xo raze i didn't learn to love you until you were already gone. josh tried to get me into your music in the middle of that strange summer when we were almost second-best friends for a while, until it all went to shit. he let me borrow a few of your albums. he snuck "the enemy is you" onto a great mix cd he made me. i liked that one because it had an f_bomb in it. i liked the title track on "roman_candle". nothing else really stuck to me. i can still hear josh's voice on the phone the night the news broke that you were dead. he was just drunk enough to keep it together. he sounded like he'd lost his whole family. in a way, i think he had. when "from a basement on the hill" came out, i bought the cd and listened to it for the first time when everyone i knew was asleep. the quiet menace and battered beauty of your songs pinned me to my bed for an hour. i went out the next day and bought every album you made. yesterday i was listening to "waltz #2" for the first time in too many years. i forgot those dive-bombing strings near the end were coming. it sounded like the whole world was disintegrating around your ankles while you sang, "i'm never gonna know you now, but i'm gonna love you anyhow." your mantra to someone you invented or saw with emotional x-ray vision from a million miles away has always been my goodbye to you, only you're singing it with your own voice, and i can see you smiling through the sadness in a way no one else could manage without looking like a liar. 220321 what's it to you? who go blather from