Trouble

January 6th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Recorded: Claremont, CA, 1991 to 4-track cassette, without overdubs.
Released: Tangerine (1997)

The first place I ever lived in after college was a room I rented in a house in Claremont. It didn’t work out, and I only lived there a few months. This is the only tune I wrote there, and though I didn’t like the living arrangement. I was a long way from any romantic entanglement as I wrote these lyrics:

Oh, here comes trouble
He struts with a swagger
That looks like he lives for his tool
He’s looking your way
Yes, he’s traveled this distance
To ask you to drink ’til you drool
He tries hard to smile
But his teeth crack and crumble
His face falls to pieces
He stands there to speak
And the words start to tumble
His jawbone releases
His words are all hollow like lies
But you know that he thinks you believe that they’re true
You can’t bear to look in his eyes
Because there’s nothing looking back at you.

He tells you it’s love
He wouldn’t know that emotion
If it came up and pissed upon him
Says he’ll pay for your drinks
And when morning has risen
You can watch him work out at the gym
You block out the sound
Because it’s more than annoying,
It’s mildly insulting
He can’t sense your reaction
But he shuts his mouth randomly
There’s a silence resulting
His gaze wanders off of your face
And it stops right below where your neck begins
You know that his head’s filled with space
And his vacuousness is the least of his sins

His eyes bulge
Bursting with vanity
And bitterness
The world that he sees
Is filled with nonentities
A desolate wilderness
He’s looking your way
And you’re staring right back
This he hadn’t expected
He can’t look at you straight
All his words were mistaken
His mind misdirected
You’re looking for something to say
But it can’t be said politely
Not to gaze on a sight so unsightly.

I don’t know if it’s good or bad fortune that out of the most neurotic thought processes I have derived some good observations. This lyric, for example, is an expression not of disgust at the form of attention shown, nor compassion for the recipient of the attention, but jealousy. I would have loved to have been in a position to even imagine that I might foist such unwanted attention on someone after buffing out at the gym. I wasn’t, and resentment came forth in the form of accurate observation of the flaws of this type of character.

I suppose the truth of it is that while I had then and have now my flaws, I had and have my virtues. I have been wrong about many things in my life, but right about many too. As many mistakes as I’ve made, I’ve gotten a lot of things right. At times I think that I sought escape in song from a life, a mental life above all, that was uncomfortable to me. At other times–and this song, which even though it’s far from my best is one of which I’m exceeding proud–I think of the beauty of things like this and feel that if at some level I was running from, there was, and continues to be, something I’m running to. Whatever my motivations, not many people can put together a tune like this, and it’s one of the things in life I’ve done right.

“Not to gaze on a sight so unsightly”: I knew that feeling well. It was how I felt about myself, inaccurately but so nonetheless.

Flute Tune

November 1st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

I consider myself very fortunate to have stumbled into this recording.  I feel as if I was there for it, rather than that I wrote it or recorded it, even though I came up with the whole thing and made every sound.

I had a friend at Pitzer who played flute, and for some reason I got it in my head that I wanted to try to play it.  I do not know what possessed me, other than the fact that I love the flute and have always wanted to play with a flute player.  As an aside, My Bloody Valentine sealed the deal with me when I read that they had a flute player on the Loveless tour, the one that I missed by a week when I read about the gig after it happened.

In any event, I can’t remember which I did first: the flute track or the guitar.  I imagine it was the flute track, because the guitar I actually know how to play and could adjust to the sounds I made on the flute.  I had, more or less, not simply a poorly formed embouchure but rather no embouchure at all.  I produced a lot of white noise from blowing into the flute.  I had no idea how to finger the thing except that the more fingers I put down the lower the note would be–like on a penny whistle–and the notes that came out, at least in terms of the tonality, came out entirely on their own accord.

Let’s imagine that my deduction is right and I cut a guitar track after the flute.  This much I know: I had been around that time playing with an arrangement of Ornette Coleman‘s “Lonely Woman” for acoustic guitar, entirely for my own enjoyment, of which there exists a recording I’ve never made public.  I used the tonality on “Flute Tune” that I’d used for “Lonely Woman.”

