GROUNDED IN A COMPASS
compiled by, brad golding inspired by the album, cardinal by pinegrove
Strings frayed like my good days Tied around my finger I felt so afraid
Foreward I first listened to Cardinal during the summer of 2016. A summer where I saw myself fall deeply in love, bounce between a big town and a small one, make several new friends, cry from time to time and battle with my head - all themes that this album deals with. Musically, I adored Cardinal from my first listen but there was something special about it that went beyond just my ears. I began to retrospectively realize that my friends and I were main characters in many of the songs on the record and my summer, the setting. The personal connection that I formed with the words that Evan wrote on Cardinal got me thinking about the universality of music and the way that art consumers can feel cathartic about a piece of art that they themselves didn’t create. In spring of 2017, a class project presented itself. I could create any piece of art with the only requirement being that it was inspired by text of some kind. Being a student of media and photography, I had a crazy, scary, exciting idea. If I found the stories of Cardinal within my friends and I, I’m sure that I could find the stories of Cardinal within others as well, right? And that’s what I set out to do. I wanted to create a living, breathing, pulsing version of Cardinal that worked as a blueprint for not only the album but also the intersections that come from the sharing of stories. To prepare, I wrote a list of motivations behind each song, and questions to ask people on the streets. I planned none of these interviews, nor did I know any of the people ahead of time. Nothing was unique to specific ethnicities, genders, classes, sexual orientations or ages. Everything between these pages was discovered by pure chance. I encourage you as you read to listen to Pinegrove’s Cardinal. I hope that you uncover pieces of your ownself, and feel the same excitement I did as I discovered the stories of these waveforms wiggling in my reality and abroad. The following stories were discovered in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia between March 25th-31st, 2017 and paraphrased for readability.
track one
Old Friends
The Song’s Motivations Losing old friendships, expierencing setbacks, sacrificing relationships for personal endeavours, feeling selfish, wanting to make more of an effort to take time for parents and friends, missing the good ol’ days.
Stuart, 49 I think that when you’re away, you romanticize about things being the way that they were when you left and then when you get back you realize that people’s lives have moved on. Sometimes they’ve had children, sometimes they’ve moved away or to different suburbs. Everyone gets on with their lives. I think loneliness is a good thing, it makes you change directions and figure out what’s important to you. It’ll help you decide what you will and won’t put up with. You shouldnt be afraid to be alone sometimes. My good old days were escapism. We were escaping from the seriousness of life and not having to address what our careers would entail. We just lived in the moment and never thought about the future. It was also an escape from what we were told we should be doing with our lives at that point - the mundane path of life that people seem to choose, but that has it’s merits too, each to their own. Although I look back and think of them as fun and a bit wild, these days were also pretty stagnant. We wasted a lot of money, we didn’t study, we didn’t have careers, all our money went in one pocket and out the other. We took a lot of drugs, we hung around with people who probably didn’t care about us much. From 25 to 35 was a pretty exciting time and up until 40 went by really really quickly. But I enjoy getting older, I enjoy the wisdom of it.
track two
Cadmium
The Song’s Motivations The pressure that builds up when you don’t say what you’re thinking about, the release when things are no longer on your mind, being bold, the differences between different relationships, the meaning of relationships, taking risks, conquering the fear that comes when you don’t know the consequences of a certain action.
David, 25
I suffer from horrific anxiety so I’m not someone who deals with things straight away, I let them bottle up inside of me. And then they explode at the most inconvenient moments. This affects all of my relationships from family, to partners, to friends, I just never seem to nip things in the butt before they get bigger. I remember one time, I had been seeing a person for quite some time and the relationship wasn’t official or unofficial, but neither of us said anything. Naturally, it fizzled out. We kept bottling things up and not expressing what we wanted. Neither of us. Which ended a potential friendship or relationship and now we don’t speak to each other at all, which is kind of sad. I’ve definitely used my art for catharsis. I love to laugh, because it’s the only way I deal with things. I don’t really see my art as a form of therapy but I think for me it’s just about being someone else sometimes. It’s a nice escape. A few years back, I did a one man show about my battle with mental illness. It was very cathartic for me to write about and perform it. I was able to channel my experiences into this show and it was really helpful for me to navigate my way through it. I think what’s interesting is that I didn’t consciously set out to write it, but I subconsciously did, and I think I needed to. Now I’m much better than I was three years ago, I was awful three years ago.
track three
Then Again
The Song’s Motivations Moving from a small town to a big town, reflecting on how far you’ve come in life, being grateful for what you have, being nomadic.
Dayle, 41 I came from a small town in New Zealand. To give you an idea, the Rolling Stones have called my hometown the arsehole of the world. Mick Jagger wasn’t impressed. It was really country, really sort of backwoods, so I got out of there as such, you kinda had to or you’d get stuck. I think I was fairly progressive for my small town, so it was my time to move on. I always had a good sense of myself even before I left. When I was in highschool I had two other friends, and we weren’t necessarily against the norm, but we did things differently. We were really into music so we opened up our own dry pub for underages. We’d bring in bands from the big city to come down. We ran our own arts magazine. It was a pretty tough period of time for me in high school, but it helped to have friends who were in the same mindset. I ended up in a hospital in my younger years because I wasn’t well. I was being quite self destructive, I went through drinking and drugs and that sorta thing. Then my friends did an intervention and I ended up in there. One of the nurses who was there told me that I needed to look around to see and talk to the other people who were in the psych ward. Talk to them and ask myself: is my life really that shitty? It was exactly when she said that and when I started talking to others, I realized that people have had to deal with so many terrible things in their lives, and I took a look at myself and thought about my life in comparison. You’ve really gotta hit rockbottom to have these types of realizations. I remember, one night, I was in bed and I tried to hang myself. The next day, I was surrounded by about nine friends who had come to see me and as they all stood around my bed, I was just like ‘God, sorry for doing this!’ My parents had also come up. It was one of those things: you’ve got friends, you’ve got family, you’ve got people who care, you can get through this.
track four
Aphasia
The Song’s Motivations Not being able to access words or the right ones, the inability to perfectly say what you’re thinking, the inability to express yourself, difficulty articulating your thoughts, self doubt, being misunderstood.
