7
THE FLOWERS OF ROMANCE
WHEN I WAS fourteen years old, I made a list for my parents of the records I wanted for Christmas. The first record on that list was The Flowers of Romance by PiL. Reviews I’d read included words like “confrontational” and “heretical” and phrases like “not music.” Plus, I was a fan of Johnny Rotten, who on this record was calling himself John Lydon, so I was intrigued. I never expected my parents to actually buy it. It was like asking for a pony, or claiming the only gift you want is world peace. Somehow, implausibly, they had found it at the mall and it was wrapped and waiting for me under the tree on Christmas morning.
I sat on the floor and studied the album cover—which featured an angry-looking woman with a rose in her mouth, holding a heavy kitchen masher like she intended to hit somebody with it.
“Hey, Jeff,” my dad yelled from across the room. “We need to liven this place up. Why don’t you throw on that new record we got you and play it for everybody?”
Our house was full of family for the holidays. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmothers. Even a few neighbors had stopped by to say hello. They had been eating plates of potato salad and glazed ham and drinking and smoking and loud-talking at one another, and I’d been carefully avoiding interaction. Now all eyes were on me, waiting for something to happen. I nodded and slowly carried my record over to the family turntable. I slowly lowered the tone arm onto side one and braced myself. I had no idea what was going to come out of the speakers, but I knew John Lydon was Johnny Rotten and Johnny Rotten had been in the Sex Pistols, and I knew there wasn’t a single note of the Sex Pistols that I would want to be dropping the needle on at that moment.
Electronic insects? Loud snare cracks . . . “Aaaalllaaah!” John Lydon began ululating. “Aaaaallaah!” “Doooom sits in glooom . . .” Lopsided drumming. “Deeeeestroy the iiiin-faaaah-dellll!”
Wow, did that kill the mood, instantly, with extreme prejudice.
“What in God’s name is that?” my father screamed. “Boy, are you trying to kill me?”
He hopped over presents and piles of wrapping paper strewn about our living room floor and yanked the needle across the record—rwiiiiiiieeeeeeppppp—which oddly sounded like a part of the song.
It’s one of my favorite records. I still have that exact copy, with the scratch across it from my dad’s Christmas rampage. It’s a document of a perfect musical experience. In a way, that was all I ever needed from The Flowers of Romance, just enough to get a sense of its power before it was ripped away. The potential of the rest of the album might have been even more powerful, left to my imagination after that.
It’s similar to how I sometimes prefer demos to a finished version of a song, especially when it’s a song of my own. I love that moment in the life of a song that is all possibility and potential. When I can imagine all of the different directions it could go. I find that just as enjoyable, maybe more enjoyable, than when it’s fully realized. A finished record is just . . . finished.
When a song is finished, and it has its final coat of paint, it makes me sad. I mourn all the choices I didn’t make. I can still hear the overdubs I didn’t add, the notes that were left out, the guitar parts that are just all wrong. That’s when I realize I’ve ruined it. That’s not false modesty. Any song that ever originated in a person’s imagination and was translated into notes and words is inherently inferior to its potential. When a song is rattling around my subconscious, it’s still limitless, which means I haven’t found a way to fuck it up yet.
Once a song goes out into the world, that’s when it really gets ruined. Other people get to listen to it and make it worse, by misreading intentions and judging and weighing in with opinions. I’m right there with them. Not just my songs, but all songs. People ruin everything. My songs are never as good as they were in my head when they had limitless forms and belonged only to me. It’s a leap of faith every time to share them. I do it willingly, because if I held on to my songs I’d eventually be the one to break the spell and I’d be the one ruining them. And that’s the only thing I can think of that could be worse than other people’s opinions.
MELODY IS KING. Songs are ruled by melody. I believe that melody, more than lyrics, is what does all the heavy lifting emotionally. When I write lyrics, or when I adapt a poem to a song, my goal is to interfere as little as possible with whatever spell is being cast by the melody. At the same time, I hope—at best—that the words enhance the song somehow, add meaning, or clarify and underline what the melody is making me feel.
I think that’s why I often don’t bother with lyrics for a long time, because I don’t want them to get in the way of the emotion coming from the instrumental track. In fact, one of the primary ways I write lyrics is to sing and record vocal sounds without words—vowels and consonants that sound like what I hope the lyrics will sound like. I call them “mumble tracks.” I’ve gotten pretty good at making it sound like I’m singing actual words. So much so that a lot of times when I play people a track at this stage, they’ll think they’re listening to finished lyrics. I keep them mixed really low, so they’re almost a struggle to hear, but just loud enough to make out the rhythmic phrasing and melody. I almost always prefer to have a finished track before I commit to a lyric. So having a mumble track in place is an easier way to keep working without losing sight of the bigger picture.
