“Beginnings of a Beard” is the opening track from our first full-length, Bear Hair, and it’s also our opening song for almost every set we play. That’s true for a lot reasons, the primary one being, it’s representative of the entire mindset I was in when I was writing the album, and it’s about one of the most important (and telling) things I possess: my dreams. The recording of this song features some of the best production on the album, done by Chris French, and also features backing vocals from Danny, Abigail Large of Property of Saints, and a poem at the end performed by the one and only Spiros Loukopoulos, our former bass player/current good friend.

One of the most fun parts about playing this song live is doing my own poem at the end. I would not feel comfortable saying Spiros’s, for that is obviously not my experience. I’ve done two poems primarily, one old, one current, and all of them feature some improvisation, especially when things get frenzied near the end. The first poem involves an experience I had with a homeless woman at a Metra Station near my old work, wherein I was reminded of many things: my status, my mortality, and my mental state. The second one is about resuscitation on a beach, and breathing life into what was once lifeless; I wrote that after the band started playing shows again.

I regret to say, I do not have Spiros’s poem transcribed for y’all…hence my hesitance to do a post about this song. However, the few lyrics that I sing in this song mean a lot to me, and set a tone for the rest of the album.

I dreamt a hot-to-trot blonde bombshell
built by my brain to bring me love
She had a pair of legs I could sink my teeth into,
a body held tight by a tank that was see-through

This, by the way, is a real dream I had; I should’ve mentioned that in the beginning. I have very vivid dreams and remember almost all of them, usually with the assistance of writing. And, naturally, when the dreams get vivid, the sexuality in a lot of dreams gets amplified a whole lot.

But something about her face had me laughing
Same color as her hair, and just as well-kept
A beard that was flowy and hung to her breasts,
a beard she could grab, pull apart, and groom flawless

A lot of people have asked me what in all fuck I mean right here, and it’s really not all that complicated or strange; in fact, it gets explained a little bit in the next stanza. I’m obviously writing about this super-foxy lady having a beard, a really perfect and flowy beard, but it represents something very important about me: all that I love, I have to laugh with. And sometimes, laugh at. However, when I can’t laugh with the people I love due to precarious, if not terrible situations, I’m not even CLOSE to the same guy. It brings me down in a big way.

It is important to know that when I wrote this album, as well as this song, I was living in my family’s house at age 17, jobless (for 4 months, until I got the job from Hell), not in college, separate from most of my friends due to collegiate distance, and suffering from guilt from a terrible thing I’d done. I spent most of my time in a blue bathrobe, eating crab sandwiches with melted butter, watching TV all day while everyone was gone…you know, unpleasant stuff. The people I loved were far and I didn’t properly love myself, and that can easily set a lot of bears loose in your brain. Hence the last line of this next stanza…

And it draped from the middle of the face
We glowed on neon thrones for days and days
Someone I could love on and laugh with, well-suited for dreams
My pining, I find, is an underlying theme

My pining for communion, laughter, and in the end, sanity, fueled this album, and I know everybody’s been through bouts of that from time to time. So, I really hope that some people can relate to this album like I obviously do.

When we perform this song live, I also allude to a song on our upcoming record, a song called “Burble” that we play all the time now. I say lyrics that have a completely different listener in “Burble,” but in “Beginnings,” they’re directed at anyone who’ll give me the love that I needed, and eventually got. They’re simple:

And I’ll do, what you tell me to,
because I love you
I have to