What made the recording, however–and this had never before nor has it been since the case–was the reverb, or delay more properly put.  My friend Brian had a digital delay, and I used it to bounce this track to tape.  That delay made every thing sit well.  Believe me, the dry version is nowhere near as good to listen to as this is.  I had misplaced this mix, as it turns out, for years between various moves, and had found it, in a copy of the original copy, about six months before I made The Bathroom Mirror.  Someone was looking out for me.

I have a vivid memory about this tune.  The night after I recorded and mixed it down I listened to it a number of time.  I was dazzled by it, partially because it came together in a way that I didn’t really feel I was responsible for it.  I drifted off to sleep with the sounds of it in my head.  That night, I had a vivid dream that in content was a nightmare but which I don’t remember feeling terror over.  I dreamed I lived in a medieval town of some sort, where the houses had thatched roofs.  Somehow, at night, the town had caught fire and everything was burning.  A man spoke to me and told me his son was in their home and had burned to a crisp.  The man then said that the Devil had come to the town.  I have very vivid memories of flames and floating embers, as well as the orange light that came from them.  No idea what this was trying to tell me, but I have always felt that this record does have a power to it to call things up.

Where Has My Blanket Gone?

October 31st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

I believe I recorded this my senior year as well, likely in the fall, which would be 1990.  I would like to have something profound to say about it, methodologically or in terms of content.  This is one of a slew of instrumental doodlings I have made over the course of my life, more memorable than most, broadly speaking respectable, and not particularly brilliant.

Having said that, there is definitely a role for respectable but not brilliant tunes in one’s repertoire.  Realistically, there are times when one hits a streak and is brilliant non-stop, but those are rare.  More often one hits and misses.  If the misses are close and don’t take up too much time, they can help structure a record, which is precisely why I chose to put this on Tangerine, the second cassette-only release (initially) I put out under my own name, which collected a series of 4-track recordings that none of the bands I’d been in ever managed to do well but which I liked.  I always liked Beatles records because they fit a lot of range into a short amount of time.  If “Dr. Robert” were a five-minute tune, I’d skip it every time, but at around two minutes it adds rather than subtracts from Revolver.  “Where Has My Blanket Gone?” works the same way.

As for the title: when I was very young my family took a trip to Anaheim and we stayed in the Disneyland Hotel.  I had a blanket, with which I had a relationship similar to that of Linus and his.  I left the blanket, which I called, appropriately, “Blankey,” in the hotel but only realized it when we’d driven half-way back down to San Diego.  Of course we didn’t go back for it, and I cried quite a bit.  The song evoked that memory very quickly when I, compiling the record, sought a title for it.

No Cause for Grieving

October 5th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Again, I realize that, going chronologically, I skipped a tune.  I wrote “No Cause for Grieving” my senior year, after “Imagine You’re Flying” and before “Footsteps,” which came that following summer.  I was immensely relieved when I finished it, as I felt that at long last I’d written something that was better than any of the first five good tunes I wrote and cut demos for.  However neurotic one might find the lyrics, they’re both honest and well-executed:

Her footsteps move quiet like stealing
Her scent rose like smoke to the ceiling
Her dress was just barely revealing
And it captured my wandering eyes
She leaves here, her memory lingers
Feel the touch of her ice cube fingers
I’ve been caught by her claws and her stingers
It’s as if I’ve been hypnotized

Her hands move, two butterflies dancing
So controlled yet so casually entrancing
I saw them last night, I was glancing
Struck dumb, waiting for a word
Smooth like a mirror reflecting
Her eyes hide her secrets protecting
One word, now she speaks. She’s rejecting
The ones that would care for her.
She’s stepping away
And I watch, she’s leaving
She never can stay
But it’s no cause for grieving

