under the cold and darkly sky / you trip the light and go…
the cars were my fav growing up. their records and lateral solo projects not only will come with me to any desert island, they are my desert island — if i had to choose one island.
ric ocasek catalysed my desire and urgency both to play the electric guitar and to write songs. all-lowercase, overdriven-jangle, and quirky-jerk, yet endearing, intelligent, and accessible, ocasek and the cars became my crash course in how to bring depth to “disposable” pop; how melody married to meaning could still court the coolest girl in class.
more importantly over the long-arc of my teenage daydreams, some of which linger to this day, the cars’ music spoked me out into innumerable adventures in sonic discovery. riding with the cars, i found (among many more) roxy music, david bowie, and t-rex in the backseat; robert fripp, steve reich, and john cage in the side-view; buddy holly, the byrds, and tom petty in the passenger seat; and new order, blondie, suicide, the cure, and eventually the ramones, the replacements, and much of what i’ve loved since in the way way back, crouched flat out of sight of the driver.
to an intelligent kid on the fringes of cool, ocasek and the cars said, “c’mon, man, the fringe is the cool. one foot in, one foot out — that fine line — that’s the place to be.”
i’m the american misfit kid / still wondering what i did / i’m on the inside, taking a fast ride…
throughout my songwriting life, co-opting ric’s icy reserve, black leather smirk, and reverence for poetic-yet-stuctured rock ’n roll let me embrace any style without care or ambition in my own music.
in a little structure we can find freedom. learning to break with structure comes later, and makes you comfortable as an iconoclast.
alienation is the craze…
ocasek’s passing on 15 Sep 2019 saddened me, though i never met him, never worked with him, never knew him outside of my own context of almost-lifelong innocent-obsession, deep-inspiration, and distant-admiration.
i’m careful not to cry out loud (or post stock pictures with sad-emoji captions) at the deaths of people I know, let alone people i don’t know, IRL. that said, that’s okay if it works for you. i’ll hit like buttons on my friends’ memorial postings, with no irony.
sometimes you can’t help get emotional, thinking of connections a passed artist’s work threaded into your life.
when the dance night flies / and the broadway screams / connect up with me…
in december 2016, we put our dog Sterling to sleep in our living room, to a david bowie mix on shuffle. bowie died in january that year, and it all seemed fitting. now, i can’t listen to absolute beginners, the track that randomly came on as Sterling drifted off, without losing my shit. i can’t even write about it here, can’t even think about that song, without a deep-breath pause to hold back tears.
but that melodic association’s about Sterling, not bowie.
you’re emotion in motion, my magical potion…
along the same lines now, with ocasek’s death came another spectral transition, of a similar, though more distant, cosmic force to Sterling that traveled astride me over time.
what’s left of them, fortunately, will never die.
in the ethereal afterglow of their spirits, i can still return to a state of all potential and no past, with a wide-eyed worldview that, for better or worse, believed life was malleable enough to coax in my direction from sheer will.
beneath the stars / all souls are lucky…
Luna, our current companion, btw, is the dog in these photos. she is a reluctant model, but as patient with me as Sterling was.
let the photos behold, let them show what they want…
on 16 september 2019, the day after ocasek died, i plugged in my guitar and mic for the first time in a month, and hit a record button for the first time in a year.
since returning to new york city last june from an extended california sojourn, i have made no recordings, written only two tracks, and found scant musical and literary inspiration in my immediate surroundings. life has curved sharp in 2019.
unexpected reckonings. fleeting-at-best, illusory-at-worst successes.
life is as living does.
i always claw out with creativity. this time, tho, seems harder. not sure why. could be this age. my age. age-old curses. could be the mirror never lies.
dancing ’neath the stars and the strife / going through the motions of life… the flowers of evil / will surely grow…
my new york city’s changed, too. it’s not the warholian bohemia that welcomed ocasek’s buoyant darkness when he decamped from boston to manhattan all those years ago. walking the city’s surface deterioration, surrounded by unrelenting collisions and widening gaps between manmade, systemic misery and negligent, indifferent opulence, you know new york will never be new york again.
then again, maybe it’s as it always mostly was, and i was just fortunate to live here for the last 20 years in an anomalous, halcyon blip of progressive serenity.
either way, while this city owns my tomorrow, it can’t touch my someday.
the good life is just a dream away…
thing is, tho, even after an “escape” or a “clean break,” nothing resolves. except pop song choruses (one reason i love to write pop songs). ric’s songs reveled in resolutions.
and IRL “codas” are a fade-out, however, most of the time. very few people go out for good in a fireball.
the passing of heroes always begs reflection that daydreams come with expiration dates, too. when dreams die before you, regrets are more than willing to fill the vacuum.
