ON MEETING MATT HITT

This past Monday I was lucky enough to go to a very intimate show at Local 506 in Chapel Hill to see Drowners along with a couple of other relatively underground bands (if you are unfamiliar with Drowners, here is the promo video for the fall tour that was released this past July). It happened to be my first indoor concert, as every other show I've been to has either been a festival or an outdoor venue. We got there pretty early because I knew we had a good chance of meeting the band beforehand, had dinner in Chapel Hill, and then I loitered around the venue during their sound check. Somehow, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, god bless his soul, was on my side, because shortly after sound check ended, I noticed a lanky figure in all black about to cross the street a few yards away, smoking a cigarette (ding, ding, it was Matt Hitt!!!!). A friend of mine and I basically hauled ass (as coolly as one can) over to him and briefly introduced ourselves. He was very nice, a little bit shy it seemed. I remember that he seemed smaller in person, even though he still towered over me by at least seven or eight inches. For those of you that aren't familiar with the lovely Matthew Hitt, here's a little background info: Matt formed Drowners back in early 2012 when he moved to NYC from Wales to pursue a career in modelling. The band's first full length album was released at the beginning of this year, and since the release of their earlier EP, they have toured the U.S. and Europe, doing a number of solo shows and also opening for acts like Arctic Monkeys, The Vaccines, Foals, SKATERS, and Temples. Matt has become a pretty established model as well, and in all honesty I kind of just want to sit him down and feed the guy a cheeseburger. He's absolutely precious though, and he complimented my shirt (it's made by a company that his bandmate, Jack Ridley, supports if I'm not mistaken--there's definitely some affiliation) and was really nice about taking pictures and I felt really bad because it looked like he had been about to make a phone call before we essentially ambushed him but he was very chill about it. He was happy to sign my CD and even happier to take a picture and then he went on his merry way while I quietly freaked out.

Here are our photos together:

The show wasn't for a couple of hours so we hung out at the venue until they let us in and then hung out through the first two bands which were pretty awful, in all honesty. Finally, around eleven, Drowners started setting up and Matt Hitt was pathetically drunk and very touchy with his band mates (which was kind of adorable). They opened with "My Little Red Book" which was really exciting, considering I'm a huge fan of The Last Shadow Puppets' cover of the same song back in 2008, and throughout the rest of the show it was a constant back and forth between jamming out and making sure Matt Hitt wasn't about to fall on top of me. Eventually he did fall off the stage, the poor guy, but luckily he seemed alright afterwards. It was actually pretty comical, to tell the truth, and Matt made it into a valuable learning moment, slurring "Shakespeare used little boys in his plays for women parts, how much more embarrassing is that than me falling off the stage?" A part of me desperately hopes (and wholeheartedly expects) that one day Drowners will become huge and I'll have the fortune of being able to say that I saw them when they were just starting out, met Matt and Jack, kissed Matt's neck, drank from his beer, and got him to sign my CD. Oh, and Matt actually sat through an entire song.
Probably the funniest/strangest moment of the show was the very end, when Matt decided he wanted to crowd surf in the tiny congregation of teenage girls clustered at the stage--literally there were like, sixty of us; the show wasn't even close to being sold out. He ended up kind of rolling onto my sister and then into this one girl's arms and nobody could even lift him up because, despite his lanky frame, the man is over six feet and he's got pretty broad shoulders, so it ended after a few seconds with a bunch of people just kind of gently setting him on the ground. That didn't stop him from trying it a second time, however, at which point I think everybody was a little fed up with his antics and he ended up on the floor in shockingly less time. I wanted to help him back up on stage the second time because frankly, it was about four feet high and he was just so drunk, but he decided to kind of thrust himself on stage and I ended up getting shoved out of the way by nothing other than Matt Hitt's nonexistent butt, which was a beautiful experience, naturally. We left pretty much immediately after the show ended--I'd already met Matt and gotten Jack to sign my CD as well and I was pretty pooped and kind of in a daze. All in all, I think they're great live, or rather I think they have the potential to be great live. Let's face it--it must've been kind of an off night. I mean, a Monday night in Chapel Hill during the university's fall break? What idiot scheduled that show for them? So I do feel bad, but I still think they're talented and they played well and while Matt's stage presence was, well, borderline cataclysmic, he was still entertaining and somehow charming.


