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The cover image for Wreckrium is one I culled from a Facebook feed of my friend Dieta Duncan. It was an image that a friend of hers had taken out a backdoor on a ridge in Tennessee during a lightning storm. I took it and squared it and thought I would try to recreate something with a similar feel. You can see the wonderful ghostlyness of it. Then I thought why not just ask if i could use it. I didn’t know, it could be a famous photo, or one taken by a famous photographer. I contacted Dieta and she said she would contact her friend. The next day she got back to me and said that her friend said to “go with God” concerning the photograph. Well I translated that to either mean it’s o.k. to use it, or that she would rather see me dead. I opted to believe the first. Then I researched the photographer, who’s name was Melonie Cannon, only to find out that she just appeared in a duet with Willie Nelson (To All the Girls…), and that her father was heavy weight record producer Buddy Cannon, who just finished producing Alison Krauss’ upcoming offering, Windy City. Even before i knew all of this I was already contemplating wether it was wise to use an image that was so much better than the album. Then I thought, hey, you only live a bunch of times!
Someone kindly suggested that it might be better served if it had an image of my face on the cover. “That would be false advertisement”, I responded. My face is not what’s on the inside. A big lightning bolt in a pissed of sky is way more accurate as to what you’re getting for your money.
Together Torn Apart
There was a scratch at the door somewhat hollow
Godforsaken at the hearth was he now
Cricket’s chirped down the empty lanes of his life
He produced from his coat a bottle and a knife
It’s hard to stay together torn apart
If a black pine can pass the years why not my heart
The past is just the paint to blush the new
You next to me next to you
They once whispered each other’s name in passing
Her dress printed with birds unmoving
They both wore similar pre-historic cowboy boots
The fields shown pale, the dying color of their roots
Let’s stay together wasn’t spoken or denied
It hung the way starlight never need to be implied
Into the zinc white light of morning far
Going two long directions in one car
A rumor’s like a lion with a roar like chain
It’s the base of a story that might excite rain
Abashed and unworthy a biblical definition of man
The eyes closed sound and feeling of the ceiling fan
Written by: Patrick Brayer (12-06-16)
Bad Dream
I am having a bad dream
Maybe the worst that you’ve ever seen
Worried and withered and tantamount
To the corners that the forgotten haunt
For I am having a bad dream
I left you at the station like an iris in the dew
I wanted to tell you and I finally do
And each day, the error of my ways
Touching our glasses like old sun rays
For I am having a bad dream
——
Like a row of cotton, the plow being your pout
My feelings for you rise without a doubt
You can’t photograph what you can’t shout
A man isn’t a man without a certain doubt
For I am having a bad dream
Clouds the color of molten chain
Imitating the cold, the pond pounding rain
Holding hands under the table in sin
Holding off satin, until this song begins
For I am having a bad dream
——
Confederate colors in your new make up
Cheeks the color of leaves I forgot to rake up
Bars of music play bars of time
Like a jukebox on a dolly down a steep incline
For I am having a bad dream
If you jump from your car that’s suicide
If you jump from my life, there’s nothing left to hide
Human nature just whistles what it’s all about
For there would be no bones in our body without certain doubt
When love frees a convict in a bad dream
Written by: Patrick Brayer (02-17-15)
Pictured below is the pre-purple Spanish house on Date Street in Fontana that we moved to in 1958. My grandfather was living in it with a man named John Skovich, whom we in turn bought it from. It included 2 1/2 acres of fruit trees, rustic out buildings and a working egg ranch. At one point I remember coming home from school and my dad had painted the house lavender. My father was artistic without being an artist. He was the real deal. I do what i imagine an artist does. My dad didn’t know what an artist was but yet he was one. Hence, the real deal. I loved my parents and I appreciate what they laid before my feet. Instead of a place to hide myself, the leisure time to find myself. My mother was sensible with a background in music, theater, and a degree in business. My dad had a degree in business from Loyola University with a side degree in “off the wall-ism”. I see all that in my songs when i get the chance to stand back. My grandfather later lived with us in the small house behind, pictured on the left. At one point the Fontana Fire Department burned it down for practice. The lot is now an elementary school, but it still looks as pictured below in my mind. This lavenderisation just wasn’t enough for my dad. He later applied a polka dot theme to his El Camino camper shell, as well as to his dune buggy. Not so much as to say “i’m an artist”, but more to let people know, “here I am!” He would have polka dotted Carnegie Hall if someone would have left it in our sideyard. The song eludes to my father’s hometown of Marshfield, Wisconsin, our catholic upbringing, his paint-bare dodge with donut scented seats, quotation shaped Spanish tiles, and my parents last resting place, Green Acres, in Bloomington, CA.
