"Hiding Behind the Moon"  Jeff Hanson

I found out tonight that Jeff Hanson is dead.

Jeff at the Bordello singing this song found me tonight.

There's footage of an interview of him in 2009, such a normal guy from Minnesota. He had married.  He divorced.  His parents found him dead, apparently from a toxic overdose.  Nobody knows if it was accidental.

In the first weekend of May, this year, I woke up at 5am.  Maybe 4:30, I was so excited.  I used my sister-in-law's car and drove from Bucktown, north to Wisconsin.  The air this morning was something I wanted to remember.  It had cooled through the previous night, which was humid.  My shirt felt hot that night, walking back to the apartment we rented.  But this morning's air had the quality of a refrigerated watermelon that had just been taken out and cut open:  crisp and life-giving, but latent with a sinister promise of something sticky and wet in some hours.  Just outside the concrete reaches of Chicago, the urban sprawl of squat brick buildings, grass began to appear.  It competed 10 miles north with misplaced 4-story office buildings.  I imagined pale-skinned and overweight commuters sliding into their sedans early in the mornings to do their time.  Their brown pants and routine bitching about supervisors.  But at the point my GPS failed and the blue dot of me in my iPhone lingered miles behind, the grass gained preeminence.  I said hello to it, and soon, hello to the barns and other strange structures these humans had built upon it, to tend to it, to tend to the creatures grazing upon it.

Jeff's voice was so angelic, and so courageously not what it was supposed to be.  And it was born--I imagine--in a place like this.  Green and just far enough from the city.  His innocuous tinkering with a guitar, these random plucks eventually shaping melodies.  His experimenting with his voice, tapping its higher, thinner functions timidly, quietly, privately.  What was it like to let others hear it the first time.  Before he died when did he last think about running through the grass in these cool mornings.