(6) Patti Smith, “Gloria”
disbelieved
(10) Sarah McLachlan, “Dear God”
243-166
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/22/22.

I DO(N'T) BELIEVE IN YOU: EMILY MILLS ON GROWING UP AND ANGRY WITH SARAH MCLACHLAN'S "DEAR GOD"

Say the name Sarah McLachlan and you’re likely to get one of three reactions: “Oh no it’s the sad puppy lady,” “Isn’t that the Lilith Fair chick?” and/or “I am obsessed with her music and have been for years.” Most people who were alive and aware of the radio in the 1990s at least heard her hit single, “Building A Mystery.” Sarah was, in fact, the founder and consistent headliner of the Lilith Fair festival that ran from ‘96-’99 in cities across North America. And she did record a notoriously sad PSA on behalf of the ASPCA, resulting in numerous parodies and tear-soaked cheeks.
You might also recall her pleading ode, the theme song for many a high school graduation of the era, “I Will Remember You.” Or maybe you chuckle over the fact that her extremely melancholy “Do What You Have to Do” made its way into U.S. history when it was referenced in the Starr Report about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (true fact).
Real ones know that Sara’s repertoire isn’t limited to wistful ballads or soft adult contemporary, though (no offense to those excellent offerings). Do a little digging and you’ll find the occasional hard edge, thrilling like hearing a soft-spoken grandparent say “fuck!” for the first time. One shining example is Sarah’s cover of XTC’s sacrilegious screed, “Dear God.”

*

I think Sarah’s cover transcends the original.
I don’t mean any disrespect to XTC or songwriter Andy Partridge in particular. He wrote what I think is a great song. I just think Sarah performed it in a way that better reflects the pathos and nuance in the lyrics. Listen to her version: the slowed down, pounding tempo, the uncharacteristic growl of Sarah’s voice during the emotional peak of the bridge, the live room quality of Pierre Marchand’s production work. There’s something altogether more deeply felt and urgent about the cover. It feels appropriate given how the lyrics grapple with some massive but intensely personal topics, something XTC’s almost jaunty original take doesn’t quite capture.
Of course, XTC’s original version helped propel the band back into the spotlight and got far more play than Sarah’s iteration ever did. After the song didn’t make the cut for their 1986 album, Skylarking. “Dear God” was instead released as a B-side and was only later re-added after it turned into a huge hit (thanks in large part to college radio). Predictably, there was serious backlash and even violence in response to the song–most coming from the United States. At least one radio station even received a bomb threat over it. A student forced his high school to play the song over the PA system while holding a teacher at knifepoint. It stirred up some intense feelings, is the point.
Andy also says that part of the reason the song got left off the first release of the record was because he felt like he’d “failed” to really do justice to the topic.
“It's such a vast subject—human belief, the need for humans to believe the stuff they do, and the many strata involved, the many layers of religion and belief and whatnot,” Andy told Todd Bernhardt in 2006. “So I thought I'd failed to address this massive subject for all mankind.”
No one song could do that, of course. But it can still bring an important perspective to the table. More importantly, I think, a song like this can provide a much-needed lifeline to other people struggling with similar questions and feeling otherwise alone on that journey.

