thomascwaters.com

Last night (Thursday) I had a chance to see a performer that I’m have a crush on, for a while now. Crush. I say that and my boyfriend rolls his eyes. More accurately I suppose, Tom’s music just speaks to me- he is saying something I really want to hear and he sings beautifully as well. But up until now, I have never seen him in person, so it was a real treat to have Tom Goss performing at the Club Cafe here in Pittsburgh. Opening for Tom, and also singing with him on a few songs was Pittsburgh based, Jeremiah Clark.

I haven’t a clue how I found Goss’s music in the first place. Facebook seems a likely spot or Twitter, but all I remember is being captured immediately. Which brings me back to this notion of having a crush. It has been days since I started this post, and every day I have thought about what to write. I sat there listening, just entranced by every word of every lyric. Tom isn’t the first recipient of such a crush- that’s why my partner rolls his eyes. He has seen this before. Often an artist of some sort does this to me. But I think there is something especially poignant about this time for me. As I listened to each line of spoken emotion, I felt inspired and jealous at the same time. The words seems to roll of the tongue as if they are easy and spontaneous… And here I sit struggling every day to pen a blog post. Though I’m not so naive, and do realize that a songwriter can struggle over lyrics too. I don’t think it is so much about my writing, but rather about my artwork (yes, that creative outlet I seem to be ignoring these days.) Maybe the crush is a reminder to let myself create.

But really runs deeper than that. There is so much love in Tom’s music, and I don’t finds that in my artwork at all. IKt is a voice I don’t know how to speak in my artwork. My partner will say that I know love and share love, but in my artwork, or the ways I express myself? Might as well be a foreign language. I have chalked that up, overt time to a simple solution- my work, the purpose of my work is about other subjects, that’s all. Someone has to talk about the other stuff, right? Som, I have a crush- I’m drawn like you wouldn’t believe to this sharing about love, because it is a topic, I want to be sharing about too, and yet, when I try, nothing comes out. Yet.

Tom, expressed thursday, that he doesn’t really want to be political. To which I replied that making songs about love is very political indeed. He didn’t buy that, I don’t think, but I stand by it nonetheless. Now, more than ever before, we must be giving voice to the wide breadth of our experiences as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people. As we make gains in the political arena towards full equality, the negative voices and hate mongering will only increase. The real battle isn’t just about rights, but rather, about who is controlling the message. There is no better way to bring truth to the discourse, than through love songs, that display the whole of our experience, and the reality and depth of our relationships. If these love songs are not political, then, that is exactly what we need in order to make political gain. (In addition to lots of political work, that is.)

As crushes go, this one is pretty ideal. Tom as a partner and I have a partner. Too often, a person can mistake a crush for something else and miss the point of it entirely, chasing after something and losing even the crush in the end. Some people talk of finding their muse, that may have some similarities to acknowledging a crush. I’d advocate for more people to have crushes, actually. Imagine a world, where often and passionately we felt inspired and moved to look for and step outside our safe box of current existence. I’ll close with a video of Tom Goss and one of my own images. Maybe you will be inspired too.

This is an image from the BabyDoll Series, a series I’ve been working on forever, but haven’t found the nerve to show it as a body of work.

copyright Thomas C Waters