Golgotha by Gray Witch

MUSIC VIDEO HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlU2mu8CV9E

I first heard of Golgotha, the place of the skull, as a 10 year-old in Catholic church. It was introduced as the place where Jesus, along with two thieves, was put to death. It's been stuck in my mind ever since, this vision of the son of God saturated in his own human blood dying in the heat next to two worthless nobodies. Throughout my life, Golgotha, as an idea, sort of became the ultimate memento mori; a symbol of a perfect and totalitarian communion with death.

In March of 2019, one of my best friends died from a heroin overdose and my grandmother, my only close family member, had a stroke that left her unable to move or speak. I flew from Philadelphia to Chicago for my friend Matt's funeral, sat in the back of the church and cried until I threw up in my mouth, swallowed it, and then drove into Rockford to sit with my grandmother, holding her hand and feeling every bit of the space that she was trapped in, which is to say the space between death and life. Every few hours I had to step out to really lose my shit in the empty chapel of this Catholic hospital. There was a boxwood carving of Jesus and the thieves crucified at Golgotha. I just laid in the pew, crushed by the enormity of it all.

I went back to Philly completely hollowed out. I did weird bad self-destructive grief things. I took a day off work to sit in the woods and watch everything wake up and thought about suicide in that sort of meditative way that you maybe do or maybe don't do. My mom called and asked if I wanted to say goodbye to my grandma. I flew home again. Wore my good pants. Got some dirt on my hands. Was pulled to pieces by hatred, depression, and numbness. Slept on the floor of an airport. Flew back and floated through the spring of 2019 like a ghost while the whole world spitefully came to life all around me.

I didn't really write this song. I didn't work for it. I just sat in my car at lunch, and sat in the woods after the sun went down, and laid in my bed all day. I bought a cheap Casio keyboard and played the same chord for hours and swore I could feel my spirit thrashing itself out of my body. The words sort of fell out the way things tend to when the big hands of life pull you apart. I carried the words around and mouthed them into my respirator at work and repeated them in my head over and over until I fell asleep at night. It felt less like a song and more like the dark shape that dragged me around.

My friend who died, Matt, had a truly magical and raw project called Spaceshow. The lyrics were winding and hypnotic and dominated by death, but the music was thick and pulsing and electric thanks to production from our mutual friend Oscar. As a general rule, I like to work alone, but it felt painfully obvious that if I was going to allow this poem or quasi-mantra or whatever to become a song, it should be with Oscar, who was grieving the same loss, and who I could trust with this thing that was holding me together.

I sent Oscar some recordings I made from an electric Smith Corona typewriter, a few steel guitar tracks I dragged out of my absolute sack-of-human-shit brother, and because it felt like a life raft in the midst of all of this incredibly unromantic pain, a few Casio SK-1 tracks. He made all the beats and "synths" on Golgotha with those tracks. He made a dozen versions of the song, but this final version is very close to his first draft. It just hit me hard.

About a year before all of this, Matt borrowed some old lyrics of mine and blended them into a Spaceshow song. Now, on the eve of this release, I'm sitting here with this song, a piece of Spaceshow bound into Gray Witch, and I can feel the pain ritual humming happily on the other side of the mystery.

This isn't a narrative about the transcendent power of art. Two pieces of me died that March along with those two people that I love so dearly. I lost something powerful that I'll never get back, and that feels profane. I hope it always will.

Anyway, here it is. Golgotha. A "new" song. To me it feels more like a place to preserve all this pain that I can't carry around, but can't release. I hope you really like it.

-Frances

F. J. Downey is a songwriter from Rockford, Illinois. His band is called Gray Witch. Yes. No. Goodbye.

Instagram
YouTube
tinyletter.com
gray-witch.com