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.
Thing a Week 35: Soft Rocked By Me I find this one a bit…
Thing a Week 35: Soft Rocked By Me
I find this one a bit unsettling. The guy in this song is a total ass – his philosophy is whatever the opposite of carpe diem is. I thought the idea of someone “soft rocking” you was kind of funny when I started this, but now I think it’s just creepy and sad. I’m disgusted with the whole thing.
No bass – no time!
PRESENT DAY JOCO SAYS: No bass, no time, no matter! It’s funny, you obsess over every little thing, and then one day you don’t put bass in and it doesn’t really make all that much difference, the world doesn’t end (literally).
The loathing I felt for this character I created certainly comes from my own tendency to avoid seizing the day at any costs – I really don’t like to strive, or make waves. Here’s a story: I had a girlfriend at some grade school age where having a girlfriend means you tell each other that you LIKE each other and then you never speak again (doing it wrong). Her family moved out of town and we got together for one last (first?) hanging out together time at her house after school, and it was chaste and awkward. After she moved she wrote a letter to me saying that she had a new boyfriend and he was awesome! I found out later at some high school reunion that she made it up because she was mad that I didn’t try to kiss her. I’ve always been too busy “respecting” (I think I might mean “fearing”) girls to ever try to make out with them. I’m pretty sure it was this very memory that made me hate this character so much. The passive voice joke though, that’s a winner.
This song has had much more of a life in live shows than it ever did during Thing a Week, and for that I must thank Paul and Storm. It was their idea to cram a semi-improvised medley in the middle, and it’s always an enormously successful set piece when we perform it together. It’s also a great excuse to sing soft rock songs in three part harmony, which is all I ever wanted to do anyway.
I haven’t talked about Paul and Storm much during this reblog thing, but that’s because this was the year I met and got to know them. They contacted me sometime after Baby Got Back and we started doing shows together, and we’ve been friends and frequent collaborators ever since. I learned a great deal from them about many things, especially touring – from the best envelopes to use when you’re sending posters to the cheapest way to book a hotel (Paul is a master of the Priceline bidding mojo). I continue to rely on them for advice for all sorts of things, and to be a little jealous of their energy and never ending string of good ideas. If it was the internet that helped my career get off the ground, it was Paul and Storm who helped me figure out how to bring it out into the real world in front of real audiences. They are consummate showmen, and if you say otherwise I will write a very long blog post explaining my opinion about it. Count on it!
Seriously, don’t wake the dragon (because he is very tired).
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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