Featured Essay: Five Dice, All Threes

by Seth Chandler

I can’t remember the first time I heard Bright Eyes. I remember snapshots along the way. It’s one of the bands that’s helped me wade through moments of darkness, of which there are too many to name and who would want to any fucking way. It’s cathartic. It’s liberating. 

Summer 2004

I woke up in the middle of the floor in the apartment I shared with my roommate. The Bright Eyed album Lifted was blaring from my neighbors apartment. The events of the night before were a blur but I could guess what brought me here. I’d become increasingly isolated over those recent months, nearly flunking out of school, starting and quitting a nearly endless stream of shitty college kid jobs, feeling lost and floating further away from myself and reality. I had recently aged out of being on my parents health insurance and subsequently couldn’t afford the laundry list of psychotropics that kept me semi functional and wasn’t smart enough or didn’t care to realize how stupid and incredibly dangerous it was. I’d begun replacing my prescribed meds with whatever else I cauld get my hands on. I opened the door and immediately regretted it as I was nearly blinded by the blazing sun. “Lover I don’t have to love” sounded even louder our shared porch. 

I could hear one of my neighbors outside speaking softly, several flights of steps below. She was laying out, sunbathing in the remains of an ancient lawn chair next to the nearly empty pool, her tiny dog sprawled out on the end of the chair between her legs. One look at the dog and you know its name was Itsy, Bitsy, Shitsy, or Fuckface. As I walked down the stairs from my apartment I heard her say “that’s a good boy, you made a poopoo for momma,” and I felt immediately embarrassed for that poor fucking dog and a bit sad that I was there in this moment to witness this creature’s humiliation. I knew the feeling. Sometimes I crave sadness. Loneliness. It’s morose and probably pathetic but it’s a secret language that speaks to the core of my being. She saw me coming down the stairs and asked me to get her smokes, assuming I was headed to the store, which was fair because I hadn’t left my apartment in weeks or months or years or who knows except to go the grocery store down the street. “Whatever’s cheap,” she said. I didn’t respond because a response would’ve been misleading. I didn’t want to talk. I only wanted to dwell in my melancholy. I walked until I got sick of walking and laid on a picnic bench in the middle of an empty park. I’d already worked hard to isolate myself from anyone who understood me and most of the people that liked me. I was punishing myself for still being alive. For feeling like I was spinning out. I felt unworthy of attention or affection or life. Probably the most fucked up thing was how much I enjoyed feeling that way. I eventually wandered to the store, bought her a pack of the cheapest cigarettes I could find (Liggett) and left them on her doormat. We never talked again. Soon after I moved out and my roommate told her and all our other neighbors I’d died because it was easier than explaining that I’d been too depressed to function as an adult and had moved back into my parent’s fucking haunted basement. 

Bright Eyes was the soundtrack to that summer. A summer that felt like it lasted a hundred years. The one thing that made me feel alive or provide a small glimmer  of hope during those dark days was this mysterious band. I started collecting physical copies of music  during that time, probably as a way to turn my attention from my inside, a giant fucking mess, to something tangible that I could hold outside of my broken brain. I used collecting as a way to dig myself out of the hole that I’d woken up in.  Did I start collecting records or are they just collecting suckers like me?

I think I’m addicted to my own sadness. It’s not a thing that I’m necessarily proud of, just a recognition of a truth about me. It’s part of the core of my being. I’m morose. I’m obsessed with death.  I like feeling lonely, actually enjoy it. I love sad songs. Sometimes I feel the most alive when I’m in these dark places. There’s something amazing about a song that can speak in the secret code of sadness and then rip me in half that just leave me feeling  simultaneously dissolved and somehow whole again. That’s what Bright Eyes does best. Maybe I’m a product of the Midwest winters that lasted forever or the relentless upbringing by hyper religious parents but sadness is my secret language. 

Bright Eyes has always made music that’s spoken to me and my own bullshit darkness. When friends told me they didn’t like the band for whatever reason I’d think “yeah, it’s not for you. They made it for broken people like me.” Bright Eyes 

I tend to ignore Bright Eyes’ singles when they’re released because they always make more sense as a part of a whole album. It would be like reading the 3rd chapter of a book I had planned to buy the day it came out. Without the context of the album it wouldn’t make much sense. It’s not that they make concept albums but they make albums that fit together like puzzle pieces. 

Five Dice All Threes is beautiful. The songs settle over me like a fine dust of grief and loss and pain and sadness. They speak to that hidden part of me I’ve worked hard to keep buried, like a magnet pulling my pain back to the surface. But there’s an underlying celebration of life and love in their albums that is less obvious. Its a party. It’s an exorcism. 

 This album speaks  to the absurdity of life. It’s a game of chance, a ride at Disneyland that you can’t control and you’re already on it so you try to hop off mid ride and end up as one of the ghosts in the haunted mansion or you can stick around and see exactly where it goes. 

It’s classic bright eyes and reminds me of the early records. It’s raw. It’s full of the entire spectrum of human emotions that I crave when I listen to this band. There are pop flavored songs that emit joy (Bells and Whistles, Rainbow Overpass) and there are bittersweet moments filled with a pain and regret that make me feel all my own pain well up inside of me like an angry fist trying to punch its way through my chest (Tiny Suicides, Hate, most of these fucking songs…c’mon it’s Bright Eyes!)  That’s a pretty special thing to say for a record. It made me feel. It casts a spell that briefly helps to lift me out of my own fog and reminds me what it’s like to feel. To ache. To be alive. Sometimes you’ve just got to roll the dice. You’re already on the ride, just see what fucking happens.

Seth plays in Lizard Brain Trust, Sweet Sweater and runs the label Dumb Ghost Recording Enterprises with his pal Cameron. He broke both of his arms at the same time when he was 7 and describes his relationship with his parents as “uhhh, fuck, complicated?”

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