Our friend Ben Pier is famous for a few things: photography, good looks, a proclivity for the darker, more rear access zones to a woman's interior and generally being a good dude who's always worked with my band, the Lawrence Arms. He shot pretty much every photo we've ever put into a record. He shot the cover of Buttsweat and Tears and recently, while he was on tour with us on the east coast, he shot a video for Them Angels Been Talkin without us even knowing he was doing it. I think it's pretty great. obviously, whatever you think of my ugly mug, it's obvious that chris and Neil are very handsome and ben is extremely good at this shit. I'm going to visit family, so I'm not gonna be regularly updating this until the new year, so until then, here's my gift to you: Ben Pier's video for some song off some record.
Dig it, here!
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Presenting: offensive grandpa.
I gotta say, hell in a handbasket, kids. That’s where we’re headed. As 2010 comes to a close, I look around and all I see is tubby men dressed as hockey playing clowns spraying each other down with cheap, off-brand cherry cola, shake weights and greasy dagos prancing back and forth like their abs and cross tattoos just got appointed to some sort of dukeship. It’s a disgrace. Black presidents, females in positions of power, tax cuts, tax hikes, some Australian telling the world what we think of Sarkozy as a leader (not much) and a bunch of goddamned terrorists runnin’ around and exploding the few good, god fearing folk we got left.
George Soros and NPR are controlling the fucking airwaves, and by extension, our minds…Burger King is serving a sick pizza/cheeseburger hybrid that will instantly turn anyone who eats it into a Mike Moore type: fat, sloppy, effete voice, sympathizing with Cuba and Marilyn Manson…you know, a soft faggoty sort of cancer on the zitty arse of our decaying empire.
And speaking of zitty arses, they’re curing HIV using stem cells now? That’s just GREAT! Now all the depraved sodomites out there can go bugger each other to their little hearts content and then just turn around and use the juice of sweet innocent murdered babies to cure their gay cancer and go back to taking the world over. This is the best thing to happen to the gay recruiters since Queer Eye got a twelve share, people. Fred Phelps is being picketed as a depraved, evil (obviously closeted, ragingly gay) bag of human waste while Neil Patrick Harris gets to host the video game awards? Has the world gone fucking insane?
I mean, we’ve got secessionist hillbillies from Alaska with real live retards and unwed daughter moms in their family tree trying to play as the moral center against a cigarette smoking Kenyan president who’s so hell bent on setting up death panels and putting queers in the military that he can’t even take the time to stop and prove that he’s not actually a Muslim. That’s a battle with no winners folks. And you know who loses? You, me, and most critically, your children. Think of them, why don’t you? Put down the Cheese steak and sex lube long enough to think of your motherfucking children for a change, eh?
And look at the fucking televisions, why don’t you? Everywhere you turn it’s some new fourteen year old trollop jazzercising her cameltoe across a writhing sea of naked bodies over to a bong in order to nationally televise themselves smoking some drug that I’ve never even heard of! We’ve got glory holes in our airport men’s rooms, people! And they’re talking about it on the news while good people like me are trying to eat dinner!
A few years ago, all our problems could be summed up in two words: “Britney Spears”. She was the crazy, drug addled pansexual provocateur with crazy eyes, a man haircut and a penchant for walking into restrooms with no shoes on that titillated the gays and the little girls and revolted the liberals and conservatives alike. And she was married to that loser with the sweatpants and the beard. Everyone hated him too.
Ah…that was a simple time. We had reckless hillbillies and vampires running the country and we felt like we could do anything and no one could stop us. We’d just lost a bunch of investment bankers in what can only be called a fair trade, because suddenly we were able to stomp all over the world, telling everyone to suck our collective sweaty dick and people just had to deal with it. USA! USA! Suck on that, Gorbachev!
Yup…those were the days: we were reckless and had no sense of consequences and we could blame all our troubles on one depraved white trash celebrity couple. There was no Lady Gaga. There was no meat bikini. There was no Levi Johnston’s issue of Playgirl. There was no girlish, crying republican speaker of the house. There was no sense that anything was less than awesome. We were careening towards heaven in a luxury sedan (american made!) driven by a drunken angel and we were taking out anyone stupid enough to step off the curb, be they man, woman or child.
Now, we’re headed to hell.
And just in time for Christmas. What a world.
Enjoy your holiday sodomy.
George Soros and NPR are controlling the fucking airwaves, and by extension, our minds…Burger King is serving a sick pizza/cheeseburger hybrid that will instantly turn anyone who eats it into a Mike Moore type: fat, sloppy, effete voice, sympathizing with Cuba and Marilyn Manson…you know, a soft faggoty sort of cancer on the zitty arse of our decaying empire.