well i think of you when i dramatize / the things we never did / and i think of you when i’m flyin’ / or when I’m feelin’ just like a kid…
when i hit “record” the day after ocasek’s death, a mournful version of my best friend’s girl poured out. as i played, i tried to sort out an alien sense of loss welling up from the fretboard. like i said earlier, it’s rare for me to lament on (or revel in) anyone’s passing, let alone in public — and let let alone to grieve in public about a stranger.
in many ways, even just cutting a cars cover song the day after ric ocasek died felt as the musical equivalent of instagramming a stock photo of him with a sad emoji caption. sharing it now, which i’m about to do, feels a bit, well, silly. yet, still, feels necessary. can’t explain, other than i’m driven.
all catharsis is tinged with selfishness, anyway.
the dead don’t mourn. grief is a one way street.
you weep for you.
who’s gonna come around / when you break?…
there are four songwriters whose deaths, if i am lucky enough to outlive them all, will have thrown me into a cycle of self-reflective sadness. ocasek and tom petty are already gone. ray davies and paul westerberg are still around.
i strum their songs all the time to myself. to calm. to sleep. to salve the sense of time passing.
playing covers is also a means to repay artistic debts to an inspiration, as much as it might cast me as a wannabe.
at the same time, every musician starts out as a cover band.
yeah, you hang on tight / (and you’re running around / with your face in the ground) / like it was your last right…
through the years, i’ve recorded dozens of covers, but only released three: george harrison’s isn’t it a pity (on my 2007 release stay home vs. the love shoppings), the postal service’s such great heights (on my 2013 release :^D), and the psychedelic furs’ the ghost in you (as a spotify single in 2010).
harrison’s track cemented the message of a record that told stories of the struggle to find spiritual centering in a post-kindness world. i couldn’t imagine that record without that track now. the recording was a series of live full tracks laid over each other. in true lo-fi fashion, you can hear my apartment radiator knocking in the more quiet moments. i loved that.
the postal service track was one that me and a few friends got obssessed with on a road trip down the east coast in 2012. the fun i had on that trip — one of the best unadulterated adult good times i’ve had — comes through on the electrified version i coaxed out of my limited virtuosity, again layering a host of live run throughs to create the recording. also as with the harrison track, i can’t conceive of the record without its inclusion.
the furs’ track was a moment where i channeled an homage to my 1980s highwire days into 6 minutes of jangle-crash. i drew an awful rendering of john hughes for its cover that i now wish i could take back, but re-releasing on spotify is a pain in the ass, and i still think it stands as a decent rendition of a great song, and an encapsulation of everything i loved about my idyllic suburban new jersey teenage space.
mostly, though, i use cover recordings as a means to explore and mine processes and attitudes — to try to get inside the heads of artists and tracks i’ve admired. so except for the 3 above, they all sit on hard drives gathering digital dust. everything from the sonics’ you’ve got your head on backwards to kris kristofferson’s i may smoke too much to the cure’s just like heaven. at some point, maybe i’ll release the ones i secured rights for.
in many ways, i’d like to think it takes courage to play or record cover songs. you allow avenues of comparison to your own work, with work that most likely has reached further and deeper into wider audiences than your work ever will.
showing up to a party you’re not invited to is always a risk. if you’re selective and creative about what you cover, though, those performances can inform and refract on your own influences and development, as i hope the ones i’ve released do.
playing covers live is a bit different than recording them, too. with an audience, covers can complete circles in a performance, fill in narrative gaps with collective free association. as a performer, you can take people on a journey through their own memories so as to bring them back to you.
in early 2018, i played a cover of tom petty’s walls (circus version) at a local solo gig. a few months removed from petty’s passing, i pulled out a floaty arrangement i had played only to myself for years, never recorded. sharing it with a live crowd in that moment felt right. i needed no catharsis, just to inspire a moment of collective joy and memories of the good times that petty fueled.
recording covers, however, is a private conversation between you and the artist you’re covering. eventually, if you release it, a crowd gets to eavesdrop on that conversation.
my my best friend’s girl performance was not an interaction between me and an audience. only between me and ocasek, in my cluttered home office / studio, driven somewhat (in retrospect) by pure cathartic intention. no one told me to do it. but i had to do it.
jackie, what took you so long…
it always flipped me out a bit that my best friend’s girl was one of the last songs kurt cobain played live (in march 1994 nirvana opened their final concert with it). what did cobain see in his penultimate month of suicidal ideation inside ocasek’s jangled tale of lost love, blithe envy, and never-faded lust?
with where the song took me, i saw not only into ocasek’s head, but also a little bit into cobain’s head.
“she used to be mine.”
yeah, yeah, yeah
in many ways, ric’s world — the cars’ world — used to be mine, too.
RIP, ric.
i’m in touch with your world / and nobody’s gonna buy it / it’s such a lovely way to go.
