Stories Behind the Songs
As the page title suggests, here I discuss the stories behind certain songs I've written.
Accidental Physics
I don't recall the genesis of this particular song and title, but as I was writing it, my memory jumped back to high school, pushing through crowded hallways, occasionally brushing past girls on whom I was crushing (there were lots of them), and I think the story (such as it is) built from there. As far as I know, Strawberry Fields™️ isn't a real perfume, but it sounds like it could be. The bridges and guitar solo are especially tasty. (Listen to "Accidental Physics" here and here.)
Apocalypso
I've been writing songs for over 30 years but have usually approached this as a solo endeavor; i.e., I'll write the lyrics, guitar music, and overall song structure on my own and then bring it to the group so they can add bass, drums, and additional guitars as needed. Rarely have I actually written with someone else, so this song is a bit of a unicorn: Craig Smith wrote the music in Skeleton Crew's early days and asked me to add lyrics. The result, in my opinion, is one of S.Crew's best songs and also one of our most ambitious — the calypso-tinged verses give way to skittery, word-tsunami choruses and a thunderously Primus-like instrumental midsection. When we played this live, you could see people going "Huh?" every few seconds, then headbang/slam during the midsection, then go back to "Huh?" Which, honestly, is the only reaction we ever wanted. (Listen to "Apocalypso" here and here.)
Are You Wearing Argyle?
While attending an unusually boring seminar during the spring 2004 semester, I saw my outstretched legs in front of me and noticed that I was wearing argyle socks, which somehow put a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-type voice in my head intoning incredulously, "Are you wearing ARGYLE?" I literally chuckled out loud at this and spent the rest of the seminar sketching out the chords, melody, structure, and lyrics. By that night, the song was wholly finished and included one of my best lyrical passages: "Will we ever make time / To evaluate what we have wrought / Now that everything we've known and loved / Has been sold or bought?"
At Five in the Morning
Sometime in spring 2006, I saw a bumper sticker that said:
GET IN
SIT DOWN
SHUT UP
HOLD ON
I had two thoughts about this set of commands: (1) What a dumb bumper sticker; (2) What a cool album title. Leaning into #2, I jotted the phrase down in my notebook. A few days later, I decided to do a version of what I'd heard Guided by Voices' Bob Pollard say he occasionally used to do in writing songs: create an album cover, album art, band name, and song titles and then write the songs. In my case, I rewrote the phrase on a clean notebook sheet, visualized the list of songs that would appear beneath it, and wrote them down. I then visualized the band name that would appear above all this, and below is what I came up with.
Sparkler
GET IN, SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, HOLD ON
1. Welcome
2. Being a Saint
3. Sometimes a Ghost Is All You've Got
4. Football Blood
5. At Five in the Morning
6. Swing on By
Then, one night, I decided to try writing them. I turned on my amp, strapped on my guitar (the PRS, if you're curious), looked at "1. Welcome," and began. After 30 seconds, I stopped and fired up my 8-track recorder because I could tell these songs were going to come fast and solid. I wrote for perhaps six hours, well into the night/next morning, and what I produced eventually became the six songs above after a short period of revision, tinkering, and so on. There were five others that I probably have documented somewhere, but these are the six that turned into full-fledged songs. I point out the others below.
As for the song's contents, the groove echoes Cake's untouchably perfect version of "I Will Survive," and some of the vocal melody probably borrows a bit too much from "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega. The lyrics detail a long and occasionally difficult relationship punctuated by overly late date nights back when people could still smoke inside bars. (Listen to "At Five in the Morning" here and here.)
The Ballad of Michael Malloy
I was inspired to write this song by "The Many Lives of Michael Malloy," episode 151 of the consistently wonderful podcast Criminal. Spending over a decade as part of the Bold O'Donaghues has created several wrinkles in my brain devoted exclusively to Irish melodies and motifs, so this song's sprightly form was probably inevitable. (Listen to "The Ballad of Michael Malloy" here.)
Beneficial Neglect
The lyrics tell the story of the only day I ever spent in daycare, which is 100% true: I went to daycare for exactly one day and never went back because it was so traumatic to me. I also went to kindergarten for ten minutes, and, as soon as my mom left, I ran right out the door behind her and never returned; kindergarten wasn't compulsory in Virginia at the time, and my parents didn't make me go. I wrote the music, meanwhile, less than a year after Nevermind came out, and it shows. The title comes from one of my wife's graduate-school papers, and the verse chord progressions sound an awful lot like the Plimsouls' "Oldest Story in the World," but I swear this is a total accident. Also, when we recorded this as the final track for The Persians album A Thing Like Any Other, I did a take of the outro guitar solo, and then I recorded a different take at the request of the engineer. While deciding which take to use, one of us (might've been me, might not've) suggested layering the second track atop the first, and when the two solos diverged after the first 16 bars or so during playback, we all fell out of our chairs laughing. We also kept this layered approach for the final mix because, if I do say so myself, it fucking rocks. (Listen to "Beneficial Neglect" here and here.)
Bowhead
I came to college prejudicially biased against the Greek system. I had experienced a similar set of groups in high school (where I think they were called "service organizations") and thought it was all ludicrous. College amplified this mindset and introduced me to the term "bowhead," an epithet for sorority girls stemming from their garish hair accessories. Mix these concepts with all the Metallica I was consuming at the time along with The Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl," and you get this song. It's the closing track on Rage and still gets requested on a regular basis. Saab Saab Saab Saab Saab... (Listen to "Bowhead" here and here.)
Bricks Aspire
I can't recall if I've ever told anyone this detail, but "Bricks Aspire" owes its existence to the movie Indecent Proposal. I had it on TV in the background and overheard this line: "Even a common ordinary brick wants to be something more than it is — wants to be something better than it is. And that is what we must be..." I wasn't even really watching the movie and had only a yeah-I've-seen-the-trailer idea of what it was about, but for some reason this line — and especially the first half, "Even the common ordinary brick wants to be something more than it is" — rattled around in my head for a few years until I wrote the song around it (in one afternoon, as I recall). I don't play it much anymore because it's very word-heavy and because I've consciously tried to move away from my old verbosity, but I do consider it one of my better compositions. The instrumental guitar passages are particularly sweet. (Listen to "Bricks Aspire" here.)
Chuck of 8 Chins
This is one of my truest creations in that it's about an actual living person. As such, the lyrics are in code. The music owes a huge debt to Guided by Voices and Fountains of Wayne, which is also a type of code. And isn't it interesting that adore and abhor can sound nearly identical when you sing them out loud? (Listen to "Chuck of 8 Chins" here.)
Clever Arnold
While grading papers late one night, I noticed that one of my student's middle names was "Floyd." Having now seen literally thousands of full student names, I can confidently say that "Floyd" is rather uncommon, and it certainly struck me as such back then. Anyway, when I'm grading, I'm very often like Spongebob in the "Procrastination" episode where he uses every tactic imaginable to keep from writing his essay for boating school. My main tactic is mentally searching for song ideas instead of grading, and sure enough, seeing "Floyd" in my gradebook conjured up the phrase "Dreadful Floyd and Clever Arnold," thus providing the song title and propelling me into writing a spastic, postpunk workout replete with jagged chord progressions, sudden stops / starts, lyrics that are slightly more coherent than they might seem at first glance, and a mighty howl in the final verse.
