Neal Casal: Bird With No Name
Bird With No Name: Neal Casal 2011
Neal Casal 11/2/68-8/26/19
Liquid gold, his voice.
Listening now, it brings you to your knees, makes you bow your head and and inhale deeply. The music he wrote, the lyrics he penned, the way he played…was simply stunning.
I didn’t know the man, not personally. I was lucky enough to have had a few short conversations when he was setting up for a gig, and to have watched him play in various prolific musical configurations over the years. I’m simply a fan, not really qualified to talk about what a kind, humble human he seemed to be. He was beloved by our musical community at large, and was clearly a friend to so many in the psychedelic jamband community.
Strange to say was, since it feels very much like he still is.
I’m trying hard to believe that the bright light that was Neal Casal is now in a different kind of place, if you believe in that sort of thing, which I mostly do. I’m more struck by Neal’s suicide than I thought I would be, when I first heard the news. I know I’m not alone in truly mourning his departure, and I can’t even imagine how his friends and family are struggling.
Nothing about this makes sense, but the one thing that’s clear is that people with real depression can’t see past whatever pain they’re living with, to have faith that one day it will be better. Depression is particularly insidious and crippling because of the shame component . Like, you’re not supposed to be sad when you have so many blessings—and when so many people are counting on you.
Sadness somehow passes; depression, not so much. And we can only guess how much pain the man must have been in to have wanted to turn off the faucet, permanently.
I’ve seen good people express a lot of weird things about suicide over the past couple of days. People talk about being angry that someone chooses the “easy way out”, which I don’t get at all. There is absolutely nothing that strikes me as easy about actually putting an end to your life. Imagine what it takes to get you to that final moment, and that final act. Agonizing, and surely not easy. I have an advanced clinical degree in the field of mental health, and I won’t even pretend to truly understand suicide, other than what the literature tells us about brain chemistry and risk factors .
Many of us have a story about our own depression or a loved one who has struggled with this same thing. I have a couple of close family members who suffer, and I mean suffer, from clinical depression, and it is indeed baffling to watch. A couple of times in my life I’ve experienced a bout of real depression, the kind that literally hurts your insides, and makes you feel like an alien wearing a normal face, and it’s only through luck and the love of patient friends that I was able to swim out through the other side.
I can only hope to be there fully for another human being at a moment when they have lost hope, and encourage others to have compassion instead of judgment.
But back to Neal Casal, who somehow managed to join Oteil and Friends and with his band Circles Around the Sun at the Lockn Fest just a few days ago, for what would be his final performances, leaving us in the wake of the flood.
By Neal Casal, 2011
Empty pages there before you,
Days go down into our history
All the ways you could have taken,
There was only one that meant to me
Long before you ever could have known
Things would come to be this way
Now you find yourself lying alone
Like a bird with no name
With no name, with no name, with no name
But time lies around you
As the dawn surrenders to another day
The world goes on without you,
There's a gift to bring, just a word without a page
There's no one left to let you down
You're holding on, but...
Of the all the things you could have found,
You ended up a bird with no name,
with no name, with no name
You made this promise to yourself
Was for you and no one else
Was no one knowing...
Your story to another...
Long before you ever could have known
Things would come to be this way
Now you find yourself lying alone
Like a bird with no name!
With no name, with no name, with no name!
A bird with no name
With no name
Blue Rose: Mouse Studios
