After The Wake

So I know that I'm still not exactly great at updating this thing, but I do still have a lot to write about The Wake Tour, and now that I've procrastinated, it's not going to be nearly as cool or detailed as I originally intended, but whatever. 

It was amazing, to say the least. I don't know how many people follow me on here, but if you do, and you went, you know what I'm talking about. 

Sleeping Giant and The Glorious Unseen rocked my world, and Chad's prayer and encouragement gave me perspective into a faith in God that I may have not realized before that weekend. 

We started out in Dallas. Drove through the night and didn't get enough sleep and didn't do much of anything healthy, actually, but I had a lot of sunflower seeds and Mountain Dew and Coffee and pretzels, and I'm still alive, so I suppose that's a testament to the miraculous nature of God who allows me to survive on crap the majority of the time.

The bills were packed. Maybe a little too packed. Alright, yeah, they were too packed. But it was a good opportunity for the artists to be able to play with the bands they love, and regardless of the stress involved with those of us who put it on, it was a blessing for most, to be sure. 

I just about knocked myself out during my set. I hit myself in the forehead with a big metal trash can lid and Brandi said my face turned pale and my ears wouldn't stop ringing and I think that I died for a minute and somehow kept talking. It was fun though. 

I don't know. I don't know what kind of a point I'm trying to make or how I'm possibly going to be able to explain how much the Spirit moved in The Max that night, but he did, and it was great. The Glorious Unseen played a passionate worship set, and Sleeping Giant, although a different kind of worship, carried the flow on as though there weren't a break at all. To see the way the people moved and the crowd exploded into worship through hardcore music and dancing and ... freakin', I don't know. I don't know.

Tommy from Sleeping Giant explained a lot of the songs, took time to pray in between, told one of the craziest, most heartbreaking/redemptive testimonies I've ever heard. He read a note from Jesus to the kids that basically begged them to love him. He started out by saying that he knew this was gong to sound crazy, but the Lord had given him a message to read to the kids at the show, and it was that Jesus loved them, and said, "please, please, please, please, please, please love me."

Oklahoma was so hectic! Shawn and I went to Wal Mart for the first three hours of the show and asked people to come because the promoter:

a) dropped the ball

b) put on another, bigger show with Plain White T's twenty minutes away

Who does that?

But it was so much fun, and the Lord really worked in the lives of some people there, too. A girl was healed there, and one of the guys that we invited to come from Wal Mart came and was really touched. He just got out of prison, and I told us afterwards that he really appreciated being invited. One of my buddies, Aaron, has been in touch with him and he said he'd was really touched that night. 

I'd have to say that the ABQ show touched me the most, personally. We put a lot of prayer and work into that weekend, and the Veil Arms vision is put over Albuquerque. Shawn and Ashley and Brandi have always had such a heart for the ABQ music scene, and the Lord has been developing one in me, as well. One of my good friends accepted Jesus, and another one re-dedicated his life to the Lord, and it was just awesome. (I know, I know - all the Christianese, sorry.) 

My dad came. He hasn't seen me play in so long. He has horrible back problems, and has been out of work for years. I felt that the Lord put it on my heart that he was going to be healed. 

This didn't happen. But it's okay. I was sad, because I so hoped for it, and felt like it would be okay, and all his pain would finally be gone, but like I said, The Wake helped me develop a trust that I don't know if I ever had in the Lord, and I no longer doubt God's power, even though he didn't choose to use it where I thought he would. 

I mean. I'm not all-trusting-Levi-with-no-doubts, but I'm not as skeptical as I was before. 

And it blessed my dad, too. Tommy freakin' stopped in the middle of their Sleeping Giant set and took like ten minutes to pray for my dad. It was just incredible. A bunch of kids from the audience came over and prayed for him, and then Ben from Glorious, and SG, and Chad all prayed for my dad for about an hour after the show was over, too. It was touched, man. It was great.

