Andrew Mcmahon Quotes

It was one of those almost fall days, when the sky gets pink too soon and the weakest leaves are ripped loose early by the wind.

For all the things my hands have held, the best by far is you." - Cecilia & The Satelite

And that’s when it happened. I felt myself relax, my skin craved contact with the sand. I closed my eyes for a moment or eternity, and when they opened, I was staring into the sky, as if it had, just then, come into existence. Below it, the headlands rose from the earth, cradling the condemned trailer homes like sleeping sentinels. Their once colorful uniforms had faded, washed out in the patina of neglect. Every inch of everything was beauty, comedy, and profoundly more interesting than the short life I had lived prior to that moment.

With August came the shadow of sadness that trails the summer days of youth. Aware of their rarity, we leaned into the remaining weeks, pulling at the fabric of curfews and daylight.

Love is a fucking juggernaut.

Young love is so pathetic and perfect, and depending on the lens with which I revisit mine, I am either horrified by my flailing or nostalgic at the reminder of its purity.

So many nights I had been willing to investigate the heartache of strangers, to stand in the cold with fans who had been sick like me and offer them my kindness, but somehow, I couldn’t do the same for Kelly.

try as you might, you can’t take the creaking from the floorboards of an ancient thing.

Laguna Beach is a hippie holdout from the ’60s, and though no hippies can afford to live there any longer, it flies a liberal flag in a county still drunk on Ronald Reagan.

Back then I couldn’t admit to anyone how destroyed I was by the cancer, and in my denial, I became a secret to the world. I had been so fortunate to survive and wore my gratitude like a mask in public, ashamed of the wounds it concealed.

When the chords arrived, the words were never far, riding melodies and rhythms I’d only dreamed of. Other times, the words came first, a phrase of longing or exaltation of the life I’d given myself permission to live. I would sit for hours, hunched over your keys, staring through your abyss of exposed string and wire, holding ideas like fragile bodies until you wrapped them in your armor.

I had become an outsider in their world. They would have preferred otherwise. In a way, I would have, too, but I had pulled the drawbridge years before, and though we could shout across the distance, I had forgotten how to reach the other side.

Austerity parading as minimalist design.

We would record for a few hours and then a chef would arrive with a bunch of prerolled joints, which we’d smoke in preparation for dinner.

All the living I had done had been collected and then reimagined as sound.

Days when everything hurt, I would meditate, and the pain would subside. At first it was counterintuitive—the body wants to meet the enemy with force—but the enemy is within, and the medicine works better when you rest.

Maybe history and family were the poison in my veins, but in the end, they would also be my salvation.

My sister and I were raised in a house on fire; we got out with our lives, but the memories were like fires of their own. Kate grew up to find black days and demons of unimaginable prowess, and I grew up to find myself devoured by a cancer of the blood. Fate had now placed us in the arena together—Kate with her strength coming back and me, stripped of everything. She fought her demons first and won, and in agreeing to be my donor, she stepped in to help me fight mine.

What is it about the chemistry of sickness and a mother’s love? We return to the ones who carried us when we can no longer carry ourselves, our histories erased, and our scores settled. Perhaps not forever, but for a time. And then, beneath the weight of too much truth, I reached for her and she caught me, her resolve without cracks, her body like a life raft.

when it came to the pain medication, administering the daily limit was enough to extinguish the light in me. What a choice—agony or oblivion.

Show me a fuse, and I’ll show you a man who likes playing with fire. It could be anything: jealousy, politics, or the weather. Kelly gave the signal and I’d strike the match, and we would launch fireworks into the morning.

the quagmire of a war between hope and dread.

Grown now, I know what it’s like to bury things, and I understand my parents’ hope for reconciliation was not in vain, but their hope had a way of prioritizing expedience. Rather than exhume the bodies of their own hard histories, they planted flowers in the graveyard and waited for rain. The rain would fall, and the flowers would grow, but it would always be a cemetery garden. A space more haunted than beautiful, where side by side with our collection of ghosts, my sister and I would come of age.

I was a piano player, a singer-songwriter, and as a band we were, without question, the most unpunk thing at the punk show.

