feeling like it wasn’t my dream — it was as if my antennae had inadvertently picked up a broadcast from a much different frequency. And while my dreams (even the really weird ones) tend to dissipate into nothing in the light of day, this one clung to me like dampness on an autumn overcoat. I just couldn’t shake it — so upon returning to the States, I resolved to try and turn it into a short story or a song…
Most of you who read Jagged Time Lapse know me as a writer and music journalist, but I also paid plenty of dues as a gigging musician back in the eighties and nineties. I retired from the stage around 2000 for all the usual reasons (frustrations over my band’s lack of success, home life pressures, needing to actually make a living, etc.), but I still love to play guitar and write music. For about five years now, I’ve been recording under the nom de rock of The Corinthian Columns, and putting individual tracks up on Bandcamp whenever they feel finished enough to share.
The Corinthian Columns stuff is admittedly all over the place, sound- and vibe-wise, since one of the nice things about no longer being in a band is not feeling painted into a particular stylistic or sonic corner. If you’ve ever listened to an episode CROSSED CHANNELS, the monthly podcast I do with
, you’ve heard “Blue Diamond Fire,” my seventies cop show-influenced instrumental that we use as the podcast’s theme…
I came up with the music for my dream-inspired song pretty soon after returning from Scotland, though the words and the instrumental mix took forever to get right. The whole thing was like nothing I’d ever written or recorded before, which seemed appropriate given that the dream didn’t really feel like it came from my own brain.
And now, after many months of tweaking and refining, “The Island” is finally ready for public consumption. I hope you dig it; no pressure to purchase a download of it, of course, but every cent I make from it on Bandcamp will be donated to Pasadena Humane to assist with caring for animals injured and displaced by the Eaton Fire.
That’s all for today, Jagged Time Lapsers — I’ll return to writing about other people’s music later this week!
Wow, Stonehaven is beautiful, and what a strange dream to inhabit you there. Clearly you came in touch with some powerful spirits!
there is no end to your creativity is there???!!!!!!