Ellen, 18
I have trouble speaking up all the time. I think sometimes, when you talk about things it’s difficult to put a concept into words. Words themselves can’t capture the scope of life and it’s just hard to find the exact word to encompass what you’re thinking, without going off on a tangent. The scope of life can be feelings or anything really, because there’s so much subtlety and detail in the way that we are as humans that language just can’t capture. You’re trying to constrain an experience into a structure that is language and language is a creation that we’ve invented. No matter what the context is, trying to fit something into a preformed structure will always be difficult.
track five
Visiting
The Song’s Motivations Catching up with old friends and things being totally different, making rash decisions, feeling calm in chaos and eventually content with chaos, using your heart to make decisions instead of your head.
Les, 92 I moved to Australia from Italy because I wanted to finally do something for myself. I’ve been living here since I was 21 years old. When I first left Italy I was a bit sad, it was a shock moving from a smaller town to a bigger one, but I came here for a better life, which it was. I kept in touch with friends via letter. As the years have gone by, my personality, the way I think, it’s changed. I discovered when I went back to visit Italy my friend’s and I had different ideas. I told them to stop worrying about me, I came to a different country with a different culture of course I’ve changed! We still send christmas cards to our friends in Italy once a year, but in the end we have a different life here with different friendships, but we will always understand and respect each other.
track six
Waveform
The Song’s Motivations Having regrets, turning negativity into art, experiencing rejection, using art as a way to relieve pain, the role that art plays in one’s life.
Marcel, 43
Art keeps me alive. I use visual art as inspiration for my music and comedy. This one’s an artform called collage, where I often take one image and then add paint. I started painting when my daughter was four because she liked it. She was also four years old when my wife and I got divorced. That experience has made me feel every negative emotion that you could possibly imagine. She thought I was using drugs behind her back, when I wasn’t. She put me in a mental hospital, which made me lose my job, then they attacked my brain with medication. I drink everyday now. Everyone said that it was alright but I lost my house, my car, my mortgage, my kids, my fucking everything. I went from musician, tax-paying, working citizen who does stuff for the community to fucking nothing. Now I’ve got none of it. This piece is about my daughter, an angel, so I put a halo on it. It represents a time when we were together. I haven’t spent one day with her one-on-one since she was four. She turned thirteen last week. That means that from the age of four to thirteen she’s had no one to one time with daddy.
track seven
Size of the Moon
The Song’s Motivations A relationship falling apart, nostalgia, a relationship being close to but never forming, having trouble relating to parents, feeling hopeless and wishing that things in life would magically just work out, getting through difficult periods in life.
Linus, 20
I’m from the Sichuan province in China. The first time I came here I met a Vietnamese girl in foundations school, we hungout a lot and I fell in love with her. Sometimes when we were studying, I would pick up my backpack to leave and she’d just come along with me and follow. I finally felt like I found someone to rely on in this country. After a little bit of time, I confessed my love to her and got rejected. It was so sad. I spent the whole year trying to move on. Sometimes my heart still feels warm when I think of her. I lost my passion to study. Every day I would just think about her instead of studying. One time, I went to a lecture and saw her, I felt so embarrassed that I escaped the lecture and went home straight away. Before she rejected me, we texted each other a lot. Everyday. After she rejected me, everyday, I sat at the table and looked at all of the photos we took together and my brain, my head, was full of her. Some memories still just pop up! Even sometimes I buy beers to take the edge off. But now, I just focus on studying. That’s my purpose, I came here to study not to have a girlfriend.
track eight
Old Friends
The Song’s Motivations Connecting deeply to someone new which eliminates other people from your life, breaking up with a partner and then realizing that all of your other friendships have suffered because you spent too much time on that one person, making new friends, being abandoned by old friends.
I moved to the city for my boyfriend. Naturally, I ended up becoming friends with all of his friends. It wasn’t working out between us, so we ended up breaking up. Shortly after we broke up, I started dating another guy who was in the same friendship group and because of this I basically lost all of my city friends. I’d invested all of my time and energy into him and making friends with his friends and then they just sort of left me. That period was really hard, because I found myself having to make new friends again, it wasn’t a good time. It was especially hard because there was so much guilt involved. I’d been rejected by all of my friends, cut off, so I was alone and disliked for no good reason other than because I was dating the wrong person. And you can’t help who you fall in love with, you know? It was a good lesson to learn, because you need to have your own space and your own life. You need to maintain that individuality in a relationship, because I mean, if it all goes to shit, you’ve got nothing to rely on.
Frankie, 26
Thank you, Pinegrove. to purchase cardinal visit pinegrove.bandcamp.com
to view more of my work or contact me visit www.goldshoots.xyz
My steps keep splitting my grief, Through these solipsistic moods, I should call my parents when I think of them, Should tell my friends when I love them