Daguerreotype
This is one of the first songs I wrote after returning to Starkville in 1996 and sort of resuming my music career. As such, I have a special affinity for it along with an awareness that I was heavily influenced by both Guided by Voices (down-stroked riffs aplenty) and Catherine Wheel, especially their criminally underrated album Adam and Eve (listen to "Satellite" and you'll see what I mean). The song eventually became track 4 on A Thing Like Any Other. (Listen to "Daguerreotype" here and here.)
Drinking Is All That Matters
This is the Irish-drinking-song version of "Kiwi Parade Gloss" (see below), which continues an Irish folk tradition of using the same or very similar music beneath different sets of lyrics (e.g., "The Orange and the Green" and "The Risin' o' the Moon"; "Nell Flaherty's Drake" and "Bold Thady Quill"; and so on). While working on the latter song, I realized it moved and felt much like The Pogues' peerless "If I Should Fall from Grace with God," so I set about creating some appropriately imbibe-happy lyrics. I confess that "Peeled off his kilt, then / Rumpled his stiltzkin" made me laugh out loud when I thought it up.
Football Blood
Track 4 from the Sparkler "album" described above. I've always been really fond of this one. Its lyrics just sort of fell happily out of me while writing, and they feel unusually good in my mouth when I sing them. Plus, the instrumental midsection fucking rules. (Listen to "Football Blood" here.)
Going Dutch Means You're Ugly
This phrase popped into my head for no apparent reason one day while I was sitting at a traffic light, and I know that because when I think about the process of writing this song, I immediately return to sitting in a driver's seat and looking out a windshield at said traffic light. The beat of the song feels like John Sebastian's "Welcome Back," the theme from Welcome Back, Kotter. The lyrics are a real exercise in modern-poetry excess — "Splendiferousness is only a test, wince now / You're better unfettered by lonesome go-getters (and how)" — but they're also a solid example of the listener creating meaning from a pile of words. In this case, the listener is me, and the more I worked on the song / played and sang it, the more I began to see a painting with a guy at the top of a hill theatrically dispensing dating advice to another guy who's beseechingly climbing up the hill toward the advice-dispenser. As far as I know, I've never seen such a painting, but it could not be clearer in my mind's eye. I also sneak in a fun Hamlet reference: "The spurious queen who says 'I'm too much in the sun.'" Hamlet himself says this quoted line, and, for me, Hamlet is Derek Jacobi, whose portrayal always seemed tinged with pansexuality even before I learned he was gay. (Listen to "Going Dutch Means You're Ugly" here.)
I Carry Whiskey (Everywhere I Go)
Once, in my recent travels back and forth between Mississippi and Georgia, I got to my Athens house and wanted some bourbon but found myself without any and, because it was after 10:00 p.m., without an easy way to get some. I said out loud to myself, "I need to start carrying whiskey with me," and I kept this idea in my head for a few weeks until the song suddenly started to take shape while I was driving long distance and had to repeat the lyrics and melody silently to myself so I'd remember it all until I got stopped and could write it down (see also "Spasmatron" below). Like a few other songs here, this one has multiple versions: one is heavy and intended for a three- or four-piece band; one is solo acoustic; and another modifies its rhythmic pattern to sound a bit Irish. The laudatory chorus is one of my best — "I carry whiskey everywhere I go / My liquid brother, my brown-eyed soul / I can't forget what I will never know / I carry whiskey everywhere I go" — but the other lyrics are more of a cautionary tale than anything else. (Listen to "I Carry Whiskey..." here.)
I Have Followed You
By my count, I've seen Guided by Voices live 11 times, most of these in Memphis. At one of these Memphis shows, in a venue called the Young Avenue Deli, I was near the front of the stage, and when Bob walked out, I thought to myself, I have followed you, thinking about how many times I've seen them and where all I've gone to do so, including Hollywood, CA; Nashville, TN; Atlanta, GA; and, best of all, Dayton, OH. This phrase nagged at me for a while before the song bearing its name revealed itself. I was listening to a fair amount of Jimmy Eat World at the time, and I think it shows. I also tucked in three GBV allusions: (1) The melody's initial ascending quintet of notes ("I have followed you") mimics the start of the GBV song "Storm Vibrations" ("Does she blend well?"), an effect exacerbated by the fact that both songs are in the key of A; (2) The line "with a thousand bees" is an obvious nod to their legendary album Bee Thousand; and (3) The line "and a table of clay" paraphrases the GBV song "Bulldog Skin" ("I made a table out of clay"). I sent a song link to the "Self-Inflicted Aural Nostalgia" podcast for hopeful inclusion in their compilation album of fan paeans to GBV; they didn't get it in time to put it on the album, but the guy was highly complimentary of the song. (Listen to "I Have Followed You" here.)
Innard Yank
Track 7 on A Thing Like Any Other. Originally a Skeleton Crew tune, I wrote this just as "grunge" music was taking off, I was listening to a lot of Mudhoney at the time, and (as I say more than a few times on this page), it shows. I specifically remember thinking of Mudhoney and their general ethos when I first came up with the song's main riff, but the opening line — "If I dug your eye out with a soup spoon, would you hate me back?" — came to me while working as a line cook and encountering a particularly bitchy, unpleasant coworker who happened to be standing near a container of soup spoons. And that's about where the lyrical coherence ends; the rest is mostly nihilistic English-major word association. I will confess that I've always been overly proud of the monster riffs in the song's midsection. Jody Stephens, Big Star drummer and owner of Ardent Studios in Memphis, thought enough of this song that it prompted him to come visit us in Pasadena after we'd sent him a demo, though, of course, this didn't become the breakthrough we'd hoped it would. (Listen to "Innard Yank" here, here, and here.)
Kiwi Parade Gloss
I've always had a contorted relationship with the concept of storytelling. As a novice songwriter, I often sneered at the idea of songs telling stories because it felt too easy, like too much of a cookie-cutter copout. My English-major ethos back then tilted very heavily toward modernism, post-modernism, absurdism, and meta-literature, so I was far more enamored of hyper-creative, even nonsensical language use and perspective shifts than I was of "storytelling." I also developed a view that I still mostly hold today: people attempting to write sometimes lean on the comfy old saw of "telling a good story" because their prose sucks, and sometimes they know their prose sucks, so they really lean on the conveniently vaporous notion of "being a storyteller" instead of, you know, maybe revising their work with an eager scalpel to get rid of be verbs and excess prepositional phrases, to reduce clichés and words / phrases that have leapt automatically to mind, to balance out shorter sentences with longer ones, and so on.
As you may imagine, my views on storytelling have softened / matured over the years. Telling a good story isn't easy. Telling a good story with a well-developed voice and an evolved writing style really isn't an easy. Doing all this in a song people might actually want to hear has occasionally seemed impossible to me, but when I recently learned John Prine's "Spanish Pipedream" at someone's suggestion, I realized that I should be able to do this. In no way do I mean "I'm just as good as John Prine" — please. I just mean that I've lived long and widely enough and am dextrous enough with language that I ought to be able to write a song that tells a compelling story. And so I wrote this one, which has at least three things in common with the aforementioned Prine song: (1) It has an evocative title that doesn't verbally appear in the song itself; (2) It starts with "She was a..."; and (3) It paints a picture of two humans interacting at a bar. Will people actually want to listen to it? We'll see.
