Thank you, Thom

[Jeff Kimball]

Thom, I feel strange writing this. I'm not a friend -- i don't know you. I only understand you through your music, and for that I'm grateful. I'm a widowed father of two young girls -- ages 7 and 10. My wife had cancer for 7 years. She died on Nov. 5th -- my daughter's birthday, the day my mother also died of cancer (4 years later). I also lost my father, grandmother and best friend to cancer. Through these experiences, I have found refuge in your music from time to time, for which I want to express my gratitude. Through your music I have unexpectedly come to terms with my own suffering at times, and been lifted into lightness at others...just dancing away to the rhythm, sounds echoing through experiences, lost in time, but thankfully captured, for you on tape, for me in my mind. Through my love of music -- yours and others -- i am able to put my experiences in context, to know that our world and many of its inhabitants often suffer more than me and my children ever will, and that in my own very small way, i have a chance to rise up from my experiences and make my own world better. My children and I make our own music every day, we dance to our own rhythms -- none of it captured, blogged about, critiqued or any of the other crazy things that your art is subject to. You have a lot of courage. I live in the shadows. But we live responsibly off the earth, we take care of each other, we understand pain, indifference, injustice and suffering in all its forms and do our best to forgive it, to not compartmentalize it, to rise above it. In all the grand absurdity that life offers, in all the ways we lose ourselves, lie to ourselves, delude ourselves, we have brief fleeting moments where we remember, we experience, all that is triumphant about the human experience. So I write to thank you and the band for providing some of those moments for me and my kids (if I'm listening to it, they are too) -- some deeply moving, some provocative, some just fun. I don't expect you'll ever read this, and I've never posted anything like this before, but if someone else reads it and feels the same, well, then, I guess I'm one less person who feels alone in this world.