Precious Lord, Take My Hand

Singing hymns in a Greenpoint church.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Aaron Roche hosted a small “song share” at Greenpoint Reformed Church.

People brought food and some signed their names up to perform a song to the small gathering of faces seated in the dimly lit church with the one little Bluetooth amp and a Grand Piano sitting regally in front of the pews.

I war nursing an ear infection (my sixth one this year) which had now created a complete blockage in my left ear. Instead of the normal waves of sound entering my ear canal, all I heard was white noise. Through a more poetic lens, I guess it could be mistaken for the sound of the ocean. I decide to go with that one because surviving life requires one to reframe negative situations into good ones.

I kept pulling at my earlobe of some relief — every now and then I’d get the right angle and some of the liquid deposit would move to open up a small portal of sound Aha! I was free! Clarity! Treble! There it was!

And then bam.

…the ear would close up again leaving me with a mono, hard-panned, dull, dampened sound spectrum once more. It was isolating. I felt almost literally stuck inside my head.

The first few performances began. I was blown away. There was something so tender and intimate about hearing these people sing so quietly. The amp couldn’t amplify much so one had to lean in to hear. The sound was so slight that it was almost as though it was coming rom another room. I felt like I was sitting in on a fantastic secret.

This is Molly and Michael. They are soon to be married. Their songs reminded me of the subtlety, elegance and heartbreak of Elliott Smith.

Next, one of my best friends Alex Toth performed two new songs called “Triangle People” and “Spiraling.”

Earlier in the evening, I had heard him practicing “Triangle People” with his friend Alex Dean outside the church. I had laid down watching the clouds creep across the blue expanse, their voices filtering through the lazy evening streets of Brooklyn. It brought me to tears. People are so angular, I thought.

If you’re not familiar with my magical friend Toth …