And speaking of zitty arses, they’re curing HIV using stem cells now? That’s just GREAT! Now all the depraved sodomites out there can go bugger each other to their little hearts content and then just turn around and use the juice of sweet innocent murdered babies to cure their gay cancer and go back to taking the world over. This is the best thing to happen to the gay recruiters since Queer Eye got a twelve share, people. Fred Phelps is being picketed as a depraved, evil (obviously closeted, ragingly gay) bag of human waste while Neil Patrick Harris gets to host the video game awards? Has the world gone fucking insane?
I mean, we’ve got secessionist hillbillies from Alaska with real live retards and unwed daughter moms in their family tree trying to play as the moral center against a cigarette smoking Kenyan president who’s so hell bent on setting up death panels and putting queers in the military that he can’t even take the time to stop and prove that he’s not actually a Muslim. That’s a battle with no winners folks. And you know who loses? You, me, and most critically, your children. Think of them, why don’t you? Put down the Cheese steak and sex lube long enough to think of your motherfucking children for a change, eh?
And look at the fucking televisions, why don’t you? Everywhere you turn it’s some new fourteen year old trollop jazzercising her cameltoe across a writhing sea of naked bodies over to a bong in order to nationally televise themselves smoking some drug that I’ve never even heard of! We’ve got glory holes in our airport men’s rooms, people! And they’re talking about it on the news while good people like me are trying to eat dinner!
A few years ago, all our problems could be summed up in two words: “Britney Spears”. She was the crazy, drug addled pansexual provocateur with crazy eyes, a man haircut and a penchant for walking into restrooms with no shoes on that titillated the gays and the little girls and revolted the liberals and conservatives alike. And she was married to that loser with the sweatpants and the beard. Everyone hated him too.
Ah…that was a simple time. We had reckless hillbillies and vampires running the country and we felt like we could do anything and no one could stop us. We’d just lost a bunch of investment bankers in what can only be called a fair trade, because suddenly we were able to stomp all over the world, telling everyone to suck our collective sweaty dick and people just had to deal with it. USA! USA! Suck on that, Gorbachev!
Yup…those were the days: we were reckless and had no sense of consequences and we could blame all our troubles on one depraved white trash celebrity couple. There was no Lady Gaga. There was no meat bikini. There was no Levi Johnston’s issue of Playgirl. There was no girlish, crying republican speaker of the house. There was no sense that anything was less than awesome. We were careening towards heaven in a luxury sedan (american made!) driven by a drunken angel and we were taking out anyone stupid enough to step off the curb, be they man, woman or child.
Now, we’re headed to hell.
And just in time for Christmas. What a world.
Enjoy your holiday sodomy.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
more self important bullshit
Yesterday I was asked the following in the sock drawer:
“Chris was quoted in an interview that you write songs in about "twenty minutes". Is this an exaggeration? Is he just unabashedly lying?”
In an effort to keep a semblance of a theme going, I’m going to expand on yesterday’s topic (see “get out your pencils, class” immediately below for part 1) and explain a little bit more specifically how I actually write songs.
It is in fact true that when I write songs I do it in about twenty minutes, but this isn’t because of any sort of deluded notion of super genius or quick wit, it’s just that it’s really the only way that works for me. To put it another way, it’s not as though I just casually shit out songs in 20 minutes but if I slaved over them for days they’d be that much better. That’s not at all how my brain works.
I, like many people, get lost in long projects. I lose all sense of perspective and forward momentum. I’m a pretty unrepentant revisionist and as such, the only way that I can maintain having any sort of output at all is to just kind of go for it, get it done and then live with the results.
This blog is a perfect example. There are times when I’ll sit down and write this for up to about forty five minutes, but those are days when I’m kind of flailing and don’t have anything to say and I’m grasping at straws. The vast majority of the time, and particularly if an entry is interesting (to me), it comes out in about ten to fifteen minutes. Here’s how it works:
I sit down with a really vague notion (yesterday is a perfect example. I was thinking about how I kind of wanted to write about the appropriate usage for the article “The” in rock lyrics) and just kind of start going. Unless my kid starts bugging me or I have to shit or something, I just sit and type until my thought comes to a logical conclusion. At that point I go back and tweak sentences that seem redundant or are otherwise poorly constructed and then I post it and it’s done. I suppose that I’m fortunate (?) to be able to think in a pretty linear and clear stream of consciousness and that I’m a good enough typist that I can pretty much keep up with it, but yeah. That’s how I write this thing. I get in, go as fast as possible and get out.