Krupnik on a Sunday
Similar to "Drinking Is All That Matters" above, this song follows folk tradition and adapts an old Irish tune for the Bold O'Donaghues' own purposes. Promisingly titled "Whiskey on a Sunday," the original chorus delivers the goods — "La da da da / Come day, go day / Wish in me heart it was Sunday / La da da da / Drinking buttermilk all the week / And it's whiskey on a Sunday" — but the verses tell a profoundly sad and creepy tale that has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with either whiskies or Sundays. So we decided instead to pay tribute to one of our own favorite liquids, the Slavic liqueur called krupnik. The Debicka-Dyer recipe calls for an entire handle of Everclear, 2.5 handles of water, a large jar of honey (locally grown, ideally), and spices like vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc. All of this gets boiled down into a caramel-golden ambrosia that smells like Christmas and can be consumed hot, but, as with all distillates, the longer it sits, the smoother it gets. After aging for six months and more, krupnik tastes like it has barely any alcohol content at all — which is dangerous, because it hovers around 110 proof and will put you on the ground very quickly (he said from extensive experience).
Life-Size Stencils
The impetus behind this song was a particularly thorny weekend visit with family; I soon shelved it after hitting some writer's block and then finished it a few years later when a married couple within a close-knit friend group of mine went through the ugliest of divorces. It became the penultimate track on A Thing Like Any Other, and, with as much humility as I can muster, I've always found this one to be absolutely gorgeous. When I re-listen, the lyrics sometimes choke me up because they so sharply evoke the pain of familial relationships and the way this specific sort of pain can malinger for generations. I'll also go so far as to say this vocal performance may be the best of my entire recording life: the harmonies on the bridges are glorious, but the real apex is the high note I hit on the line "What did you think the dawn was for but putting on our airs?" A deeply emotional song that we as a band truly nailed. (Listen to "Life-Size Stencils" here and here.)
Maggie of the Four Winds
Sometime during fall 2021, I decided I should write an Irish ballad and started brainstorming titles, an act which tossed the phrase "Maggie of the Four Winds" into my consciousness. I loved this as a title (still do) even though I don't really know anyone named Maggie, and I spent about three weeks fleshing out the song, which I think is one of the lovelier I've written to date. (Listen to "Maggie of the Four Winds" here.)
Mallory-Free
Once, when asked how her brother was doing, a family member said that he was now officially "Mallory-free," meaning, of course, that her brother had broken up with a girlfriend named Mallory. It didn't take me long to turn this phrase into what I consider one of my best songs, easily top 3-5. Part of this opinion comes from multiple instances where I've played it live and someone has asked me, "That's a great song. Whose is it?," and when I say, "It's one of my own," they go, "No way. Wow!" This, my friends, is a feeling that does not get old. The song also contains one of my own favorite lyrics: "Those who mouth away the truth / Still wrestle it at night." I can't tell you how many times I've lain awake at night due to some festering anxiety and felt this couplet rise Frankenstein's-monster-like in my consciousness, tap me on the head, and go, "Hey. Hi. Hello. Remember me? Isn't this fun?" (Listen to "Mallory-Free" here and here.)
Me and My Kind
Many years ago, a friend of mine had to write "the perfect country song" for a college course. Not being much of a writer himself, he asked me if I would help. I had never done anything like this before, so I agreed, and, two hours later, I called and asked him to come listen to his completed song. He grinned the entire time the song played (on cassette!), so I knew I'd struck the right notes. I also knew this when people began earnestly telling me after hearing it at shows that this song was the story of their lives. I never have the heart to tell them it's a parody. (Listen to "Me and My Kind" here.)
Mullet Boy Enumerates
While watching TV one day, I saw a guy with a mullet in a local commercial count something off on his fingers, and the universe gifted me with the phrase "mullet boy enumerates." I wrote this down in my list of titles and didn't return to it until I consulted the list seeking a title for the song that became "Life-Size Stencils" (whose lyrics provided no obvious title) and remembered it was there. A few nights later, I decided to make myself write "Mullet Boy Enumerates," which is a relatively rare occurrence as I typically wait for inspiration to strike. At any rate, I turned on my amp, strapped on the PRS, and started playing. Thirty minutes later, it was done, and I still have the notepad sheets of paper where I scribbled the lyrics and song details because it was all coming to me so fast. It's been one of my favorites ever since, especially the banging midsection riffs and the lines "Harried girl matriculates / She's taken her last quiz on BSE / Yet she still hates / The Crate-and-Barrel types with / Concrete longitudes." (Listen to "Mullet Boy Enumerates" here and here.)
The Nose Hairs Burn
Is autumn most people's favorite season? I feel like it is, but I also recall a time in my life when I felt like I was alone in this sentiment. This song, to that end, is a paean to fall, which for me smelled like crisped and fallen leaves, cut cedar, and woodsmoke. It felt like the suddenly cooler temperatures singing my nasal passages after months of warm, humid breathing. It felt like kneeling in the front and back yards, picking up those leaves alone in my old blue handed-down sweatshirt, living in my head, and reflecting on being an awkward, hormonal preteen crushing on girls who would never look at me let alone know my name. It sounded like chainsaws on said cedar and like Keith Jackson calling college football games on ABC. The song is unusually brief, just like the fleeting nature of everything I just described.
Rader, Fish, and Kermode
For my oeuvre, this is the ultimate word-association exercise, conjured by three lines on a course syllabus for Form and Theory of Fiction or something like that. The three lines represented consecutive topics for this Monday-Wednesday-Friday class, which were the literary critics Rader, Fish, and Kermode. This triumvirate of names struck me as an excellent song title, so I tapped into my general grousiness with old, pontificating, white-male theorists and created a childish set of words impervious to interpretation. (Listen to "Rader, Fish, and Kermode" here and here.)
Register 5
Back in 1988-1989, Craig Smith and some friends of his wrote a spoof of Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" that contains one of the all-time brilliant rewrites: "'Cause I'm a bagboy / On a shopping cart I ride / And I'm wanted / At Register 5." Skeleton Crew played this version countless times back in the day, and then the spoof got shelved when we disbanded. However, at a solo gig in perhaps 1996, I was piddling around between songs and drifted into this chorus, which elicited a huge amount of laughter from the crowd. I immediately decided to resurrect it, but I only had access to the chorus and a few other details from the original rewrite — "It's all the same / Only the prices change"; "I stalk these aisles / A loaded price gun at my side"; and, of course, "I've seen a million cleanups / And I've mopped them all" — so I rewrote the rest. Audience members who hear the song clearly and get the joke usually love it and never fail to sing Richie Sambora's backup part ("And I'm wanted [wanted...]"); those who don't hear it clearly and / or don't get the joke become either confused or angry, including the drunk gal at Hal and Mal's in Jackson, MS who screamed "YOU'RE SINGING IT WRONG!" all the way through. Ah, memories... (Listen to "Register 5" here.)
So Help Me Something
I imagine it's often difficult for a songwriter to identify one favorite out of their own work, but for me it's surprisingly easy. This song hits a near-perfect combination of melodicism, lyrical inventiveness, chunky guitar riffs, and simplicity. It began with the title phrase as a smartass, atheist-agnostic version of "So help me God" and developed from there into a sort-of tableau showing two struggling lovers ultimately deciding that the long-standing dance they do (read that wording again) is actually worth it. The pounding, down-stroked G and C power chords owe a large debt to Guided by Voices and in particular to the song "My Kind of Soldier," while the sleazy G-F-G-F-E-F-G riff in the final two verses comes more or less whole from the obscure GBV track "James Riot." I'm probably too proud of the lyrics, in part because they tell an unusually (for me) linear story and in part because they're just high quality. Extra points for my sly T.S. Eliot "Prufrock" paraphrase: "In this room the women come and go (no / Talk of Michelangelo, though)." Audiences respond very well to this song, including the acoustic version that I play much more regularly. (Listen to "So Help Me Something" here and here.)
