Leave Your Mother (G. Diablo) Recorded around the same time as Enantiodromia (see below), this tune was another attempt to write a motivational aide to spur my indolent ass out of NJ.
Once again, I have to bring up Carl Jung because his writing was central to my thinking around this time. Jung wrote quite a bit on the mother complex, and particularly frightening to me was what he wrote about the negative aspect of it. He referred to it as the “suffocating mother,” the force that threatens to castrate your will to power, to infantalize you and keep you in a kind of womb-like somnolence.
I should point out that writing this song had nothing to do with my real-life mother with whom I was pretty estranged from in the late ‘80’s. We’re talking about archetypes here; unconscious drives that bubble up in unseen ways and compel certain behaviors. How much you’re influenced by them, Jung theorized, is relative to how conscious you are of what they are and how they are impacting your actions.
I can remember making the lyrics as creepy as I could (“she’ll rip you to shreds and take you to bed to be buried at sea”); I knew moving to Washington without anyone to join me was going to be something I would instinctively do anything to avoid. I didn’t want to be able to give myself any wiggle room on this decision.
Two years later, I hugged my brother Carl and drove off in my loaded up truck for Olympia with nine grand and a dream. Unfortunately, simply changing venues doesn’t often make the nut.