Performance-wise, I freakin forgot my set. It was great. I was so distracted by everything going on that I started to do that Oh Captain My Captain poem and I just forgot it in the middle and started laughing about it. And then some dude screamed "what the f###?" in the middle of When I Go To Meet God, and I was scared that my friends were going to beat him up, because they had him all cornered and were threatening him and stuff. Haha. My friends. They mean well. The dude was nice. I probably would have had the same reaction if I'd have walked in to some kid in an orange hat screaming a bunch of crap with no music.

I don't know. It was great. 

Some cool opportunities came up, too. I think Sleeping Giant might put some of my poetry stuff up on their podcast, which is beyond a blessing and an encouragement, that they liked it that much. And I talked to Carlos of this band, Before Their Was Rosalyn, and might go out on the road with them sometime next year. 

I don't want to make anything about me, though. It's weird talking about cool things happening for myself. I feel like I shouldn't or something. It's God. It's not me, it's all God. The fact that my fingers are even moving to type this right now is a gift, and I always want to remember that. 

Highlights:

Micah Dean

Listening to Micah Dean talk about Poema.

Poema.

Driving in a van with my best friends

Eating Denny's (or was it IHOP) at two in the morning and watching Shawn laugh at everything because he's so freakin tired

Sleeping Giant

Glorious Unseen

Chad Johnson

Hanging out with Fallstar. Those guys are some of the kindest dudes ever, and their performance is phenomenal

Watching We Became The Sun - a band that came down from Ohio to do the Dallas and Tulsa dates

Hardcore dancing for the first time in my life during "worship" to Sleeping Giant in ABQ

Seeing the look on my mom's face when she finally understands that you can worship to heavy music

Praying for my dad with a bunch of random people he doesn't know

Eating absolutely nothing healthy whatsoever throughout the course of everything

Meeting people 

Smiling

The Wake

I leave with my Veil Arms family tomorrow for Dallas where we'll start the three-day "The Wake" tour Friday night with The Glorious Unseen, Sleeping Giant, and Chad Johnson. It's weird how bands and people are built up so crazy huge and we're all just people. Sometimes it makes me wonder if fame is weird, you know? Like, it's awesome to give recognition for beautiful work, but when you know people as people instead of people as stars it's a much different perspective. 

I don't really know what I'm trying to say, but regardless, I'm excited and privileged to play with these musicians. 

I've been working non-stop since 9 this mornin' - freakin... reminds me of deadline at HM. 

I am happy to be home. I must admit, I just unpacked my car last night. It's been completely full for these past two weeks and no one could really ride around with me because, well. Yeah. 

I stuffed everything into my friend's closet, and now I'm sleeping on her floor for ... for indefinitely. 

I've been working on writing some new poetry. I can never just sit down and come up with something that I like, though, which is really irritating. I don't know how other people write, but the times that something genius comes to me are the times that I don't have a pen, and then later when I try to remember it - it's a bunch of jumbled crap that I can't remember. It sucks... to be honest... but my goal is to write a new poem by this Sunday and play it at the ABQ Wake date. I guess those of you that come will see if I've been successful.

Love.

Levi.

It has been too long...

Wow. A whole month - even longer - has gone by since I've written anything on this blogging page. I don't know what the happened. I seriously never realize how fast time goes by until it's gone.

Aww... that's such a cute little cliche thing to say. Little Levi. 

Brandi, my girlfriend, set up a free show at Starbucks last night that I played along with some friends and this band - Ives. It was definitely the most fun I've ever had playing a show. It was incredible. She did such a good job setting it up. Seriously, like, 60 people came to the thing. My friend Amanda even brought a firepit and we roasted marshmellows. It was great. 

I met an awesome person named Christopher last night. Seriously, man, if you read this blog, you were the biggest blessing to me. Incredible.

I'm sitting in Satellite right now, listening to some coffee shop mix consisting of Manchester Orchestra, Band of Horses, Bright Eyes, and Death Cab. Yep. Sometime soon I'm planning on setting aside a day to write some new material and start working on my CD.

