Dying on the Vine happens to be one of my favorite John Cale songs. This, of course, isn’t it. It is, however, a song I seem to be be writing over and over. I think this might be the one to end it on.
I’ve been struggling to find time to write these days. Lots of changes. Lots of things and people to take care of. I started this one about a week ago, messing around on the little Martin I bought Kian when he turned six.
The song speaks for itself, I hope, because I don’t really want to say much more about it.
After I finished “Dog Gone Home”, I figured I had met my song-a-week goal and planned on spending the rest of my weekend alone doing not much of anything. Watching t.v. the next night, this one kind of blindsided me and remarkably it feels like a real breakthrough. I do worry that I’m working too fast and that I’m starting to get a little careless in my determination to finish the songs I start. But better to finish and revise than to leave undone.
I took this song as an opportunity to write plainly and honestly because that’s how I wanted it to feel. But writing like that is hard for me because there’s no hiding behind wordplay (and poetry?). There’s such a fine line between simple and hackneyed that you can’t help but getting nervous about approaching it. Still, I’m working up to nerve to aim high and the target is Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You.” I don’t know if it’s anywhere close and I can give you a dozen or so reason why I’m not satisfied with the lyrics and the performance. Hell, it might even need a bridge. But it makes me feel something that I’ve never felt before so I’m posting it the way it is.
And yes, I wrote it for Adrienne. She didn’t ask for another but it’s hers anyway.
Alone again. Kind of. Ad had gone back to Wisconsin with her other girls to see Raff give her end-of-summer camp performance and this time, it was up to me look after Dakota, her/our/everyone’s dog. Because she hates to be alone, there were no drinks for me that Friday night and no burgers with Randall either–just a hurried trip home to get Dakota before she started to panic. So it was around the block and back upstairs to an empty refrigerator with a quick whine via text to Randall about being hungry and lonely thrown in for good measure. The hungry thing was easy to take of. Popeye’s used to be kind of a treat for me when I first moved up to Harlem (oh good, Ad has other plans for dinner so I can have fried chicken!) but it’s come to be something of a drag–an option of last resort when poor planning or sheer laziness have left me with no other choice.
On my way back from the restaurant with my box of food in a bag, I pulled out my phone and saw that Randall had replied. I don’t remember for sure but I’d swear now that he told me to stop complaining like a nancy boy and do something–why not write a song? Despite the fact that I’d been on something of a roll, it actually hadn’t occurred to me to try again. I was actually feeling a bit empty and tapped out with no ideas for anything new. And there, at the bottom of my stoop, it hit me, “Doggone Home”! I had, after all, gone home to be with the dog–this is the kind of literal thinking I’ve spent tens of thousands dollars developing in two of the best graduate programs in the country. Yikes. But wait, it literally gets worse. Randall, budding superstar New York architect, actually used to be a shit-kicking farm boy from western Minnesota with a thing for Rascal Flatts. And what was I having for dinner again? Oh yeah…
So it was going to be a country song and that made the whole thing easy. Working within a genre can be really liberating because there are rules to be followed and broken and country songs about drinking are great in particular because they actually demand a certain amount of cleverness and a sense of humour. Once these decisions were made, I texted Randall back and told him the song would be in his inbox before he got home that night. I figured I had about four hours. It took me way less than that and I had a great night.
Just before I fell asleep a couple of Saturdays ago, I got the opening line for this one. I didn’t know what it meant but I decided I’d remember it so I repeated it to myself a few times and dozed off. I got up way too early and went into the living room to grab the Martin. Once I settled on a few chords, I took the guitar into bed where Ad was still sleeping. I don’t know why I thought she’d like me to wake her up with singing but she didn’t. So I went back to the living room and did what I had to alone. Once the arrangement had firmed up, I gathered up the dirty clothes and headed off to the laundromat with a notebook and a good pen. I finished the lyrics just in time to get everything out of the dryer. Then it was back home to figure out the bridge melody. That made it two weeks in a row that I’d managed to finish something.