By the end of the tour, my view from center stage was one of apocalyptic beauty: wrung-out bodies, dirt kissed and pressed against the barricades; crowd surfers on their violent journeys; paradoxical mosh pits springing up like clear sky hurricanes, and my favorite sight of all . . . the jumping—endless and in unison as if the earth before our inconsequential everything had been wired to a current and triggered by the kick.

Taking my seat at the piano bench, I disappeared into the tension that wraps the entertainer and the entertained just before the journey begins—the collision of fear and possibility that one must weather to meet the magic on the other side.

If you’re lucky, you lose yourself quickly onstage, the pressure subsides, and you become the pilot of a dream.

There is no more powerful delineator of time than tragedy. Like a great wall you cannot climb, tragedy lies down in the path of a life, reshaping all that was and will be into the “before” and “after.” Sometimes the barrier is built brick by brick, a collection of moments followed by a realization that cannot be undone or forgotten. Other times, it’s the work of a bomb blast ripping through the center of existence, leaving in its wake a shrapnel mountain.

The secret had become a wound; it had changed me.

But if I’ve learned anything about the investigation of a memory, sometimes the facts are less relevant than the scenes we invent to protect ourselves from them.

There were few places with a more commanding view of the California coast and few I’ve found to be as peaceful.

I think we were in shock, but the DNA of shock and peace are so closely aligned it can be hard to know the difference.

Growing up fat is a curse no one survives without scars.

my musical life craved reanimation, and what came next was a set of jumper cables.

It was there, in the little blue townhouse on Santa Clara Drive,

I could bore you with the mundane details of our demise, but the truth split in fifths and dosed by its least objective historian would do it little justice.

At the same time, Kelly was finding her voice. She had always been strong, but she had put her faith in me, that I would return to her the way I had once been, and it kept her from putting me on trial. But with her twenties in the rearview, she had a right to know if I was ever going to step up and be the husband she deserved. I wasn’t ready to answer questions about my mental health, my anger, or my choice to meet the day impaired, but she was done sharing the house with a ghost. The harder she pushed back on me, the more explosive our exchanges became. There were tire marks in the driveway, empty threats of divorce, and then one sweltering night in September, I climbed up on my soapbox with some bullshit defense to her well-earned concerns. She burned that soapbox down. She was done. It had been six years since the hospital, and good days be damned, I had never returned to her, never fully recovered. I was a cynic, a stoner, and cruel in confrontation. I stayed out late and didn’t call and left her to worry about where I was and whom I’d fallen in with so many nights as I moved through the world. She knew where I came from and feared me steering toward addiction and felt like a fool for having accepted my excuses for years. I had robbed her of her youth and then asked for loyalty in return. She had loved me through it all, but she couldn’t love me any longer, not like that. And that night in September, she finally gave me an ultimatum: either I find my way back to the land of the living or she was moving on without me.

She had given everything to me, and I had been nothing but careless with the both of us.

Each has her own unique style not yet corrupted by the beige assimilation that, for most of us, comes with age.

I never realized how many roads there were to a song until I finally stepped off the one I had been traveling all those years.

And at some point, you have to remind yourself, when you add it all together, if you wake up where you want to be and you do what you love surrounded by people you love, maybe the pieces fell exactly as they were meant to.

Had he simply chosen his addiction over us, it would have been easier to let him go, but the paradox of his love and destruction were at times too much to bear.

nothing more wholly symbolized the joys of being young as the five of us riding around in that hatchback with the windows down, laughing loudly over the radio, going nowhere and everywhere at once.

Growing up fat is a curse no one survives without scars. The heightened state of awareness and constant fear of unsolicited daggers leave so few safe places to hide.

At six, time is a slow climb up a roadless mountain. At thirty-eight, it is the psychedelic wash of green from a tree-lined highway through the lens of a camera that can’t keep up.

I couldn’t make sense of my feelings at the time, but there was a heaviness I understand now to be grief.

The gift of those lessons and the shape of that chord were both a passport and the invention of flight.

missing things is the price you pay for starting over,

he made you feel like all his magic belonged to you.