Life is exciting right now, though. Some cool opportunities have come up for me to be able to play quite a bit, and I'm going to tour with my best friend and his band We Were Born As Ghosts in January... so I'm stoked. 

I miss HM a lot. It sucks. I get pretty bummed out sometimes. That place really had an impact on me, and I probably just consider Doug one of my best friends now. It was a beautiful time, and will be one of my fondest memories without a doubt. 

I'm doing some work for Veil Arms Clothing now... helping out with shows and promotions and bookings and what have you. I'm loving it. I'm so happy that I didn't have to come back to Starbucks. This is where my heart lies, and I'm stoked that the Lord has so blessed me. I seriously don't understand it. It's crazy. I never would have dreamed that he would work things out the way that he has. 

I read a very encouraging verse the other day. It's from 1 Corinthians 3, and it says:

Everything belongs to you: 22 Paul and Apollos and Peter ; the whole world and life and death; the present and the future. Everything belongs to you, 23 and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

That's just really beautiful. I've been thinking about how we are given every spiritual blessing, and about how much potential we have in Christ. It's something that I can't possibly begin to grasp. It just blows my mind. 

God just blows my mind.

The End.

24

Jack Bauers (sp?) is saving the world. He's just been tortured in China for two years, but he's back, a killing machine.

There isn't a whole lot I'd like to say right now. I just thought I'd say hello, you know. To the massive amounts of people who actually read this blog. :-)

Hello. 

Jesus loves you. 

Pick of the Litter

So, I am very excited to say that my Levi the Poet project will be a Pick of the Litter in HM's upcoming issue for Nov/Dec #134. I gave my demo to Doug thinking that he might give me a few pointers or something like that, and next thing I know it was up on the "potential pick" shelf and the other other intern, Laurel, loved it and gave it this veto - vote thing that says it's going in the mag no matter what - respectively. 

Um, man. HM is my favorite magazine and I just feel like an excited little kid who ate way too much sugar for breakfast and caffeine for lunch. Really I just feel totally blessed by the Lord, and humbled, to some degree, in doubting his care for me, or my lack of faith in him. 

I mean, I'm not saying I came out here to intern at HM so I could have the potential to be in it... I came here because I love to write and I love music and I feel like God's given me a passion for both. And I love HM. It's not like if you work here you get favors. They could've really just thought my project sucked beyond all hope for anything...

Anyway, when I get stoked I think I start to put my foot in my mouth, but all I'm trying to say is that I am stoked, and that God loves to bless his children. 

Working here has been really fun. Doug has a beautiful heart for what he does and he works harder than I may ever have. Basically it's like, him and his wife, and a couple people here and there that run the whole magazine - which was a big surprise for me, having been a fan it for so long and having these pictures in your head of like, a lot of people working on each one. It's crazy. It's a blessing, and I hope more than anything that I am and can continue to be a blessing to them. I'm so privileged to have the opportunity to be out here - and I do learn a lot and it's all very in depth and in those ways i'm really profiting from it - but man, my mindset right now is just that I want to do whatever I can to help, to be a part of something that I love and get to bless others in the process. I guess. 

So yeah. I'm excited about the way things are going right now. I miss everyone at home terribly - especially Brandi. But the Lord's in control, and he has used this time to help build up my faith so much (not only through the good things, I've faced a lot of bad here, too, with personal or relational struggles). If you would've told me that God was going to use the trials of a couple of months ago to his glory in my heart the way he has, I wouldn't have believed you. 

So, to God be the glory. Because I could die in the middle of this sentence. 

I'm in the process of learning harmonica. I just learned "Merrily We Roll Along", "Lullaby", and "Jingle Bells". It's awesome. I want to be one of those cowboys in the movies that finds a random stump by a cactus and builds a fire and cooks the rabbit he killed and plays harmonica while drinking whiskey from a flask. 