The tone of this one had a lot to do with Damien Rice. We’d become obsessed with a performance of “Rootless Tree” he’d given on Live at Abbey Road and would watch it a few times a night before we went to bed. Each time I’d tell Ad that i was going to give up on songwriting–there was really no point since I wasn’t going to make anything better than that. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to PERFORM like that.
But there was something about his directness, his ability to lose control of himself for the sake of the song that made me think it was about time that I started to write things that would hurt at least a little to sing.
I didn’t demo this song until tonight which is good because I just figured out what it’s really about. I have a lot to apologize for. I’ve made too many people responsible for me over the years because I wasn’t doing what I ought to have been. I’d always held on to the belief that if I went off and kept to myself, my mistakes would belong to me alone. That, of course, isn’t how it works. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that.
I’d been promising Adrienne that I’d write a song for her for months now but getting started again just wasn’t easy. I had a couple of false starts along the way. I’d even gotten so close to the sweet spot that I’d been able to work on melodies and lyrics on the train into work. Still, nothing was getting finished. Then five weeks ago, she left me alone for a couple of days to visit her daughter Raff at summer camp. Having nothing better to do, I plugged in the drum machine I’d just reclaimed from my parent’s house in Minnesota over the 4th of July and tried to find a beat for the song I’d been working out for Raff since the spring. Then I plugged in the Strat and tried to write a bridge. The beat and the bridge worked together but not with the rest of the song–the phrasings just refused to come together. So it seemed to me that maybe they wanted to be something else on their own. That was a beginning but I had to drop it all to go see Beth Orton in Prospect Park that evening. I caught the 4 train at the 135th St. 2/3 stop–since it was a weekend, the express trains weren’t running. That gave me extra time to work things out. By the time I’d walked from the train to Jeebs’ house in Park Slope, the verse and chorus were set in my mind.
Usually, it’s trouble for me to listen to other music while I’m working on something of my own because the thing that’s becoming usually gets overwhelmed by the thing that already is. But this one had some backbone apparently.
The next day, I got nice bit of encouragement from Randall who’d been listening to some of my old stuff and that was enough to send me straight into the bedroom to finish the song. I wanted it done before Ad got back that night. And even if her plane hadn’t been delayed, I would have been able to play it for her when she got home. When she got home the next day, she was exhausted from the airline runaround and I was exhausted from staying up listening to my new song over and over again.
She didn’t buy it. It was breezy, summery–not who she was, not good enough. For the next week, I worked and worked and worked to make it better. I got out of bed to find chord substitutions. I revised lyrics during lunch. By the time the weekend rolled around, the song was finished. That was a month ago and it’s been a surprisingly productive period for me. I’m just posting the song now because I’ve been playing with my new mic, a M-Audio Solaris, and trying to understand what it means to give a vocal performance. It’s taken me dozens of takes just to get to this point and I’m still not even close to happy with it. But I think I’m getting better and think I can get better still. If I do, I’ll re-record the vocals and repost the song. I’ve got to do some work on Protools too… So much to learn about this songwriting business.
I started to study architecture at Columbia in the fall of 2004. Getting there was hard but being there was even harder. When winter break finally came, I headed home to Minnesota to unwind. What I really wanted to do more than anything that winter was go down to Chicago again to see Poi Dog Pondering do their New Year’s Eve show. So Luke and I got into this truck and drove down. It was a pretty brave thing for him to do since I described the band to him as having been a folk rock band that had somehow managed to morph into a house/funk band. Just couldn’t sound much worse could it? But we had a great time and by the end of the show he was grinning from ear to ear. That’s what a Poi Dog show does to you. But then, Luke was almost always smiling. A sweet, lovely guy. We ended the night by getting hot dogs at the Wiener’s Circle and, oh yeah, I got punched in the mouth by a Wisconsin farm boy I’d managed to antagonize after he begged his way into our cab. We had a traditional New Year’s Day meal up in Korea-town and drove home in a blizzard. We were having such a good time that Luke didn’t even think to turn the 4-wheel drive on until we were past Menomonie. It was slow going but the extra time gave him a chance to tell me most of his stories.