*

Picture this: It’s 1997, summer probably, and I’m 15 years old, a preacher’s kid, a gamer, and an awkward tomboy whose fashion choices could best be described as “thrift store raver.” I’m bubbling over with hormones and big emotions. I’m bisexual but I don’t fully grasp it just yet, still convinced that the intense feelings I sometimes have toward my non-male friends are just “fascination crushes.” I’m occasionally bullied by peers and adults alike who are pissed off about not knowing whether I’m a “boy or a girl.” Oh and, through all of it, my mother is slowly dying–but I don’t fully grasp that just yet.
My older sister introduced me to Sarah McLachlan in the early ‘90s. The revelation came via a dubbed copy of her outstanding 1993 album, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, and my sister’s throaty sing-alongs in the shower before school each morning. That album would go on to become the soundtrack to my teenage years. It helped spawn a slightly obsessive fandom that brought me to an email listserv community (shoutout to the Fumblers), three Lilith Fairs, and as many of her solo concerts as I could manage.
Point is, my opinion on anything Sarah-related is obviously extremely biased. There is simply too much nostalgia and sense memory tied up in my feelings about her music for me to even pretend to be objective. Still, you gotta admit, her version of “Dear God” slaps.
I first heard the song that summer of ‘97, on a compilation record of Sarah’s contributions to movie soundtracks, other people’s albums, and tributes, called Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff. It was my introduction to her voice outside of her original music (ex: the killer newbeat track she recorded with Manufacture, “As the End Draws Near,” which yes I do own on vinyl now, thanks for asking). “Dear God” hit my newly agnostic, raised-in-the-church, lost little lamb self like a ton of bricks.
For those unfamiliar, the song is a sort of ironic indictment of religion and belief in a higher power. It calls out the rank hypocrisy of so many “people of faith” who use their dogma to excuse being horrible to others while grasping at a sense of control. It questions the existence of an allegedly all-powerful God who would allow awful things to happen to us. Repeatedly, the singer insists that “I don’t believe in you,” but the whole song is addressed to God. It’s an intentional paradox and a surprisingly nuanced argument, an almost universal human struggle put to music. Not so shabby after all, Andy.

*

While my mom was dying, my father’s church began to question the time he was spending away at the hospital instead of attending to the needs of the congregation. After years of service, he was now driving one hour each way to visit his wife as she underwent multiple surgeries, rehabilitation, and relapse. Shortly before she died, when she had been in the ICU for a month battling a fungal infection in her brain, the church voted to terminate my dad’s position. It meant he needed to begin looking for a new pulpit somewhere. It meant going through the exhaustive application and interview process required by the Presbyterian Church all while tending to my sick mom. It meant upending my life, too–a new school in a new state far away from friends and family, except for a dad who would increasingly disappear from me.
Mom died a little while after the church issued its decision. It was a beautiful, sunny September morning. I had been in math class, daydreaming as usual, staring out the window at the clear blue sky and wishing I was someplace else.
All of that, as you might imagine, made me feel some bitterness toward the church and those pious people who’d kicked us out in our darkest hour.
One evening that autumn, I slipped my headphones over my ears and clicked play on my silver-and-blue Discman. I had Sarah’s version of “Dear God” cued up. As the sun began to sink behind the horizon, I walked from our house through the long parking lot to the church itself. I alternated between sipping from a bottle of pop and singing along, feeling myself get more and more worked up as the song progressed. It had been a long time since I’d let my anger fully manifest itself. The last physical fight I’d been in was in the 6th grade. I’d worked hard to seal tight the lid on the boiling cauldron of my temper, channeling the energy into drumming, punk music, softball, and angstry journal entries. Constructive things.
I skulked around to the back of the building, where the brick wall of the sanctuary bordered a narrow strip of grass and then a sad line of trees that shielded it from the view of the subdivision beyond. Shadows grew long, then all-encompassing. I finished my pop. I felt Sarah’s pleading, angry voice as she hit the pivotal bridge where the music and the lyrics hit their emotional crescendo. Through watery eyes, I stared at the tall, expensive, stained glass sanctuary window, and I listened.

And it's the same the whole world round
The hurt I see helps to compound
The Father, Son, and holy ghost
Is just somebody's unholy hoax
And if you're up there you'll perceive
That my heart's here upon my sleeve
If there's one thing I don't believe in…

I wound up and, with all my righteous fury, hurled that fucking bottle at the window.
And missed.

…It's you,
Dear God.