A Night In Austin (Give or Take)

Monday, September 1, 2008
Day Twenty-Nine (Labor – Day)

I walked around Wal-Mart with a big HULK glove on that made cool HULK sound effects and punched myself in the head over and over again and laughed out loud. 

We went to see Hellboy II (no, it wasn't good at all, but there were a couple funny parts and it was a dollar, so it's okay). I got a large popcorn bag out of the trashcan and refilled it for fifty cents (kind of like the rapper) and ate more popcorn than any one person should eat and felt like throwing up afterwards. 

The movie got out around midnight, and then I drove into Austin to try to find Woody. Being Labor Day Weekend, which I forgot about, it was ridiculously crowded and there was no Woody in sight. 

However, I met a guy named Don. Don Pendleton. He's a 48-year-old drifter from Okalahoma City, and we got to talking and I helped him panhandle for a little while and we laughed at funny drunk people and things of the sort. Anyway… he was trying to get a bus ticket north and I live north so I told him I'd give him a ride up to Waco (which, I didn't honestly realize how far Waco really is – turns out it's like two hours north from downtown Austin). Man, his eyes lit up like no other – he got so excited! And that made me excited, you know? Being able to help someone that needed help. So anyway, he said he didn't want to leave till the morning, so he took off to crash, and I walked around some more and sat on this stoop and started doing spoken word poetry. 

Funny things happen when you do spoken word poetry around a bunch of drunk people. I think about five or six of the first people to walk by just started cussing me out. A couple people walked by and smiled. More people walked by and spit in my general direction (good thing their aim was off). 

One dude came up to me, grabbed my hand and started walking with me, and then stopped a few steps later to say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were a girl."
And one guy, God bless his heart, gave me a dollar.

It was awesome. I laughed so much at everybody getting all mad at me and stuff. It was so, so much fun. So then I got tired because it was like three o-clock in the morning and all the cops started shutting down the streets, so I walked back to my car and parked next to a church on 10th and Red River and took some pictures of the city night and went to sleep. 

I had finally fallen asleep when a cop shined his big dumb spotlight into my car window and I'm thinking, "Great, he's going to tell me to move…"

Instead though, I just popped my head up and looked at him and he looked and me and said into his walkie-talkie thing, "Somebody's sleeping in there…" and then he got in his car and left. So that made me happy and it was kind of funny that he just looked at me and left and then I fell back sleep until about nine. (FYI – it's really hot inside of cars inside of Austin). 

Next cool thing. 

Went to Starbucks to get coffee and this chick asked if I would watch her bag. So I watch the bag, she comes out with Starbucks, and starts telling me about all these things you can do to scams your way into getting free drinks and I just think it's funny because I work there and already know all those things but whatever. 

So she's cool. Her name is Beet. She's 20 and she's from New York and she's not really a drifter but she travels around hitchhiking and tells me how to hop trains and things of that sort. She also drew out picture directions on how to bind my own books, which is really cool and I plan on making a journal this week. Pretty much she's awesome. 

Anyway, she ways she's going to try to make her way up 35 and I say, "I'm giving some other dude a ride up 35 anyway, you're welcome to come." So she's stoked and we hang out and talk about music and travel and things and make our way to some gas station where we're meeting Don and it was really cool. Got to share my testimony with her and tell her about my life and stuff, and more than anything I feel like I made two cool friends and I like making friends, so it's good. 

We stop by a gas station and I think I made the counter-lady's whole week because I gave her my pound of coffee mark-out from Starbucks and for a minute there I really, really, really think she's going to cry tears of joy.

Don comes, we split. We listen to Manchester Orchestra and mewithoutYou and we talk about life for a long time. 

So now I'm sure they're parted ways and are on the road again with some other person, and I'm back in my trailer thinking about it all, and if I've learned anything, because no one says you have to have learned something – it could just be building relationships. I don't know if there's a lesson in every single circumstance we come across – but I know that I loved last night and today, and I think that Jesus used me to help some people out, - cause I didn't know that was going to happen, man, I just went downtown to sleep - and I know that they were happy for it so that makes me happy for it. I got both of their phone numbers so that we can stay in touch. Beet says she's gonna send me music suggestions, and Don says he's going to finish clearing things up with the truck company he worked for and get back out on the road again sometime in the next month. I wish them both the best. 