The next semester of grad school was even harder than the first. Then, during spring break, while I was wandering around MOMA taking in the Rachel Whiteread house, I got a call from my friend Ryan. Ryan had taken a studio with me at the U of M and we’d learned about her work together so I thought it was an amazing piece of luck. But he couldn’t get excited about it at all because he’d called to tell me that Luke had died. A security guard kept telling me to get off the phone and I didn’t know what else to do but run outside. I walked up 6th Ave, into the park, then onto the 1, into studio where a few people were working over break, grabbed something from my desk (I don’t know what anymore) and finally to my apartment. I took over for Ryan and started calling people.
No one knows exactly when or exactly how he died but he was diabetetic and lived alone. He’d been working his ass off to get into grad school (he wanted to come to Columbia more than anything) while holding down a job as a carpenter and playing the shit out of his new guitar. His mother went looking for him on a Monday after he failed to show up for work and found him in his bed. He was only 30 but when they opened up his chest, they found that his arteries were 70% blocked. You never would have known it from looking at him because he was as fit as you’d expect from a guy who made a living with his hands.
This is one of his songs. He, apparently, never felt comfortable enough to sing what he had to say–not even to himself. His kid brother Bear gave me a cd of the songs he found on Luke’s computer after the funeral. Bear also took on his Luke’s guitars and swore he’d play them all the way to fuck all.
I talked my friend Luke into seeing Richard Thompson with me at First Ave. in the summer of 2004. He saw a girl, pointed her out to me and then I saw her too. She was with a friend but the friend was married. Drinks were bought, small talk was made and when Luke stopped short, I jumped in.
Everything about this song is rough but it got me a second date and a short-lived but compelling relationship. It’s the last thing I wrote for over four years.
In the winter of 2002/2003 I started going to meetings run by a group called Nashville Songwriters Association International. The people who showed up were mostly regular guys with regular jobs who wanted a little more out of their lives. Some of them had even made the trip down to Nashville to make connections down on Music Row. None of them seemed to be making it very far which is about what you’d expect since the songs that got passed around tended towards the fair to middling. The exceptional one at the meetings was a kid named Ray Barnard (he has a working band in Minneapolis called the Copperheads–they’re worth a listen). He’d pull out his J-200 and blow everyone away week after week. Plus, he was blessed with a high, pure tenor that made his songs that much more convincing. Not surprisingly, he got asked to co-write a lot.
After a couple of weeks of just showing up and seeing how things worked, I took in “Blind Faith”. It went over. The next week, I took in “Eyes Open Wide.” That went over too although I got some grief over the “honeyed medicine” line which I happen to like a lot. For the following week I decided to write something new. Guess what?
This one started out a little straighter than it is now but I managed to fit in that ascending chord progression in the verses. That’s when it started to work.
In some deep way, I’ve always felt proudest of my music when I could come up with a good bass line when the song really needed one. I had a lot of fun working this one out and I have to say, I’m convinced that the song wouldn’t work without it. I happen to think this one works just fine
I just took up real bass last fall. Man, I thought I could handle the transition from playing the lines on a guitar to playing them on bass pretty easily but it’s a completely different instrument. It all happens slower–maybe it’s because of physics–so you have to lean back into everything that’s working to push the song forward. Your time has to be dead solid. You control everything. Playing bass is dead serious work as one of my critics as the GSAPP would like to say.
Like “The Only One”, this is more an exercise than a proper song. There are no lyrics to speak of and the chord progression is pretty standard. But on occasion, I get obsessed with the idea of making pretty vocal harmonies despite (or more likely because of) the fact that I think I’m a pretty limited singer. The last variation sounds like something copped from a 60’s British folk rock song. Twee, I think I’d call it.
