Coming out of the closest

I was catching up with a friend the other night when the conversation turned to close friends and how we might define who we are 'closest' to.

As a rule, I generally don't give much thought towards quantifying my varying degrees of closeness to my friends, but for discussion's sake, it did make for an interesting topic: what does make a close friend close?

Is it the person with whom you spend the most time with? The person to whom you share the most with? The person you talk to the most? The person you have the most in common with? The person with whom you have been friends for the longest?

There are endless reasons to be close to someone, and indeed all the above reasons are reasons to be grateful for. For me, there are two reasons that I am close to the people I am close to.

The first is honesty. Among those I count as my closest friends are those who are willing to open up to me. They have shared things with me I know that one does not immediately readily share with the world, and their trust and vulnerability induces reciprocality in me. I have great difficulty in sharing and opening up to people, and as I have grown older I have only made more mistakes in whom I elect to share my vulnerabilities with. This negative feedback means that I tend only to open up to people I feel have opened up to me.

However, more than just sharing their personal lives, such friends are treasured for the fact that they are unafraid to share their personal opinions, even when said opinions may be less than savory. When someone is willing to insult or rebuke you in the interest of being completely honest, it is for me one of the signs of a true friend. Caveat: insults alone do not imply friendship though - quite often they imply rather the opposite.

The second is gratitude. As my dear blogstalkers are well aware of by now, I love a good cliche, especially when it is true. And my dears, a friend in need really is a friend indeed. This works both ways. Both those who have helped me when I am weak and those who have allowed me to see and aid them in their darkest moments, are friends who I treasure deeply.

Music: the polite audience

Warning: gush alert which shouldn't be surprising since I'm such a big fan of the artist in question.

Went for Lenka's Asia Tour at Zirca Mega Club (which is ironic, considering its unobtrustive location and tiny size). Was it The Show. As some fans said, "We don't want our money back." She's just that good.

The thing I love about live performances is the raw, unadulterated quality of the performance - you get to see whether the singer is really good or whether it's just smoke and mirrors. Lenka's even better live than she is on album, which is really quite rare in singers nowadays. Her slightly breathy, sexy vocals had remarkable breadth and range, which she exhibited quite fully in this performance. One of the things I particularly enjoyed was the emotion of it - there's no replacing a sensitive artist putting her soul into a song, and hearing and feeling it live. For one song, I was even moved to tears by her rendition. I also really enjoyed that she gave little snippets of insight into the songs she sang, and these added a depth to the songs which I already knew so well from her debut album. For instance, I found out that Dangerous and Sweet was a dance number written because of a fight with a girl friend in LA, and that We Will Not Grow Old was written for a best friend in high school who shared her sentiments of not wanting to grow up and become an adult. Although the meanings were quite implicit, it was nice when she spelled out that Don't Let Me Fall is about being afraid of getting hurt in relationships and wanting to trust again. In fact, her live renditions of Don't Let Me Fall and Like A Song were notable in their unique instrumentation. In Like A Song, fans got a blast from the past with radio waves from WWII.

The only disappointment was how, well in Lenka's words, polite the Singaporean audience was, laughing on cue, clapping and cheering on cue, and obediently doing everything on cue. There was no musicality in our response, nor was there an uninhibited sense of enjoyment (perhaps due to a lack of inebriation) that one might expect from adoring fans of at a live concert. Those in the mosh pit, most certainly didn't mosh. Instead, there was a sea of small LCD screens - yes, everybody there was so busy recording the concert that there was hardly anybody actually enjoying and experiencing it.

Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable evening with good props, better technicians, and wonderful musicians with a great sense of humour. Lenka even gets brownie points for attempting to play the trumpet! All in all, I was not disappointed, at least not with her and her artistry, and I can't wait to see more from her.

Some snippets of song lyrics from songs not in her album:

Maybe I Love You

by Lenka

Maybe I love you,
maybe I do
maybe this feelin'
inside me is true.
And if I love you,
and if I do,
then maybe, baby,
maybe you love me too.

I knew I liked you,
I knew I could.
And I knew a song
that was brewing in the air.
But I don't fall easily
too many betrayed me.

Pull Me Apart
by Lenka

You are the one
you are the only one
that can make me whole
yeah, you make whole.
There's only one problem
with this situation:
when you go,

I can't go on.
...

Cause you have a piece
a piece of my heart
that you take with you.

You pull me apart,
you break me in half.
Every time you leave
I'm a broken heart.
And I stay that way,

till I see you again

You put me all

back together again.

All My Bells Are Ringing

by Lenka

Take my heart this Christmas,
I'll wrap it in a ribbon and a bow,
yes, take my heart this Christmas,

take it where ever you go.

All my bells are ringing just for you.

Home on a high

Random cool song I heard on Gossip Girl, Season 3, Ep 6. The band looks really stoned, and the lead singer sounds a bit like he has a Messiah complex. But hey, if it's good music, I'm hardly one to judge a bit of insanity.

Demon in my veins

Oh caffeine, caffeine -

exalted guanine degenerate,

won't you please release your hold on me?

Without you I am but a daytime walking zombie -

brain-dead, I am poor company,

paying attention to naught but

your absence from my body.

Yet with you,

my nights are passed sleeplessly -

where I am only relieved of you

in the spewing of badly rhyming poetry.

Caffeine, caffeine,

held in your stimulating thrall,

I am powerless with or without you.