Willard Grant Conspiracy
Flying Low

THE REVIEW

It's the great American dream that slowly fades away, the last red and then orange and then yellow glimmer of what was once a great blaze, at the edge of those monstrous highways that drag you away from the great city of angels towards the scorching and chilling desert sand, where every great dream finds immense spaces to expand without obstacle and reach infinity.

"The Smile At The Bottom Of The Ladder." Each of us has had our own American dream, and we've spun it in our heads like a movie, the most beautiful ever made... with the most sublime music ever heard. Mine is locked inside the Mojave, with the deep voice of Robert Fisher in "Evening Mass" pushing me to move the limits a little further, for it's just a dream. Landscapes that I should never have known, at least without ever having been there, parade through my mind; but so it is... aboard a '70 Dodge Challenger R/T, white, I dart through desolate lands that perfectly match my mixed mood, immense spaces of nothingness stretch before my dusty Ray-Bans, with the blazing sun lighting up the road with visual distortions and the dry guitars of "August List" accompanying Robert’s "telephoned" voice that seems unreal, just as unreal as my being there.

I enter a semi-abandoned village and find myself at dusk on "St. John Street". I get out of the car and step into the saloon. Everything is sound, and the sound is soft purple velvet on the walls, the floor, the chairs... just as soft are the violins and guitars, no one pays me a glance, it all seems so unreal to be true. Time seems never to have moved forward in there, it feels like the Wild West of Sam Peckinpah with the notes of "House Is Not A Home" arriving from behind, languidly. Something moves in my stomach... I feel a cold air chilling my neck as brushes nervously meet the drums... "Bring The Monster Inside" simultaneously grows inside and outside me, like the mad visions of a failed acid trip. The crescendo with the troubled voice coming directly from the brain is sweetly terrifying, and for some unknown reason, I find myself running through the deserted streets of the ghost town, chased by my worst nightmares; I stumble and roll down a cliff where I find myself at dawn and "No Such Thing As Clean"... nothing has been resolved. Its remarkable progress as I try to shake off the dust accumulated from my fall. I sense eyes watching me, but I cannot see them; they peer inside my soul, and I feel a mix of sadness and anguish in them... for me, as the guitar distortions echo my memories within the cerebral cortex that relentlessly descend the spine to awaken me in the deepest darkness I've ever seen "is this perhaps the warm center of my soul...?" I ask myself without feeling any emotion.

Then, a gentle female figure approaches, softly whispering that "It Doesn't Matter" while a small, serious, and inquisitive crowd scrutinizes me from behind, trying to understand what I am, and I hear them murmuring about "Eephus Pitch" with the firm vehemence of a judge... a just among the just, but I can't understand what they say about me. They offer me a pitcher from which I drink greedily, but their "Water" is heavy and slowly descends down my throat, which feels like land parched by the noon sun, "peasant psychedelia" the toothless old town madman whispers to me as he leads me to my '70 Dodge Challenger R/T, white, magnificently white, and the notes of "Split Tender" are the sweet music of the desert that slowly comes back to life in the lush green that beyond the hills of orange groves fades into the ocean.

I am safe... but as always, in my American dream, I am alone.