Little Lavender Spanish House
Who are you my friend my father foe
The quotient of what we both don’t know
Gravel in the driveway / sorrow stained dodge without paint
Knights of Columbus / one drink and then faint
Little lavender Spanish house I say
Quotation-like tiles never fade away
The color of dried blood / requiem of a breeze
The world is all locks, and the land is all keys
Halleluiah Marshfield boy without farm nor a crew
You’re family turns on you like a hard fought screw
You had no dreams that you ever spoke
We were Catholic Church / donut shop folk
Our house was like a mission / cast upon a lone egg ranch
I watched it all unfold from beneath a fig tree branch
We had chickens and turkeys and desert heat
Now there’s someone I’m dying for you now to meet
I look like my mother would
But I drink like my father could
I remember the barn and the pine plank wooden smell
The heart only rose when the mind only fell
My father painted that house lavender in a buzz
The artist, he had no idea he was
Even in the dark it was purple / crow’s wing dresses in tow
Pretty Bloomington tombstones all in a row
It’s all in the graveyard now / the house it is leveled clear
Children in a playground / where I buried my fear
But whenever I want to / I just close my tired eyes
I conjure a house only I can realize
Little lavender Spanish house I say
Quotation-like tiles never fade away
Written by: Patrick Brayer (05-02-16)
(early Fontana / Miller Park)
My Heart’s Grenade
It’s better not to promise in a world that’s tainted
You saw her yourself and you fondly fainted
Ghost town colored clothes and insurrection
Pink champagne and harp string affection
I got to get simple in insect denial
At Palmetto Park our love is on trial
In the hopeful gray of morning shade
She pulled the pin on my heart’s grenade
We offer what we offer and we stand in the clearing
Life’s not a vehicle that even needs steering
Don’t call it progressive and then start a fire
The blackberry bramble / is the first barbwire
I’m at the end of my rope / a haystack crossfire sound
Pulling myself up and setting me down
At the times that we shared and the pittance it cost
Mystery has a free hand until something is lost
—-
Fontucky White was the name of the speed that we did
The trailer park shallows was the place that we hid
And when we emerged as king and queen of this said town
There’s no hope left when a square is found to be round
Flesh is a certain signature that rises above
It laughs in our face when we call it love
It was combat the way her desire would parade
And pull the pin on my heart’s grenade
Written by: Patrick Brayer (05-09-16)
(photo: Patrick Brayer)
Nobody Dies Alone
His father taught him about clearance
Being dust on a rocky road
And the certain things in life
You just have to be nude to know
If we’re in this all together
Show the pleasure to the pain
A moon like lit enamel
Chomp dogs on a rattling chain
Someone that lives forever
Is someone you just can’t phone
Life is a crowd and daunting
But nobody dies alone / nobody dies alone
Come home heedless wages
A thunderous shot of sin
We’re just gambling with actors here
The real thing lies within
Within the arc-welding of desire
Swish of sundress in day’s light
A circling of birds catch the cat’s eye
At the even wrong end of a kite
One might die in crimson
Left just a remark of bone
When we free-fall we only realize
That nobody dies alone / nobody dies alone
Hate to see the night in rags
Hate to take a job from a ghost
A strip mall of sullen starlight
Diamonds on a whipping post
I’m writing like there’s no tomorrow
Yet that’s all that’s left of me
Nightmarish tones of bliss
As practicality
Tijuana or Fontana
Wash rocks with rain water moan
A sky of surgical steel
But nobody dies alone / nobody dies alone
Written by: Patrick Brayer (11-27-15)
Pictured below is a recent drawing by my old Fontana friend Richard Taelour. It’s a girl with a branding iron, which got me to thinking of the old honky tonk on E street in San Bernardino by the same name. Richard is perhaps the greatest musician to ever surface from our home town. He simply humbles everyone with ears. Some people make it look easy, but Richard makes it seem like you’re not ever going to live long enough to be as good as him. It’s guys like him that made me find my own way, cuz i certainly wasn’t going to beat him at his game. We had talked about doing a co-write of this branding iron idea but it all just came out quickly one day. But i do hope that we can collaborate on a new version just to say we did it. Life ends, songs don’t. Richard’s life has been a amazing panorama that stretches all the way from being homeless to being courted by Clive Davis and Arista Records.