She could never pretend to be homely
Not alone, only ever so lonely
And this I could cancel if only
She’d let me get close to her
She cuts me without blades or violence
But her lips can speak nothing but silence
It’s been more than just a while since
She’s stepping away
And I watch, she’s leaving
She never can stay
But it’s no cause for grieving

I actually had a person in mind when I wrote this, and in hindsight I realize how deeply self-absorbed I was at the time.  I had a good friendship with a fairly close enounter that more or less ended the friendship.  No alcohol was involved on my end, and I don’t think so on hers either.  I imagined I wanted to be in a relationship with her, and the fact that I was unwilling to actually discuss what had happened between us is a good indicator that, desires aside, I wasn’t ready for one.

I have, since I’ve started playing, felt that music was my saving grace as a person, even though I don’t believe in salvation outside of one’s present moment and, were I to, I wouldn’t think it a matter of grace but of works.  That said, once one has made something beautiful, it can’t be erased from the world, no matter what.  This is a great example.  Beauty in art, at least as I take it to apply to my work, is how clearly the piece reflects a reality.  The reality can be fictional, to be sure.  This is not an original idea but it fits with me.  This tune is as real, in its details, as anything I’ve written.

Lyrics have always taken me more labor time than music–I’m not different that most musicians I know or read about–but they are of secondary importance.  To clarify: it is of primary importance that one’s lyrics are excellent, so that they don’t draw attention away from the beauty of the music.  Bad lyrics distract.  With good lyrics, one can accept the music on its own terms.  It is the music of the piece that taps into whatever part it is of people that is deep, spiritual, and opening to the world.  That’s what music needs to do: open one up to the world.  It’s at that point that one can re-encounter the words in a piece in a way in which they don’t hit one at a merely intellectual level.  At first, the primary thing with words is that they not distract from the music.  Moved through the sound, the words themselves become music.  That happens in this piece, and in my best ones generally.

I later recorded a country version of this with Peter.  The tune fit the genre nicely.  A few friends familiar with this original recording gave me hell about our arrangement–the banjo is corny, etc.–but I stand by it.  We were ahead of Wilco by I don’t know how many years but somehow never made the pages of No Depression.  Imagine that…This original recording, however well we rearranged it, is the better version.

Imagine You’re Flying

September 6th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Recorded: 4-track cassette, 1991.
Originally Released: The Little Band (in a different version).
Now Available: Poison Against Poison, 2005.
Download: mp3

“Imagine You’re Flying” was the first tune I wrote after my first five good pop tunes that was any good.  I haven’t played this live in years, but I can actually conceive of myself still doing so.

In the time between “One of the Lucky Ones” and this tune, more or less a year, I wrote a lot of pretty genuine crap.  I turned very distinctly away from pop, and lyrically wrote only one piece that had anything to do with romantic relationships, called “What Your Heart Can See,” which I never really thought was particularly great but which had nothing wrong with it, and which came out on Duckweed Records’ Mind Monkey many years later.  Lyrically, I wrote some sort of fantastic stuff, drawing on stuff I’d learned in school.  Very good as an exercise in broadening one’s subject matter, but as it happened not much good for listening.

I have told people that the reason I made of point of writing good lyrics was fear of embarrassment.  It’s not a noble motive, but in my case it got me through to a point where, having developed some technique as a writer, I could actually focus on more interesting reasons to write well, such as having something to say.  “Imagine You’re Flying” is a perfect example.  I was in my last semester of college and not simply not highly motivated but, taking it further, highly unmotivated in my studies.  I took a creative writing class, thinking that, OK, this won’t be too taxing.  It wasn’t, but I made a habit of writing my pieces for that evening class in a very dry afternoon history class that met on the same day.  This was too much even for me, and the stuff I brought to the class stunk to high heaven.