I went through a period when I thought I’d be happy if I could play guitar like David Hildago of Los Lobos. Then I wanted to play like Richard Thompson. Then I wrote this song and it was pretty clear that I wanted to be Buddy Miller. I’m pretty sure that’s still what I want.
This is is as good as my lead guitar playing ever got. It’s much worse now that I don’t play as much. The solo was played on Jeebs’ Sadowsky Tele. He let me borrow it for a few weeks while I was living in Brooklyn which means that I must have started this song while I was living there. It’s a bit heavy but in way that makes the guitar feels solid, smooth and fast–it’s one of best playing guitars I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. It also has a punchier, drier tone than either my Tele or my Strat. The riff that runs throughout the verses was worked out on my Tele after I moved back to Minnesota and the riff is really what makes the song work for me. That’s why I don’t think of this as a Brooklyn song.
R.E.M. primed me to love country and folk music with “Don’t Go Back to Rockville.” I suppose Elvis Costello’s King of America album helped with that too. I was already listening to my share of Dylan by then but through most of high school, I mainly listened to what they used to call college rock. When I got to Berkeley in the fall of 1986, things changed thanks to a guy down the hall named Paul Barber. Paul was from L.A. but somehow managed to be both doughy and pasty. And like a lot of pasty guys at the time he loved the Smiths and the Cure (I hated both). But he was a funny, smart guy and interesting enough to have this deep, deep thing for a band from L.A. called Lone Justice. It may be that what he actually had was a crush on Maria McKee. I fell for her and the twang too. From there, is was an easy move to Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. I pretty much gave up on rock after that.
In general, the thing folk writers do better than rock writers is tell stories. This song is my attempt to write a piece of pure fiction. Started sometime in 2002, it was finished mostly because I liked the first line. Regardless of how I feel about the song itself, I have to admit that I hate the fact that I drawl slightly when I sing it. It sounds as patronizing as all that mugging John Tuturro did in “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.” But I can’t help it. I probably do it for the same reason English singers used to sing with American accents–it’s just how the music is sung. Or maybe it’s that long-buried Georgian accent poking up!
Guitar, it turns out, is an easy instrument to be self-indulgent with. In this song, I’m indulging myself with a ‘57 reisssue Strat that I bought used at the Lake Street Music Go Round. I’d been looking for a second electric for a while. Before I settled on this one, I’d bought and sold a black Rickenbacker 360 that never sounded, played or felt quite right. And I was always on the lookout for a Rickenbacker 1997 (with an f-hole instead of the swoosh) but the couple I played didn’t really do it for me either. Now they’re impossible to find. I’ve always felt Iike I should have some sort of Gibson but I’ve always hated the way they balanced so that never happened either. I liked the neck on this Strat the minute I picked it up so I bought it. Sometimes I like the way it sounds. Sometimes I think I should just sell it and get another Strat. It’s been with me for 10 years or so now. Maybe in another ten years it’ll sound great.
I grew up listening to power pop. This one is built on a variation of a Replacements riff–Color Me Impressed, if you must know. I learned how to play the song from Jeebs while we were in high school. He learned it from Ross who learned it from his guitar teacher. Listening to “The Come On” now for the first time in years, I am realizing how Billy Bragg-y it sounds. Early on, Billy liked to use this semi-tone drop down thing where you hold on to the fifth of a power chord and lower the root–think “The Saturday Boy.” Apparently he and Wiggy picked up this trick from the Faces. This riff does that a lot–just like Color Me Impressed. I’m sure Westerberg listened to the Faces a lot too.
Writing these kinds of songs comes pretty easily to me but they tend to leave me a little cold so I don’t do it much. I did send it, along with Girl of My Dreams to Ed Ackerson (of Polara, The Dig and half the bands in Minneapolis) a long time ago. He actually listened to it. Said it was good, better than most! Said it could use some bass and drums though. I saw Ed at a show at the 400 Bar on the West Bank a few weeks later (New Pornographers, maybe?). I thought I should introduce myself and thank him for the encouragement. I didn’t. Maybe someday I’ll take his advice and fill in the song. Maybe I’ll like it better.