Anyway, that's the last eighteen hours or so.

I suck at Photoshop

I have this beautiful idea in my head of awesome things to create and cool designs and beautiful goodness, and I suck at photoshop and the scanner is sketchy and I can't do any of it and I'm going to cry. 

Today was entirely uneventful. However, I did run around for a while and boy am I, like, ten times sexier than I ever was before. That mile, man, that mile run just transforms your entire body from skinny little pansy to beautiful junk of man. 

The myspace stuff is going well. I'm liking the responses to the poetry stuff. Not sure what to expect you know, because, it's not exactly rocking or anything, but I'm glad people have enjoyed it. When I get home I'd really like to start playing more and, I dunno...

I started emailing a ton of venues around Austin to see about opening up for shows over the next month or two while I'm here, so I guess I'll see if any fruit comes from that...

Tomorrow I'm going to spray paint things on my car with these stencils this dude I met here said he made. I haven't seen them but I'm sure they're cool. And then I think I'm going to drive into Austin and find this homeless guy i met and I'm going to do poetry on the corner and make us some money so that we can go eat food together, and then I'll spend the night in Austin with him and talk to him about stuff. 

His name is Woody. He's very nice. 

Love ya'll. 

Levi.the.Poet.

City and Colour

I'm working at a magazine right now, been out in good 'ol Tejas for a little over three weeks now, and it is such a blessing. I cannot even believe how wonderfully the Lord orchestrated so many things that I never could have imagined in the last six months. 

I dropped out of college to pursue a different calling. Trouble is, you ask me what it was and I'd have diddly squat to tell you. The year kind of went like this: 

Semester #1: Do good in English. Stress your way through elementary level biology and mathematics with everyone's telling you you're doing fine when you're convince you're not, and then get an A and feel stupid for reasons other than academia. End up 3.76 GPA. You are a phenomenal student with high potential for success.

Semester #2: Absolutely, positively... SUCK at statistics, take your first test, immediately drop the class right afterwards, never even attempt to discover what sort of negative grade you received on the exam. Sit in English 102 and read about how Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde somehow became a more viable source for study on the human condition than Paul's timeless, scriptural groaning of hating the sin that acts despite his desire for righteousness. Look out the window. Start shaking because you know that once you leave you will not be back, and somewhere, at some point in time, someone told you that college is actually a wise decision, and the opposite is not wise. 

Do the opposite. Approximately, eh, two weeks into spring. 

For as much as I've laughed out loud while writing this, I do not count myself a complete idiot. Dropping out of college is, perhaps, not an especially wise notion when considering... um, life. However, after timeless prayer and seeking the Lord's counsel, I can say that the decision was, in the end, more of the Lord's idea, perhaps, than mine, and that he was calling me to other things... things that I am still discovering. 

All that to say is that somehow, not four months later, I got an acceptance email from Mr. DVP at HM Mag and now I'm here in Texas. God only knows what it took for me to trust him. Irritatingly enough, I seem to have developed some sort of anxiety issue where I absolutely flip out about things - and all I can say is that there are a few of you out there (you know who you are) that have prayed for me, interceded on my behalf, given me words of encouragement and, to some degree, prophesied aspects of my path throughout my struggle to believe - and to you I am indebted, and I can't stress my appreciation for the beauty and inspiration and insight you've painted onto my canvas, and know that I pray and thank God for you every day. 

I guess this will be my official blog thing for now. For those of you that want to check out the poetry - I'd love any feedback. Hopefully I'll have the discipline to daily keep whoever finds their way here updated with whatever random info my head conjures up. 

I love you, whoever you may be, but Jesus loves you more.