One piece I wrote was about a guy who went to Tijuana for a bender and met up with a Mexican friend once there.  This to me was a reasonable subject matter, as I’d known too many people who’d made a habit of doing that, growing up in San Diego.  I knew nothing about it: I’d never done that kind of thing myself, and the notion that the San Diegan would actually have a Mexican friend was, given the context implausible.  I got called on the carpet for shoddy craftsmanship and for misunderstanding the political context of the episode.  I mention this because the germ of the idea later became “12 O’Clock Sharp,” very probably my strongest piece on the first (and only completed) House Carpenters’ record.  It also bears mentioning because, having my tail between my legs, I decided to write something good.

Late at night, when the sun goes down
And the evening spreads its wings,
I’m sitting down upon the shoreline
Just a-changin’ my guitar strings.
I play, oh I play to the seagulls
Though they can’t know what I say.
It does not begin to bother me.
It doesn’t really matter anyway.
I left from the place where I came from
And I settled in the West.
It just happened like an accident.
It ain’t the worst and it ain’t the best.
The world, oh the world is a wheel
And it spun me ’round and ’round.
When I returned into my senses,
This was the place that I had found.

Back at home, I’m a poor, poor boy
And I play for all the passers by.
When they tossed to me their empty pennies
I didn’t stop to even blink an eye.
My heart, oh my heart’s now a window,
My mind a hall of crystal mirrors
Because I live among the reeds and rushes
Where the city disappears.
I left from the place where I came from.
I try to tear it from my mind.
Today, nobody tosses me pennies.
It always seemed to me a bit unkind.
My name, oh my name is now useless.
For it is just another sound
Like my hand across my instrument,
Like the rain that falls upon the ground.

The line, “Because I live among the reeds and rushes” was if I recall the first put to paper, and I’d been listening a lot to Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints.  The line came from the “Born at the Right Time.”  I am not a Paul Simon fan, but I hadn’t realized that yet at the time.  However one might critique his project (and demeanor), though, he can craft a tune and has a broad enough base of easily understood cultural references–referencing Moses without naming him allows the listener to feel educated, e.g., without needing much of an education–to give the impression of being genuinely impressive.  What else can I say?  I was only a kid and I believed Rolling Stone.

Many people have noted that I have a visual aesthetic in my tunes, but I didn’t always have one.  I may have hinted at it in something like “Full Tank of Gas,” but it really started to come through here, in this tune.  I didn’t care about the biblical reference in the Paul Simon tune, but I did like the way the reeds and rushes looked when I imagined them.

As far as the subject matter of the tune goes, I suppose it reflects the feeling of separateness that’s been too much a part of my world for too long, and also a healthy reading of the Chuang Tzu.  Both were very much a part of me at that point in my life, and both were genuine.

A last note: this was the first time I ever double-tracked and panned hard left and right two solos on the same instrument.  Of the different stock tricks I use in recording, this is one of my most effective.  In this case I use penny whistles, but one can use anything.  One records one solo, and then a second, with the first one muted.  The two end up–because they are coming out of the same head–intertwining nicely but not precisely linking.  It produces what some people might call a psychedelic effect, but while electronic devices are most often used today to make things sound “strange,” techniques such as this, that rely on actual playing, get much better results.  The best example I can think of this is Kevin Shields’ work.  He doesn’t use a ton of effects, but rather plays things in a particular way.  In any event the title, which originally was “Imagine You’re Flying Across the Surface of the Ocean,” derives from the feeling I got when listening to the instrumental break with the penny whistles.

Orange Peel Headache

August 29th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Recorded: 1989, live, to 2-track cassette.
Original Release: Tangerine, 1989.

I put the finishing touches on my Bandcamp page this morning.  My albums are available to download on a pay-as-you-wish model, which means you can get it without charge as well by giving an email address.  I want people to have this music, but I also want to be able to be in touch.

I make the point because I realized when I was uploading Tangerine, a collection of recordings from between 1989 and 1994, that some of the songs on it were written considerably before “Footsteps,” the last tune I wrote about.  If my goal here is to go in order of release, I’m fine, but if it’s to chart my actual development, such as it was, I need to go in the order I recorded things.  So, to the oldest recording I’ve actually included on any of the albums I released myself: “Orange Peel Headache.”

