A Bullet, A Lever, A Key: Part Two
(Instead of using the album cover a second time, here’s a picture of Castleton performing live)
The third track off the EP, “2038″, describes the narrator losing his job as a computer programmer for the second day in a row. Because of the severity of his drug problem, the narrator has forgotten that he was fired the day before and come back to work: “It must’ve seemed strange when I came into the office/on the next day, like as if nothing had changed.”
“2038″, like “2045″’s description of a marriage, fits an entire career into a short song. We find out about the dynamic between the narrator and his boss (Victor is younger and learned everything about the job from the narrator), the atmosphere of the office, and why he’s being fired. The narrator has “never made much of an effort to get along,” so there’s tension between him and his co-workers. He’s that employee that doesn’t do much anymore, but has been around forever and is difficult to get rid of.
The chorus of the song is the most we get of another character’s direct speech on the EP:
Take a year off, maybe you can come back.
You’ve done some good work, it hasn’t always been bad.
You’ve written good code, taught me most of what I know,
but you’ve been distracted and we have to let you go.
The boss spins the narrator’s termination quite a bit. We find out the narrator “shoved this girl” when he found out the coffee wasn’t ready. He’s probably never going to be offered another job by the company if he physically assaulted a female co-worker, but the boss just wants him to go away, so he’s being falsely optimistic.
The other employees aren’t described, but the narrator is embarrassed when he realizes he’s already been fired because “even though the door was shut, he knew that they’d be staring.” Though Victor tries to keep the narrator calm, the seriousness of the situation is emphasized again when “Jim and Barry came along to escort [him] out.”
All of the details in the song, including the drug-slurred voice Castleton uses for the narrator’s lines, indicate the work environment the character is being gently coaxed out of. Memory loss and violence seem to be symptoms of his addiction, and we can see how this episode could lead to the narrator’s divorce and abandonment in a hotel room.
Tracks 4 & 5, “2031″ and “2020,” develop the narrator’s relationship with his children and explain the anxiety that leads him to drug addiction. In “2031,” Sarah, the narrator’s wife, buys their son, Chris, a guitar for his birthday. The narrator is upset that Sarah did this without consulting him, but the underlying reason for his anger is that he doesn’t want to be reminded his abandoned pursuit of music. So he breaks the guitar one night when Chris won’t listen to him:
Finally, for once ever, Chris looked scared.
He bolted out the door and downstairs.
Sarah came up to see what all the fuss was about.
When she saw the guitar she started freaking out,
telling me how I’m taking my own life out on my kids.
She was calm when she said,
“You won’t be happy until nobody is.”
He’s satisfied when he scares his son, so Sarah’s criticism seems reasonable, but the narrator remains sympathetic because no one tries to understand why he’s upset. Sarah asks him why he doesn’t get his keyboard down from the attic to play along with Chris instead of getting angry, but he plays it off: “I laughed too quick and told her I wasn’t about to encourage this assault on our senses, but the truth is I couldn’t play a song if my pension depended on it.”
His anxiety centers around a loss of control, which the song’s chorus describes:
In the attic/in the corner/under sheets
I found my keyboard/put my fingers/on the right keys
but couldn’t find/a single chord/and
if my hands can forget all the songs that they wrote and the parts that they played
in the albums they made/who’s to say that they won’t just forget everything
one day/can’t cook/can’t code/can’t feel
my job, my skills demand/my hands
all wrong/paycheck/all gone.
The reason he’s anxious and unhappy to begin with, as we learn in “2011,” is his decision to give up music and return to school; but if he can forget everything about the one passion in his life, what happens if he loses the other skills he relies on to live and making a living, or even the ability to feel anything at all. Because of the album’s structure, we know that the narrator’s anxiety is valid. He’s on a self-destructive downward spiral that will result in exactly what he fears.
In “2020,” he takes his kids, Chris and Zooey, to the park while Sarah cleans the house for a party. He’s begun to worry about his health:
Two nights this week I dreamed that my teeth crumbled when I tried to eat.
When I wake up my gums feel weak – I make the kids brush their teeth til their mouths bleed.
I feel ambushed by my body or at least a little misled,
as if the blood that moves my parts can’t keep up with commands coming from my head.
The narrator’s dreams are another aspect of his anxiety over losing control. While his kids are playing, he watches a girl running laps around the track: “I watch the muscles sing in her thighs.” The girl’s youth and health are things the narrator is afraid of losing. When he turns back a woman is helping his daughter off the playground equipment. She misinterprets his reasons for staring at the running girl, saying, “Maybe you should keep your eyes on your own child.” He gathers Chris and Zooey and goes to the pharmacy for his prescription, because he can “feel the panic starting.”
“2011″ reveals the mistake the narrator refers to in “2045,” the turning point in his life, through the end of a prior relationship. His girlfriend, Keta, cheats on him with a musician, and he can’t figure out what he’s done wrong:
She wanted more stability, she wanted more attention
and I just wanted to have less tension between us
I told her I could change my whole life if she’d be happy
when she said I’d never change, I called her a defeatist.And then I did it – I put a knife in the thing I loved most
It was music that I burned at the stake,
as a toast to the girl and the world that I want to be a part of.