The glass shattered against the brick wall instead. I sat down in a heap and stared miserably at the shards now strewn in the grass. The sublime peak and quiet release of the song’s end was almost too perfect, too on-the-nose. But I felt it all the same. Deep. I was a teenager, after all.
I also felt some amount of relief. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d actually broken the window. I don’t think God would have minded, but dad and the church folks probably wouldn’t have been chill about it. I wasn’t looking for ways to make our lives harder. I wasn’t really thinking, either. I was just angry. Grieving. I was trying to make sense of my life as the old world I’d been raised in died and a new one struggled to be born.
I think I’d stopped believing in the things my dad and his church taught many years before. I don’t remember there being a specific moment or incident that caused it, that severing. I just knew that the God I felt in my bones did not match the God of the Presbyterian Church USA. I wasn’t able to articulate it just then, but the God I sensed wasn’t interested in causing joy or pain. After all, humans were plenty good at that on our own. And that, I think, is what really resonates in “Dear God.” All the things the singer complains about? Humans, not God. So really, it’s a letter to all of us, a recognition of the myriad ways we contort ourselves in order to justify our own best and worst instincts and behaviors. To make sense of the insensible.
Sarah is herself a self-professed spiritual agnostic who has noted of the song that “it has an intensity that perhaps I don't possess on my own.” Still, she manages to tap into something profound just in the way she sings it. And here is the beauty of the thing: The self-doubting songwriter who manages to pen great lyrics, the gentle singer who digs in and infuses the words with added power they hadn’t known they possessed, the listener who experiences it all and finds desperately needed connection. Strangers meeting over soundwaves.
Some covers are just covers. Others breathe new life into something that was always great and just waiting for different people, with different lives, to be in conversation with it. Humanity will likely always wrestle with questions of religion, spirituality, systems, relationships. And so we will continue to hurt and heal each other with our seeking and our answers, and so “Dear God” will continue to be relevant–ready and waiting for the next artist to add a chapter to its story.
I will probably still think Sarah’s is the best. Not because it objectively is. She was an artist and it was a song that both found me when I needed them most. And that’s enough.

Emily Mills is a writer, musician, amatuer naturalist, and gadabout who lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her partners and two smol rescue dogs. She will burn in heaven, like we do down here. Find her on Twitter @millbot or online at www.emilymills.org.

ALPHABET OF DESIRE: ASHLEY NAFTULE ON PATTI SMITH’S “GLORIA”

G.

A believer is a horse in search of a rider. In vodou a worshiper who is possessed by a Loa spirit is sometimes called a mount. To be possessed is to be ridden, the human acting as a vehicle for the divine. When the avant-garde director Maya Deren documented vodou rituals and dances in Haiti, she called her 1954 film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren had gone to Haiti to make a recording of ritual dances as an observer, but was so moved by the vodoun tradition that she became an initiate. She left the U.S. as a woman and returned as a horse.
The relationship between a spirit and its rider is the inverse of how humans deal with horses. Normally, we keep our mounts calm and form a rapport with them. We earn their trust so they’ll be willing to carry our weight. It’s different with spirits: you have to make them feel at ease so they’ll take you for a ride. You ply them with offerings of their favorite liquors and treats, maybe bribe them with a hand-rolled cigar or shiny bauble. You decorate your space with colors they like and wear the kinds of clothes they prefer, taking on their mannerisms for your own, hollowing out a space in your skull for them to make themselves at home. You say their name and sing their songs until you’re hoarse, following Aleister Crowley’s credo of “Invoke often! Inflame thyself with prayer!” You live and breathe as them until one day the spirit moves you and you are them. For a time. Until one of you throws the other off.

L.

Before “Gloria,” before Horses, before Mapplethorpe, before fame, before critical acclaim, before fucking Blue Oyster Cultists and playwrights and guitarists named after French Symbolist poets, before tours in Europe, before “Because the Night,” before THAT song that shall remain unnamed, before playing chicken with God, before Fred “Sonic” Smith, before retirement, before motherhood, before Law & Order: SVU guest appearances, before Just Kids, Patti Smith was a poet. She came to New York with dreams of making it as a decadent, renowned artist. Her heroes ran the spectrum of brows from high to low: Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Maria Callas, Brian Jones. The Beats, garage rock, and William Blake all vied for Patti’s affections but she wouldn’t commit to a single muse.
There were others who came to NYC with similar outlaw literary dreams: Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. The three of them quickly realized that the glamourous spirit that once rode the Beats had moved on to popular music. People still fucked and feted writers but not nearly as much as they do rock stars, and besides— the musicians get better drugs and paydays. Had James Murphy written “Losing My Edge” in the early 1970’s he’d no doubt be warbling “I hear that you and your friends have sold your typewriters and bought guitars.” The spirit of rebellion didn’t want ink anymore; it hungered for electricity.
For Patti, the gateway to music was through poetry. It was through her St. Marks Poetry Project readings that she became initiated into the downtown art scene, where she first started working with her musical partner Lenny Kaye, and where she first blew that legendary raspberry at the Almighty: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”
“Oath,” the poem from which the opening line of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” is taken from, was originally a St. Marks solo piece. As recounted in Ray Padgett’s Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time, Patti’s performances of “Oath” took on many different forms before it got merged into “Gloria.” The daughter of a Catholic mother and a father who “used to blasphemy and swear against God,” “Oath” is a hard dismount of her past, kicking off Jesus with a dismissive “I am giving you the good-bye/Firing you tonight.” With Lenny Kaye accompanying her on guitar at her readings, Patti heard her future career taking shape one power chord at a time.

