It’s finally happening to me
The thing I just had to believe
It will be seven years in June
I know my time is coming soon
— Motopony, "June"

A gray, blustery Tuesday afternoon.  The Mad Hat Tea Company in downtown Tacoma is quiet, almost empty.  When Daniel Blue arrives, wearing skinny jeans, a denim jacket and a DayGlo orange hoodie, it’s like he’s coming home, in out of a storm.  He shakes my hand, hugs the owner, Maureen, reaches into a drawer for some loose leaf and brews himself a cup. 

The Motopony frontman, fashion designer, artist, poet, writer, and crown prince of T-town’s hipsterdom looks tired.  Not like he stayed up too late or drank too much — not short-term, twentysomething tired — but grown-up, long-haul, life’s-a-bitch tired.  He’s smiling, but it’s a tired smile.  He’s talking, but it’s tired talk.  Tea in hand, he retreats to a couch in the windowless back room. 

I sink into a chair to his left.  We exchange smiles, nods, harrumphs.  Just to say something, I say the first thing that comes to me: “Is your head spinning?”  

“Yeah,” he answers.  But it’s not for the reasons I expected.  It’s not because Motopony has just finished Motopony, one of the best debut records of 2009 — anywhere.  It’s not because he’s been auditioning musicians to help him recreate the complexities of Motopony live.  It’s not because of the endless rehearsals he and Buddy Ross, the production wizard who composed the album’s gourmet beats, have been undertaking to prepare for upcoming shows.  It’s not because planning an epic CD release party (and it will be epic) is a lot like planning a wedding, or because being on the verge of breakthrough is as scary as it is exciting — even though it is.  It’s because three nights ago 31-year-old Tacoma rock icon Brian Redman, who Blue tells me had agreed to play bass in Motopony, wrecked his scooter and died.  It’s because it’s almost October, and it’s gray outside and a friend is dead and, well, there you go. 

The jacket is still buttoned.  The sweatshirt hood is up.  The tea is untouched.  Sitting beside me, Daniel Blue is somewhere else.

So I do the talking.  There’s something behind this record, I say.  I can’t name it, but I can feel it — weight, ballast, the proverbial iceberg two-thirds underwater.  I recite the opening lines of the disc, the lines that introduce this story.  It’s a strange pronouncement, I point out, like he’s saying in the first verse of his first record that he’s made it.  I say the record seems like the culmination of something, like a birth. 

“Am I reading too much into it?” I ask.

“I don’t know how much I should tell you,” he says. 

Walking the talk

The first time I saw Motopony was at the Helm Gallery last winter.  The crowd was thin, maybe a dozen people sitting on the floor and sipping coffee.  A singer-songwriter whose name I’ve forgotten opened, sitting and strumming, singing and bantering — standard fare.  And then Blue took the stage.  Accompanied by an acoustic guitar player, he wore all black with a big medallion under a half-buttoned shirt.  The guitarist strummed and Blue sang — loudly, bravely, desperately — rocking on his heels, craning his neck and sweating as if the medallion somehow controlled him.  Suddenly the lights seemed too bright, the walls too close, the ceiling too low.  It was too intimate.  It was oppressive and impressive as hell. 

Since then I’ve kept watch on Blue, waiting to see where he’d go, what he’d do, because it seemed impossible he’d go nowhere.  It hasn’t been hard.  In the home of the Tide Flats and Nalley Valley, of Knapp’s Restaurant and the Acme Grub Cage Tavern, Daniel Blue stands out.  He is DayGlo amidst gray.  He’s a disco medallion at a folk show.  He’s an aesthete in a town where you can’t swing a funky vintage shirt by the tails without hitting three or four pragmatists, a spotlight lover in Shadowsville. 

