Is is THAT time of year again already? Why yes, it is. Andy Shmushkin‘s perennial ode to gourderotica is NSFW, NSFK, and definitely not safe for the cucurbitophobic.
I remember the glimmer in Dave Celia’s eye before the gig years ago when he said almost conspiratorially “I hope you don’t mind, I have a song for you tonight, Bryk.” And then it showed up on his ace album This Isn’t Here and I basked in the glow of a first-rate takedown. Or compliment. Both, I think.
I stumbled onto Dave’s music around the turn of the millennium when by chance I stumbled across his band Invisible Inc. opening for someone else I’ve long forgotten. They were way more musicianly and classic rock-minded than the Queen Street indie crowd. I’d never heard anyone local (other than Swinghammer, or maybe Kevin Breit) play rock guitar with jazz fluidity and punk rock urgency, like Larry Carlton slumming with Steely Dan. Or something. All his songs weren’t quite there yet, you could still clearly pick off the influences, but his writing was way more ambitious than the new wave slackers and pub crawlers you would catch playing a thankless weeknight at C’est What.
Gently blown away, I introduced myself, (hopefully) bought him a drink, and soon realized we grew up barely a mile away in the shallow suburbs of Mississauga. He invited me over to his home studio and played me a bunch of songs that morphed into his first solo record Organica while my jaw kept dropping further with each song. I caught him every chance I could in the year or so before I departed on my great American misadventure, and I suppose my gratuitous tales of career success/failure/success/failure left an impression on him. Dave has worked much much harder at making an actual career of making music than I ever have, and when you hear him sing or even touch the strings, you’ll know it.
So it was double homecoming seeing Dave and Marla play last week. I love their duet record Daydreamers but didn’t realize they had re-recorded this—ahem—my song together as a standalone single. Check it out. And then work your way backwards through their catalogues for some tremendous awesome.
So here it is, nearly a year later, and I find myself not only completing but now actually demoing a batch of troublesome tunes. Songwriter musicians tend to open new album press releases with statements to the effect that their new stuff is “the best they’ve ever written.” In all honesty, I seem to have as much ambivalence about this particular bunch as I have about any of my songs. Are my new songs great? Probably. Are they awful? Yes, that too. Surprisingly for myself, I have even broached those long-avoided, practically loathed themes of parenting and adulting in general.
Moments after I write a good song, I immediately wonder if I’ll ever write another one. And so far I have. But as they say, your car keys are always in the last place you find them.
I designed a pledge drive T-shirt for Pseu Braun’s essential-listening Thing With a Hook radio show a while back and looks like they have the last few left for sale on the WFMU store. Now you can listener-support freeform radio and stealth brag for yours truly with one easy purchase!
Hook and Heart
Pseu’s Thing with a Hook’s Hook and Heart t-shirt. Can’t wear your pop heart on your sleeve? Put it on your chest! Designed by pop genius Dan Bryk. First time offered since 2014. Only 2 XXL left!
It’s hard to believe.
From our humble, be-tilde’d beginnings at www.passport.ca/~sinatra we embraced the world wide webs whilst they gently, lovingly ensnared us like baffled houseflies savoring their first tantalizing whiff of vapona.
We partied with a sliver of that first big Mercury Records cheque and invested the rest in gear and rent, so grateful we could do this full time! No more day job for us.
We gasped as the best-intentions-cum-best-laid plans of Starjob Records collapsed into a PolyVersal morass of UniGram.
We paid some attorneys fees.
We adored those Laura Nyro bootlegs and obscure Dodgers sides and Coke Commercials and all the other amazing stuff that showed up unexpectedly on Napster and Soulseek and Gnutella et al. Everything is free now! We did not know we were sealing our own fate.
We grimaced as the economics of music-for-a-living quickly crashed and burned around us like the twin towers of arrogance and naivete they probably were.
We giggled as indie music became the domain of the family-free, mom-and-dad’s-COBRA-insured undergrad living above the garage. Look at us, we formed a band! Any teenager with a Macbook can make music, really there’s nothing to it! We can do this part-time!
Then, we cried
Like a wind that’s always blowing
Life is flowing
Move on
I opened a house concert for my old friend and tourmate Michael Holt. This is the warts and all document, sneetched from Facebook Live. Super rough around the edges and straight from the heart. All new songs except for the opener and closer, this is “what I’ve been up to”, sort of.
So I found this 2008 Word .doc on an external dump drive while hunting for a scan of an old, never-finished song. The file is dated May 17, 2008. I have no memory of which writer or publication even asked these questions–no hint in the file either–but never mind. I have a feeling this probably never even made it off my desktop.
In hindsight, I certainly take back my natterings about Lou Reed, though. The callousness of youth and all that. (R.I.P. Lou, may you find the rest you were denied here.) And I’ve certainly made my peace with I-IV-II-V, so long as there’s a solid supporting argument for it.