To translate a mumble track, typically, I might take a rough mix out to our cabin in Michigan and sit around for hours listening without trying to think too much, just writing down the first words that pop into my head that fit the meter. Once I’ve transcribed everything line by line, I’ll take a look at what I’ve got. The lyrics at that stage are often pretty meaningless and nonsensical—though sometimes they’re not, which fascinates me.
The next steps after translating are to add however many more rounds of revisions and reshaping it takes until something coherent begins to come across. Usually, there has to be an image in my mind that guides me through the song—some narrative, even when it’s impressionistic or fractured. For me, that visual connection is important—I have to be able to see something to remember it. I think this process works because it makes use of how our brains are wired to make sense of things. When you listen to a mumbling voice, your brain wants to hear words, the same way it wants to see animals or faces when we stare at clouds, because our brains are sense-making machines and we have a low tolerance for ambiguity. Sometimes I have to listen over and over again just to make out a single word. Other times whole sentences appear at once; they come like slips of the tongue.
If I sing something like “Shay clom fum-ah dif tansh,” by the eighth time I play that phrase I might hear it as “Blum blum from a distance.” Oh, hey, that sounds right. So I keep listening till I stumble onto the first part of that line. I’ll eventually get to the feeling of “Well, that’s obviously what I always meant to sing there”—which is strange and wonderful, because no words were intended at all. But I do think it means something. You’re not just playing Mad Libs with a melody. It’s a process where you trust your subconscious, and you allow it to come up with ideas and phrases that don’t need to make sense to your rational mind right away.
I think I’m drawn to this approach to writing lyrics because it keeps me attached to a song in its early state, the way it was before I’d thought it through and figured out what it was. I don’t feel like I’m always trusted to make the best choices consciously. I trust myself enough to commit to a process, see what gets made, and respond with feeling and intuition, but when my ego gets involved I know I’m just going to cater to it, in other words, avoid embarrassment, be clever, show off. There’s nothing that makes me crazy like a song that just wants to be clever.
It’s a type of writing I’ve tried hard to avoid, where you can almost picture the songwriter sitting in a café and pulling out a notebook. “What rhymes with vestibule?” they wonder aloud, tapping a pencil against their lips. And then, inspiration! “Aha, cesspool! Perfect!” That mental image breaks the spell for me. Music is most magical when everyone can lose the burden of self and be put back together as a part of something bigger, or other. I think of it as egos blending, singer into musician into listener. Something like that feels right to me. Anyway, it’s something worth aiming for.
THE PAINTER AND photographer Chuck Close once said that younger artists too often sit around and wait for inspiration to strike while “the rest of us just show up and get to work.” I assume by “the rest of us” he means anyone making art when they’re old enough to have realized inspiration is way more likely to come around when you already have your tools out. A pen on paper, a brush on canvas, a guitar in your hands. I’m that old now, but I’ve believed in that kind of work ethic for longer than I’ve been old.
I try to make something new, something that wasn’t there when I woke up, by the end of every day. It doesn’t have to be long or perfect or good. It just has to be something. I used to fill up notebooks with poems and lyrics, now I do it with my phone. Sometimes I’ll give myself a time limit of no more than twenty minutes to write and record a song into my phone.
I used to assume that the people who were great at writing songs were just more talented than everybody else, and that they always had a very clear understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and the intent behind it. As I’ve gotten older I’ve concluded that this is rarely the case. The people who seem the most like geniuses are not geniuses. They’re just more comfortable with failing. They try more and they try harder than other people, and so they stumble onto more songs. It’s pretty simple. People who don’t pick up a pencil never write a poem. People who don’t pick up a guitar and try every day don’t write a whole lot of great songs. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
Too much ambition gets a bad rap in my line of work. If you grew up in the late twentieth century loving or wanting to be a part of the punk or indie rock scene, you were expected to at least give the appearance of not caring and giving the least possible amount of effort. Of course, it’s a lie. Does anyone think Devo just happened with minimum effort?! The Ramones?! Pavement?! I’d be willing to bet every band you’ve ever heard of worked hard and had crazy ambition. Maybe it went away at some point or they got content to coast, but trust me, at some point they worked their asses off and dreamed grand and triumphant dreams. Listen, it’s a cop-out to hide ambition and pretend aspirations are shameful. It’s a way to protect yourself. Preemptive sour grapes.
