Iron & Wine

Set My Soul on Fire (part 1)

Strange memories on this night in Las Vegas, such that I had no idea as to where to begin with it all once I started to write it all down. I figured it would be best to write it all out just to better recollect everything that had happened back there.

Everyone is asleep now, and I'm still very much awake, very much in an amped state, and no doubt I'm going to fall asleep upon writing it out as well. My hope is that my fingers can keep up with it all.

The bunch of us had gone out to Vegas from the Bay Area to attend the wedding of one James Hetfield and his fiancée Ashley.

He had met her some time before any of us had even known as to what we were getting ourselves into with the royalty or the fact that we had bonds to one another in the soulful realm. As far as I know, he met her on a whim, and sometime following Lars and Kirk's wedding in Santa Cruz, that whole infamous occasion that came along like a venomous spider on the back of the plume of silver on my head. I had my ties in and out of the whole entire spiel, but no one ever gave me and Chuck the full scoop, much to our chagrin. It was a strange decision the more that I thought about it on the ride down from Dublin, but then again, it wasn't my call to make, especially when we learned that James had popped the question to her, and we received the white letter to tell us to save the date.

We were all riding the highest crest of the highest most beautiful wave known to a score of mortals such as us. We had our bands and our soul bonds, the things that tied us all together under a single rouse of life and golden wire itself. I had heard of word about my being in the running for the fastest guitar player on earth, which was an honor if I ever saw one, an honor to twin the copper crown rested upon my head, while Chuck had become one of the most fearsome singers to hail out of the Bay Area.

And yet, when James and Ashley became a couple, in retrospect, I wondered about the origin of all the trouble, specifically the point as to where it all fell down the tubes. The wave broke at some point there in Vegas, and I was sure of it: I needed to ensure myself of it at some point along the way.

I figure it's best to just start from the beginning and see where this whole thing goes from here.

Anyway, like I said, he had met her well before any of us learned of the royalty. Chuck had learned about it from Lars and Kirk when they learned about the royalty as well as James' meeting with her: according to the two of them, James met Ashley under a bridge somewhere up in Vallejo. Not necessarily the Golden Gate Bridge, but a certain bridge of some sort. When asked which bridge, neither of them could give a full answer, and apparently James couldn't, either.
The most bizarre game of telephone and gossip I had ever witnessed before in my life, and I grew up in a neighborhood of Berkeley where we were the sole Jewish family with middle-aged parents.

Though it was particularly obvious that there was no way in holy hell I would be in the least bit interested in her, I had my curiosities with her. I wondered as to what she looked like and what she wanted to do with James.

Maybe I was a filthy boy in my own rite, but I had a need for it.
This boy was our friend, our neighbor, our brother of sorts, the new kid who came up to the Bay Area on a whim all so they could have Cliff with them. A soul bond in its truest sense possible.

And as far as I knew—as far as I knew, anyway—James was a little standoffish when it came to us. And when I say "us", I don't mean us in the band sense: I mean a rumor traveled around that he had said some things about Lars and Kirk, as well as Chuck and me, as well as Eric and Louie. Greg seemed a little unsure of it, but here, it made sense because we were a quintet: the odd man out and the bassist to boot, but he had a damn good reason for his own angst. You can't be the front man of a quartet like Metallica and then look at your own brethren as if they're beneath you in some way.