Maybe going back to school was when I started to lose.
“2011″ seems like a bit of a misstep in the narrative flow, since introducing a second relationship into a story this compressed feels disjointed. Continuing with Sarah would have added complexity to the entire narrative. If he caught Sarah cheating and confronted her, that information would influence the way both characters are viewed in previous songs on a second listen.
I’m also not completely sold on the narrator’s motivation for continuing to pursue his college degree after breaking up with Keta (italics mine): “I’m gonna prove to her world that I can always follow through.” Proving a point to the “adult world” by entering that world out of spite doesn’t seem reasonable, but it makes sense that he would stubbornly pursue his relationship with Sarah, even after finding out about her affair, because he’s already changed his whole life so “she’d” be happy.
Everyone’s got an opinion, as the saying goes, but this narrative blip doesn’t detract from my appreciation of the EP. I do wonder, however, if since the EP’s timeline is approaching the present of 2007, that maybe “2011″ is an extrapolation of a real life situation. In my own writing, I’ve often found it difficult to give up reality in order to tell the best story. Anyway, I could play guessing games until a new century rolls around if Castleton is right about the increased lifespan, but let’s continue.
The final track, “2007,” explains the narrator’s frustration with his musical career and his motivation for leaving it:
. . . when you have no luck to start with, you’ve nothing to part with,
and I’m not mad that I don’t have it,
I’m mad that luck should have anything to do with being an artist.[. . .]
There was a time when I thought that I could change the country
with a few choice raps and some odd time beats,
but noise plus noise equals noise,
and the only way that noise can make silence is defeat.
The narrator has reached the point in an artist’s life where idealism hits reality. Dramatic irony drives the tension in this song. We know what happens when the narrator abandons music from the songs leading up to “2007,” but at this point he’s optimistic about giving up on his dreams:
This is not how I wanna spend the rest of my life
’cause I got it in my head that I had to stand for something?
Once you get pass that the future actually looks bright.
The lyrics do a wonderful job of depicting the sort of rationalization people go through when considering whether to stop expending the massive amounts of sweat and tears that go into pursuing a poorly paid dream. Giving up the pursuit of a dream can be an enormous weight off your shoulders, but it’s possible to lose more than just the strain. When the narrator gives up music, he also loses the only thing that anchors him and provides a sense of control in his life. Without a dream to follow, he has nothing to strive toward.
And in under 20 minutes, we’ve experienced most of a person’s life. Hopefully, we’re all inspired to continue pursuing our passions instead of hopelessly depressed about the inevitability of failure and death! A Bullet, A Lever, A Key tells an old story worth repeating, that people should pursue their own course through life instead of letting someone else choose for them. Telling the story in reverse allows Castleton to painfully layer the consequences before revealing their origin, which gives the character’s decision to abandon his dreams the entire suffocating weight of his failed life.
Now that you’ve read about Gavin Castleton’s potential future if he can’t make music viable as a career, I’ll point you once again to the place you can buy his stuff. I’m going to hold off on looking at his most recent album, Home, until the New Year, so you’ll have plenty of time to listen to it on his website, gavincastleton.com, and maybe even buy a copy so he’ll continue to make music instead of becoming a computer programmer with a drug addiction and a failed marriage. How’s that for a guilt trip?
A Bullet, A Lever, A Key: Part One
This seven song EP tells the story of my life backwards – from my suicide in a New Jersey hotel room in 2054 to present day 2007, in the backroom of Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel after a show. The music is a cross-breed of progressive rock rhythms and hip hop instrumentation. Lyrically, each song travels eight or nine years back in time to depict a telling scene in my tragic timeline. Over the course of the record, various clues unveil the catalyst of my downfall: the decision to leave music for the seemingly greener pastures of corporate life. The album is a rendering of how my life could look if I stopped doing what makes me happy and started following a more adulty path.
- Gavin Castleton
A Bullet, A Lever, A Key is Gavin Castleton’s prog-hop mini-epic about a fictional alternate life where he gives up music to go to college and join the ranks of the cubicle-bound office world. Each of the EP’s seven tracks is named after a different year and the story is told in reverse chronology (“2054,” “2045,” “2038,” “2031,” “2020,” “2011,” & “2007″). The narrative begins with Castleton’s suicide at age 76, so tension is immediately established and most of what drives the story is finding out how the narrator reached such a desperate point in his life.
Since the EP begins in year 2054, the story also has some subtle science fictional elements: an extended lifespan (Castleton’s ex-boss hopes to live to 140 through the use of “enhancers, attachments, and stuff”) and holograms instead of photographs. Though these SF elements could have been distracting, there are only two, and the extended lifespan is particularly interesting because the narrator ends his life at 76, which would typically be near the end of our lifespans anyway. What effects would living through almost an entire extra life have on our society? An increase in the number of suicides seems likely.
On the opening track “2054″, Castleton immediately grounds the listener in the concrete:
For three days I’ve carried all my stuff down from the attic
and cut it up into two piles:
the things that hurt I threw into the bathtub and burned.
