I got a call from somebody at a groovy box-set company; they’d acquired the Warner Bros. catalog. Or Warner Bros. acquired them?
She asked if I’d be interested in doing a Soul Coughing best-of.There’s only three albums: it would be odd. Thanks, goodbye.
She called the next day to clarify: they were going to do a Soul Coughing best-of.
She said her boss told her to pick a band from the Warner Bros. stack. Anything she liked. She’d been an assistant; this was a promotion.
She sent a track list: almost entirely songs from our first album, Ruby Vroom.
Very cool, thanks, but if it’s a compilation, we could cover all three albums, and some soundtracks?
“But those are the best songs,” she said.
She wanted to call it Paleolithic Eon—a lyric from the song “Sugar Free Jazz.”
I heard it as fossilized.
“But, no, let me send you this graphic I had our designer do. The way those words look together.”
No, I really don’t like it. No—you don’t have to send—no, seriously, I’ve made up my—no.
I agreed to write liner notes—reluctantly—if they agreed not to run them past my ex-bandmates. Soul Coughing was wall-to-wall opposition: when I’d suggest something, they’d become enraged and insist on the opposite. They’d cut their own jugulars and hope I bled to death.
I offered to bow out. Terrifying, because my ex-bandmates’ stories disincluded me: they’d told interviewers that they’d already been a band, playing shows in clubs, and I was a random kid who begged to join.
Who were they gaslighting? Themselves?
One had a MySpace with pictures of other artists we’d worked with—and TV people, random celebrities—without me in them. What did they do—run back into the room with a camera after I split?
She didn’t want my ex-bandmates. She wanted me.