Sometimes a Ghost Is All You’ve Got
Track 3 of the "Sparkler" album. Here's another one I like a lot, a linear story of a troubled relationship told from one partner's blinders-on perspective. The passage "I'd treat you like a queen / If only you would show me something / Royal or wise" is one of my best ever, devastating though it may be. I've always harbored dreams of hearing the Dixie Chicks or Kacey Musgraves or Brandi Carlisle cover this, so maybe their people will come calling at some point. (Listen to "Sometimes a Ghost Is All You've Got" here and here.)
Spasmatron
Here's another unicorn, a song I wrote collaboratively, this time with Mississippi indie-rock legend Gordon Garretson (lately of The Delicate Cycle). While he and I were in Men from Nantucket together, he gave me the music for this song, saying he couldn't seem to come up with lyrics he liked and that I could do something with it if I wished. As with "I Carry Whiskey..." above, the music caromed around in my head for a while only to have inspiration strike like lightning while I was driving and thus wholly indisposed. In this instance, my wife and older daughter (we were but a trio then) were asleep in the car with me during a nighttime trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in summer 1998, so, in an attempt to entertain myself, I started brainstorming around this song when the lyrics just started flowing full-force. We had stopped in Hattiesburg prior to this moment, and the drive from there to the coast is about 1.5 hours, during which I literally wrote every word of this song and sang them silently in my head over and over and over so as not to forget. When we got to our hotel, I carried my daughter and our luggage up to our room and immediately scribbled all these lyrics down on hotel stationery (no smartphones in those days, kids). The lyrics, for what it's worth, paint a very specific picture of overly enthusiastic dancers listening to a band in a bar. We played this song in Men from Nantucket for a few months until we disbanded, and it eventually became track 2 on A Thing Like Any Other. (Listen to "Spasmatron" here and here.)
Sprung
I wrote this instrumental in the springtime, which is one inspiration for the title. The other inspiration is the colloquial meaning of "sprung," used to describe someone who's wholly infatuated with another person. (Listen to "Sprung" here.)
Swimming Herward
This one begins with a riff I wrote in 1993-94 while a whole lotta grunge churned in my head and ultimately became one of the musically heaviest songs I've written thus far despite being mostly devoid of traditional crunchy power-chord riffs. The lyrics took me an unusually long time to write because I was constructing a world based on the John Barth story "Night-Sea Journey." It eventually became the first song on A Thing Like Any Other and is the de facto title track as it contains the album-title phrase itself as its first line. (Listen to "Swimming Herward" here and here.)
Swing on By
Track 6 on the "Sparkler" album and yet another of which I'm especially fond. The music is bright and upbeat and thus neatly offsets a tale of small-town despair, told through the eyes of someone who's never left this small town and who, in increasingly pleading tones, asks a former denizen to spend more time back in their joint hometown. I pride myself on writing from a gender-neutral or gender-fluid perspective, and this song is probably the best example of this. In my own head, I cast the story with two males, but I'm hopeful it can apply to any combination of humans. FYI, I performed this in a writing workshop once and made a friend cry with the line "It's the small-town scars that take longest to heal." The trauma in me honors the trauma in you. (Listen to "Swing on By" here and here.)
That Kind of Funny
In 2003-04, my family and I were all about They Might Be Giants' album No! The opening track, "Fibber Island," has a couplet that goes, "Here on Fibber Island we hide mittens in our hair / You might need to stare to see the mittens in our hair." Everything about this idea and these lines is hilarious to me (especially the winking panache of an identical rhyme), but it doesn't actually make me laugh out loud, which is a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: e.g., something can strike me as so funny and brilliantly conceived that I'm kind of in awe and I just gape instead of laugh, or an idea can hit me in such a way that I go "Huh, that's neat" but, again, I don't really laugh. "Fibber Island" is a combination of both examples, and while walking around the house singing this song to myself, I literally said out loud, "It's funny but not that kind of funny." Perhaps not surprisingly, "that kind of funny" stuck in my craw as a great song title, and it was only a few days later when I wrote the song in one nearly-stayed-up-all-night sitting. The story is another fairly straightforward struggling-couple tale; the bridge and guitar solo rank among my best work, imo, as does the passage "Because the lights are on, but we’ve both gone outside / Because the bravest souls still need a place to hide / From stubborn people who / Don’t so much cry as swallow hard," in part due to some sneaky enjambment. I also snuck in an Antigone reference, and I'll give you a crisp $5 bill if you can find it. (Listen to "That Kind of Funny" here and here.)
Tomorrow Wants to Extend
When I find it, I'll post a photo that speaks more eloquently than what I say here, but, until then: I wrote this song directly from the title (a regular occurrence), which I found scribbled on the back of a folder. The crazy thing is how I found this scribbling. I was in my office grading papers one day and leaned back to take a mini-break. I had my hands behind my head with my eyes initially closed, but when I opened them I was looking at the bottom of a stack of papers yet to be graded (or maybe I was done with these?), and on the bottom of this stack was a folder containing a student's work. The lower one-fourth of the folder's back side hung out past the shelf edge, and on this visible part of the folder was a note that seemed to be about calling someone back: a name, a phone number, and the phrase "tomorrow wants to extend." I stayed in that slightly supine position for probably two solid minutes staring at this unbelievably evocative phrase before I added it to my list. I should say that this song — a Green Day-ish power-pop playground telling the story of two druggies hanging out (literally) at a beach and waxing narcotically philosophical — like much of what I've written, is not autobiographical or based on firsthand participation / experience; in other words, I just made it all up. I also still have the folder containing the scribbled phrase. (You can hear "Tomorrow Wants to Extend" as the last song in this live Persians' set.)
U.V.A.
There's enough to say about this song that I created its own page. (Listen to "U.V.A." here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Welcome
This is track 1 on the "Sparkler" album and is the spark (heh) that lit this particular project's fuse. It's a song with a pronounced attitude, which is not something I think I've ever thought or said about any of my own output until right now. The main riff is very simple but is perhaps more powerful as a result. The internal riffs are muscular and occasionally go in sudden, unexpected directions. The lyrics invite listeners in, warn them about (among other things) living unexamined lives, and then conclude with a more focused version of carpe diem: "When you die / Leave behind more than your remains." (Listen to "Welcome" here and here.)
When I Grow Down
The opening track from the Rage EP is a big, angry shout into the void about the horrors of conformity. Its title stems from something a friend said after a class one day: "Ugh, I can't stand [so-and-so]. When I grow down, I want to be just like him." I was struck by the phrase and asked my friend "What did you just say?" Their reply: "You heard me." Onto my list went the phrase, and I wrote the song over the next few weeks. I know I was incredibly proud of these lyrics just after I completed them and especially after Skeleton Crew began playing it live to enthusiastic audience response, but, try as I might, I find it difficult to get myself back into that headspace of pride. When I think about the germ of this song (i.e., the vocals and guitar), I mainly think how juvenile the whole thing sounds, from the ham-handed and all-too obvious lyrics to the overly dramatic and even-more obvious chord changes (Tim's hi-hat-and-bass-drum intro is phenomenal, though). But believe it or not, I'm not actually criticizing or dismissing the song — I'm just acknowledging my own growth as a songwriter, especially considering this is the second song with lyrics I ever wrote (after "U.V.A.") at the decidedly unsophisticated age of 19. After all, as Barney famously said, "Growing, we do it every day." (Listen to "When I Grow Down" here and here.)