The things that made me smile, I cleaned them up,
and set them up in rows around my bed
The use of objects from the narrator’s past works well to establish an emotional connection between the listener and the character. We learn through a bound copy of a dissertation that the narrator was raised by a single mother with four kids, but she still “fought eight years” for a PhD. The mother’s struggle to complete something personally meaningful despite hardship foreshadows the narrator’s failure to continue pursuing his own passion.
The second object is the narrator’s son’s diploma:
Then I picked up Chris’ diploma from Brown University,
and I remember how he asked me not to attend the ceremony,
but I hid in the back when he walked up to get it,
and my heart screamed his name when they said it.
The narrator and Chris are estranged, which creates tension without an explanation, but that the character still cares for his son. He also finds a picture of himself as a young man that he had forgotten about. The photograph is the only thing he has from the period in his life when he was truly happy. It shows him backstage after a musical performance with a girl, and though he doesn’t seem to recognize the girl, he knows they’re in love.
The hopeful look on that face makes me wince.
I haven’t seen that look, haven’t seen that face since.
I take it into the bathroom – light it up and throw it in.
Since this is the only object in the song that the narrator describes burning, it gains additional narrative weight. Seeing an object from this period in the his life causes him pain, and gives the listener a clue to what initially started him on the path toward suicide.
Castleton uses the list of objects to establish a history for the narrator in a short amount of time. Starting any narrative with the narrator’s suicide is risky because it’s difficult to give death meaning without an established connection to the character, and in the even more constrictive confines of a song, the risk is greater.
I smelled Zooey’s baby clothes,
my first program code,
the leotards I wore when I was just four years old,
the first cartoon I drew,
Chris’ first pair of shoes . . .
Similar to Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” Castleton uses the list of objects to describe the character and develop an emotional connection to the character for the listener without having to spend a lot of time in development. Listeners understand how the narrator feels about each object because they have similar objects that are important to them. The quantity of objects with emotional significance to the narrator communicate the length of his life and what he’s giving up by ending that life.
Castleton doesn’t mention suicide directly in the song. Only the method is implied:
I empty out the medicine cabinet into my shaky hands.
My fingers look so new for a second I wonder who I am.
I quickly stow them away, back in my pants.
This indirect method of describing difficult subject matter works well, especially since the story is told through the character’s voice. There’s no way to artfully have a character say, “I’m going to commit suicide,” and since the narrator has already made his decision, it would be awkward to mention it directly. The narrator also suggests suicide at the end of the song:
Some people feel like the world wants them around, and that’s fine.
I decided 10 years ago that I don’t want all that time . . .
For me 76 is enough.
For me 76 was too much.
The extended lifespan of the character also adds emotional weight, since the suicide of a 76-year-old is different from a younger person’s. We can assume that the narrator has contemplated ending his life for quite a while, and that he truly may have little to live for. The way he plans his suicide is methodical. He burns everything that hurt him and then sets the few things that make him happy on display, as a memorial to the good things in his life.
The second track, “2045,” describes the end of the narrator’s marriage. His wife delivers divorce papers for him to sign at a hotel room where he’s staying. Since the story is told through the narrator’s voice, we only hear his side of the story regarding the cause of the divorce, but other problems are suggested in the chorus:
It’s pathetic, but everything came down to whether or not I was rich.
She tells me it wasn’t the money,
but I find it funny that losing my job is what toggled the switch.
She says it’s painful to be in the house with me,
but never complained when she had half my salary.
She says that I have a problem with pills;
the real problem is all the credit card bills.
A drug problem is referenced, but the narrator believes his wife, Sarah, only stayed with him previously because of his paycheck. The narrator explains the reasons he used the pills:
I took the pills because they were there,
and they evened me out . . . make me act right.No, I took the pills because I don’t dare
to be thinking about the mistake of my life.
The “mistake” the narrator mentions creates tension for the listener, and suggests that a single decision he made led to his addiction, divorce, and suicide. Though the “pills” aren’t specifically named, they seem to be for anxiety.
Castleton is able to develop a complex relationship quickly by describing the dynamics within the marriage. Aside from the financial dynamic described in the chorus, the narrator asks Sarah, “How can they expect us to raise our own replacements? It’s insane!” suggesting that he doesn’t feel capable of raising children. Castleton doesn’t allow Sarah to appear completely blameless, however, which would cheapen the impact of the song:
She tells the kids that I ruined her life.
What kind of wife – what kind of human tells that to her children?
About their father!
Even if I did want to get better, why bother?
The narrator’s question about raising children as “replacements,” along with Sarah telling the children their father ruined her life, suggests a complex relationship between two complex characters, and all within a three and a half minute song. That kind of narrative compression is impressive, and makes Castleton’s music worthwhile to examine. Writing a complex, compelling short story is more difficult in some ways than writing a novel, and by word count, Castleton’s lyrics are flash fiction. This Blaise Pascal quote comes to mind, “I would have written a short letter, but I did not have the time.”
I’m sure that quote could also apply to this post, especially if I continued through to its conclusion, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to read about the rest of A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. I would like to encourage everyone who’s reading to purchase the EP so that they can listen along. The digital version is only 6 dollars, and you can listen to tracks “2038″ and “2007″ for free, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.