O.

“Gloria” is not a cover in the conventional sense. It is a bricolage, a hybrid of the original Them song and Patti’s poetry. “Gloria” is not a cover, it is a hijacking. It changes the original so profoundly that it usurps it, renders it anemic in comparison. Through some kind of artistic time paradox the very existence of Patti Smith’s “Gloria’ has turned the original song into a cover of its own cover. The Them song feels naked without the (many) alterations Smith added to Van Morrison’s song: the “humping on the parking meter,” the stadium full of screaming fans, the tower bell chiming tick-tock tick-tock, “oh my god it’s midnight,” the piano notes that are perfectly timed to mimic knocking as she sings “she’s knocking on my door.” The one thing Van Morrison’s original version has going for it is Morrison’s feral vocals, all full of lusty swagger—the sound of a man who’s so horny it causes him searing pain.
Patti has done these kinds of rewrite covers before: her debut single was a heavily Pattified take on “Hey Joe,” and she would also throw in some choice ad libs when doing live performances of The Who’s “My Generation.” On “Land,” the song on Horses whose ecstatic visions of waves rolling in like Arabian stallions gives her first album its name, Patti breaks up her soliloquies about switchblades and sperm coffins to do a snippet of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances.” Like so many great folk art traditions, Patti wasn’t afraid to file the serial numbers off of older work and repurpose it for her own ends.
Patti wasn’t the only rock singer/poet who took liberties with “Gloria.” Jim Morrison would do his own wildman poet take on the Them classic during Doors concerts, asking the object of his affections how old she was and what school she went to. Eventually the clumsy seduction between Jim and Gloria builds to the point that she sneaks him into her room while her parents are out and Morrison, in full blustering sex god mode, intones “Now why don’t you wrap your lips around my cock, baby” (the rest of the Doors chiming in with hoots and “suck it” ike the dorkiest wingmen imaginable transforms the line from sleazy to hysterical). Morrison narrates the positioning of Gloria’s lithe limbs around his body like he’s doing play-by-play commentary for a game of Twister. None of his additions to the “Gloria” canon seem essential or even necessary—all the luridness he makes explicit in his version is plainly evident in Van Morrison’s voracious, leering vocals.
Patti’s contributions are far more unexpected and poetic. Beginning the song with a soft piano intro, she sings her famous brush-off to the Lord before the rest of the band joins in. Patti doesn’t change the gender of the narrator or Gloria, singing the song as a woman in a man’s body—which gives the song its off-kilter energy, like an 80’s body-swap film where a woman turns into Van Morrison and immediately goes into horny cartoon wolf mode. The song sways and lurches in its tempo as it struggles to find a shape that will contain it, much in the way that Patti as a singer seems to be teasing out the possibilities of being a male character—taking both the song itself and masculinity out for a bumpy joyride.
“I can’t write about a man, because I’m under his thumb, but a woman I can be male with. I can use her as my muse,” Smith said in Please Kill Me. She would later tell The Observer that she “enjoyed doing transgender songs. That’s something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view. No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.”
The Gloria in the two Morrison versions of the song is a sexual conquest, an object of desire to own and tell the world about (and in Jim Morrison’s case, someone to patronize: “why did you show me your thing, babe”). Patti’s Gloria is more complicated. The singer almost seems afraid of her, intimidated by how wild Gloria is—the sweet young thing enters the song’s orbit humping on parking meters, as uninhibited as Darling Nikki under a magazine. Listen to the strain on Patti’s voice when she sings about “her pretty red dress,” the tremulous gasp of someone who wants something so badly and is afraid they’re going to get it. Smith’s Gloria is a figure of lust and awe, a challenge, a free spirit looking for a body to call home.
When we finally get to the chorus, the guitars and drums gallop as they rush headlong into Smith’s invocation of her lover, inflaming herself with the letters of her name. You can hear the roles shifting as she gnaws and spits out each hickie-mangled letter: she goes from prey to hunter, from deer-in-the-headlights to speeding Cadillac, from horse to rider. Smith’s “G-L-O-R-I-A” is her victory lap, celebrating her freedom from God, from the rules and regulations of Man, from gender itself.
For Van Morrison and Jim Morrison, the song is about a man finding himself by fucking a woman. For Patti Smith, “Gloria” is about a woman finding herself by being a man fucking a woman,