This isn’t really a song. I just think it’s pretty. I tried turning it into the chorus of a song but it seemed to get less pretty, so I’m leaving it alone.
The guitar part uses this ridiculous open-A tuning that Emmylou Harris learned from Daniel Lanois–A A A E A A. Because the Martin has such a big body, it handles dropped tunings really well. It sounds great in dropped-D, maybe even a little better in dropped-C (perfect for It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue). But in this tuning, the bottom string gets so floppy that it’s hard to play in tune. I wrote a couple of songs using it and I have absolutely no idea how to play them anymore.
I worked most of this one out during a series of runs around Lake Harriet in south Minneapolis. Once while I was walking off a lap, a woman called out my name and snapped me out of my post-run daze. I knew her. I’d written two songs about her. She was in from New York, visiting a friend. This is the last song of the trilogy, I suppose.
Baby chaser! That’s what my sister called me after I decided to move back to Minnesota in the summer of 2001 just in time for the birth of my brother’s daughter. We took a lot of chest naps together, Gemma and I. It was my favorite thing.
I wrote this song in Minnesota but it was the last song I wrote about my time in Brooklyn. When it came to me, I’d been playing a lot and had a pretty intuitive understanding of how the guitar worked harmonically so I was able to write this one pretty much by ear, without even knowing what the chords were–the shapes are slightly bizzare. I wasn’t as comfortable on the piano however and tried compensate for my playing’s, let’s call it “naivete,” by adding some Peter Garbriel-ish reverb to it.
Unlike the music, the lyrics for this song took a lot of work. I thought at the time (and still do) that it was a really good piece of writing. Fortunately, I knew pretty much when I started the song what it was about, so that helped. When I listen to it now, I tend to think of a friend’s wedding. That’s where the second verse is set. I tried calling it “The Weight of You” for a while but that’s not really what it wants to be called.
This is it. The best piece of music I’ve ever written. And yes, it was conceived during the height of Pet Sounds mania in 2001. I obsessed over this song for weeks and weeks. I remember working out some of the lyrics at the Bergen 2/3 stop. i remember changing the melody while walking up 6th. I sang it to myself while I was out for a run to keep my mind off how much I hated to run. This one I’m genuinely thrilled to have written.
I can’t remember if I wrote this song in three or in four first. But this version’s in four and it feels completely different. I’m pretty sure that the meter change was inspired by Elvis Costello. On Mighty Like a Rose, he plays “The Other Side of Summer” as a straight-ahead 4/4 pop song and it never stuck with me. Then I heard him play it in 6/8 and all of a sudden it clicked. Adrienne likes this one better.
When I wrote this song, I’d come to think that my writing was a little too straight. So I tried something a little more, um, wordplay-y. This is what I ended up with.
Oh boy. This one was almost purely an exercise in mimicry. Can I write something like Adam Schlessinger would write (he wrote “That Thing You Do!”)? Maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. Can I end a song with a major 7th? You bet. I love the bass line and the guitar solo though. They were both played on my Martin. If you spend enough time with it, there’s nothing my HD-28 can’t do. It’s a magic guitar. You’ll hear songwriters say that they have a guitar “that has all the songs in it.” My Martin is definitely one of those. I got it at the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor in Richfield, Minnesota after months of kicking tires. J-45’s, OM-18’s, Santa Cruzes, I played a lot of guitars. It wasn’t until the guy with the beard pulled this one from the back of the store, saying that it was something special, that I found the one I wanted to keep. I’ve never played a guitar that works as well for me.
This song is NOT about my cousin! I just happened to borrow her name. Lou Reed’s fault really, the “… Says” thing being big with him. It’s a little bit Lloyd Cole’s fault too. This song was written during the winter of 2000/2001 while I was sharing an apartment in Park Slope with an old family friend. I spent my days writing songs, going to book stores and buying cd’s. I got pretty good at all three. When it came to finishing this one, it helped that I’d finally learned another lesson that David Byrne had tried to teach me years back–buy songbooks and learn how the songs you like are constructed. I like Tom Waits. I love “Ruby’s Arms.” If you know it and love it too, you’ll find one of the chord progressions familiar.