Branding Iron Girl
A prairie of time / couldn’t hold me in line
The winds sometimes vicious as pride
She rubs a mood ring on the porch / as I still hold a torch
For that Branding Iron Girl
I was soon to realize / that nothing soon dies
Just staggering flowers of desire
A gazelle in the grass / of the motel looking glass
For that Branding Iron Girl
Hope hold eternal / until found infernal
I hear halleluiahs in the distance not here
I loved her in Banning / but I left her out standing
And she loved me like the headlights love the deer
From the bottle what I learned / was never get burned
Build a dam and the fire don’t care
There’s just no elation / on the wrong side of creation
Let’s all throw our hats in the air
For the branding iron way / of a beautiful day
And I will introduce you when the time is right
For I’m not really sure / if my intentions are pure
Pure gold or just pure light
In the tread-mark of a whisper / you call me mister
But I feel much younger than you do
onto the opacity of the moon’s wall / Dragnets of sun-fall
a ballad etched in blue
eyes like pistol grips of pearl / the branding iron girl
twisting a finger in along lost curl
A stomp and a swoon / and she’ll meet you in June
In her branding iron world
Written by: Patrick Brayer (03-21-16)
The song Riot of Hands and Shadows I will dedicate to my long time friend Pat Cloud and his grandmother Almeda Sterner. I stumbled across this image in my archive and I thought Pat should have a copy, so i scanned it and it just happened to be on my desk as i was beginning to write the song. I had no intention of writing about her, but i would just be writing about what came to my mind and i kept glancing down and there she was staring at me, so i spontaneously put her imagery into the song. I shared the lyric with Cloud and he wrote back and said that he felt there were things alluded to in the song that there was no way i could know concerning her life. That’s one of the main reasons I gravitate towards songwriting, besides the massive wealth, is the fact that often what I write is much smarter than i am. If i wrote only what i know, how boring would that be? Almeda is seen here holding Pat’s recording Higher Power (Flying Fish Records 1983). He is perhaps the most noted musician that there is for bringing bebop jazz to the cornfield banjo. Somewhere on this site there is an entire blog entry on him called, The Five String Trane.
(photo: Patrick Brayer)
A Riot of Hands and Shadows
It’s a riot of hands and shadows / Just a cinder of creation’s breath
From validity comes experience / And not a beat of action death
Grandma holds an album in huge glasses / Owens valley openly attests
Where readiness and symbolism / That not a rock pile could undress
Brick edifices / Music with spear like notes
A bear employs a berry bush / Crab hands rise up like quotes
Eyes just like diamonds / Being thrown from a cave
In a glass pack rapture / In the sullen tension does behave
A bowling bag full of tension / I speak to the dead when I rehearse
Then there’s grandma with the album / And she is gone in song and verse
A man came to the door / He had a clipboard but all alone
He wore the shirt of the late Kim Fowley / Eyebrows like Hank Williams tombstone
Now I’m free from glamorous ghosts / Cry from this drink to that
Let’s make a ceiling with our hearts / Loosen the hold and have a chat
Spell walker married to the half moon / Locked in time to the rhyme of matter
The hiss of the wind in the wheat / Going backwards up the ladder
Delicate darkness / Vision raked across forty trees
Our hearts in a glistening showcase / Breastbones like accordions breath
Until it’s a riot of hands and shadows / Just a cinder of creation’s breath
From validity comes experience / And not a beat of action death
Written by: Patrick Brayer (10-02-16)
(Bill Bergan / Patrick Brayer / Jeff Morning / Fontana 1971)
Let’s See What a Song Can Do
Sometimes life sinks / into shadows dank
Got no money in the golden bank
When you think you lost it all / it’s not true
Have I got a song for you.