R.

God, sex, and the liberatory power of rock & roll are the animating spirits behind “Gloria.” You can hear Patti wrestling with this trinity in “Piss Factory,” the B-side to her debut single. The Patti in "Piss Factory" is a "speedo motorcycle,” a fast worker whose productivity rate is too high for the pipe factory that’s paying her “screwed up the ass” wages. Browbeaten by her floor boss and by a “real Catholic” coworker who threatens to beat her in the bathroom if she keeps throwing off their quota, Patti daydreams about bringing a radio to work so she can listen to James Brown scream and sigh instead of the mechanized chorus grinding around her. She steals glances at the nuns living in a convent near the factory. “They look pretty damn free down there,” she croons. “Not having to worry about the dogma of labor.” It’s like Dylan says: You gotta serve somebody. At least you don’t get your hands burnt up in God’s factory.
Patti sees a final escape hatch in the form of gender. “I would rather smell the way boys smell,” she snarls as the music thrashes behind her like factory equipment struggling to meet a rush order. She rhapsodizes about the “forbidden acrid smell” of “roses and ammonia” that rise from their drooping dicks, lamenting that all she can smell is the “pink clammy lady” odor of the women laboring around her—hardened, dead-end women with “no teeth or gum or cranium.” She wants the freedom the bad boys sitting in the back of class have—not by enjoying it vicariously through fucking them or hanging on their arms but by taking their cockiness, their who-gives-a-shit swagger, for herself.
“Gloria” is this Promethean moment for Patti, where she steals the fire from the male artistic gods she venerates and runs with it. It’s the moment she was building up to since she arrived in New York. Reading accounts of her time in the NYC scene, it’s easy to see why people accused her of being a careerist: laser-focused on emulating her heroes, hob-nobbing with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City, getting in good with all the local literary luminaries, always “on” as though she were rehearsing for the role of Patti Smith: Punk Poetess before it existed. But from a ritualist’s eye, Patti’s early years take on a different light.
Patti did what she had to do to summon the same spirits that rode Rimbaud and Brian Jones. She left her family, cut ties with her past, and started anew. She inflamed herself with the names of her heroes and invoked poetry and rock & roll as often as she could, until she could hollow herself out enough to coax the same dark angel that spread its wings over the Beats and Lautreamont and Gene Vincent to move into her. And thus the trap was sprung: she grabbed that spirit and rode it for dear life. “Gloria” and the rest of Horses is Patti trying to answer the question “am I the horse or the rider?”
The sound on Horses is unstable and manic, the band trying to keep pace with her hipster glossolalia. Compare it to the music of her fellow poet-turned-rocker Tom Verlaine, whose own masterpiece/debut Marquee Moon takes a more Apollonian approach to her Dionysian rock & verse. Marquee Moon is a twilight rollercoaster, Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s twin guitars ascending in pristine loops and curves, sliding down through a landscape of neon signs and piss-stained floors and barroom napkin poetry. Television are Apollonian detectives—stiff, beautiful, regulated—forever running in circles after a mystery they’ll never solve.  Television’s music is as clean and dry as an unlit match. Every note on Horses is a blackened match-head.

I.

If we could resend the Voyager probe with a new golden record, it only needs two brief pieces of music to represent the whole of rock music: a vocal loop of Iggy Pop screaming “LOOOORD” at the beginning of “TV Eye” and a sample of Patti gnawing on the “I” in “Gloria” like it’s the bar on a jail cell door she’s trying to chew her way out of. Pure lust and rage, defiance and triumph, fuck-you and fuck-me all co-mingled in the briefest of exhortations from two of our greatest singers. The aliens don’t need anything else.