It depends. Melodies, if I’m sitting at the piano “trying to write a song.” Words generally come any time a pen and notepad aren’t handy: falling asleep… driving in the car… in a meeting at work… post-coitus or worse, during. Awkward!
I used to write a lot while driving, but I burned out the compact flash card in my old-school Olympus portacorder and I’ve been too lazy to hunt down a 16MB CF card. I’m really not good at writing while driving. I guess I could just buy a new note recorder (which might even have Mac OS X-friendly USB), but it was one of the first things I bought after moving to the Triangle (yaay Capital Pawn) and besides it’s the principle of the thing. We accept enough planned obsolescence as it is.
Wherever possible. Pop songwriting is a magpie’s art. I remember Nick Lowe saying something to the effect of “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Or maybe it was “I steal, but I steal from the best.” Hopefully the overall effect is more like Rauschenberg than say, Puff Daddy looping 8 bars of “Every Breath You Take” over and over and calling it your own.
“Please Please Please Lord.” I believe it had something to do with asking God for a girlfriend. This was even before I got sent to the principal’s office for playing the White Album on the art room cassette player. It’s hard to believe that even in 1982 Pentacostals still had a problem with that “bigger than Jesus” bit. It was someone’s birthday.
Randy Newman – American Genius. No one skates between pop song and art with such finesse.
Aimee Mann – huge influence on my album “Lovers Leap”. She hasn’t done shit for me lately, but “I’m With Stupid” is still my Nevermind.
Leslie “Sam” Phillips – one of the smartest, deepest thinkers ever to wield a sharp pop hook. I’ve been a fan for 20 years, even when she was still considered a “Contemporary Christian” artist, and her last three albums are her best. She is so underrated, especially in indie music circles, it’s just stupid.
R.D. Burman – the late Bollywood composer. I have been devouring everything I can find of his since I bought a box set on a trip to India three years ago. An incredibly versatile composer, syncretic in the extreme, he mixes up Indian classical music and ragas and bollywood pop with all kinds of western sounds in brilliantly idiosyncratic arrangements—I hear everything from Bacharach to John Barry to ABBA in his music, but it’s still unmistakably his, and he wrote for all the great playback singers. Young Indian composers refer to him as L.O.R.D. for a reason.
Whatever works. I’m not very good with descriptive detail, but I’ve been working on that. Some people find my lyrics hyper-specific, but those people probably hate Douglas Coupland too. I’ve tried to cut back on name-dropping consumer products when it’s clear they’re not going to underwrite my work. No-one told me about that Taco Bell “Feed the Band” contest, and that hurt.
I try and write good songs and hopefully I write enough of them to fill an album every year or two. I consider myself lazy if I can’t write 10 good songs a year, but then again inspiration’s for the lazy. Pretty soon I’m going to have to give up using immigration as an excuse for not finishing up my records. I’m fortunate in that Pop Psychology sort of has a grand theme, but it’s failure. People will only put up with one or two albums about failure in a row. Ask Mark Eitzel.
Dust on the piano.
Dude, that’s a ten-point essay question! Unfortunately I, uh, tend to write from actual life experiences. I always sucked at creative writing in school, I was more into The New Journalism. Also I find unhappy or tense situations to provide more compelling narrative than when things are going smoothly. And I never tweak to make shit more universal. Put them all together = I still have a day job.
Love me some Copywriters: Mary Wells, Bill Bernbach, Edward Graham, Ron Rosenfeld, Phyllis Robinson, Shirley Polykoff, David Ogilvy, (mmmm) George Lois. They made art out of the art of suggestion. Probably explains a lot.
17 years. It’s called “Lowering The Standards” and it’s been almost done for maybe 5 years now. I just need to get the lyrics right in the bridge… it’ll be worth it, I swear.
A I-IV-II-V chorus. It’s like the “hit” algorithm. Every lame-ass pop punk song, every formulaic song the Matrix shits out… my ex-girlfriend referred to that chord progression as the “money chords.”
Also, auto-tuned lead vocals. Well, maybe I’ll make an exception for movie soundtracks when the actor is supposed to be singing. I’d rather hear Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman sing “Come What May” with a little help from Melodyne than some ringers with perfect pitch.
Costello. It’s like the best of both worlds, without all that irritating myth and hagiography.
There’s no point in choosing, no choice really. Their genius… it’s so ubiquitous you just have to accept it and try to work around it. It’s like picking between air and water. It’s like… Falkner or Brion?
I am so fucking sick of Lou Reed coasting on his laurels. New York was his last good album (not counting ‘Drella, but that was half Cale anyhow) and I was in Grade 11 when that came out. GRADE 11. Tom Waits still writes great songs, cuts great albums, plays great shows. Plus, Tom never shilled for Honda.
Pollard.
Just an awkward reminder: you are often only a degree or two of separation from the object of your opinion.
