I essentially would have really liked to wait to drop a blog like this in the glory that would be the band reuniting. However, in the event that it never happens, I would rather just get it off my chest and out of the way.
What can I say, I love this band. I may be guilty of growing older and my taste changing. Though they may not be in my playlist every day, it does not change how I feel. If the world was ever so lucky to be blessed with the opportunity to hear this band 1 more time live. I WOULD BE THERE. Front and center. Screaming and sweating.
Everyone has that ONE band they latch onto. That ONE band that means the complete world. Whether it was the first band they ever heard, the band that got them to pick up and play an instrument, got them into a specific music style or scene. Fairweather is really what got me into playing poppy emotional music. I was for lack of a better term "raised" on punk and hardcore music. Even though I had liked bands such as Piebald, Saves The Day and A New Found Glory, who in 1999 were still in some way hardcore punk bands but were totally on the verge of something different. I was so young and new to it all that I didn't really fathom what was going on around me, what I was a part of and what it all meant. Fairweather was the band that really grabbed me and opened me up to the lighter side of punk.
Fairweather to me, was MY band. I discovered them when they signed to Equal Vision Records. Who at the time had tons of bands I liked and was an amazing label for both hardcore and Post Hardcore, indie, emo bands alike. During the course of their existence I didn't miss a single New England show. I caught ALL of them.
Fairweather even lead to a great friendship that I still have with me today with a gentleman by the name of William Wheaton. Bill and I met at Iodine Fest 2002. A musical fest thrown by the label Iodine Records, which was a Boston based Indie label. We were both front row center, screaming every word enjoying Fairweather to maximum potential. Halfway through the set we looked over at each other to notice not only are we both acting like lunatics but we are also wearing the SAME Bane T-shirt, only different color scheme. We exchange pleasantries as well as jokes on how "gay" we are right now and later, names. After that, we just started running into each other through being involved in the same scene and later discovering us having mutual friends as I started to attend more and more shows all over New England always meeting more and more people. We still tell this story today to humor ourselves.
I also consider myself lucky to have a minor personal connection to them as well. After going to all the shows, always being in front, always saying hello, I got to establish a small relationship with them. We were never really "friends" so to speak but I guess I was that friendly face that they saw every time they came to town. Even though they were not a band any longer when the craze of social networking sites exploded, I coincidently found Jay and we kept in touch that way. The others I became friends with years after when Peter and Shane started Olympia. After publicly displaying my joy on the internet and attending their shows when they came to New England, I was now "that guy from the internet!" instead of "that guy at all our old bands shows!". With that statement alone, makes me wish we could all go back to more primitive, less...creepy sounding times. Out of that though, I got to meet another man by the name of Phil Williams who sang for Olympia. Phil is a great dude and someone who I am pleased to say I know. Whenever I have been in Richmond, hes the man I call.
Now to the original point of this whole thing. Here is the original blog, as it was in October 2005.
now you wonder, why post this? well, to be honest i dont really know. ive always been very into music. when i actually discovered what music, actually is, i cannot remember but, id like to say it started 5 years ago. i wish i could say i discovered Faulkner through my own interest by learning about him in a class room or hearing something through the news or something and read tons of his work, etc but thats not true. i heard about him through one of my all time favorite bands and a large inspiration to me musically and at the time of their exsistance as a band, a large part of my life. that band being Fairweather.
i bought the CD the summer of 2000 when it was released. very eager to listen to it, i ripped it out of the human proof packaging and demanded that Kate stop her life in her own vehicle and put in my CD and thats where it began. later i read through the CD booklet with squinty eyes due to their very small, hard to read scratchy font and there is where i discovered the last words of the last paragraph of this speech. the last paragraph, is exactly what fairweather meant to me. though, this isnt about music, its about writing, books, poetry, etc but that all pretty much ties into music if you choose it to. so in a way it all works out. fairweather was more than a band, they stood for something and meant it. they wrote from the heart and not of the glands. with their release of their EP "alaska" furthered their explanation of what they stood for. writing music for the passion, to feel, to be used as an outlet. instead of being what a majority of the bands are today, a bunch of watered down bullshit, where effort and feeling are second best due to style, image and songs about things they have never experienced. ill stop here, but if you made it this far, please read the speech and this will all make sense.
William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950
"I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
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