Marty Anderson is Okay

His dad wasn't the only one.

"I got a call from him in the hospital, and he had gone down to 98 pounds," remembers Cory Brown, who runs Absolutely Kosher, the label that's releasing High Road and Low Road. "I think he was seriously concerned that he wasn't going to see the records' release."

Anderson, it turns out, is among the most prolific songwriters I've ever met. By his estimation he has written between 200 and 250 songs (prior to Dilute he wrote as Jacques Kopstein and was also one-half of Howard Hello). As he explains in what I'm sure is not meant to be a pun, "Writing songs [for me] is like shitting. How many times did you shit this week?"

In the year before he went into the hospital, in addition to playing guitar with Dilute and managing his flailing relationship and his sickness, Anderson was writing the material that would make up High Road and Low Road. When Brown received the phone call in spring 2004, he was expecting to release the more or less completed records once Anderson had made a few minor postproduction tweaks. (And while we're talking about production: Many of the songs on these albums consist of 200 tracks of sounds, which is so mind numbing that I won't even dwell on it.)

But when Anderson got out of the hospital in May, he was in the worst shape he'd ever been in. This was when he got started on the IV. For months, he says, he was "not even recording. Jay would come by usually once a week, but our hangout sessions would be me laying in bed and him sitting in a chair, 'cause my anemia was so bad, my blood cell count was so low, I had no energy. For, like, a long time."

In September 2004, he was finally able to put the finishing touches on the Okay records, and Brown was able to move forward with releasing them. Then, in January, Anderson got sick again. For a week he couldn't keep anything down, not even water. When he was admitted to the hospital the doctors told him his white blood cell count had fallen dangerously low. They feared it was leukemia. Anderson feared it was the end.

"There was a whole day and into the night when I thought, 'OK, this could be it.' And it's like, 'What have I done, what could have I done?' Just thinking of stuff like that."

He made it through that night, but the next turned out to be even worse.

"I basically had 16 hours straight of just throbbing pain at the base of my spine. ... The nurses were freaking out because they kept giving me morphine, but it didn't stop the pain. I was shaking, I couldn't lay in bed, I couldn't walk, I couldn't stand, I was just moving around. Not a fun night. But then it just went away. I couldn't sleep all night, and finally I passed out, and I woke up 20 minutes later and was fine."

Anderson thinks that what happened to him was something called a "Kundalini Release." The term "Kundalini" derives from a Sanskrit word that means "coiled up." Dictionary.com defines it as "Energy that lies dormant at the base of the spine until it is activated." A release is, well, apparently what happened to Anderson; he believes that this energy exploded out of him, kicking off a new kind of healing process and imbuing him with a heretofore nonexistent vigor, determination, and compassion.

You can raise your eyebrows if you like, but these are the facts: Okay played its first show on Feb. 23, 2005, at Noise Pop, a scant month after Anderson got out of the hospital the second time; the man plays in a band with his ex-girlfriend and the guy she cheated on him with, who is now her fiance; despite ongoing maintenance like the IV and the prednisone, etc., he is arguably as close as he's been in a long time to controlling the disease that has so relentlessly controlled him for the last decade. "It's like a fire has been lit," he tells me.

The Very Brief Tale of the Bizarre Love Triangle

Kamps: Anna, could you please briefly tell me about the Bizarre Love Triangle?

Weisman: Yes. [Though not briefly. The 1,400 insightful and compelling words that Weisman and Lewis wrote on this subject could not fit in this space. Here are two representative paragraphs:]

"Anna and Marty moved to Lake Merritt in February 2003, whence Marty began recording the low/high road. Yosef went to Spain. While he was there, Anna told Marty that she had taken ecstasy with Yosef in 1999. Marty didn't want Anna to see Yosef anymore. Yosef was hurt and wrote a catchy song about it."

[More things happen. Weisman and Lewis eventually end up engaged ....]

"Anna waited to tell Marty until he asked in January 2005. Marty took the high road. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Marty asked Anna to play in his new band in February. Marty and Yosef talked for the first time in two years and got on famously. Marty asked Yosef to play in the band. Marty, Yosef, and Anna are all waiting to see what happens now."