Stephen Mejias

The sound quality is horrible, but so what? It's not like we're a bunch of audiophiles around here. (Kidding.)

You have to know these songs in order to appreciate what's going on in the videos. (Serious.) To those who are not already familiar with the songs, the videos may present nothing more than an awful lot of red light and loud noise. To me, however, these videos are pure beauty.

And they do offer some idea of what our live shows were like. For instance, "Jackals - Live. Part 1." is exactly the way I choose to remember seeing things: Blackness, liquid motion, flashes of light, bobbing heads.

I will treasure these videos. Below, I've embedded my favorite bit. It captures the last couple of minutes of the last song we ever performed live. It was our newest song, "The Lock Is On Our Side," and it was the only time we ever performed it. Like each newest song before it, "The Lock" was my very favorite. The song was so new, in fact, that we hardly knew how to play it. At about 0:58, you'll see me turn towards the band, my signal to let them know it was time to go into the finale. We hit it pretty good, I think.

In April's "As We See It," John Atkinson describes the joy of music, the ability of music to stop time, to transcend ego. Playing this song did that for me.