The best part of this song came to me in the shower. It was the fall of 2000. I was living in my sister’s spare bedroom in Manhattan. I’d been messing around with a new (for me) tuning for a few days– GADGAD (favorite of Celitc guitarists everywhere!)–and I stumbled on the chords that shaped this song. I, of course, didn’t have the guitar with me in the shower but it turns out that I didn’t need it. It sounded like a slow country waltz to me even though it’s in four– I love slow country waltzes. But then I got distracted and thought I’d lost it. It put me into a genuine panic. Luckily, it came back to me. The lyrics took months to finish. I don’t love them but the song makes sense to me anyway.
In June of 2000, I bought my first bit of proper recording gear–a Boss BR-8 along with an AKG C1000S mic. Eight whole tracks play with! This is pretty much the first song I recorded on it. I did version after version, making it more and more complex. Oh! I can simulate bass with my guitar! Oh! It has modeling capabilities! This is the fourth version. I hadn’t listened to it in years before I dug it up to post. I felt compelled since it was a milestone of sorts. Luckily, it isn’t as embarrassing as I remembered. I think. It was written about someone I’d met through one of my oldest friends. She shows up again in another song. And again. But that’s it. Three songs is enough for someone I’ve only kissed on the cheek, don’t you think?
In the summer of 2000, my twin sister’s son was born in New York. He was my parents’ first grandchild, my first nephew. I had gone back to Minnesota during the spring so I had to fly back to see him. I’d never loved someone so much. I wrote this for him a few months later. I’m pretty sure he’s never heard it.
I finally got over the hump and added vocals to the tracks Jamshied and I recorded. I threw in some more guitar in an attempt to make it sound more like me. I don’t know for sure if it took months or years and I don’t know if it worked but at least it was finished.
The first song I remember writing and recording was about a hapless country girl–I think she worked in a coal mine. Or maybe her father did. I don’t remember much about it except that it was written on my first guitar–a Yamaha dreadnaught. I’m pretty sure it was in D and I was in college when I finished it. I doubt it was any good but it thrilled me to have done it so I pulled out my JVC boombox and sang it onto a cassette tape. The tape went into an envelope and I drove it to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis where Nanci Griffith would be playing that night. I had it in my head that she was just the sort of person that would actually listen to it and have something encouraging to say. The fantasy was, of course, bigger than that but I’m not going to admit to how much bigger right now. The woman at the box office who took the tape from me was sweet. She knew what I was up to and she smiled when I asked her to give it to Nanci. That was that. Robert Earl Keen opened for Nanci that night. He talked about how she had changed his life by singing a song of his on her “pink” album. Then Nanci came on and talked about all the songwriters she’d known, admired, and worked with and spent the night singing their songs and hers.
The song I gave to Nanci is long gone. This one is the oldest one I have. I came up with the chords that make it up around the same time. It’s really only three chords but the guitar is tuned strangely–DBDGBD–based on a misunderstanding about an open tuning Keith Richards liked to use. Because of the tuning, there’s a drone that runs through the song that I find touching somehow.
“Wait” was finally recorded in the spring of 2000. I was (and am) lucky enough to have a professional musician with a home studio for a brother-in-law. I really had no idea what I was doing but he did and the session went fast. Jamshied played everything but my Martin (the Yamaha having been stolen from my parents’ house while I was in law school) and came up with everything but the “violin” part. That was mine. “It’s called a double stop, right?” Nervous, sheepish but excited, I was lucky to be able play at all. I don’t know if the lyrics were finished at the time but there was a melody which never made it to tape. Singing in front of someone else was way beyond me at the time. But, as David Byrne said, “singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.” I hadn’t quite come to terms with that yet.
