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love

Breathe Me In

February 9, 2017 by Aaron
aaron j. trumm, break ups, breathe me in, dr. thunda, love, michael clifford, n8$, nathan menhorn



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Breathe Me In – a saddish break up type song, from Livin Is Bling. Here we have Nathan Menhorn (N8$) on drums, Michael Clifford (Thunda) on bass, Aaron (me) on keys and vocals. Mixed right here in river city at NQuit Music, and mastered by John Greenham at John Greenham Mastering.

It’s a sad song, yes, but it’s also sort of triumphant and redemptive. I mean, at least I think so. At least that’s what we were trying for. πŸ™‚

We love you! Pick up the single right now by clicking the big button! It’s only a dollar! πŸ™‚

Here’s the lyrics!

you been lookin pretty good these days
you been lookin pretty fine i’d say
you been lookin pretty lonely too
i been thinkin i should rescue you

you been lookin pretty angel face
i been lookin for a pity case
you been lookin for a way to get away from me

this is the devil’s land
a blood wet hand
nobody over here remember the plan
so i keep on runnin the direction i been goin
and i cannot stop until i make it to the end
so don’t you give me any reason to remember that i’m dangerous
and i’m never to be trusted
now if you want a bait and switch
we can do that
everybody knows the situation
ain’t what it used to be
because you caught me at a time when i could not see
and i been lookin through the dust tryin to get my path
and i been waitin for a little rain to wet my wrath
now wait a minute which of us was needin a pity screw?
can’t remember anything (gimmee a minute dude)
brain is breakin down i don’t know what’s true
goddamn would you believe that i thought it was you?

breathe me in
one time before you go
come over here and breathe me in
one more time before you go

you been lookin like a goddess baby
ever since you came my way
and i been lookin for a way to let you go

got a little bit of rock n roll runnin through me
always think i need to break down the way it need to be
like
“if you wanna be my woman and you want me to be your man you gotta follow the plan”
see?
so let me get up around your face
let me wrap around your head like a cold case
and let me breathe what i normally see let me be
let me do what i normally won’t do and listen to you
and maybe everything you say can make me realize that i’m virtuous
and i’m never gonna hurt you
i know that you can see that i done been
broke down beat round makin a sick sound
wander round town lookin upside down
i need to come down get my feet on the ground
why why why why would you wanna stay my way?

breathe me in
one time before you go
come over here and breathe me in
one more time before you go

do yourself and me a favor girl
and don’t push me away
come over here and breathe me in
i wish that you would stay
come over here and breathe me in
we need to find a way

breathe me in
one time before you go
come over here and breathe me in
one more time before you go


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Open Oceans

July 1, 2016 by Aaron
aaron j. trumm, love, music video, nquit music, open oceans, ptsd, stop loss, war



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Here is Open Oceans. I wrote this tune in about 2008 or so on an acoustic guitar. It’s the first time I tried writing with a guitar and playing and singing simultaneously. I ended up playing the repetitive acoustic guitar on the actual record. There’s another couple of electric parts that I added, and then more electric parts by my friend Paul Lafourest. He also played the bass on this. My buddy Nathan Menhorn is the drummer.

The lone female vocal is Jenny Malin, who is now passed away πŸ™ There’s also Paul on backing vocals, and our friend Lacey on extra female vocals. There’s a lot of density in the song, but it can be done pretty pared down.

This song is about stop loss. The woman character is waiting for the soldier to come home, but stop loss has him staying longer. Stop loss is when the military disallows scheduled retirement or return from duty in order to keep soldiers in the field. In the end, he’ll be coming back, but with PTSD.

What can you even say about PTSD? I will say this – a LOT of people have a little bit of PTSD, and it can come from the obvious stuff like going to war, or being a cop, or living in a really rough neighborhood, or being physically abused as a child, but it can also come from other places, like trauma surrounding your health, or psychological abuse that can come from a lot of places. What PTSD does is it makes you react to every conflict as if it were life and death, and this makes it very very hard to communicate.

