Thing a Week 39: Pizza Day In my school, it was Friday. The…
Thing a Week 39: Pizza Day
In my school, it was Friday. The pizza wasn’t any good at all, but you can’t really argue with pizza at school can you?
Those of you who’ve spoken to me in the last 24 hours may be surprised that there’s a song here – until about 2:00 this afternoon I had pretty much nothing. I was all ready to blow it off and go play some tennis when this came to me. The music is an idea that’s been floating around in my head forever, but the sad guy singing about pizza was one of those things that just bubbled up from somewhere. It’s by necessity a pretty simple structure and arrangement, but I kind of like it that way. It’s economical. And recording it also felt very old school for some reason, reminded me of high school, sitting in my room at home with a four track cassette and a chorus pedal. And maybe a piece of pizza.
PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: One of the “bolt from the blue” songs, born of desperation and despair. I’m just now remembering that originally this melody had different lyrics: it was a love song for Dana Scully. No, I can’t remember them, and I wouldn’t share them with you if I could because they obviously were not good enough to graduate to song-dom. Even then it felt a little too on the nose.
Jeez, this one is a heartbreaker, it makes me really sad. The arrangement could use some work (duh, it was done in two hours), but those vocals at the end of the chorus are great. Still love the concept, though I probably could have eased up a little in verse two – one of the things I think I’ve learned how to do a lot better is write AROUND what I want to say instead of just saying it. There is certainly a bit of distance for this guy, he never says “me” or “I”, and that works pretty well. I do think the lyrics could be stronger if he didn’t directly address what he’s really worried about in verse two. Of course there’s something honest and simple about him talking about lunch tables and wanting it all to be over, but I often find that the knife twists more painfully when you don’t see it coming. Gah, I can picture this kid sitting alone with his little slice of pizza, make it stop.
And you know, I wasn’t the kind of kid in school who didn’t have friends at lunch, so I don’t know why it still hurts me so much to think of this character. In a general sense I was definitely a nerd. I had buck teeth, I liked math, I was pals with the teachers, but various class clown techniques kept my head above water. And then in junior high, one day I woke up and realized I was a gawky kid with the wrong clothes and the wrong haircut and a sweaty underarm problem and ridiculous giant glasses. I had a good friend who had made it across the barriers, maybe had always been there somehow, and I went to great efforts to model myself after him in all the right ways. I spent a couple years feeling extremely uncomfortable all the time about how I looked and moved and acted, and somewhere in there found my way to contact lenses and confidence. By high school I had figured out how to pass as a cool kid, though I was always terribly afraid someone would discover my secret, put glasses on me, and punch me in them.
But those kids. I remember their names still, sometimes even the odd way they walked or the twitchy thing they did with their eyes when they were socially panicked. The super smart kids who talked funny. The kids who really did sit alone, who really had no friends at all. I hope I was nice to them, I always tried to be a nice to everyone, but I bet I was a jerk sometimes. I certainly didn’t go out of my way to sit with them at lunch. And I still remember how it felt before I put on my cool kid skin, the blind fear that came with certain situations – the AWFUL feeling of being different and having someone call attention to it. That’s the worst thing I can imagine, having to slog all through your school years feeling that way. I’m glad I’m a super cool rock star now with no insecurities.
Oh, and I just got this, it’s about Friday isn’t it? Because of course at this point I was done with Fridays. That was by now the saddest day of the week for me because I was tired, and empty, and slowly shambling week by week toward the day when I could stop writing dumb songs.
This is the last song on Thing a Week Three, and this is where it starts to get really good.
You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.
Thing a Week 38: Drinking With You I don’t know what it is…
Thing a Week 38: Drinking With You
I don’t know what it is with me and the office crushes – I haven’t had a job in almost a year so you know, it hasn’t really come up. But I find them very sweet, I think because offices are a lot like high school, which is the best time to have a crush. Except when you have an office crush, you are most likely old enough to drink, and so you can go out and get drunk with your crushee, which is also the best.