Accidental Physics
I don't recall the genesis of this particular song and title, but as I was writing it, my memory jumped back to high school, pushing through crowded hallways, occasionally brushing past girls on whom I was crushing (there were lots of them), and I think the story (such as it is) built from there. As far as I know, Strawberry Fields™️ isn't a real perfume, but it sounds like it could be. The bridges and guitar solo are especially tasty. (Listen to "Accidental Physics" here and here.)
Apocalypso
I've been writing songs for over 30 years but have usually approached this as a solo endeavor; i.e., I'll write the lyrics, guitar music, and overall song structure on my own and then bring it to the group so they can add bass, drums, and additional guitars as needed. Rarely have I actually written with someone else, so this song is a bit of a unicorn: Craig Smith wrote the music in Skeleton Crew's early days and asked me to add lyrics. The result, in my opinion, is one of S.Crew's best songs and also one of our most ambitious — the calypso-tinged verses give way to skittery, word-tsunami choruses and a thunderously Primus-like instrumental midsection. When we played this live, you could see people going "Huh?" every few seconds, then headbang/slam during the midsection, then go back to "Huh?" Which, honestly, is the only reaction we ever wanted. (Listen to "Apocalypso" here and here.)
Are You Wearing Argyle?
While attending an unusually boring seminar during the spring 2004 semester, I saw my outstretched legs in front of me and noticed that I was wearing argyle socks, which somehow put a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-type voice in my head intoning incredulously, "Are you wearing ARGYLE?" I literally chuckled out loud at this and spent the rest of the seminar sketching out the chords, melody, structure, and lyrics. By that night, the song was wholly finished and included one of my best lyrical passages: "Will we ever make time / To evaluate what we have wrought / Now that everything we've known and loved / Has been sold or bought?"
At Five in the Morning
Sometime in spring 2006, I saw a bumper sticker that said:
GET IN
SIT DOWN
SHUT UP
HOLD ON
I had two thoughts about this set of commands: (1) What a dumb bumper sticker; (2) What a cool album title. Leaning into #2, I jotted the phrase down in my notebook. A few days later, I decided to do a version of what I'd heard Guided by Voices' Bob Pollard say he occasionally used to do in writing songs: create an album cover, album art, band name, and song titles and then write the songs. In my case, I rewrote the phrase on a clean notebook sheet, visualized the list of songs that would appear beneath it, and wrote them down. I then visualized the band name that would appear above all this, and below is what I came up with.
Sparkler
GET IN, SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, HOLD ON
1. Welcome
2. Being a Saint
3. Sometimes a Ghost Is All You've Got
4. Football Blood
5. At Five in the Morning
6. Swing on By
Then, one night, I decided to try writing them. I turned on my amp, strapped on my guitar (the PRS, if you're curious), looked at "1. Welcome," and began. After 30 seconds, I stopped and fired up my 8-track recorder because I could tell these songs were going to come fast and solid. I wrote for perhaps six hours, well into the night/next morning, and what I produced eventually became the six songs above after a short period of revision, tinkering, and so on. There were five others that I probably have documented somewhere, but these are the six that turned into full-fledged songs. I point out the others below.
As for the song's contents, the groove echoes Cake's untouchably perfect version of "I Will Survive," and some of the vocal melody probably borrows a bit too much from "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega. The lyrics detail a long and occasionally difficult relationship punctuated by overly late date nights back when people could still smoke inside bars. (Listen to "At Five in the Morning" here and here.)
The Ballad of Michael Malloy
I was inspired to write this song by "The Many Lives of Michael Malloy," episode 151 of the consistently wonderful podcast Criminal. Spending over a decade as part of the Bold O'Donaghues has created several wrinkles in my brain devoted exclusively to Irish melodies and motifs, so this song's sprightly form was probably inevitable. (Listen to "The Ballad of Michael Malloy" here.)
Beneficial Neglect
The lyrics tell the story of the only day I ever spent in daycare, which is 100% true: I went to daycare for exactly one day and never went back because it was so traumatic to me. I also went to kindergarten for ten minutes, and, as soon as my mom left, I ran right out the door behind her and never returned; kindergarten wasn't compulsory in Virginia at the time, and my parents didn't make me go. I wrote the music, meanwhile, less than a year after Nevermind came out, and it shows. The title comes from one of my wife's graduate-school papers, and the verse chord progressions sound an awful lot like the Plimsouls' "Oldest Story in the World," but I swear this is a total accident. Also, when we recorded this as the final track for The Persians album A Thing Like Any Other, I did a take of the outro guitar solo, and then I recorded a different take at the request of the engineer. While deciding which take to use, one of us (might've been me, might not've) suggested layering the second track atop the first, and when the two solos diverged after the first 16 bars or so during playback, we all fell out of our chairs laughing. We also kept this layered approach for the final mix because, if I do say so myself, it fucking rocks. (Listen to "Beneficial Neglect" here and here.)
Bowhead
I came to college prejudicially biased against the Greek system. I had experienced a similar set of groups in high school (where I think they were called "service organizations") and thought it was all ludicrous. College amplified this mindset and introduced me to the term "bowhead," an epithet for sorority girls stemming from their garish hair accessories. Mix these concepts with all the Metallica I was consuming at the time along with The Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl," and you get this song. It's the closing track on Rage and still gets requested on a regular basis. Saab Saab Saab Saab Saab... (Listen to "Bowhead" here and here.)
Bricks Aspire
I can't recall if I've ever told anyone this detail, but "Bricks Aspire" owes its existence to the movie Indecent Proposal. I had it on TV in the background and overheard this line: "Even a common ordinary brick wants to be something more than it is — wants to be something better than it is. And that is what we must be..." I wasn't even really watching the movie and had only a yeah-I've-seen-the-trailer idea of what it was about, but for some reason this line — and especially the first half, "Even the common ordinary brick wants to be something more than it is" — rattled around in my head for a few years until I wrote the song around it (in one afternoon, as I recall). I don't play it much anymore because it's very word-heavy and because I've consciously tried to move away from my old verbosity, but I do consider it one of my better compositions. The instrumental guitar passages are particularly sweet. (Listen to "Bricks Aspire" here.)
Chuck of 8 Chins
This is one of my truest creations in that it's about an actual living person. As such, the lyrics are in code. The music owes a huge debt to Guided by Voices and Fountains of Wayne, which is also a type of code. And isn't it interesting that adore and abhor can sound nearly identical when you sing them out loud? (Listen to "Chuck of 8 Chins" here.)
Clever Arnold
While grading papers late one night, I noticed that one of my student's middle names was "Floyd." Having now seen literally thousands of full student names, I can confidently say that "Floyd" is rather uncommon, and it certainly struck me as such back then. Anyway, when I'm grading, I'm very often like Spongebob in the "Procrastination" episode where he uses every tactic imaginable to keep from writing his essay for boating school. My main tactic is mentally searching for song ideas instead of grading, and sure enough, seeing "Floyd" in my gradebook conjured up the phrase "Dreadful Floyd and Clever Arnold," thus providing the song title and propelling me into writing a spastic, postpunk workout replete with jagged chord progressions, sudden stops / starts, lyrics that are slightly more coherent than they might seem at first glance, and a mighty howl in the final verse.