The reason I do this, as I stated before, is that if I stop to think, to borrow a mangled phrase from Larry King, my tongue gets in the way and I can’t see what I’m saying. Put another way, the second I start thinking, I’m overthinking and a huge traffic jam builds up in my mind, and I can’t get anywhere. On days when I’m really, desperately trying, just for the sake of having an entry every day, to crank something out despite the fact that I have no ideas, it’s murder trying to get into the groove long enough to put a couple of sentences together effortlessly (because, we’ve talked about that before, right? Sure we have. The main things human beings respond to, in terms of enjoyable consumption is effortlessness. That’s why we love watching Jordan dunk or Omar shred on the guitar, or Ronaldinho do anything with a soccer ball. Sure it’s hard, but it looks SO FUCKING EASY, and that’s something we all inherently admire, even in people’s appearance. That’s why being ‘put together’ requires a certain level of looking like you just threw something on and walked out the door. That’s why the situation looks like kind of a dildo but a scruffy Tommy Lee still moistens panties worldwide at almost fifty. One is all effort and the other exudes the illusion of effortlessness) and thereby create the shitty, snide prose that all you Dogs Of War have come to expect from this place.
And that’s the difference. Here, I feel compelled to write something every day, so there’s bound to be some turds that I have to slave over just to fill space, but it’s not like that with songs.
When I write songs, I start with a pen and a notebook and I sit down with an idea for maybe the first word or the first phrase and then I just kind of go. I write and kind of push through stuff that I think may be totally shitty and just write about as fast as I can til I’ve written about a page or two and then I stop, grab a guitar and try to set what I’ve just written to music. Once I have the music set up, as in, once I’ve played through the song once, and I’m happy with the chords/melodies, I get on my 8 track and record a real crappy guitar/voice version of the song as to not forget the melodies/not start getting into revisions before I’ve let it sink in. Then I go away, and leave it alone. I come back a day later and listen to the song as though I’ve never heard it (because by that time, I’ve forgotten it) and see how it holds up. The very best songs I’ve ever written usually end up being done at this point, no revisions, the exact words that I wrote on the page and the first set of chords that I tried out.
For example: On With The Show on Greatest Story Ever Told was written in about five minutes. The original draft of the lyrics are the exact lyrics as they appear on the album and the first time I tried to come up with some chords I came up with the exact chords that wound up being the arrangement of the song. The first time I ever tried to figure it out, it was more or less already done. It was like a clean shit with no wiping.
So, when I wrote that song, I realized something that changed the way I wrote songs forever. Namely, whenever you hear a songwriter talk about their process, inevitably, they’ll get to some song, usually a fan favorite and they’ll say the same thing “oh, that one just came right out of me in just a few minutes…it was almost like it was already written.”
In fact, almost everyone I know that writes songs will swear that the best songs they’ve ever written are these songs that almost come pre-packaged right out of their mind, so fast they can hardly keep up. I looked back at the songs that I’d written for the Lawrence Arms that were like that up to that point: Quincentuple Your Money, Evening of Extraordinary Circumstance, Minute, A Toast, Porno And Snuff Films, Boatless Booze Cruise, Necrotism, Dancing Machine, (to name a few) and asked myself the following: ‘if all the best songs are the ones that just come right out, what’s the point of slaving over the other ones?’ This was a huge turning point for me as a songwriter.
Since then, if a song isn’t pretty much done in 20 minutes, I abandon it. Maybe a lyric or something will stick with me and when I try to write something later on, I’ll incorporate the lyric (though this is usually somewhat subconscious), but for the most part, every song that I’ve written since On With the Show (the first song I wrote for TGSET) has been written in 20 minutes or less. That includes all songs off the last three TLA releases and the Falcon record.
Now, there have been a couple of exceptions here and there (especially in my new stuff, where I’m trying a whole different style of songwriting, including writing lyrics on a computer instead of in a notebook [big difference, believe it or not] and not demoing things at all until I can do full instrumentation demos) but for the most part, the only songs you have heard from me in the past 7 years have been written in under half an hour. That means, ultimately, that I have to write a TON of stuff to get to those special ‘clean shits’ because those just don’t come around every five minutes. When I’m writing an album, I usually try to write about three songs a day. Of these, 99% are so terrible that it can be pretty depressing, but when a good one comes out, man. It’s an awesome feeling.
This is just how I do it. Shit’s different for everyone, and like I said yesterday, my shit’s not that good, so take this with a grain of salt.
xoxoxo
“Chris was quoted in an interview that you write songs in about "twenty minutes". Is this an exaggeration? Is he just unabashedly lying?”
In an effort to keep a semblance of a theme going, I’m going to expand on yesterday’s topic (see “get out your pencils, class” immediately below for part 1) and explain a little bit more specifically how I actually write songs.
It is in fact true that when I write songs I do it in about twenty minutes, but this isn’t because of any sort of deluded notion of super genius or quick wit, it’s just that it’s really the only way that works for me. To put it another way, it’s not as though I just casually shit out songs in 20 minutes but if I slaved over them for days they’d be that much better. That’s not at all how my brain works.
I, like many people, get lost in long projects. I lose all sense of perspective and forward momentum. I’m a pretty unrepentant revisionist and as such, the only way that I can maintain having any sort of output at all is to just kind of go for it, get it done and then live with the results.