The good news is, it’s a problem that can be solved (usually). To that end, I’ll be donating 15% of revenue from this song and video to a worthy cause that helps do this. I’m not allowed to say which charity, but it’s good, and I spent a goodly amount of time researching who was really doing good work for that cause. So, to help with that, you can GET YOUR DOWNLOAD OF THE TRACK HERE.

The thing that I notice in these lyrics is that at the end I’m like “gonna need your love to remain revealed”…because that’s so important. The way to really start to get out of being conditioned to be violent is love. And man…I dunno what I can even say about it. Love, dude. Love.

Here are the lyrics to this tune, so you can see ’em and such:

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

been back deep in these open oceans
bad world tracks and these backward notions
everything they have in the world is not
enough to wanna shorten the time i got
even so i run with american forces
sand gun and tanks are replacing horses
and if you come back with enough you might
sleep a little better in your bed tonight

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

i been runnin from my bones for days
lookin for another way i can say this to ya
i ain’t never really comin home
they got another little trick
in they bag o stones
they call it stop loss
and it means i ain’t comin back
so make a little snack go to bed and relax
and i’ll give you a call when i’m over the wall
but we’re gonna have to run so fuck ’em all

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

there are too many ways i can die for you
there are too many days in my life for you
there are too many things I can do for you
what you do for me?
what you do for me?

she been spendin her days makin eyes for you
she been spendin her life waitin up for me
what you do for me?
what you do for me?
come on come on come on come on now

they got me built up past the brink
i’m nothin but a pile of muscle i’m about to sink
can’t float can’t swim can’t fly away
can’t get to the end of the fight today
i got a castle made of blood and my bones are mud
can’t bang my brain on the manly stud
they make me eat this food til i need to puke
gonna break this dude and i won’t rebuke
gonna slip away gonna come to you
but you gotta remember that i won’t be through
gonna need your light to remain revealed
gotta leave this war on the battlefield

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

And here’s the lyric video, so you can follow along:

So there you have it – Open Oceans. See ya soon!


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Thanks for listening, watching and reading!

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I’m NOT About Music

November 4, 2015 by Aaron
connection, hit music, love, music, not about music, top 40


“Well then what ARE you about, Aaron?” you ask. I’ll tell you at the end of this little story…

I was talking with (several) somebody(s) recently about Top 40 hits and whether you could call them “better” than other songs. It keeps coming up because lately I’ve been talking a lot about how cool it would be to have a Top 10 hit song. I used to hide that desire (even from myself) thinking a variety of thoughts like “it’s wrong to be ambitious” or “that’s just sell out crap” or various other things about how super high brow intelligent music or poetry was a higher calling than trying to be some pop star.

Recently, though, I’ve thought about it differently. To be honest, I’ve thought about it differently for about 2 years, since I had my famous double lung transplant. Surely I’ve told you about that?

Oh… well if you don’t know me…I had a double lung transplant. The end. πŸ˜‰ Heh. Ok ok. On July 4, 2013 both of my lungs were replaced in what is now a pretty common but still utterly miraculous surgery. At that point I’d already been doing what I do for..what?…18 years or so? But obviously things in the music and performance world had gone dormant for me. I’d been in and out of the hospital for about 6 months, after having never been in the hospital (which is an outlier accomplishment when you have Cystic Fibrosis – btw this could be the last time I mention that diagnosis – I don’t particularly want to be identified with it). I got pneumonia in November 2012 and kept being out of breath – constantly – for months. In February 2013 I finally gave in and let my family take me to the emergency room, where I sat for 10 days in ICU. After that I’d get out for a couple weeks, flare up, go back in. I was suddenly on oxygen 24-7 and it took me 45 grueling minutes to walk half a mile around my neighborhood park. Conversations were had in hallways where it was admitted that Aaron is dying. Let me tell you, for a four sport high school athlete and a (low level terrible πŸ˜‰ ) college ice hockey player, that was a DISTURBING existence.