Daguerreotype
This is one of the first songs I wrote after returning to Starkville in 1996 and sort of resuming my music career. As such, I have a special affinity for it along with an awareness that I was heavily influenced by both Guided by Voices (down-stroked riffs aplenty) and Catherine Wheel, especially their criminally underrated album Adam and Eve (listen to "Satellite" and you'll see what I mean). The song eventually became track 4 on A Thing Like Any Other. (Listen to "Daguerreotype" here and here.)
Drinking Is All That Matters
This is the Irish-drinking-song version of "Kiwi Parade Gloss" (see below), which continues an Irish folk tradition of using the same or very similar music beneath different sets of lyrics (e.g., "The Orange and the Green" and "The Risin' o' the Moon"; "Nell Flaherty's Drake" and "Bold Thady Quill"; and so on). While working on the latter song, I realized it moved and felt much like The Pogues' peerless "If I Should Fall from Grace with God," so I set about creating some appropriately imbibe-happy lyrics. I confess that "Peeled off his kilt, then / Rumpled his stiltzkin" made me laugh out loud when I thought it up.
Football Blood
Track 4 from the Sparkler "album" described above. I've always been really fond of this one. Its lyrics just sort of fell happily out of me while writing, and they feel unusually good in my mouth when I sing them. Plus, the instrumental midsection fucking rules. (Listen to "Football Blood" here.)
Going Dutch Means You're Ugly
This phrase popped into my head for no apparent reason one day while I was sitting at a traffic light, and I know that because when I think about the process of writing this song, I immediately return to sitting in a driver's seat and looking out a windshield at said traffic light. The beat of the song feels like John Sebastian's "Welcome Back," the theme from Welcome Back, Kotter. The lyrics are a real exercise in modern-poetry excess — "Splendiferousness is only a test, wince now / You're better unfettered by lonesome go-getters (and how)" — but they're also a solid example of the listener creating meaning from a pile of words. In this case, the listener is me, and the more I worked on the song / played and sang it, the more I began to see a painting with a guy at the top of a hill theatrically dispensing dating advice to another guy who's beseechingly climbing up the hill toward the advice-dispenser. As far as I know, I've never seen such a painting, but it could not be clearer in my mind's eye. I also sneak in a fun Hamlet reference: "The spurious queen who says 'I'm too much in the sun.'" Hamlet himself says this quoted line, and, for me, Hamlet is Derek Jacobi, whose portrayal always seemed tinged with pansexuality even before I learned he was gay. (Listen to "Going Dutch Means You're Ugly" here.)
I Carry Whiskey (Everywhere I Go)
Once, in my recent travels back and forth between Mississippi and Georgia, I got to my Athens house and wanted some bourbon but found myself without any and, because it was after 10:00 p.m., without an easy way to get some. I said out loud to myself, "I need to start carrying whiskey with me," and I kept this idea in my head for a few weeks until the song suddenly started to take shape while I was driving long distance and had to repeat the lyrics and melody silently to myself so I'd remember it all until I got stopped and could write it down (see also "Spasmatron" below). Like a few other songs here, this one has multiple versions: one is heavy and intended for a three- or four-piece band; one is solo acoustic; and another modifies its rhythmic pattern to sound a bit Irish. The laudatory chorus is one of my best — "I carry whiskey everywhere I go / My liquid brother, my brown-eyed soul / I can't forget what I will never know / I carry whiskey everywhere I go" — but the other lyrics are more of a cautionary tale than anything else. (Listen to "I Carry Whiskey..." here.)
I Have Followed You
By my count, I've seen Guided by Voices live 11 times, most of these in Memphis. At one of these Memphis shows, in a venue called the Young Avenue Deli, I was near the front of the stage, and when Bob walked out, I thought to myself, I have followed you, thinking about how many times I've seen them and where all I've gone to do so, including Hollywood, CA; Nashville, TN; Atlanta, GA; and, best of all, Dayton, OH. This phrase nagged at me for a while before the song bearing its name revealed itself. I was listening to a fair amount of Jimmy Eat World at the time, and I think it shows. I also tucked in three GBV allusions: (1) The melody's initial ascending quintet of notes ("I have followed you") mimics the start of the GBV song "Storm Vibrations" ("Does she blend well?"), an effect exacerbated by the fact that both songs are in the key of A; (2) The line "with a thousand bees" is an obvious nod to their legendary album Bee Thousand; and (3) The line "and a table of clay" paraphrases the GBV song "Bulldog Skin" ("I made a table out of clay"). I sent a song link to the "Self-Inflicted Aural Nostalgia" podcast for hopeful inclusion in their compilation album of fan paeans to GBV; they didn't get it in time to put it on the album, but the guy was highly complimentary of the song. (Listen to "I Have Followed You" here.)
Innard Yank
Track 7 on A Thing Like Any Other. Originally a Skeleton Crew tune, I wrote this just as "grunge" music was taking off, I was listening to a lot of Mudhoney at the time, and (as I say more than a few times on this page), it shows. I specifically remember thinking of Mudhoney and their general ethos when I first came up with the song's main riff, but the opening line — "If I dug your eye out with a soup spoon, would you hate me back?" — came to me while working as a line cook and encountering a particularly bitchy, unpleasant coworker who happened to be standing near a container of soup spoons. And that's about where the lyrical coherence ends; the rest is mostly nihilistic English-major word association. I will confess that I've always been overly proud of the monster riffs in the song's midsection. Jody Stephens, Big Star drummer and owner of Ardent Studios in Memphis, thought enough of this song that it prompted him to come visit us in Pasadena after we'd sent him a demo, though, of course, this didn't become the breakthrough we'd hoped it would. (Listen to "Innard Yank" here, here, and here.)
Kiwi Parade Gloss
I've always had a contorted relationship with the concept of storytelling. As a novice songwriter, I often sneered at the idea of songs telling stories because it felt too easy, like too much of a cookie-cutter copout. My English-major ethos back then tilted very heavily toward modernism, post-modernism, absurdism, and meta-literature, so I was far more enamored of hyper-creative, even nonsensical language use and perspective shifts than I was of "storytelling." I also developed a view that I still mostly hold today: people attempting to write sometimes lean on the comfy old saw of "telling a good story" because their prose sucks, and sometimes they know their prose sucks, so they really lean on the conveniently vaporous notion of "being a storyteller" instead of, you know, maybe revising their work with an eager scalpel to get rid of be verbs and excess prepositional phrases, to reduce clichés and words / phrases that have leapt automatically to mind, to balance out shorter sentences with longer ones, and so on.
As you may imagine, my views on storytelling have softened / matured over the years. Telling a good story isn't easy. Telling a good story with a well-developed voice and an evolved writing style really isn't an easy. Doing all this in a song people might actually want to hear has occasionally seemed impossible to me, but when I recently learned John Prine's "Spanish Pipedream" at someone's suggestion, I realized that I should be able to do this. In no way do I mean "I'm just as good as John Prine" — please. I just mean that I've lived long and widely enough and am dextrous enough with language that I ought to be able to write a song that tells a compelling story. And so I wrote this one, which has at least three things in common with the aforementioned Prine song: (1) It has an evocative title that doesn't verbally appear in the song itself; (2) It starts with "She was a..."; and (3) It paints a picture of two humans interacting at a bar. Will people actually want to listen to it? We'll see.