We stand and take / our little turn
Polishing life / before it starts to burn
Is that the sun fading / or a big straw hat
Wondering what a song could do / with all that
We loose many things / That will never be found
We cling to hope / like it was fresh ground
Eyes brown as bourbon / clear as the will to give
There are more words in a song than reasons to live
a writer’s life is / saved by the page
as sure as it can be ended with age
The grinding sea, a star’s blood, and love
These are the ingredients of what a song’s made of
We tried stronger jails to confine the thieves
We tried doctors we tried lawyers we tried Indian chiefs
We thought they were shamans but they were just a t.v. crew
Now let’s see what a song can do
Let’s see what a song can do
To right some wrongs / repaint the sky blue
Let’s tap our toe to what’s written down
A Wyatt Earp lyric coming to town
Raindrops falling / like the old soft shoe
Close our eyes / let’s see what a song can do
Written by: Patrick Brayer (09-15-16)
Long Live Okie Adams (When He Died)
Long live Okie Adams when he died
Hot rod and banjos forever implied
Who has an answer when it’s a parable crime
It won’t be water but rather fire this time
The flame’s own boarding school light on doom
He inlayed a figure on a sawdust moon
Like my grandpa always asked, “what is that that won’t forget”
Every memory as silver as an overhead jet
A sun lit the way the dark smoke denied
Long live Okie Adams when he died
Okie Adams of dropped down axle fame
When you’ve done everything and you stake your claim
We’ll still talk about you beyond a lasting breath
Bandages are often hidden letters to death
Flame-cut ends on a Deuce axle in the corner
Are those red shoes on the foot of the mourner?
The books that I write in, muddle in rows
Angels trading out harp shapes for banjos
A congregation of exits aside
Long live Okie Adams when he died
Un-split wishbones and a stock spring support the axle
Workshop caught on fire all so factual
Last words murmured secret on the lips
Of a five-string claw hammer Cole’s Eclipse
The heart is an oracle often left untried
Long live Okie Adams when he died
Written by: Patrick Brayer (09-29-16)
When You’re Done You Leave
Do you want to walk with us / to a land beyond its means
The moment feeds a golden dog / The way the silence feeds a dream
There’s a burning sun in our house tonight / It is fit for no one new
When the maker hits its mark / Come with me, whether I’m coming with you
Ice cream socials, blossoming trees
Many masks that we achieve
And all that life demands of us
that when you’re done you leave
Hard fought, wishful thinking / What’s not real will finally fade
One moment never duplicates / Summer lawns upon the jade
Day to day turnstile / Pick a ticket flash a smile
Walk an entire lifetime / Seems you only go a mile
I’m coming down from fever
Rivulets of sweat like tears
Dirt parking lot and tavern
Neon shining through our beers
Hell of a steeltown night / Town painted red as blood
Roses mocking us in shadows / Then etch our names in mud
Pull the van around the alleyway / Got your suitcase in my hand
Just me and you against nowhere / But first we need to learn to stand
Don’t treat me like the fool
That left fingerprints on your door
I’ve been in all directions
Ridden elevators before
In the way long craven universe / Up or down the hidden ladder
A cloud cold cocks a frosty moon / Until what kind of heart that breaks don’t matter
Nor if you’re happy or if you grieve / Just that when you’re done you leave
Written by Patrick Brayer (09-07-16)
My West Virginian uncle Ron Hardman came to live with us in Fontana, California for a while. He was on the run from a marriage unraveling and we put him up in our chicken strewn backyard in a trailer. We bought it from our neighbors the Hesters across the street and plopped it down on the foundation of my Slovenian grandfather’s old house that had burned to the ground. The first thing my uncle did when i met him was to make me a West Virginia hotdog, which although it was just a glorified chili dog, was blissful and exotic at the time. I’d often spend evenings with him playing cards in his trailer. It was ramshackle but it had real wood paneling. He had a great impact on me which i can still feel today if not aptly describe. It was said that he had a fiddle in the trunk of his car. It was rumored, I heard later, that it was a Stradivarius that he had acquired in Italy during the war. Although i never saw him get it out, just the thought of it inspired me to take the instrument up a few years later after hearing that he died in a car accident. I still can picture my mom crying on the wall phone in our kitchen upon getting word. The song plastered below is based on the image I got from a story my cousin Peggy told me about Ron’s funeral. How it was raining terrible there in Parkersburg, West Virginia and that the grave was high up on a hill and my grandmother couldn’t get up to it, so they brought her up to her son’s grave on the tailgate of a pick up truck. If i was a painter i would paint that image. I sometimes even forget myself that a song can be as vivid as a Rembrandt.
