Last Night It Was Raining and I Went to See Jeff Mangum
(pic from Brooklyn Vegan)
I love you Jeff Mangum! I love you because even though you were gone for over a decade, it was like you sat at home and played your songs every single night for just yourself or for ‘the big guy’ or for the walls or for your invisible fans. I love you because though you glared and glowered (but not in a mean way), you also encouraged everyone to sing along. I love you because you didn’t smile very much, but when you did, the smiles were guarded and sardonic. One day when we are friends, maybe we can swap sweaters the way regular people swap baseball caps. I love you Jeff Mangum!
Excerpts from a 2002 Pitchfork interview:
Does your music stem from dreams and visions sometimes?
Jeff: Yes. I spend a lot of time practicing active imagination before I go to sleep. What I’m feeling will manifest as images through active imagination. And then I go to sleep and those play out even more in my dreams.
What is “active imagination”?
Jeff: It’s a Carl Jung term. It’s sort of staying in that place between sleeping and waking. Just allowing your mind to completely begin to flow with images. Allowing it to become whatever it becomes. You know, you go to bed filled with worries and thoughts, caught up in that everyday kind of thing. With this, you try to concentrate on what you think is really important, or some type of interesting or mysterious image, and then allow your imagination to become like a stream. You can let the stream go, and just observe it to see what happens.
***
Jeff: …even though I believe with my whole heart in the power of music, it didn’t provide any solid answers on how to heal myself and heal others so that they could overcome what had happened to them. I realized that I wanted to take a deeper look at life in order to be some kind of truly healing force in people’s everyday lives.
Pitchfork: Don’t you think that your music has served that purpose, at least some?
Jeff: Well, I would hope it would have a healing effect. The music is supposed to be healing.
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