Krupnik on a Sunday
Similar to "Drinking Is All That Matters" above, this song follows folk tradition and adapts an old Irish tune for the Bold O'Donaghues' own purposes. Promisingly titled "Whiskey on a Sunday," the original chorus delivers the goods — "La da da da / Come day, go day / Wish in me heart it was Sunday / La da da da / Drinking buttermilk all the week / And it's whiskey on a Sunday" — but the verses tell a profoundly sad and creepy tale that has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with either whiskies or Sundays. So we decided instead to pay tribute to one of our own favorite liquids, the Slavic liqueur called krupnik. The Debicka-Dyer recipe calls for an entire handle of Everclear, 2.5 handles of water, a large jar of honey (locally grown, ideally), and spices like vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc. All of this gets boiled down into a caramel-golden ambrosia that smells like Christmas and can be consumed hot, but, as with all distillates, the longer it sits, the smoother it gets. After aging for six months and more, krupnik tastes like it has barely any alcohol content at all — which is dangerous, because it hovers around 110 proof and will put you on the ground very quickly (he said from extensive experience).
Life-Size Stencils
The impetus behind this song was a particularly thorny weekend visit with family; I soon shelved it after hitting some writer's block and then finished it a few years later when a married couple within a close-knit friend group of mine went through the ugliest of divorces. It became the penultimate track on A Thing Like Any Other, and, with as much humility as I can muster, I've always found this one to be absolutely gorgeous. When I re-listen, the lyrics sometimes choke me up because they so sharply evoke the pain of familial relationships and the way this specific sort of pain can malinger for generations. I'll also go so far as to say this vocal performance may be the best of my entire recording life: the harmonies on the bridges are glorious, but the real apex is the high note I hit on the line "What did you think the dawn was for but putting on our airs?" A deeply emotional song that we as a band truly nailed. (Listen to "Life-Size Stencils" here and here.)
Maggie of the Four Winds
Sometime during fall 2021, I decided I should write an Irish ballad and started brainstorming titles, an act which tossed the phrase "Maggie of the Four Winds" into my consciousness. I loved this as a title (still do) even though I don't really know anyone named Maggie, and I spent about three weeks fleshing out the song, which I think is one of the lovelier I've written to date. (Listen to "Maggie of the Four Winds" here.)
Mallory-Free
Once, when asked how her brother was doing, a family member said that he was now officially "Mallory-free," meaning, of course, that her brother had broken up with a girlfriend named Mallory. It didn't take me long to turn this phrase into what I consider one of my best songs, easily top 3-5. Part of this opinion comes from multiple instances where I've played it live and someone has asked me, "That's a great song. Whose is it?," and when I say, "It's one of my own," they go, "No way. Wow!" This, my friends, is a feeling that does not get old. The song also contains one of my own favorite lyrics: "Those who mouth away the truth / Still wrestle it at night." I can't tell you how many times I've lain awake at night due to some festering anxiety and felt this couplet rise Frankenstein's-monster-like in my consciousness, tap me on the head, and go, "Hey. Hi. Hello. Remember me? Isn't this fun?" (Listen to "Mallory-Free" here and here.)
Me and My Kind
Many years ago, a friend of mine had to write "the perfect country song" for a college course. Not being much of a writer himself, he asked me if I would help. I had never done anything like this before, so I agreed, and, two hours later, I called and asked him to come listen to his completed song. He grinned the entire time the song played (on cassette!), so I knew I'd struck the right notes. I also knew this when people began earnestly telling me after hearing it at shows that this song was the story of their lives. I never have the heart to tell them it's a parody. (Listen to "Me and My Kind" here.)
Mullet Boy Enumerates
While watching TV one day, I saw a guy with a mullet in a local commercial count something off on his fingers, and the universe gifted me with the phrase "mullet boy enumerates." I wrote this down in my list of titles and didn't return to it until I consulted the list seeking a title for the song that became "Life-Size Stencils" (whose lyrics provided no obvious title) and remembered it was there. A few nights later, I decided to make myself write "Mullet Boy Enumerates," which is a relatively rare occurrence as I typically wait for inspiration to strike. At any rate, I turned on my amp, strapped on the PRS, and started playing. Thirty minutes later, it was done, and I still have the notepad sheets of paper where I scribbled the lyrics and song details because it was all coming to me so fast. It's been one of my favorites ever since, especially the banging midsection riffs and the lines "Harried girl matriculates / She's taken her last quiz on BSE / Yet she still hates / The Crate-and-Barrel types with / Concrete longitudes." (Listen to "Mullet Boy Enumerates" here and here.)
The Nose Hairs Burn
Is autumn most people's favorite season? I feel like it is, but I also recall a time in my life when I felt like I was alone in this sentiment. This song, to that end, is a paean to fall, which for me smelled like crisped and fallen leaves, cut cedar, and woodsmoke. It felt like the suddenly cooler temperatures singing my nasal passages after months of warm, humid breathing. It felt like kneeling in the front and back yards, picking up those leaves alone in my old blue handed-down sweatshirt, living in my head, and reflecting on being an awkward, hormonal preteen crushing on girls who would never look at me let alone know my name. It sounded like chainsaws on said cedar and like Keith Jackson calling college football games on ABC. The song is unusually brief, just like the fleeting nature of everything I just described.
Rader, Fish, and Kermode
For my oeuvre, this is the ultimate word-association exercise, conjured by three lines on a course syllabus for Form and Theory of Fiction or something like that. The three lines represented consecutive topics for this Monday-Wednesday-Friday class, which were the literary critics Rader, Fish, and Kermode. This triumvirate of names struck me as an excellent song title, so I tapped into my general grousiness with old, pontificating, white-male theorists and created a childish set of words impervious to interpretation. (Listen to "Rader, Fish, and Kermode" here and here.)
Register 5
Back in 1988-1989, Craig Smith and some friends of his wrote a spoof of Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" that contains one of the all-time brilliant rewrites: "'Cause I'm a bagboy / On a shopping cart I ride / And I'm wanted / At Register 5." Skeleton Crew played this version countless times back in the day, and then the spoof got shelved when we disbanded. However, at a solo gig in perhaps 1996, I was piddling around between songs and drifted into this chorus, which elicited a huge amount of laughter from the crowd. I immediately decided to resurrect it, but I only had access to the chorus and a few other details from the original rewrite — "It's all the same / Only the prices change"; "I stalk these aisles / A loaded price gun at my side"; and, of course, "I've seen a million cleanups / And I've mopped them all" — so I rewrote the rest. Audience members who hear the song clearly and get the joke usually love it and never fail to sing Richie Sambora's backup part ("And I'm wanted [wanted...]"); those who don't hear it clearly and / or don't get the joke become either confused or angry, including the drunk gal at Hal and Mal's in Jackson, MS who screamed "YOU'RE SINGING IT WRONG!" all the way through. Ah, memories... (Listen to "Register 5" here.)
So Help Me Something
I imagine it's often difficult for a songwriter to identify one favorite out of their own work, but for me it's surprisingly easy. This song hits a near-perfect combination of melodicism, lyrical inventiveness, chunky guitar riffs, and simplicity. It began with the title phrase as a smartass, atheist-agnostic version of "So help me God" and developed from there into a sort-of tableau showing two struggling lovers ultimately deciding that the long-standing dance they do (read that wording again) is actually worth it. The pounding, down-stroked G and C power chords owe a large debt to Guided by Voices and in particular to the song "My Kind of Soldier," while the sleazy G-F-G-F-E-F-G riff in the final two verses comes more or less whole from the obscure GBV track "James Riot." I'm probably too proud of the lyrics, in part because they tell an unusually (for me) linear story and in part because they're just high quality. Extra points for my sly T.S. Eliot "Prufrock" paraphrase: "In this room the women come and go (no / Talk of Michelangelo, though)." Audiences respond very well to this song, including the acoustic version that I play much more regularly. (Listen to "So Help Me Something" here and here.)
