Christmas was good. I woke up early, ground the coffee, burned the bacon, and got lots of well-made wool socks. I also got an Orange guitar cable (Orange is both the company and the color), which means I'll actually be able to do a lot of the musical projects I wanted to do in 2017 the right way, with the right equipment: Lo-Fi Lullabies and the other EP I'm working on right now, Albert Fish: Acupuncturist were both born out of my need to be writing and recording music...and only really having my acoustic guitar. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I got two EPs I'm really happy with out of my long winter without cables and pedals, but now that I've got a rudimentary set-up again...

(This is the first time I've mentioned Albert Fish: Acupuncturist, I think. More to come. It's a country album, my brother is doing the cover art for it, and I think Erin Schug, Alice Snively, and Alyssha Ginzel are going to either love it or never speak to me again when I start putting it out in the world.)

Anyway. Christmas was good. Bird and I took Trinity for a long walk through Clifford Park, a series of paths which coil through a small, tall forest on the edge of Biddeford. Last night's rain had run off down the hills and frozen the footpaths to glass. We slipslid through the trees, past wet black bark cracking in the thaw. The trees will freeze again tonight, but things feel older over here, of sterner stuff, and they are certain to be here, tall and somber, when spring comes again.

We slept. Maybe it was the fresh air, or maybe it's good to sleep sometimes, with the sun shining through the window, and fresh salmon, rubbed with pepper and thyme, coming to temperature on the counter in the kitchen. Trinity nuzzled between us, and smelled of earth, and of hidden places green and alive.

It's night, now, but the night is outside, away from where we are, Bird and I, in our little garret. Our Seine is just a block away, a long-running river of flat, red brick: a long-dead mill, glass eyes empty and dark. It's beautiful the way the desolate, abandoned neighborhoods of Detroit are beautiful. The way only the run down, tired parts of a city can be beautiful.

Trinity is wrapped around a gingerbread man made from corduroy, and the apartment is full of the warm sugar of shortbread baking, an old recipe from Bird's Grandmother, which she's made every year since we met. We picked bunches of vinyl off the shelf at random, and the sounds of Christmas this year are The Beatles (Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), Black Flag (a first pressing of Damaged, one of my prized possessions), and some delightfully terrible 80s rock band called Axe. ELO and The White Stripes are on deck. I can see the cold blue strobe of police through our crooked blinds as, next to me, the needle runs a warm groove, catching the crackle of old albums. Bird is flipping through our movies, looking for The Exorcist, our Christmas Tradition. The streetlights, faux-sodium yellow, cast the room in quiet, nostalgic refulgence, and I want tonight never to end.

--Max Peterson
Christmas, a block from our Seine

P.S. - Here's a little Christmas present. I'll leave it here until New Year's Day. It's called "Sometimes I Wish You Were Dead," and I'm immensely proud of it. It has a lot to do with Marlon, an independent horror film I wrote and directed in 2014. When I sat down to write it, I wanted to tell the story of Marlon and Maggie's marriage. I wanted to tell it without lyrics or vocals: to compose something that would tell a story without words, something with an arc and a motif that people could follow...but I also wanted it to fit in with the rest of the album; lo-fi, trance-like, ambient, melancholy, meditative. I'm not usually content with how things I'm working on turn out, but I'm actually proud of this.

I hope you enjoy it, and even if you don't, thanks for giving it a try.