My friends have friends that make cool s%^&.
Bottom to Top by Miles Bonny x B.Lewis
-s.
Listen to and download on iTunes or milesbonnyxblewis.bandcamp.com
Hi everybody.
I am taking this short break from writing my mildly overdue newspaper column to write something else completely - an outpouring of sorts likely, that has no final destination. And like many things with no particular place to go, chances are it’ll amble its way to you and you will be kind enough to entertain it until you realize it has overstayed its welcome.
I write this with clumps of mascara in my almost bald set of eyelashes; which nobody warns you is a possible side-effect of being in the modeling industry, just like they forget to tell you early on that you are in the business of professional rejection. Jolly good thing I got a head start on that when I moved to Manila as a pre-teen. Shutting shit down without just cause. Closing the door before even trying.
And though this is an attitude that gracefully committed suicide as the years progressed, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what that Graveyard of Potential holds. Crumpled pieces of paper with the beginnings of a genius blueprint. The cure for Cancer, maybe. A new color. A vital proponent of peace.
And so I have felt about music, on many days. What of collaborations gone awry? Lyrics lost to the grapplings of frustration, beats abandoned because of a sample that was just too much effort to clear?
Ah, well. Here is a story about what was able to both breathe, and give breath.
—
I first met Miles’ voice when it punched me in the groin.
There I was, alone, thankfully. Buckled over, slow to straighten, lingering in the confusion of palpable unfamiliarity, but feeling indescribably…safe.
Unable to pinpoint a place or a time on his music, giddy with the newness of this thing I had no name for. Something I could not, would not, attempt to thumb through folders to file. Something I wanted to run to Momma with, to slap my ex-boyfriend in the face with, to wrap up like I did my newborn and hold like nothing else mattered.
Miles Bonny, I soon realized, made sense between anything my iTunes shuffle could have possibly tried to sandwich him in - from Gangstarr to Jackson Browne, Sade to Jai Paul.
It was ‘Lumberjack Soul’ that made it’s way to my phone as a ring tone, in an effort to balance the frivolity and transience of an electronic ringer with as much mead as possible; timeless, honey-laced, balance-altering, thirst-quenching, truth serum.
But it was ‘J.Birly’ that had me horizontal.
—
A voice that lays me out, meets beats that —
…frankly, make me want to do things I am not at liberty to describe to you in detail here.
Jesus, B. Lewis
Deftly able to take listeners on journeys that make you try to remember whether or not he was actually there. The one that got away.The one you haven’t found yet.
Lacing cosmically deranged beauty with a gutter-morphed Pharcyde lyric on one beat, to wordlessly describing a crisp sock-footed spring morning in pristine sheets on the next; B.Lewis is the dude that waits for you to appreciate your perfect sunny side up before scrambling the f*ck out of it.
(Then he drops a calling card on your breakfast table that says, “Yin and Yang: Matchmaker”, and nonchalantly walks away with a piece of your toast in his mouth.)
—
From the gate of the Graveyard of Potential, with love.
With the fleeting acknowledgment the internet bestows new music, and the improbability of predicting the impact of this collaboration, the 7-tracks on Egg Black might have been lost to you. But even as an individual that is violently territorial about music that moves me, I am quick to recognize that not sharing this would be detrimental to everything I stand for.
So consider this the first time I let you in. Let you stay.
The first time I offered to make you breakfast, in nothing but everything I was born with, because that is what this deserves.
Together, Miles Bonny and B.Lewis have me laid out and scrambled.
Partake. Sustenance. Egg Black.
milesbonnyxblewis.bandcamp.com
-s.
An appetizer.
—