Sometimes a Ghost Is All You’ve Got
Track 3 of the "Sparkler" album. Here's another one I like a lot, a linear story of a troubled relationship told from one partner's blinders-on perspective. The passage "I'd treat you like a queen / If only you would show me something / Royal or wise" is one of my best ever, devastating though it may be. I've always harbored dreams of hearing the Dixie Chicks or Kacey Musgraves or Brandi Carlisle cover this, so maybe their people will come calling at some point. (Listen to "Sometimes a Ghost Is All You've Got" here and here.)
Spasmatron
Here's another unicorn, a song I wrote collaboratively, this time with Mississippi indie-rock legend Gordon Garretson (lately of The Delicate Cycle). While he and I were in Men from Nantucket together, he gave me the music for this song, saying he couldn't seem to come up with lyrics he liked and that I could do something with it if I wished. As with "I Carry Whiskey..." above, the music caromed around in my head for a while only to have inspiration strike like lightning while I was driving and thus wholly indisposed. In this instance, my wife and older daughter (we were but a trio then) were asleep in the car with me during a nighttime trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in summer 1998, so, in an attempt to entertain myself, I started brainstorming around this song when the lyrics just started flowing full-force. We had stopped in Hattiesburg prior to this moment, and the drive from there to the coast is about 1.5 hours, during which I literally wrote every word of this song and sang them silently in my head over and over and over so as not to forget. When we got to our hotel, I carried my daughter and our luggage up to our room and immediately scribbled all these lyrics down on hotel stationery (no smartphones in those days, kids). The lyrics, for what it's worth, paint a very specific picture of overly enthusiastic dancers listening to a band in a bar. We played this song in Men from Nantucket for a few months until we disbanded, and it eventually became track 2 on A Thing Like Any Other. (Listen to "Spasmatron" here and here.)
Sprung
I wrote this instrumental in the springtime, which is one inspiration for the title. The other inspiration is the colloquial meaning of "sprung," used to describe someone who's wholly infatuated with another person. (Listen to "Sprung" here.)
Swimming Herward
This one begins with a riff I wrote in 1993-94 while a whole lotta grunge churned in my head and ultimately became one of the musically heaviest songs I've written thus far despite being mostly devoid of traditional crunchy power-chord riffs. The lyrics took me an unusually long time to write because I was constructing a world based on the John Barth story "Night-Sea Journey." It eventually became the first song on A Thing Like Any Other and is the de facto title track as it contains the album-title phrase itself as its first line. (Listen to "Swimming Herward" here and here.)
Swing on By
Track 6 on the "Sparkler" album and yet another of which I'm especially fond. The music is bright and upbeat and thus neatly offsets a tale of small-town despair, told through the eyes of someone who's never left this small town and who, in increasingly pleading tones, asks a former denizen to spend more time back in their joint hometown. I pride myself on writing from a gender-neutral or gender-fluid perspective, and this song is probably the best example of this. In my own head, I cast the story with two males, but I'm hopeful it can apply to any combination of humans. FYI, I performed this in a writing workshop once and made a friend cry with the line "It's the small-town scars that take longest to heal." The trauma in me honors the trauma in you. (Listen to "Swing on By" here and here.)
That Kind of Funny
In 2003-04, my family and I were all about They Might Be Giants' album No! The opening track, "Fibber Island," has a couplet that goes, "Here on Fibber Island we hide mittens in our hair / You might need to stare to see the mittens in our hair." Everything about this idea and these lines is hilarious to me (especially the winking panache of an identical rhyme), but it doesn't actually make me laugh out loud, which is a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: e.g., something can strike me as so funny and brilliantly conceived that I'm kind of in awe and I just gape instead of laugh, or an idea can hit me in such a way that I go "Huh, that's neat" but, again, I don't really laugh. "Fibber Island" is a combination of both examples, and while walking around the house singing this song to myself, I literally said out loud, "It's funny but not that kind of funny." Perhaps not surprisingly, "that kind of funny" stuck in my craw as a great song title, and it was only a few days later when I wrote the song in one nearly-stayed-up-all-night sitting. The story is another fairly straightforward struggling-couple tale; the bridge and guitar solo rank among my best work, imo, as does the passage "Because the lights are on, but we’ve both gone outside / Because the bravest souls still need a place to hide / From stubborn people who / Don’t so much cry as swallow hard," in part due to some sneaky enjambment. I also snuck in an Antigone reference, and I'll give you a crisp $5 bill if you can find it. (Listen to "That Kind of Funny" here and here.)
Tomorrow Wants to Extend
When I find it, I'll post a photo that speaks more eloquently than what I say here, but, until then: I wrote this song directly from the title (a regular occurrence), which I found scribbled on the back of a folder. The crazy thing is how I found this scribbling. I was in my office grading papers one day and leaned back to take a mini-break. I had my hands behind my head with my eyes initially closed, but when I opened them I was looking at the bottom of a stack of papers yet to be graded (or maybe I was done with these?), and on the bottom of this stack was a folder containing a student's work. The lower one-fourth of the folder's back side hung out past the shelf edge, and on this visible part of the folder was a note that seemed to be about calling someone back: a name, a phone number, and the phrase "tomorrow wants to extend." I stayed in that slightly supine position for probably two solid minutes staring at this unbelievably evocative phrase before I added it to my list. I should say that this song — a Green Day-ish power-pop playground telling the story of two druggies hanging out (literally) at a beach and waxing narcotically philosophical — like much of what I've written, is not autobiographical or based on firsthand participation / experience; in other words, I just made it all up. I also still have the folder containing the scribbled phrase. (You can hear "Tomorrow Wants to Extend" as the last song in this live Persians' set.)
U.V.A.
There's enough to say about this song that I created its own page. (Listen to "U.V.A." here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Welcome
This is track 1 on the "Sparkler" album and is the spark (heh) that lit this particular project's fuse. It's a song with a pronounced attitude, which is not something I think I've ever thought or said about any of my own output until right now. The main riff is very simple but is perhaps more powerful as a result. The internal riffs are muscular and occasionally go in sudden, unexpected directions. The lyrics invite listeners in, warn them about (among other things) living unexamined lives, and then conclude with a more focused version of carpe diem: "When you die / Leave behind more than your remains." (Listen to "Welcome" here and here.)
When I Grow Down
The opening track from the Rage EP is a big, angry shout into the void about the horrors of conformity. Its title stems from something a friend said after a class one day: "Ugh, I can't stand [so-and-so]. When I grow down, I want to be just like him." I was struck by the phrase and asked my friend "What did you just say?" Their reply: "You heard me." Onto my list went the phrase, and I wrote the song over the next few weeks. I know I was incredibly proud of these lyrics just after I completed them and especially after Skeleton Crew began playing it live to enthusiastic audience response, but, try as I might, I find it difficult to get myself back into that headspace of pride. When I think about the germ of this song (i.e., the vocals and guitar), I mainly think how juvenile the whole thing sounds, from the ham-handed and all-too obvious lyrics to the overly dramatic and even-more obvious chord changes (Tim's hi-hat-and-bass-drum intro is phenomenal, though). But believe it or not, I'm not actually criticizing or dismissing the song — I'm just acknowledging my own growth as a songwriter, especially considering this is the second song with lyrics I ever wrote (after "U.V.A.") at the decidedly unsophisticated age of 19. After all, as Barney famously said, "Growing, we do it every day." (Listen to "When I Grow Down" here and here.)