This blog is a perfect example. There are times when I’ll sit down and write this for up to about forty five minutes, but those are days when I’m kind of flailing and don’t have anything to say and I’m grasping at straws. The vast majority of the time, and particularly if an entry is interesting (to me), it comes out in about ten to fifteen minutes. Here’s how it works:
I sit down with a really vague notion (yesterday is a perfect example. I was thinking about how I kind of wanted to write about the appropriate usage for the article “The” in rock lyrics) and just kind of start going. Unless my kid starts bugging me or I have to shit or something, I just sit and type until my thought comes to a logical conclusion. At that point I go back and tweak sentences that seem redundant or are otherwise poorly constructed and then I post it and it’s done. I suppose that I’m fortunate (?) to be able to think in a pretty linear and clear stream of consciousness and that I’m a good enough typist that I can pretty much keep up with it, but yeah. That’s how I write this thing. I get in, go as fast as possible and get out.
The reason I do this, as I stated before, is that if I stop to think, to borrow a mangled phrase from Larry King, my tongue gets in the way and I can’t see what I’m saying. Put another way, the second I start thinking, I’m overthinking and a huge traffic jam builds up in my mind, and I can’t get anywhere. On days when I’m really, desperately trying, just for the sake of having an entry every day, to crank something out despite the fact that I have no ideas, it’s murder trying to get into the groove long enough to put a couple of sentences together effortlessly (because, we’ve talked about that before, right? Sure we have. The main things human beings respond to, in terms of enjoyable consumption is effortlessness. That’s why we love watching Jordan dunk or Omar shred on the guitar, or Ronaldinho do anything with a soccer ball. Sure it’s hard, but it looks SO FUCKING EASY, and that’s something we all inherently admire, even in people’s appearance. That’s why being ‘put together’ requires a certain level of looking like you just threw something on and walked out the door. That’s why the situation looks like kind of a dildo but a scruffy Tommy Lee still moistens panties worldwide at almost fifty. One is all effort and the other exudes the illusion of effortlessness) and thereby create the shitty, snide prose that all you Dogs Of War have come to expect from this place.
And that’s the difference. Here, I feel compelled to write something every day, so there’s bound to be some turds that I have to slave over just to fill space, but it’s not like that with songs.
When I write songs, I start with a pen and a notebook and I sit down with an idea for maybe the first word or the first phrase and then I just kind of go. I write and kind of push through stuff that I think may be totally shitty and just write about as fast as I can til I’ve written about a page or two and then I stop, grab a guitar and try to set what I’ve just written to music. Once I have the music set up, as in, once I’ve played through the song once, and I’m happy with the chords/melodies, I get on my 8 track and record a real crappy guitar/voice version of the song as to not forget the melodies/not start getting into revisions before I’ve let it sink in. Then I go away, and leave it alone. I come back a day later and listen to the song as though I’ve never heard it (because by that time, I’ve forgotten it) and see how it holds up. The very best songs I’ve ever written usually end up being done at this point, no revisions, the exact words that I wrote on the page and the first set of chords that I tried out.
For example: On With The Show on Greatest Story Ever Told was written in about five minutes. The original draft of the lyrics are the exact lyrics as they appear on the album and the first time I tried to come up with some chords I came up with the exact chords that wound up being the arrangement of the song. The first time I ever tried to figure it out, it was more or less already done. It was like a clean shit with no wiping.
So, when I wrote that song, I realized something that changed the way I wrote songs forever. Namely, whenever you hear a songwriter talk about their process, inevitably, they’ll get to some song, usually a fan favorite and they’ll say the same thing “oh, that one just came right out of me in just a few minutes…it was almost like it was already written.”
In fact, almost everyone I know that writes songs will swear that the best songs they’ve ever written are these songs that almost come pre-packaged right out of their mind, so fast they can hardly keep up. I looked back at the songs that I’d written for the Lawrence Arms that were like that up to that point: Quincentuple Your Money, Evening of Extraordinary Circumstance, Minute, A Toast, Porno And Snuff Films, Boatless Booze Cruise, Necrotism, Dancing Machine, (to name a few) and asked myself the following: ‘if all the best songs are the ones that just come right out, what’s the point of slaving over the other ones?’ This was a huge turning point for me as a songwriter.
Since then, if a song isn’t pretty much done in 20 minutes, I abandon it. Maybe a lyric or something will stick with me and when I try to write something later on, I’ll incorporate the lyric (though this is usually somewhat subconscious), but for the most part, every song that I’ve written since On With the Show (the first song I wrote for TGSET) has been written in 20 minutes or less. That includes all songs off the last three TLA releases and the Falcon record.
