My ex-boyfriend used to say, "If she stays for the second song, she knows what she came for."This was usually said in reference to Al Green's Call Me album and if you stayed for "Have You Been Making Out OK?" then you DID know what you were there for. But the real stamp, the defining moment in our relationship was one night, late at night and early into the "dating" part he played a disc entitled Ready for the House by an enigmatic Texas musician named Jandek.

To understate it clearly, it was eerie. Spooky. Creepy. All the Halloween words. The sounds were dissonant, disjointed, incongruous, ghoulish. There were wails and moans, there were cracks in the voice, discordant guitar sounds, and phrases like "My rapture'ss painted on the floor" from a song called "First You Think Your Fortune's Lovely". Sitting in my ex-boyfriend's house, darkness and words falling, bare feet on the cold, hardwood floor with a rising chill inside me it sounded like a ghost had recorded an album on an old push-button tape recorder in an empty house under a mountain somewhere it's really, really overcast. Jandek became an important name in that house, like he was living among the two of us. Hanging onto haunted walls, seeping into our pores, stealing our breath to gain energy. He is myth and mystery and his music is like a painful sickness that you just...might not beat. The Ex, who I am still great friends with, became quite involved in discovering who Jandek is and finally did. Not at all ironic that mere days after his first phone contact from Jandek, we ended our long, desperate, torturous run as a couple. The task of discovery took a new turn. 

I was ill-prepared for the sound, the art, the context, the inference, the meaning and unbelievable importance that very first listen

would have on me up until even this very minute, as I write this with chills rising inside me.

I stayed for the second song. I knew what I was there for.