I am sensitive to the fact that some might misconstrue this song to be not so much a “sweet love song” and more a “pro-date-rape” song. This is not what I mean. I’m talking about that night long after the two of you both know very well what is going on but haven’t acted on it, and you make this mutual but kind of secret decision to “go out for drinks” – and you’re playing it cool on the outside but inside you’re jumping up and down and doing a one-person conga line singing “Going out for dri-hinks! Going out for dri-hinks!”
If you aren’t old enough to drink, don’t go out for drinks with your crush. It’s really not that awesome. Stay in school kids.
PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Yes, yes, yes. To my mind this is a nearly unqualified success – still love the song, not that embarrassed by the mix. I managed to not ruin this by over producing it. I even find the solo to be appropriate, interesting, and dare I say, well-executed (Ebow, baby). This kind of picky acoustic arrangement with the moving bassline is a trick I first discovered in “So Far, So Good” which was week 19. But the chord progression feels pretty fresh to me, there’s even some stuff in there that I’m not exactly sure what it is. I wrote the guitar part first, and it was one of those songs where I just played it and played it a million times before I knew what it was about. I don’t recall where the lyrics started coming to me, but my guess is that it was the kicker line in the chorus, “It’d be nice to go out drinking with you.”
And that’s a good line, if I do say so myself. It’s a concept I haven’t heard before in a love song, not in such a sweet setting anyway, and it feels slightly dangerous – like you shouldn’t talk about that feeling, and anyway if you try you’ll probably screw it up. You can hear my backpedaling in the blog post I wrote at the time. But it’s a real thing, at least it was for me back when I used to go out of the house after 6 PM. My wife and I never worked together, but the beginning of our romantic involvement (we were friends for a long time first) had a lot to do with drinking together at bars in big groups of friends. And that line about discreetly sharing a cab home comes from that period of time when we hadn’t yet gone public to our social circle. Those hours at the end of an already too long evening, trying to outlast everyone else so you can leave together without them noticing that you’re leaving together – that’s still my most direct nostalgic connection to my mid 20’s, and what passed for romance in New York City in those days.
I forget how directly I lift from my own life sometimes, and usually I don’t notice that I’m doing it. That seems crazy because of course, it’s me inside my head all the time. How did I trick myself into thinking I was writing about some imaginary office crush while not noticing until years later (today actually, just now) that I was writing a love song to my wife? It’s such a complete and total deception – when exactly did I stop paying attention to what I was thinking?
It’s a strange headspace, and I’ve found that I can most easily get there by writing when I really don’t feel like writing – 38 weeks of Thing a Week did the trick in this case. I’m sad that I have to write a song, but here I go. Shuffle sad over to sentimental, and then start making stuff up and see where it leads. It’s a kind of emotionally directed free association, and it’s almost pathetic how well it works once the right switches get flipped on. Because if you’re doing it right, free association is not really “free” at all. In fact it might be the only time you’re ever writing as YOU, because for once, you’ve taken your dumb, scared, self-hating self out of the equation. Something else takes over then, and it doesn’t feel like it’s you. There’s another voice in your head, and you are merely listening to it and repeating what it says.
This is that feeling of being directed by the muse, the kind of writing you can’t remember afterwards, and that somehow makes an end run around all your stupid emotional sentries and gets to something resonant and true. If I had set out to write a love song about my wife, I never in a million years would have started with the sentiment that I liked getting drunk with her back in 1995. I sure did though…
You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.