Though I released “Dancing w/Fat Francesca” before this one, it was written later, which shows in the quality of the tune.  “Orange Peel Headache” benefits from a good arrangement and the trumpet solo, but it’s clear how I was learning how to write with this tune.  The melody would not carry the tune.  Rather, I needed to rely on the arrangement.

I took a year off from Pitzer in the fall of 1989 and, so I wouldn’t fall behind, I took courses at San Diego State University.  One of these was an electronic music course.  The technology in the studio at SDSU had at that point fallen behind the times.  There was a Yamaha DX7, but no full-fledged midi set up.  The DX7 was a terrible machine, pumped up by promotion because it used digital technology but in fact being useless as anything other than a lightweight, semi-fancy electric organ.  That’s how I used it on this recording: as a stand in for, alternately, a Vox and a set of tubular bells.

There was a 4-track reel machine in the studio, and I used it to make the backing track for this recording, which actually came from the class’ group performance to show our final projects.  I did a recording precisely as I would have on a 4-track cassette, donned sunglasses to look like a cool bebop trumpet player, and stood onstage as the tape played, looking like I knew what I was doing.  Then, as it came time for the solo, I put the horn to my mouth and blew, without any sense of what I was doing.  I borrowed an echo pedal for the purpose, knowing I would need something to make the joke not get too boring.  I had my friends boo me off the stage as the tune ended as part of the performance.  You can hear a little bit of that on this recording.

I will say that though there was some humor in it, I have a good sense of how to make noise on instruments I don’t know how to play and make it fit.  I wouldn’t put myself up in the league of Ornette Coleman on violin–he’s actually one of my favorite violinists, such as it is–but I can be expressive.  In hindsight, I would like to have hit the higher register on this solo more, but it was a one-shot deal, and it worked.  Any longer in the solo and it would have been a bore.

I hit my stride as a writer in December of that year, 1989.  It was as I was preparing to go back to Pitzer for the Spring that I got a good draft of “Bad & Good,” and to some extent though I’ve had my ups and downs the rest is history.  The difference between “Bad & Good” and something from The Duck Hunter, which is to me the beginning of my mature work, isn’t that great to me, but the distance between what I was writing in September and December 1989 was huge.

Footsteps

August 26th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Recorded: 1991 in Del Mar, CA, to 4-track cassette.
Original Release: Bill & Pete, La Petite Orange, 1992.
Currently Available: Bill Foreman, Poison Against Poison.
Download: mp3

More or less immediately after finishing this song, I was convinced it was my best work to date.  The opinion still stands that, up until that point, it indeed was.  I’d written material in 3/4 time before, and had by the time I wrote this been into the Pogues for over a year.  I did not tend to actually attempt to mimic Shane MacGowan as a writer, though I learned from him the trick of making a tune up in which a whole lot of different people do things in some place (for Shane, usually a pub).  This tune has a penny whistle and a lilt, but it sounds and reads like me.

Whose quiet voice do I hear?
Whose footsteps still linger in the hall?
Whose shadow graces the corridor
And leans itself up on the opposite wall?
Is it you calling me from my corner
Who keeps drawing me onward and outward?
Do you call from the in or the outside
Or from some other place of which I’ve never heard?
Don’t be driven away.
Don’t fall to the piercing of poisonous glances.
Because it’s here you must stay
Or be blown by the breeze to some strange circumstances.

You walk on the streets. You use the telephone.
You engage in conversation like everyone.
I’m familiar with all of these rituals.
It’s society’s hammer that pounds on and on.
I can see that you’re not my enemy.
I can convince myself of your good intentions.
But is it really you who calls for me
Or is it just another victim of social conventions?
Don’t be driven away.
Don’t fall to the piercing of poisonous glances.
Because it’s here you must stay
Or be blown by the breeze to some strange circumstances.

It’s a very hard balance to maintain.
It’s a very fine line that on which you now linger.
It’s in each of the cells of your brain
And the tiniest touch of the tip of your finger.
Whose voice echoes ’round the hall?
Whose shadow still draws me and enthralls me completely?
Will that difficult balance not fall
Or is it only beginning its slipping discreetly?

