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 onesYour 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 onesThey 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.