Now, there have been a couple of exceptions here and there (especially in my new stuff, where I’m trying a whole different style of songwriting, including writing lyrics on a computer instead of in a notebook [big difference, believe it or not] and not demoing things at all until I can do full instrumentation demos) but for the most part, the only songs you have heard from me in the past 7 years have been written in under half an hour. That means, ultimately, that I have to write a TON of stuff to get to those special ‘clean shits’ because those just don’t come around every five minutes. When I’m writing an album, I usually try to write about three songs a day. Of these, 99% are so terrible that it can be pretty depressing, but when a good one comes out, man. It’s an awesome feeling.
This is just how I do it. Shit’s different for everyone, and like I said yesterday, my shit’s not that good, so take this with a grain of salt.
xoxoxo
Monday, December 13, 2010
get out your pencils, class.
So, I write songs. It’s one thing that I’m slightly good at, depending on who you ask, and I’ve come up with a lot of notions about what makes a song good and what makes a song bad. Mostly, I’m talking about lyrics here, because let’s face it, all my songs are the same six chords and actually, they’re mostly just three, just like most poppy sounding songs, but the lyrics are where you or I, as a songwriter can really get out there and make something unique. Does this interest you at all? Good.
Firstly, this is my take on a highly subjective subject so there’s a good chance that most of this is gonna be complete drivel to some of you, and well, many (I’d even say most people) don’t give two fucks about the lyrics of even their most favorite songs and as such, slaving over lyrics to pop music is a lot like working extra hard to shine up the bottom of your car. That being said, lyrics are my favorite part of a song, and the most important point of connection to my favorite artists and kind of the only thing I really have any sort of authority to speak about (have you heard me sing or play? Jesus…it’s rough) so yeah, get out your rags, because we’re gonna shine up this undercarriage real good.
Okay, Ben Weasel, super close friend of mine that he is, once said that there’s a concrete spot in songwriting where you can tell when someone starts to suck as a lyricist and that’s when songs stop being about “I” and start being about “you.” I think that’s what he said, at least that’s the way I remember it and it serves my purposes here, so let’s just leave it at that for now. Well, this is not entirely correct as I can think of a ton of songs that are totally fabulous that are completely “you” based (No Control, Filler, every gorilla biscuits song ever) but the idea of the exercise is dead on. It’s much easier to write a song about “you” than about “I” but you’re much more likely to get somewhere a lot more interesting if you keep it about “I”.
To put this in terms of an example, if you’re writing a love song (and probably 90% of all songs are love songs) to write about “you” (the person you love, the person that fucked you over, the person you really want to fuck) is okay. You can shower them with praise, tell them to fuck off, describe what they did that makes them so fabulous/shitty/etc. but that’s pretty much it. When you write the same song about “I” suddenly you’re writing about how much whatever they did broke your heart/made you fall in love/left you confused. You can talk about how YOU (the ‘I’ of the song) feel when you see this stunning beauty or great ass, and you have all these emotions that you can conjure up. When the song is about you, the songwriter, not the pronoun, it’s more interesting, but more than that, it’s got more room to really have a visceral impact on the listener, because you’re not just describing someone, you’re laying yourself out there, which is much more fascinating and nuanced than just talking about how rad/shitty someone is could ever be.
Neil Diamond has this hilarious intro to some live record where he spends way too much time talking about “writing what you know” and you, as a writer know “I” better than you know “You” 100% of the time. Also, if you’re serious about getting in there and stirring shit up, you’re likely to get into some weird areas of self reflection that can very often lead to good and interesting lyrics. BUT, don’t get carried away. Let me give you an anecdotal example of taking this kind of thing too far:
My friend’s band was trying out new singers in the late 90’s. One dude came into their practice space and they started playing and he just went for it, singing over the song even though he’d never heard the song before. Well, this was a fairly snotty, fast paced and quick stopping band and when the song abruptly ended about a minute and ten seconds after it began, the would be singer was still screaming and he just busts out with “you broke my heart you fucking biiiiiitch!”
He was not called back.
There’s nothing so gnarly as trite heartfelt garbage, regardless of how truly you feel it. You have to bring something interesting to the table. It’s never enough just to feel it. You’ve got a zillion words and ways to present ideas out there. Just “I love you” or “I’m pissed” isn’t gonna cut it. Ever.
My former band mate (and pop whiz) Matt Stamps, in trying to teach me how to write songs once pointed to an example of a local vocalist who had written a great song called ‘the fourth of july’ and while it was about him and a girl breaking up, it was also about the bombs exploding in the sky and the small town celebration where the breakup happened. The end results were pensive and kind of sad, BUT also an artfully rendered little tune about how the explosions in the sky were reflective of his internal feelings of anguish.
The big thing he avoided with this little trope was overt wallowing in self pity. That shit is always, ALWAYS 100% terrible. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice tackles this issue better than I ever could, so check that out for more expounding on this theme.