I can’t point to a tune in my oeuvre that more clearly represents me, or at least how I at this point perceive myself.  There’s a genuine sweetness to the tune, but a neurotic unwillingness to trust.  The narrator clearly goes through an intellectual process in an attempt to form an emotional connection.  I knew it, because it was how I lived.

I don’t approach, and have never approached, songwriting as an exercise in autobiography, but conversely I always appreciated Charlie Parker‘s point that if one hadn’t lived it it wouldn’t come out of one’s horn.  I first read that line in high school, and it stuck with me.  One of my lucky characteristics is that I have always had a good sense of a good and honest lyric.  To make a somewhat obvious point but one which relates to precisely this song as well as my work generally, a work of art does not need to be factual to be honest and in fact fact itself can sometimes stand in the way of honesty in an artistic sense.  That is to say, if one limits oneself in one’s material to that which has actually happened, the limited artistic possibilities can leave one unable to solve a particular artistic problem well.

If I were to characterize what I do well in writing songs–and this point has been made by others, and not only close friends–it’s that my best work is extremely intelligent without being merely intellectual.  I am capable of intellectualizing as I imagine my prose makes clear, but that’s not what draws me to music and that’s not what I do as a musician.

This piece is a perfect example of this.  This is not the most intelligent lyric ever written by a 22-year old (I wrote it fairly quickly after my birthday), but it’s smart, particularly for someone that age.  I can’t imagine, however, that one’s first impression would be, “my, what well-put lyrics!”  Rather, I would think or at least hope that one would first encounter the simultaneous sweetness and sadness of it, and then later let the paranoia creep in.

I was 12 when I started playing drums and guitar, and though I had had some lessons in music before then, for some reason that was the time that I opened up to music.  I took to it remarkably quickly, all the more remarkably so because I had tried lessons before and had no success.  I know from experience that music operates on us as human beings in ways that for example verbal communication does not.  We are for lack of a better word spiritual beings, though I reject the notion of a fundamentally distinct spirit from material.  It’s all bundled up.  Music allows us to experience our being more fully, like, in a different sense, meditation does.  We deprive ourselves of a full experience of being to the extent that we limit ourselves in our experience to any aspect of being.  In my case, I as a 12-year old found it painful, even debilitating, to engage in authentic communication.  Experiencing emotion in a conventional sense was not on the agenda.  Playing music with emotion was.

I was drawn to music because it allowed me a way to experience a type of being that otherwise was too painful for me at the time.  A song like “Footsteps” is a perfect example of this.  It works, because it’s real, and I put effort into it because it was all I had.

Dancing w/Fat Francesca

August 21st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Recorded: Del Mar, CA, 1991, to 4-track cassette.
Original Release: Bill & Pete, La Petite Orange, 1992.
Currently Available: Bill Foreman, Poison Against Poison, 2005.
Download: mp3

I am aware that the title can seem to be mocking heavy-set people, but that really was not the point.  The point is that everyone should dance, and everyone should dance with everyone.  It’s a good sentiment but not easy to practice.

My collaborator Peter and I worked together for years, between 1989 and 1997.  This recording came at the end of an initial process of development in our project, figuring out what it was we could actually do together.  Previous attempts at projects included a very tongue-in-cheek folk opera called, if I remember, “The Kid Galahad Symphony” or something like that, which when push came to shove had about five minutes of fantastic music and twenty minutes of filler.  Somewhere there was a recording of it, but I can’t find the tape.

I had, as long as I had been recording, and even making music, made stuff that was not pop-oriented.  I got into jazz early, and loved to improvise with friends.  t never occurred to me that anything I’d do that was off-kilter at all would be suitable for public presentation until I started playing with Peter.  He was into among other things the Pogues, They Might Be Giants, and a ton of genuine folk musics I was unaware of, and this opened me up to different sounds I might use in performance.  The newness of it was compounded by the fact that there were no accordion players, it almost goes without saying to anyone familiar with the place, at Pitzer College, where I was attending school at the time.