Buried Treasure
My grandmother in coalmine black
Rode on the tailgate of a truck pointing back
Up the rain slickened hilltop / To the graveside of her son
Here lies young Ron Hardman when his day is done
The diggers where gone / And the ground was still
thirsty for a body / like a widow pops a pill
Umbrellas and hankies / someone lit a cigarette
In choreographed cloud response / gospel without a net
Light as a feather
That day in West Virginia they done buried treasure
The last thing he saw was the wreckage of his own car
The fiddle in his trunk splintered near and far
Jesus’ cross set to martini toothpicks lay
No song was good enough that day
A barge blows its nose with a shiver
on the Little Kanawha River
“You don’t die when you go.” he would say
“You’re only hidden away.”
There are more steps than thought or heard
You remain for as long as you are conjured
For you and I are born in the mind
We’re just living while we’re waiting in line
Light as a feather
That day in West Virginia they buried treasure
They all wore black as they are want to do
Dark rain soaked roses just for you
On comes a peg leg casket / silence gaining loud
Under the privacy of the smudge of cloud
Like filthy wool we feel
Like everything we dreamt was real
Some people stay with you / as prideful charm
Nothing more green than golden grace they go arm in arm
Life never goes on / like it used to in your place
As patient as stone and grandmother’s lace
The Avery house still stands/ the sun still burns
Happy bones and bells across ferns
Light as a feather
That day in West Virginia they buried treasure
Written by: Patrick Brayer 04-30-16
(Hank Snow by Leon Kagarise)
I Can’t Afford to Fail
We’re in it on our own.
The music rises, the fire flows
I hear an old rendition of
The path we almost chose
Like the hammer’s unaware of the nail
I can’t afford to fail
Sin makes a man recluse
The plot of a long lost theory
Until I’ve spent all of my Johnny Cash
Feeling the bank grow weary
Until this ghost is thrown from jail
I can’t afford to fail
Dark circles around the eyes
Dreams now kept from sleep
Throw on a silken robe
Seems our origins run deep
Like a love sonnet lost in the mail
I can’t afford to fail
In hunting vest over hill or dale
I belly up to the rail
Over exposed snowy and pale.
Until I can’t afford to fail
Colton, Muscoy, San Berdoo
Palm fronds break into a voice
I just want to toast to you
Yet you whisper in my ear with noise
Like eating wedding cake under water
Into the likes of thin air
It’s a party without people
A motel stone affair
Since the stars won’t go my bail
I can’t afford to fail
Written by: Patrick Brayer (01-11-16)
Send Her a Fool (to replace me)
Locked in time and the iron stubble of mine
Until I kneelt I felt just fine
Words are just fixtures that let loose the mixtures
The phone rings there’s a fool on the line
You can’t write me in flight without fingerprints of light.
Innocent hair and waxen despair
Arms lit by the hoof shaped light of a moon so white
Me and a fool we both don’t care
I’ll send a fool to replace me
Swallow my pride and lock you inside
Many a man / has let go of her hand
With a diamond along for the ride
Once I felt love wore a delicate glove
A black kiss in a heart shaped garden
The cadence of the clouds seem to picture out loud
A fool versed in mainstream pardon
I’ll find someone new that didn’t yet happen to you
Award a fool to replace me
It might be a new hill / with a rosemary chill
Someone too cruel to face me
—
Southern girl afloat / like an unsung note
After crying all Saturday night
a red clay mess / on her white Easter dress
Send a fool to set things right
The winds only yield / make a whirlpool of the fields
The steelmill kissed in black
Let’s all just swerve from what we deserve
He can have her until I take her back
Written by: Patrick Brayer (03-28-16)
(June Carter by Leon Kagarise)
I Love You (But in a Good Way)
Your lipstick / a black nightstick when you came
Woe begotten / you just kicked on in my name
We meet / and part the maddening crowd
Hold each other / like a love letter held out loud
What’s a moment? / but a tiny drop that’s dried
a time soaked tear / that the centuries have cried
Love is a blindfold culled from roses
Yet another problem that it’s power poses
Crush us with the bliss / storm us in it’s day
I love you, but in a good way
The smoke of fools / the years clear out now
Like a bandana / printed with birds wipes a brow
A moment with you / beg steal and then borrow back
White knuckle sorrow in a lowly shack
Nothing better than / to make the world go away
Except you and me / and a generous string of days
Nothing more to compete with, than the neon in your hair
A concrete block tavern / the swamp cooler’s air
Written by: Patrick Brayer
(08-09-15)
Patrick John Brayer 
This weaves through my conscious synapses like a dog whistle just within and beyond my elevated ears perception. It calls attention to the unseen, right, in front, of your eyes. You inspire. Thank you.
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