Clearly I needed a transplant, but I’d been such a non-compliant, defiant sumbitch my entire life, it took a LOT of work to get the doctors to refer me for transplant. I had to walk the walk, talk the talk, do the work, document the work. I had to let people coach me, groom me, manage my image so that I would be a good candidate. It was like being a politician or – dare I say it? – a rock star. I was totally “handled”.

And I’ll tell you a secret: I loved it. Besides not being able to breathe and being on death’s edge 24-7, I loved having a team around me, and when I realized I was actually the LEADER of this team, and that most of what I was doing, with the fundraising and the talking and the grueling pseudo workouts and the thank you notes, was inspiring people, I really got inspired myself. My story was MOVING people. It was like I’d found my calling. I became a transplant athlete and won a bronze metal in the 100 meters 1 year after transplant (which is kind of ahead of the curve if I do say so myself)…

But wait – that was already my calling. I’ve been a musician arguably all my life, but definitely since I was 14, and in the world of trying to be professional since I was 19. I was also a slam poet, which I did as my full time gig (along with some acting) for about 4 years.

In fact, I was the 10th ranked slam poet in the WORLD. I was actually world class at it! πŸ™‚ And it was the same calling. Moving people. Not even just inspiring, but MOVING people. There is absolutely nothing like being in a dingy old warehouse in the dead of summer, Houston, TX, no air conditioning, industrial sized fan blowing everybody’s hair back, a gritty old PA blasting over the fan noise, and just f**** stepping out of your soul’s own way, opening up your arms, and basically stepping outside of your body to watch as a room packed to the gils with folks simply ERUPT, screaming and cheering and clapping so loud you can’t hear that fan, and all collapsing in for a hug or a handshake or a victory lift – except maybe a heartfelt “thank you” from that one dude or girl in the back of the room after the noise has died down. Or being told “I said your poem to my partner and it fixed our relationship”, or simply having someone walk up to you with tears in their eyes after a show.

Coming back to Top 40 songs – there are a lot of definitions of what “good” is, and it really depends on the context. And Top 40 songs can almost never be defined as “good” by a LOT of standards. I looked at my A-list poetry slam pieces and thought about it, and when I was talking to those aforementioned somebodies, something smacked me in the face. The two poems that had made me the 10th ranked slam poet in the universe (see what I did there? πŸ˜‰ ), were, from my point of view, MY WORST SLAM POEMS. My most effective slam piece, Blink, the one with which I could decimate any competitive field in the country on any day, was amateurish. Repetition, sparce imagery, and pedantic little devices. It really is nowhere near the level of later pieces I’d written once I’d learned how.

But it was HONEST. And it was raw, and poignant, and vulnerable – and it was about love. Specifically about being afraid to tell somebody how I felt. It doesn’t posture or pose – in fact, I say repeatedly “I’m so afraid of you…”. It MOVED people.

Finally I realized, that whatever you can say about a Top 40 song, the thing that it succeeds at is MOVING people. That’s what it’s good at, and if your definition of “good” is “does it move people?”, then the Top 40 is a great place to look for how to do that.

Now suddenly I have no qualms about dreaming of a number one hit. I imagine the people that would be moved by that and the interactions I would have and I think “holy crap”. It could be done a lot of ways – but I’m really into making tracks and performing, so I’m gonna keep doing that, for my sake, but really that’s just a means to an end.

So – the deal is – I’m not really ABOUT music (or poetry, or being a transplant patient). I’m about YOU!

You – being – people. The people reading this. I’m about moving you. Who knows if I’ll ever reign myself in enough to make a Top 40 hit, but hopefully I can start by moving you.

You be the judge though. If you want to listen to my latest try, “Livin Is Bling”, just click here. And email me up and let me know what moved you, if you hear anything you could imagine on the radio, or whatever else you feel like sharing really. I’d love to hear about it!

— Aaron

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