Now, speaking of writing what you know, the last thing I’m gonna talk about here today, because my kid needs breakfast, is detail. The details in your songs are as important as the big hooks. I mean, the more specific you can get, 9 times out of ten, the better lyric you have. On a big scale, that has a lot to do with really specific places and settings. There’s no way that “Old Friend” by rancid would be as good as it is if it wasn’t being sung from the setting of an old tin van in the rain in Cleveland (while Tim is, from what I can gather, refusing to bone some girl). Beyond that, how great is it when Billie Joe sings about meeting his girl at the Berkeley Marina, or Coco from Gaslight talks about looking up at the quiet Edison sky, or Matt Skiba sings about the US Maple show at the Fireside? It doesn’t matter that you’ve never heard of US maple and you don’t know where Edison is (though you probably guessed it was in Jersey, right?) It’s that sense of bringing your listener in, that you’re using that shorthand that you use with your friends that makes a song seem intimate, that makes it interesting, that creates that rapport that makes us as fans feel like we’re friends with the artists that write our favorite songs, even though they might be total dickheads in real life.
To take this further, I think that the article “the” should rarely be employed in songs. It’s too vague. If I’m writing about the streets in my neighborhood (to use a cheesedick example) and I want to convey that every day, like some sort of character from a 90’s pop punk song, I’m walking the streets in my neighborhood, I would say I’m walking THOSE streets or THESE streets or even THEM streets before ‘the’. Just making it that much more specific can be the difference between something cool and something kind of boring. Now, there’s totally room for “the” as well, when you purposely want to be non-specific. Take “Old Friend” again:
“Somewhere in America, in THE city at night. We were far from home, but you know it’s gonna be all right.”
That “The” is so awesome, because the notion that it conveys to me is that this could be any city and every night out there in that van on those roads, that feeling of being isolated and lost and excited and hopeful is present, no matter what city you’re in.
I dunno….like I said, highly subjective topic. This is just a little bit of what I think about when I sit down to write songs. Looking at my career, you probably shouldn’t put too much stock in this eh?
Okay, waffles are done. Gotta skate.
xoxoxox
Firstly, this is my take on a highly subjective subject so there’s a good chance that most of this is gonna be complete drivel to some of you, and well, many (I’d even say most people) don’t give two fucks about the lyrics of even their most favorite songs and as such, slaving over lyrics to pop music is a lot like working extra hard to shine up the bottom of your car. That being said, lyrics are my favorite part of a song, and the most important point of connection to my favorite artists and kind of the only thing I really have any sort of authority to speak about (have you heard me sing or play? Jesus…it’s rough) so yeah, get out your rags, because we’re gonna shine up this undercarriage real good.
Okay, Ben Weasel, super close friend of mine that he is, once said that there’s a concrete spot in songwriting where you can tell when someone starts to suck as a lyricist and that’s when songs stop being about “I” and start being about “you.” I think that’s what he said, at least that’s the way I remember it and it serves my purposes here, so let’s just leave it at that for now. Well, this is not entirely correct as I can think of a ton of songs that are totally fabulous that are completely “you” based (No Control, Filler, every gorilla biscuits song ever) but the idea of the exercise is dead on. It’s much easier to write a song about “you” than about “I” but you’re much more likely to get somewhere a lot more interesting if you keep it about “I”.
To put this in terms of an example, if you’re writing a love song (and probably 90% of all songs are love songs) to write about “you” (the person you love, the person that fucked you over, the person you really want to fuck) is okay. You can shower them with praise, tell them to fuck off, describe what they did that makes them so fabulous/shitty/etc. but that’s pretty much it. When you write the same song about “I” suddenly you’re writing about how much whatever they did broke your heart/made you fall in love/left you confused. You can talk about how YOU (the ‘I’ of the song) feel when you see this stunning beauty or great ass, and you have all these emotions that you can conjure up. When the song is about you, the songwriter, not the pronoun, it’s more interesting, but more than that, it’s got more room to really have a visceral impact on the listener, because you’re not just describing someone, you’re laying yourself out there, which is much more fascinating and nuanced than just talking about how rad/shitty someone is could ever be.
Neil Diamond has this hilarious intro to some live record where he spends way too much time talking about “writing what you know” and you, as a writer know “I” better than you know “You” 100% of the time. Also, if you’re serious about getting in there and stirring shit up, you’re likely to get into some weird areas of self reflection that can very often lead to good and interesting lyrics. BUT, don’t get carried away. Let me give you an anecdotal example of taking this kind of thing too far:
My friend’s band was trying out new singers in the late 90’s. One dude came into their practice space and they started playing and he just went for it, singing over the song even though he’d never heard the song before. Well, this was a fairly snotty, fast paced and quick stopping band and when the song abruptly ended about a minute and ten seconds after it began, the would be singer was still screaming and he just busts out with “you broke my heart you fucking biiiiiitch!”
He was not called back.