Nowhere does the spotlight shine more intensely than on the cross, where Blue often can be found hanging himself.  Via his many creative outlets and especially the popular Exit 133 blog he wrote up until a few months ago, he publicly airs his private thoughts with reckless, if not masochistic, candor.  In recent months, his equivocations over whether or not to stay in Tacoma, which can easily be read as questioning whether Tacoma is worthy of him, have been especially contentious.  On Oct. 8, Exit 133 posted a video featuring Blue and Grace Sullivan of Goldfinch singing a song called “Tacoma.”

I ain’t trying to leave you
In fact I’m trying to stay
But everything that you do
Feels like, you’re pushing me away
   
The lyric is forgettable — indeed, lamentable — but the video, shot in the scrub along the Thea Foss Waterway, is true Blue.  Like his performance at the Helm Gallery last winter, it is uncomfortably, almost embarrassingly, intimate.  And like his Exit 133 writings, it is as honest as it is imprudent.  With his trademark three-string guitar in hand, Blue emerges from a house made of sticks (symbolism noted) to join Sullivan outside for a duet.  Sitting on the ground, hiding behind sunglasses, they croon Blue’s dear John, then hop on his “motopony,” a vintage Honda Trail 110, and putter away (presumably into downtown Tacoma). 

The clip, unsurprisingly, sparked a shit storm.  Fans mourned Blue’s seemingly imminent departure while cynics urged him to expedite it.  Meanwhile, as they have all along, the silent minority questioned whether Blue’s work justifies all the talk. 

Finally, with Motopony, it does.

Blue on Blue

At some point the jacket comes off.  The hood comes down.  Blue sips his tea and talks.
The narrative is not linear, nor circular, nor any other recognizable, namable shape.  It is serpentine, labyrinthine, Byzantine.  It is, as all real human stories are, a mystery that never unfolds.

At the heart of it is a piece of advice his mother gave him before she passed away in 2002. 

“She told me, ‘Don’t pursue your talent. Pursue your character,’” Blue recalls.  “‘Because your talent can get you to places your character can’t hold you.’”

Blue followed his mother’s advice like a religion for the next seven years — for the seven years that end in that strange pronouncement in the first verse of the first song on his first record.  That meant becoming a fashion designer, artist, poet and writer though his dream, his obsession, was to become a musician.  That meant living in Tacoma when his ambitions should have led him to a bigger city and a bigger stage.  That meant waiting until 2007 to write his first song though he had known for years he was a songwriter, that writing and singing songs was, if not his destiny, at least his destination.  That meant shunning the microphone until he was 27, the age Jimi, Janice, Jim, and Kurt were when their talent took them places their character couldn’t hold them and they fell.  That meant offering himself like a sacrifice to his readers at Exit 133 and to audiences such as the one last winter at the Helm.  That meant becoming Daniel Blue before becoming Motopony, and becoming Motopony before creating Motopony. 

That means Motopony is a culmination, a birth, and that makes its depths, like the iceberg’s, outweigh even its formidable heights.  Beginning with "June" and ending eight songs later with the gorgeously wistful "Euphoria," Motopony tells — sometimes overtly, often abstractly — the story Blue told me that gray afternoon in the back room of Mad Hat Tea.  Ross’s beats and Blue’s vocals shimmer above the surface while mystery lurks below, something felt more than heard, something known if not understood.  The album has its standout tracks, most notably the voluptuous Ross grooves "Seer" and "King of Diamonds," but it is best heard from start to finish, from overture to coda, from page one to the end.

The End

As Blue’s story draws to a close, we leave the tea room for a stroll.  Our route, perhaps predictably, leads us past two of his favorite Tacoma haunts: first the boarded-up Black Water Café and then the now-shuttered Helm.  Without them, he says, he sees some of his friends only online.  Others he will never see again. 

The jacket is on, the hood is up. There you go. Daniel Blue is gone. 

[Urban Grace Basement, Saturday, Nov. 14, Motopony (CD release), with Goldfinch, Indian Valley Line and Barton Carroll, 8 p.m., $10, 902 Market St., Tacoma, 253.272.2184]