When Ross Farrar got rejected from Joyce Carol Oates’ fiction workshop at UC-Berkeley, he sent her an email: “I said, hey Joyce Carol Oates, what’s going on? You didn’t give me any kind of feedback on my story. Tell me what happened. And she sent me one sentence, she said ‘Your story was just too fantastical, but I hope you the best.’ ”
Maybe the story in question, a retelling of the Greek myth of Atalanta set in rural California, was too fantastical. Far be it from me to question the novelist, but I wouldn’t describe Ross’s writing as fantastical myself. It’s eulogistic and at times absurd, emotionally astute and often immeasurably sad. It illuminates the prickly aspects of the human experience. The quiet parts you’d rather not acknowledge but feel almost relieved when someone else articulates them. In many ways, it’s not unlike the music he’s released as the frontman of quintessential Bay Area punk band Ceremony, and now with his new band SPICE, which released a new EP A Better Treatment b/w Everyone Gets In on Friday, Nov. 19 on Dais Records.
He published his debut collection of poems Ross Sings Cheree & The Animated Dark in May 2021, most of which he wrote during his MFA program at Syracuse University. Personally, Ross’ words have been pumping through my earbuds since my own salad days, when I downloaded .mp3s of the early Ceremony EPs Violence Violence (2006) and Still Nothing Moves You (2008) onto a pink iPod mini, and I can say with certainty that SPICE’s S/T 2020 record will feature prominently on my Spotify Wrapped this year. Needless to say, the notion of his literary debut piqued my interest.
On these early releases Ross began to find his footing as a writer. Unfocused in school growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, he says he never really thought of himself as a writer before he got into punk music in his late adolescence. Ceremony propelled him into lyricism, though he would say, “I blundered into it, I guess.”
The romanticism and emotionality of the lyrics placed against the brutal powerviolence of the early EPs created a stark contrast, one critics and fans alike noticed and praised. With this encouragement he dove further into it. “I wanted to write about love, but I wanted it to be up against the harshness of the music,” he explains. “I was playing with paradox really early on.”
He writes lyrics for his bands after the music is written, letting his emotional reaction to the music dictate the direction of the songwriting. It’s almost like writing a poem, but he’s not “trying to come up with shit out of thin air,” a distinction that blurs in music’s unique ability to evoke memory, dreams and emotions. Is any writer coming up with shit out of thin air?
He says, “This is an emotive vehicle that I get to use, which is incredible with music, because you know when you hear something, you hear a guitar lick or bassline or piano, those are instruments that say what we cannot.”
This process is palpable in the poems nonetheless, which exude the same tender sentiment and sometimes cynical humor of his lyrics. His fingerprints are all over them, motifs and themes like flowers and shriveling decay and the celebration of death’s inevitability that dance between the words on the page and the lyrics in the songs until it all seems like poetry. He frequently plays with characters, Ross himself and the Rotten Sun and the unredeemable past.
The sun, in particular, haunts Ross’ writing. 2010’s Rohnert Park opens with the phrase “Sick of drying up in the sun,” and the Rotten Sun chases us through the pages of the book. Losing his grandfather and close family friend to skin cancer, Ross says he has a very perverse relationship with the sun, something he reflects on in the eponymous poem: “The Planet Moon, unlike the sun, never hurt anyone. But if deprived of the sun, we become saturnine.”
“The Rotten Sun is this terrible thing, that of course all of us need so much. It grows all these wonderful plants and it gives us warmth and it basically makes the world turn, in a heliocentric sense,” he says of the character. “There’s this terrible notion that living in the world and being amongst all these beautiful things is also quite harrowing, and they could destroy you too.”
Much of his work reads as eulogy, and he frequently dedicates poems to lost friends and relatives. I say eulogy because, in spite of the dread with which he often laments its inevitability, he squeezes out something celebratory in that very same inevitability. In “Leaving Dachau” he asks “Are we just potted flowers leaning towards the Rotten Sun?” but in “Chicago, Some Year” he writes “things must die in order for us to understand the passing of time.” It’s here you can trace a thread from those early EPs to the present, the rose adorning the cover of Violence Violence all the way to “The Gain of Loss”: “I overwater the marigolds & they weep. I hold a bouquet of roses / & feel sick. I can’t imagine the boredom they feel being looked at & / endlessly adored, each cut & dying flower, their dead, gravid boredom.”
Ross is drawn to the flower because of its ephemerality, the way it signifies death. “We have all these flower shops where basically people are spending money on something that’s dead, it’s going to die, it’s dying,” he says. “The paradox of that, the beauty of that is pretty incredible, that we celebrate this thing that is already dead and dying, and we give it to people as a gift.”
And it equalizes us all, something he notes on the SPICE track “MURDER”: “Time thinks about everyone just the same.” This obsession with the past, all our different selves, pervades his work from the beginning, but especially now. This makes sense, as we grow older, that the expanse of time between now and then emcompasses more versions of ourselves and we become more sophisticated in our self-awareness. It looms on the SPICE S/T, wherein all his worst selves keep surfacing up and all his best shit keeps falling apart again, which implies it’s happened before.
It’s all over the poems: Ross (the character) and Cheree perform the the past he replays through the pages, while he bemoans the present self who regressed and ruined everything. Ross acknowledges that he’s a bit of a hopeless romantic, saying, “I have certain friends who go through [heartbreak] and they’ll never think twice about it. Or that it doesn’t affect them so much, and that’s fine, it can affect people in whatever way it does, but for me, it really affects me.”
Ross (in all his incarnations I suppose — the character, the poet, the songwriter) is prone to rumination and terribly aware that a person can only really disappear in death — when they just leave you, they’re still out there, existing, replacing you. It all comes back, spotting a certain brand of toothpaste in the supermarket or recalling the way Cheree’s voice “slows down / & blooms at the end of each sentence like our favorite records” (“Cheree at Tenants of the Trees”).
“For me, the unredeemable past is like this thing, like this mausoleum that sits there in the cemetery,” he says, laughing at the overwhelming morbidity of this conversation. “You can always come back to it and put some flowers on the doorstep or whatever, but you can’t get inside of it, you can never get inside of it, it’s stuck back there, you know? And it’s ever so present.”
But he catches himself in contradiction as he contemplates what he calls his “Doppler Effect,” how the passing of time dilutes the pain of a memory as it shrinks further and further into the past. “The longer you go into the future, and the farther the past goes behind you, the easier it is to live with the thing,” he says. “And the thing fades a little bit. The moment or the feeling or the separation or the pain you felt in that moment, I think in twenty years, it will definitely not be so much under my skin anymore.”
Here it all comes full circle, with A Better Treatment b/w Everyone Gets In. He wrote the lead single “A Better Treatment” about a close friend and “San Francisco legend” who passed away. The friend’s substance abuse issues burnt bridges with many friends, Ross included, but in the time since he’s softened in his perception, remembering the profound influence this person had on him in his youth.
“I wanted to find ‘a better treatment’ for him because he’s gotten kind of a bad rap in a lot of things,” he explains. The five-minute-long funeral song inspires goosebumps as bandmate Victoria Skudlarek’s violin soars over the slowly building bassline. We hang halfway between this world and the next as if to touch on some emotional purgatory, caught between what we know now and what we knew then, until Ross’s vocals drop in around the minute-mark.
Maybe the past is redeemable after all. In this sense, he pays it forward. You can’t apologize from your next life, but if you’re very lucky, someone will take the time to consider all your past selves and forgive you anyway.