There’s nothing so gnarly as trite heartfelt garbage, regardless of how truly you feel it. You have to bring something interesting to the table. It’s never enough just to feel it. You’ve got a zillion words and ways to present ideas out there. Just “I love you” or “I’m pissed” isn’t gonna cut it. Ever.
My former band mate (and pop whiz) Matt Stamps, in trying to teach me how to write songs once pointed to an example of a local vocalist who had written a great song called ‘the fourth of july’ and while it was about him and a girl breaking up, it was also about the bombs exploding in the sky and the small town celebration where the breakup happened. The end results were pensive and kind of sad, BUT also an artfully rendered little tune about how the explosions in the sky were reflective of his internal feelings of anguish.
The big thing he avoided with this little trope was overt wallowing in self pity. That shit is always, ALWAYS 100% terrible. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice tackles this issue better than I ever could, so check that out for more expounding on this theme.
Now, speaking of writing what you know, the last thing I’m gonna talk about here today, because my kid needs breakfast, is detail. The details in your songs are as important as the big hooks. I mean, the more specific you can get, 9 times out of ten, the better lyric you have. On a big scale, that has a lot to do with really specific places and settings. There’s no way that “Old Friend” by rancid would be as good as it is if it wasn’t being sung from the setting of an old tin van in the rain in Cleveland (while Tim is, from what I can gather, refusing to bone some girl). Beyond that, how great is it when Billie Joe sings about meeting his girl at the Berkeley Marina, or Coco from Gaslight talks about looking up at the quiet Edison sky, or Matt Skiba sings about the US Maple show at the Fireside? It doesn’t matter that you’ve never heard of US maple and you don’t know where Edison is (though you probably guessed it was in Jersey, right?) It’s that sense of bringing your listener in, that you’re using that shorthand that you use with your friends that makes a song seem intimate, that makes it interesting, that creates that rapport that makes us as fans feel like we’re friends with the artists that write our favorite songs, even though they might be total dickheads in real life.
To take this further, I think that the article “the” should rarely be employed in songs. It’s too vague. If I’m writing about the streets in my neighborhood (to use a cheesedick example) and I want to convey that every day, like some sort of character from a 90’s pop punk song, I’m walking the streets in my neighborhood, I would say I’m walking THOSE streets or THESE streets or even THEM streets before ‘the’. Just making it that much more specific can be the difference between something cool and something kind of boring. Now, there’s totally room for “the” as well, when you purposely want to be non-specific. Take “Old Friend” again:
“Somewhere in America, in THE city at night. We were far from home, but you know it’s gonna be all right.”
That “The” is so awesome, because the notion that it conveys to me is that this could be any city and every night out there in that van on those roads, that feeling of being isolated and lost and excited and hopeful is present, no matter what city you’re in.
I dunno….like I said, highly subjective topic. This is just a little bit of what I think about when I sit down to write songs. Looking at my career, you probably shouldn’t put too much stock in this eh?
Okay, waffles are done. Gotta skate.
xoxoxox
Friday, December 10, 2010
Happy birthday, Eric Halborg! Now back to me.
Okay, so I’m tweeting now (@badsandwich). I don’t really get it though. I mean, I’ve got it set up so if I text, for example “go get fucked why dontcha” that it turns up in my feed (is the shit called a feed?) but what’s with everything else? Like, I vaguely get that if I want to get toby’s attention, I can tweet “@redscaretoby is a total dildo” and that will somehow get reported to him, but does it get reported to him on his phone? On his computer? What the fuck? I don’t get it. What’s that noise? This music sounds like screaming to me! Oh! My hip! I’ve lost my medicine! Where’s the hash mark come in? Do I use that in a sentence like “man, how about those #cans? If I want to see a bunch of cans? I dunno. I really don’t know what the deal is with this twitter.
I dreamed about it last night though. That’s something. Usually, almost every night, I have the same dream. I’m having sex with a beautiful woman, but she’s got the face of Chris from my band and he’s got an Abe Lincoln beard and a stovepipe hat on (I guess another way to say this is that I’m doing it with an Abe Lincoln/Chris hybrid who has a vagina instead of a dick, but that makes it sound kind of gay) and then when we get up from that, I’ve got this gigantic dong, like two Pringles cans long and at least as big around as a slice of baloney (so, just a tiny bit bigger than my actual dong), and we have a good chuckle about how easy it is for me to suck myself off, and why do I even bother dealing with other human beings? Then we have fondue in the back of a mirror plated humvee and then usually, I wake up.
That’s the dream I have almost every night, but last night my dream involved twitter and all my followers and the notion that I’m further littering the already pretty gross internet with my unique form of uh…what’s the phrase I’m looking for? Useless drivel? Yeah, that’ll do. I guess though, if Sarah Palin can tweet, so can I, right? Of course I can. I mean, that chick on two separate occasions practically failed at passing Trig. Get it? Heyooo!
