#SundayDrive: Cemeteries & Child Star Revivals
#SundayDrive pays homage to all of the leisurely Sunday afternoons spent playing the best music, driving aimlessly with the windows down and no place to be.
I’ve spent a lot of time in cemeteries. Not burying people or attending funerals, but just for fun.
Yup, for fun.
When I took up running for a hobby, a hobby that I’ve since given up on, I would often run to the local cemetery located a mile-and-a-half from my house. Not only was it a good landmark to judge how far and how fast I was running, but it had a large, circular road that wound around its monuments and mausoleums. It was quiet and unpopulated, by the living at least, and there was no one there to judge my heavy breathing and profuse sweating.
Fast forward to my post-running days and I still visit a good cemetery every once and a while. On this particular #SundayDrive I found myself in Watertown, New York’s Brookside Cemetery. A sprawling city cemetery with residents dating as far back as 1807, it is one of the most gorgeous spots locally for photographers, casual drifters or anyone just looking for a peaceful, picturesque landscape that happens to be filled with intriguing pieces of memorial marble.
The intricate, skillfully crafted mausoleums that are placed throughout the cemetery are true works of art that house Watertown’s oldest city-dwellers. Stories fill their stained glass windows and towering arches. One, as seen in the video in this post, looked to have a resident inside. After a very, very fast double-take at first sight, a sprained neck that followed, I confirmed it was not a ghostly figure but a statue inside, alongside a white porcelain bust.
This #SundayDrive through Brookside, and the accompanying long tree-lined side roads that surround it, was set to the unlikely soundtrack of Greyson Chance’s Portraits.
Greyson Chance is a name that might sound familiar but isn’t conjuring up a face for the name. He’s the now 22-year-old child star who made his debut into the music world by singing Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” at a sixth grade music festival, and then again on the Ellen Degeneres show. For 72 hours, his face and performance were seemingly everywhere. He was even signed to Ellen’s eleveneleven record label at one point.
Nearly a decade later, Greyson is all grown up and singing about not-so-child-friendly coming of age angst. Recently out of the closet, his Portraits album touches on first loves and becoming a man in a small town in West Texas, but does so in a not-cheesy, not-corny, not over-done way. “Black on Black” is the perfect track to get lost to. More up-tempo than most of the album, with a storyline about a childhood celebrity crush who one day fatefully becomes an unexpected lover. It’s a little raunchy but in a beautiful way. The snippets of monologue throughout the album are reminiscent of Destiny’s Child’s The Writing’s on the Wall album from some 20 years ago, but overall contribute to the storytelling aspect of the entire record.
This week’s Sunday drive concluded with a spirited (spirited/cemeteries … see what I did there?) sprint home during dusk listening to “West Texas,” a narrative about a boy being reminded that he’s never too big city, never too metropolitan and never too famous to forget where he came from. As a upstate New York kid who cut his teeth in the concrete jungle of New York City following a four year stint at a liberal arts college: I felt that. I returned home to follow a few dreams that I knew weren’t possible in a city of 8 million people. Now I find myself careening down the back roads, listening to the grumble of an eight-cylinder American masterpiece under the hood of a white sports car and think to myself, this ain’t no New York City. But that’s OK, isn’t it?