A.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, why not mine?” Patti Smith retired in 1979, playing a final concert in Florence. They normally saved “Gloria” as their closing number, but on this last concert before Smith walked away to devote herself to starting a family she made it the opening number. She also changed the opening lyric, offering up a reconciliation of sorts with the Christ she fired back at St. Mark’s.
Smith’s relationship with her fired God had changed over the intervening years. She used to do a bit during live performances of “Ain’t It Strange” where she would challenge God by taunting “C’mon, God, make a move” and start spinning onstage. During a show in Tampa in 1977, her game of chicken with God finally sent her sailing over a cliff—Smith tripped over a speaker while dancing and fell 15 feet into a cement orchestra pit. A freak accident or divine intervention, it had the effect of sidelining Patti and her band right as the punk scene they helped foment in New York went global.
Smith’s late 70’s embrace of faith and family seems baffling at first. So much of her artistic life was a refutation of both traditional religion and domesticity. Her fear of being trapped in another piss factory with real Catholic shithead coworkers fueled her drive. For someone who seemed to devote every waking hour to becoming a rock star, who devoted an entire verse in “Gloria” to the fantasy of rocking a stadium where all the girls are there to scream her name, giving that all up is confounding.
But try to imagine being laid up for a year, recuperating from a fall that nearly crippled you. You think of all your heroes, and how so many of them died young: Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Rimbaud. The spirit rode them hard and stabled them under six feet of dirt. That’s the trade-off if you stay a horse in the art world for too long: you could end up dying face down in a pool or waste away delirious & one-legged in a hospital in Marseilles.
Faced with the prospect of going from “Piss Factory” to the glue factory, surrounded by scene peers like the Dead Boys who were busy living up to their names, a second act staged around faith and family must have looked like a pretty safe bet. If having a brief Godly face turn was good enough for Bob Dylan, who could blame Patti for wanting to steal one more move from his playbook? And so Patti completed her personal concert tour of Damascus, going from Saul of Tarsus to Saint Paul in just four albums.

P-A-T-T-I

The spirits move in and out of the world, taking their laps on borrowed legs when the right person comes along. Some of their horses die, some are forgotten, and a few are as eternal as Muybridge’s race horse—their grace and power preserved in snapshots by their works on this Earth. Horses, Radio Ethiopia, Easter, and Wave endure because they sound like nothing else. They are messy and beautiful and sometimes they over-reach and fall into orchestra pits. But they all come a distant second before “Gloria,” one of the greatest acts of homage and vandalism ever recorded.
Dave Barry once joked that "if you drop a guitar down a flight of stairs, it'll play "Gloria" on its way to the bottom." At the time he made that joke he was referring to the Them song. Drop a guitar down a flight of stairs today and you’ll hear a different voice echoing out of that hollow body. And her name is, and her name is, and her name is—

Ashley Naftule is a resident playwright and the Associate Artistic Director at Space55 theatre in downtown Phoenix. They’ve written and produced five full-length plays: Ear, The First Annual Bookburners Convention, The Canterbury Tarot, Radio Free Europa, and The Hidden Sea. Their next play, Peppermint Beehive, is set to premiere this summer. As a freelance journalist, their work has been published in The AV Club, Pitchfork, Daily Bandcamp, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Vice, Fanbyte, The Outline, Longreads, Phoenix New Times, Echo Magazine, The Arizona Republic, and The Cleveland Review of Books. Their short fiction has been published in Coffin Bell Journal, AEther/Ichor, The Molotov Cocktail, Cabinet of Heed, Grasslimb, Dark City Mystery Magazine, Hypnopomp, Write Ahead/The Future Looms, and Planet Scumm. Their micropoetry chapbooks Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth and Epoch & Olivetti Sing All The Hits are available (respectively) via Rinky Dinky Press and Ghost City Press. Despite the uncanny resemblance, Ashley bears no relation to country singer Vince Gill nor is in any way an evil Vince Gill doppelganger that escaped from The Black Lodge.