Here are a few of the videos and photos I took. Sorry the photos aren't great quality--I was reluctant to use flash because I was right underneath Matt and I didn't want to aggravate him but the red light was pretty garish:

SETLIST:

MY LITTLE RED BOOK (COVER)

WAYS TO PHRASE A REJECTION

LUV, HOLD ME DOWN

WATCH YOU CHANGE

PURE PLEASURE

WELL, PEOPLE WILL TALK

UNZIP YOUR HARRINGTON

A BUTTON ON YOUR BLOUSE

LET ME FINISH

SEX BEAT (COVER)

LONG HAIR

SHELL ACROSS THE TONGUE

BAR CHAT

(Matt Hitt, if you ever stumble upon this post, know that I love you)

The Beginning of Everything

INTRODUCTION 

I'm not really sure that anybody is ever going to read this. I'm not even sure if I'm going to want to read this, to be perfectly honest. I don't know if this will be a complete waste of time and a complete waste of internet space, or if it will blossom into something worthwhile and inspiring. With my luck, I'm highly doubtful. However, I've heard on multiple occasions that aspiring writers should write everyday, or as much as possible, and so I thought I'd give it a shot. This blog will be the toilet bowl to my word vomit, if you will. I apologize for the imagery, but at this point I can't really justify that this blog will end up being a collection of the works of some teenage genius or anything that people will actually want to follow and peruse. I'm here to write, it's as simple as that. However, I do feel obligated to provide some background information just in case I become famous one day and people want to refer to my glorious beginnings:

TEN FAST FACTS

1) So yeah that's me--an aspiring writer, that is. I'd ideally like to major in music journalism or creative writing in college and somehow stumble into a career in one of those fields, settle down in a nice little loft in some city with a handsome, tall, dark-haired significant other and just write for a living. Throughout my entire life, the written word has been a consistently illuminating beacon, a source in which I find solace, inspiration, and peace. I'm infatuated with the idea that you can transform your thoughts into something tangible--physical, even--something that you can refer back to and reflect on. I started reading when I was three years old, and practically as soon as I could hold a pencil, I started writing stories of my own. Granted, they're all terribly and embarrassingly bad and written with varying colors of gel pen in notebooks with horses on the cover, but we've all got to start somewhere, right? Through the years I've gotten slightly more esteemed, ricocheting from rather angsty fanfiction to less angsty but definitely infinitely sappier poetry. It's my dream to write a novel someday, although I haven't the faintest clue when or what it will be about. Apparently the idea is supposed to just hit me one day, while I'm driving to work or maybe it'll come to me in some freakishly realistic dream. For now I'm just stuck writing lines to myself on my phone or rushed journal entries and waiting for that "spark".

2) Besides reading and writing, the only other thing in life that has brought me the same level of comfort and consolation is music. I adore music--I think it's one of the most brilliant forms of self-expression. It's raw and it's tailored, it's honest and unapologizing. It's a beacon, a memory, a light that leads you to that one notional, conceptual place where you can be anybody, feel anything, rock worlds, blow minds. It's the sound of sadness or the sound of falling in love. It's anything you want it to be, and it's that versatility that drew me into the types of music I listen to in the first place.

3) My last name is pronounced like Diagon-Alley, so depending on how familiar you are with the Harry Potter series either that will blow you away or you won't give a rat's ass.

4) I have a deep and perhaps slightly naive admiration for movies. It's hard to find time to watch a lot of films but I really appreciate a movie that's well-done and can make me feel something (which, admittedly, there are several, as I am an aforementioned sap).

5) I say that I'm a cynic but I'm also a hopeless romantic on the down low. My guilty pleasure is really cheesy, bad romantic comedies that have like, a negative three percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (This is kind of contradictory to my last fact but it's the truth. I guess I just really like movies, period.)

6) I hate chocolate ice cream. I get choked up when people praise me, even if it's for something really trivial.  

7) I like burning CDs for people, driving, banana bread (duh), birthdays, any movie produced by the Marvel franchise, and the English indie rock band Arctic Monkeys.

8) I currently live in Cary, North Carolina where I attend Green Hope High School as a member of DECA and the yearbook staff. Mostly I just keep my head down and try to get through each painfully long school day with as much energy and dignity as I can preserve. That was a joke. I'm fine. I actually kind of enjoy school, in all honesty.

9) I'm sixteen, I'm an Aries, my favorite color is yellow, I'm a Gryffindor, I was born on April 3rd, my favorite number is seventeen, I really like talking about myself even though I usually have nothing worthwhile to say--

10) My favorite person in the world is my little sister Madi. She's a gem. Just an all around cool person, a real firecracker. She's the cat's pajamas, honestly. Our sisterly bond is two parts unconventional, two parts dysfunctional, ten parts everything I need. I just really appreciate that dork.

Anyway, that's me. The rest of my posts won't be as drab and unenlightened as this one, rest assured. I just wanted to introduce myself to you lovely people, whoever you may be.

Godspeed,
Cam