I had, by the time I met Peter, become a “Godfather” obsessive.  A small group of friends and I would watch the two films–the third would come out I believe my senior year, leaving us to scramble to find some way to defend our obsession–repeatedly.  We would repeat lines from the film to each other, most often, whenever we would leave someone’s dorm room telling each other to leave the gun and take the cannoli.

The first sequence in the first film, taking place at a wedding, was, with not only its music but dancing, the clear source of this tune.

It turned out that I had a decent feel for vaguely Sicilian melody, and more importantly for my development, I could write good instrumental tunes.  Instrumental rock as should be very clear at this point had been in decline since the Ventures.  I don’t count the various krautrock groups or Brian Eno’s stuff in this category: they didn’t have that swing to their music, however much I’ve loved it over the years.

I can say that I had no commercial ideas in playing instrumentals like this, but instead liked the sound and found also that I could not come up with a way to make ideas like this work in a vocal tune.  The melodic line did not lend itself to the type of lyrics I was writing or wanted to write, and, though Peter would write songs with separate instrumental sections, I never had the urge to pursue that line of work.  I had a clear feeling that were I to do so, I’d simply slap a mediocre vocal section onto a great instrumental bit, or, less likely in my case, vice versa.

One of the Lucky Ones

August 19th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Recorded: Claremont, CA, 1991 to 16-track reel.
Original Release: Bill Foreman, Poison Against Poison, 2005.
Download: mp3

Of the tunes I cut for my first demo, in my mind called “the first five good tunes”–this is not that original recording, but a better one from a year later–this was the last written and in some ways the best.

The more I look back to those first five good tunes, the more I realize that it was a very particular phase in my writing.  It was my naive period.  I was 20 years old, and had a genuine sense that if I wrote it, they would come.  I had lived a fairly sheltered life up until this point, acknowledged in the tune, in which people actually sought out good music.  I was always on the lookout and so were my friends.  I figured that with a number of solid demos under my belt, to repeat myself, I might easily sell some tunes as a writer.  I was entirely confident in the material.

I’ve been bred to be buried
And that’s easy enough to see
By a look at a glance of my eye
Can you feel a similar headache?
Air, bread, and water
Like me that’s what you need
But the things that spring up in our minds
They couldn’t be less the same
I believe what they tell me
That I’m one of the lucky ones
But sometimes that’s just so hard to take
That I’m one of the lucky ones

Your screams and your hollers
Should send shivers down my skin
But though you’re cold like the night
It makes no difference to me
And the things that you tell me,
Must you give me all the blame?
I couldn’t cause these things to happen
They just happen this way
I believe what they tell me
That I’m one of the lucky ones
But sometimes that’s just so hard to take
That I’m one of the lucky ones

They say that I’m lucky
And it’s true I can’t deny
But ask them about the unlucky ones
And see what they say
They’ll say they got hope
But hope’s impossible to eat
And their dreams are cheaper than pennies
In a world made of steel
Though they’re only the losers
There were times when I had lost
There were times when I was empty
In the pain of defeat
You tell me I’m lucky
But you forget what it’s for
I can’t be harder than metal
I can’t be colder than ice
I believe what they tell me
That I’m one of the lucky ones
But sometimes that’s just so hard to take
That I’m one of the lucky ones

What I had here in this tune was the last thing I wrote with that naive assumption.  Almost immediately after finishing the demo and not having my door beaten down by publishers, I took what I might call an art-song route, writing stuff that was patently un-commercial, though frequently quite good.  I wouldn’t say that I completely abandoned the contemporary pop song as a form until many years later, and I have returned to it in recent years in an oblique way, but without thinking about it I see in hindsight that I beat a retreat, to make one of the Richard Thompson references I so love, after this tune.  I had a good start on a pop career if I wanted it, and when it wasn’t offered to me immediately I switched paths.