Okay, it’s not nice to make fun of a sweet woman who brutally and ruthlessly parades a special needs infant around the world at all hours in order to further her theocratic, fringe party agenda that promotes the destruction of the earth, the loss of basic freedoms, the war on small business, the middle class and the non-Christian world and of course the furthering and championing of the idea that stupidity equals honesty and patriotism somehow, because let’s face it: she’s pretty hot. And I’m sure she does depraved shit. Have you seen Todd? He’s gotta be a total ass man (and you know, if you do it in the ass, you’re still a virgin. True. Ask god.)
But this is the arena I’m in now. I’m a tweeter. A twitterist. I’m in the octagon with Palin and Kanye and Kim and Paris and man, I’ll be dipped in shit if they’re gonna do this better than me. I mean, I play to win, folks. That’s why my band is so popular and I’m so wealthy. And I’m gonna bring a new dignity to twitter. No C U FAGZ L8R shit for me, folks. That’s for your grandma Courtney Love and your great-aunt Lindsay Lohan. No. My twitterings (already more sophisticated sounding than tweets [you gotta start with the details, and work out if you want to fail in true, grand form]) will feature such lost traditions as punctuation and proper spelling. And you know, so forth.
So, my point is, fuck you Sarah Palin. Fuck you Kanye. Fuck you Courtney Love. You’re three people that I deeply respected before I started delivering my twitterings, but now, it’s on. It’s war. I fully expect to have more followers than Kanye by lunch time. Don’t let me down, slaves.
Now I just need to figure out how to work the twitter, and I’m set. Any advice?
I dreamed about it last night though. That’s something. Usually, almost every night, I have the same dream. I’m having sex with a beautiful woman, but she’s got the face of Chris from my band and he’s got an Abe Lincoln beard and a stovepipe hat on (I guess another way to say this is that I’m doing it with an Abe Lincoln/Chris hybrid who has a vagina instead of a dick, but that makes it sound kind of gay) and then when we get up from that, I’ve got this gigantic dong, like two Pringles cans long and at least as big around as a slice of baloney (so, just a tiny bit bigger than my actual dong), and we have a good chuckle about how easy it is for me to suck myself off, and why do I even bother dealing with other human beings? Then we have fondue in the back of a mirror plated humvee and then usually, I wake up.
That’s the dream I have almost every night, but last night my dream involved twitter and all my followers and the notion that I’m further littering the already pretty gross internet with my unique form of uh…what’s the phrase I’m looking for? Useless drivel? Yeah, that’ll do. I guess though, if Sarah Palin can tweet, so can I, right? Of course I can. I mean, that chick on two separate occasions practically failed at passing Trig. Get it? Heyooo!
Okay, it’s not nice to make fun of a sweet woman who brutally and ruthlessly parades a special needs infant around the world at all hours in order to further her theocratic, fringe party agenda that promotes the destruction of the earth, the loss of basic freedoms, the war on small business, the middle class and the non-Christian world and of course the furthering and championing of the idea that stupidity equals honesty and patriotism somehow, because let’s face it: she’s pretty hot. And I’m sure she does depraved shit. Have you seen Todd? He’s gotta be a total ass man (and you know, if you do it in the ass, you’re still a virgin. True. Ask god.)
But this is the arena I’m in now. I’m a tweeter. A twitterist. I’m in the octagon with Palin and Kanye and Kim and Paris and man, I’ll be dipped in shit if they’re gonna do this better than me. I mean, I play to win, folks. That’s why my band is so popular and I’m so wealthy. And I’m gonna bring a new dignity to twitter. No C U FAGZ L8R shit for me, folks. That’s for your grandma Courtney Love and your great-aunt Lindsay Lohan. No. My twitterings (already more sophisticated sounding than tweets [you gotta start with the details, and work out if you want to fail in true, grand form]) will feature such lost traditions as punctuation and proper spelling. And you know, so forth.
So, my point is, fuck you Sarah Palin. Fuck you Kanye. Fuck you Courtney Love. You’re three people that I deeply respected before I started delivering my twitterings, but now, it’s on. It’s war. I fully expect to have more followers than Kanye by lunch time. Don’t let me down, slaves.
Now I just need to figure out how to work the twitter, and I’m set. Any advice?
Thursday, December 9, 2010
New exciting media!!!
I'm tweeting. Well, that's the theory. If I can get my phone to recognize this shit, I'll be @badsandwich (is that how you write this stuff? I don't get this at all. I need a hot* woman [or team of women] with exposed breasts to show me the ropes here folks. Do you fit this description? Then come help me tweet.) Thanks!
*totally subject to like, whatever, you know. I'm not trying to harsh other people's ideas of beauty, bro.
*totally subject to like, whatever, you know. I'm not trying to harsh other people's ideas of beauty, bro.
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