A Decade of Synchronicity
by Shannon Shird
Fuck. I thought about my parents, my family, my roommates, my friends. I’m a fucking idiot. Who dies from a shroom overdose?
I was sinking onto the sticky floor of Terminal 5 in New York convinced my legs were no longer going to work anymore and that my heart was going to go out any second.
This is it. This is the end…
The faces of the concert-goers were slowly losing definition and becoming blobs of pink and yellow light around me. I grabbed his arm and slid down the wall despite his protests
“Baby, you can stand. Shannon. Listen to me: Your legs work.”
His voice was soothing. Gently, he held me with both arms and tried to keep me from descending. He held me with both hands up against the wall. My knees shook as he tried to encourage me to stand. It’s a shame he was so wrong.
“Nope. No I can’t. They don’t.”
All I wanted to do was sink and slowly let go of everything. There was no more difference between me and the floor anyway, or the spotlights, or the smell of beer and popcorn in the venue. I was fusing into everything to become nothing.
My solace at the thought of my untimely death was that at least I’d be dying while Thundercat, played me out with a funky walking bass line, drenched in a luminous feathery headband, singing falsetto. Singing about death, kinda, and about cats kinda…
We neared the exit just as Thundercat’s set was finishing and Flying Lotus was coming on to screams.
In the backseat of the cab we couldn’t afford, we raced down 11th Avenue. He coaxed me to breath deeply but I was so open from the eighth of shrooms I consumed (I thought I was supposed to eat the whole bag!) that I felt every vibration in the city around me.
I thought about the sale of the island for a handful of gems and the piles and piles of corpses buried under every apartment building, skyscraper and avenue. So many bodies. I shivered into his shoulder.
I really am that dramatic.
My love for Thundercat aka Steve Bruner’s funky, irreverent, virtuoso bassist, singer, and songwriter has been almost a decade in the making. Since I heard the chords of his first album, 2011’s Golden Age of the Apocalypse a bright and cheerful, soul-funk-jazz album that sounded like nothing else at the time, his music just resonated with me. His vibe has always aligned with where I’m at in my life in ways that are almost unsettling if I didn’t believe that:
1) there’s nothing new under the sun (as every Black parent will tell you)
and
2) in the concept of synchronicity or what Deepak Chopra names as a spiritual concept that coincidences are meaningful messages about the potential of each moment. Essentially it’s a sign if you want it to be a sign.
Thundercat’s music reminds me that no matter how specific I think the circumstances of my life are, someone else is feeling, thinking and exploring similar thangs. I know, it’s not that deep, but I find it very comforting. Somehow his music has always resonated with whatever I’ve been going through in love, in life and in my deepening connection, these past few years, to my spirituality and the great beyond.
I have so many pivotal memories attached to his music. I confessed my love to my then-partner while Thundercat, on stage in a multi-colored feathered headdress and drenched in gold light, sang his rendition of George Duke’s “Is It Love? (For Love I Come).”
Likewise a few years later our last concert together as a couple was the super late show at Brooklyn Bowl. Thundercat performed much of his darkest EP 2016’s “ The Beyond/Where Giant’s Roam he started the show with a song called Hard Times which was another one of his DMT inspired musings on the afterlife.
I can't feel my face Where's this cold, dark place? This must be the end Time to shed some skin
By that time the chasm between us was widening at an exponential rate and just as he wrote a whole album exploring death, it was time for our relationship to die. As someone who refuses to accept defeat, I was the one who clung on for dear life leaving it to him to rip the bandage and end our nearly four years together. That was the beginning of the very necessary ego death I had to experience as a painful next step in my spiritual evolution.
Nobody Move there’s blood on the floor/ and I can’t find my heart
While having the darkest hours of my life sitting on the cold floor of my basement room, pondering my own suffering and generally having the best (i.e. worst) pity party for myself, all my woes, anxieties and sting of so much loss, “Heartbreaks + Setbacks” got me out of bed on so many mornings.
2017 found Thundercat exploring his relationship to alcohol with the album Drunk and as anyone who knows me knows: me and alcohol are tight. And in a year when I was newly single, on an uphill battle to fundraise and produce my short film (shoutout to freelance artists. Shannon cares if don’t nobody else care) it was a time when at least half of BedStuy (and a little Bushwick) probably saw me either: passed out drunk, passing out drunk in the corner of someone’s party (possibly my own) or bartending an event and drinking as much as I was pouring (shout out BGX!).
Drowning away all of the pain/ Till I'm totally numb
Sometimes you want to feel alive/But not on someone else's time
It’s refreshing that Thundercat is someone whose spoken at length about his appreciation for spirituality, but doesn’t take himself too seriously and can joke about how, in this dimension, he sometimes over drinks and forgets his wallet at the club. It’s Something I can, let’s say, deeply empathize with. I think his music helps make sense of my own spiritual journey. It’s not a linear path. And its messy as hell. As Erykah Badu always reminds us. This tea and incense can turn into Newports and Colt45 real quick. Once I experienced yoga (not our western, Lululemon- wearing- yt-lady yoga) but a spiritual leap. The feeling of union with all life, I felt forever changed. But still just as ratchet as the day before.
This time, though, I’m also the awareness that observes the ratchetness.
Young drifting light Drift on by Shine on me/Then pass me by
Even enlightenment is something that never stops being a work-in-progress and if you think I never got drunk, made an ass of myself and puked my brains out the next day you should holla at every member of the House of Ease.
Before we took coronavirus seriously, a mere two months ago, I (in retrospect) foolishly and gleefully attended my 8th Thundercat show at The Wiltern, a breathtaking old theater in LA with House of Ease’s own Pastor Prosecco. I had an injured foot but not an injured spirit and even though I had been unknowingly practicing for Corona Quarantine all that week by staying in the house, icing and rubbing spicy cremes on my foot I was determined not to miss my favorite artist.
It was before his new album, It Is What It Is came out. As always with artists I love, I’m a bit nervous to hear their new work. But then a month into quarantine it came out and, let’s just say I gagged.
There’s a few things I always expect from a Thundercat album: his wry sense of humor, a story about an intergalactic journey through space and time,a few songs about death... but this album left its mark on me with it’s musings on love. Specifically, unrequited love. Let’s just say a topic that I’ve been preoccupied with this year.
So hard to get over it I've tried to get under it
Stuck in between It is what it is (is what it is)
This April, I laid in the park, smoked a lovely, light strain of fruit punch, listened to his album and shed a tear listening to him beautifully articulate my own feelings about not being chosen. Hearing Thundercat sing about how it didn’t work out for him either makes being passed over a much easier pill to swallow.
Because maybe I’m the type of person to hit someone with a five page love letter even though they’ve shown no romantic interest in me. Maybe I’m not?
Maybe that’s just a good way to end this overly long, mostly pointless article about how much I fucks with Thundercat.
It is what it is.
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P.S. If you need an intro or refresher to Thundercat check this out.