I suppose that taking this view of things makes it appear to be self-flagellation.  I do have regrets about my musical life, but they’re more matters of money not made and gigs not played.  I can’t argue with the music itself.  That said, I am trying to understand at this point in my life what my thought process was that not once did I sit down and try to sketch out what it might look like if I were to make my living at music.  My tentative hypothesis is that my unexamined feelings of worthlessness made it impossible for me to conceive of a more public musical success than the one I pursued.

The song itself exemplifies one thing that made it difficult for me to fit into what would possibly have been a niche I could have monetized: the white indie guy niche.  My stuff generally swings too much for that demographic.  I never had an interest in the white people faking the funk approach, either, and what I actually did, while it indicates I listened to a lot of R&B definitely doesn’t fit into that category.

My stock-in-trade, whatever else was going on, was even at this point a folk-informed pop that had a light but unmistakable swing to it.  I listened to too many records with Art Blakey on the drum kit to shake that feeling, were I to want to.  The benefit of this is that I do have a sound.  Most people don’t.  It is the most enormous give this life has brought me.  The downside is that even though I generally work with relatively conventional form, when compared to, for example, a Cecil Taylor, I don’t do it in a way that ran in a demographic pack, which is very helpful career-wise.  I think of the people around my age that I’ve been compared to, like Elliot Smith or the Mountain Goats (both more apparent in later work), and the one thing neither really does is swing.  You might name Beck, but his approach is more referential than mine, though I don’t mean this to suggest that he’s less honest.  I don’t have a swing in my music because I’m referencing R&B, but because I played jazz drums since I was 12.  It very simply is what happens when I sit down at the drum kit.

What Would Ever

August 16th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

Recorded: 1991, Claremont, CA, to 16-track reel.
Original Release: Poison Against Poison, 2005
Download: mp3

This was the second pop tune I wrote about which I felt unequivocally good.  It was fairly easy to write, once I came up with the music.  I had been listening to a ton of Bob Mould at the time, who had just put out Workbook, and I’d gone back to Husker Du‘s records as well. I have told a lot of people that Husker Du were a big influence on me, and I think it’s not clear why most often.  It’s in forming a G chord with no third, fretting the D note on the second string.  Once you have your fingers there, you change to the other chords while maintaining the G and D notes, first and second strings respectively, as a drone.  That’s Bob Mould in a nutshell, leaving aside the fairly serious technique and seriously overwrought lyrics, bless him in his earnestness.

I treat her like a princess
You know I treat her kind
Although that’s something you might not believe
And I can’t understand it
But she’s got me by the mind
What would ever make my baby lie to me?

Did I accidentally hurt her
Or be unconsciously cruel
Did I hold her when I should have set her free
Am I only behaving like a paranoid fool
What would ever make my baby lie to me?

It stings and it hurts
I sit and rail and curse
These bitter things can never happen naturally
I’m filled with anger and shame
My heart’s been beaten and maimed
What would ever make my baby lie to me?

These things can’t be forgotten
These thoughts can’t be misplaced
I can’t hide it ’cause it’s just too plain to see
And all of this will leave me with an unbearable taste
What would ever make my baby lie to me?

Oh baby, what does it mean,
the things I’ve heard and I’ve seen?
Is it true my love’s no longer a monopoly?
Are we no longer alone
In a sweet place of our own?
And what would ever make you want to lie to me?
I got my head in the sky

I don’t feel like mine are so much overwrought as naive.  I imagined the situation, as I hadn’t been in any like it.  What is of interest is that this was a fairly big jump for me as a writer.  For the first time, I took an idea and analyzed it as the lyric.  We have dishonesty, but then a series of mental reactions on the part of the protagonist.  Each, given the premise, is plausible, and the overarching sequence is logical.  “Bad & Good” consisted by and large of good or passable lines strewn together in a way that mimicked rather than exemplified logic.  This was different, and I would pursue this line, demanding logical coherence in my writing, as time passed and I developed as a writer.

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