Thing a Week 37: Rock and Roll Boy I went trolling for some…
Thing a Week 37: Rock and Roll Boy
I went trolling for some interesting audio this week over at the Internet Archive – frankly, I’m a little sick of writing songs, and I wanted to flush out the system with a found audio thingie. I found this treasure trove, a collection of kids on cassette in the public domain (if you’ve never been to the Internet Archive, you should check it out – it’s non-profit with an enormous library of, like, everything). It brought back fond memories of yelling nonsense into the grill of a 40-pound tape recorder with a record button you had to lean on and mash down with your whole hand. And I was blown away by six-year-old Justin’s “Rock and Roll Boy,” which begins with the most fantastic opening lines in the history of rock and roll. So I wrote a song around Justin’s vocals. He wasn’t thoughtful enough to provide a third verse or a bridge, and he wandered a bit in terms of key, so I had to improvise. But I really think he had an actual song in his head. Which is more than I can say for myself some weeks…
PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Well, hm. I find my backup vocals hilarious: “He loves to live in this crazy crazy town.” And I seem to remember it was quite a bit of work to get the audio to do what I wanted, so that part feels like an accomplishment. But I can’t really say I’d ever, you know, CHOOSE to listen to this song. I like the guitar solo, which is unusual. One thing I would do differently today is not make it three and a half minutes long – a lot of the songs from the new record are just barely two minutes, and they’re just fine that way. There’s just not enough material here to justify so long a song.
Boy was I tired! I can remember making the decision that I was not going to write anything that week, and how relieved I felt. At this point the relentlessness of the weekly schedule was kicking my ass. It was harder and harder to find ideas and tricks that I hadn’t already used at least a couple of times. I think that after you’ve written enough, that happens, in fact I still feel that way today. Like I’m cooking dinner and nobody’s gone shopping in years. Rice? I guess we could have rice again. Rice with chicken? Haven’t had chicken in a couple of meals. Maybe if I put these mushrooms in, nobody will notice that it’s still just rice and chicken. It’s either that or this can of cheese soup I’ve been staring at for six months. Fuck it, let’s open the can.
You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.
Thing a Week 36: Not About You Ah, denial. Sometimes it’s the…
Thing a Week 36: Not About You
Ah, denial. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you going. This one cried out for hand claps from start to finish, but I resisted – the first step is admitting you have a problem.
Funny story: while I was recording this, I got a call from the Gin Blossoms. They want their pre-chorus back.
PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: Egads, what a mix! The weird, short, roomy reverb on the vocal drives me nuts. Overall it’s just too busy and monolithic – there are some good ideas in there, but they haven’t really been featured in a way that keeps them out of each other’s way. It’s like there are a couple of radios playing in the background, I can’t hear anything. What’s that synth doing in there? Do you want the synth or not?
The song is OK, catchy, not too deep though. The setup and the one-joke-only aspect of it, plus the appearance of the kicker line in the chorus makes it feel to me like a song that you might hear if you were one of those guys who takes song pitches in Nashville. Of course it’s the same logical conundrum presented by Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” which means it’s already an idea that’s been done QUITE PROPERLY thank you very much. It sounds to me a little like I was flailing, possibly a bit checked out, busy with other things.
As I recall, the title and the line in the chorus had been with me for a long time, like maybe years. I’m looking around on the blog and in my calendar for that week and can’t find much going on specifically, though likely I was in the midst of PopSci podcasts, preparing to release physical CDs from earlier parts of Thing a Week, and trying to leave time free for all the Summer family stuff that starts to happen this time of year. Just like now in fact (except for the podcasts of course).
I don’t remember (nor do I have good records on) how much money was coming in at this point, but I can tell that it was getting really busy in a lot of areas. There’s a point when first you launch into a bossless existence where you think you’ll never be able to fill up the hours of a day, and early on you don’t. You find stuff to do, and bit by bit it creeps up on you. Eventually you have to start saying No to things because you just don’t have time to do them all, and that’s kind of exciting. Pretty sure that feeling was just arriving for me at this point five years ago. Now I work harder than I ever did when I had a job, and I feel slightly behind and out of control of lots of things at once. On the plus side, I do not have to wear pants.
You can find more info on this song, a store where you can listen to everything, and also other stuff at jonathancoulton.com.
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