Here’s an aspirational thought I’ve had about what I do that kind of turns Chuck Close’s quote inside out. Sometimes I think it’s my job to be inspired. I work at it. That’s what I do that most resembles work. It seems to me that the only wrong thing I could do with whatever gifts I’ve been given as a musician or an artist would be to let curiosity die. So I try to keep up with other people’s creative output. I read and I listen. I’m lucky that’s what I get to do with my time—keeping myself excited about the world and not being discouraged when it loses its spark. By now I’ve been doing it long enough to say with some confidence that if you can remain open to it and you’re not afraid to call it work sometimes, inspiration is limitless.
Back in the late nineties, I came across The Conet Project. I saw it in the record store and thought, “Huh, a CD with nothing but Cold War–era spy transmissions sent over old-school shortwave radios. This looks cool,” and I grabbed it. I listened to it in the car on the way home, and I was hooked. The voices were so eerie, like long-dead ghosts trying one more time to make contact but not really sure anymore how to use language or even who they’d been trying to reach in the first place.
I kept expecting the novelty to wear off, but I kept coming back to it. My mind kept wandering back to Conet. These recordings of cryptic and indecipherable shortwave radio messages, which may or may not have been encrypted orders to undercover spy operatives, were as fascinating to me as anything being made by actual musicians using actual instruments. I found it satisfying much in the same way as my dad’s album of steam engine recordings was satisfying.
I wanted to know why it was so hypnotic to me. Why could I listen to hours of this stuff, even though I had no clue what any of them were saying? That question became the foundation for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate in The Conet Project, it’s not all that different to me than my own efforts to communicate. Most of the conversations I’ve been involved in during my adult life are just slightly less awkward versions of The Conet Project. I’ve been to dinner parties and other social situations where I can’t even pretend to get with the small talk. I want to be nice, and I want to be there, but I’m not on that wavelength. I can’t get there. I can’t just abruptly turn to the person next to me and say, “Where do you think we go when we die?” Even though that’s what I’m thinking. That’s what’s going through my head. And it feels like an attempt at real communication to me. Everything else, well, there’s such a fine line between saying to somebody, “The Cubs are doing pretty well this season, huh?” and making uninterrupted eye contact while informing them in a blank-faced monotone, “I AM A NORMAL MALE HUMAN, I AM A NORMAL MALE HUMAN.”
Every time somebody asks me, “How ’bout the Cubs?” I want to respond with “Yeah, the Cubs, they’re going to die someday. Do you ever think about that? All of them. All of them. Rizzo. Bryant. The one with the goatee. The other ones. The entire team. Some of them probably soon, you don’t know. They could be dying right now while we’re sitting here making conversation about baseball. Death is lurking.”
Susie always wants me to come with her to these type of gatherings and she almost always regrets it.
I’VE CARRIED AROUND a lot of books over the years that I’ve never bothered to read.
I’m not that way with all books. Just the books that I’m waiting for, anticipating some turning point when I’ll be ready for what’s inside. Other books I don’t feel are necessarily to be read. Sometimes, I think it can be just as inspiring to imagine what a book is about. I might crack it open and read a sentence or two to get a feel for the language, but I don’t always need a larger context. I don’t need to read them from start to finish. My relationship with them is mostly my imagination of their potential. I’m guilt-free when it comes to books. I make an honest effort to read what I know is important, but I don’t grade myself. Life is too short to pretend you finished a book or understood it. Who cares?
I suspect that almost anyone claiming to have read Finnegans Wake is a liar, but it sure is a fun book to carry around, just feeling its weight in your hands. That’s a powerful thing, to have access to the mind of James Joyce right at your fingertips. I didn’t need all of it. It’s exciting enough to open to any page, find some crazy long sentence and see what kind of sense you can make of it.
Books are my companions. I love books and I’m always in the middle of several at a time. I don’t think of them as mountains to climb, or chores to accomplish for some notch in my belt or a badge to buff. Sometimes I’ll read a book about a book without even once feeling like a fraud for not having read the book the book is about. You understand. Sometimes I’ll read them with a highlighter, marking phrases that excite my lyric-loving mind. Otherwise I lose the plot. William H. Gass, who has written more than a few of my favorite sentences, has turned up in some of my songs. There would be no “Something in my veins / Bloodier than blood” without his genius.
Bits and pieces from Henry Miller have found their way into my lyrics, especially while I was working on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. “Quiver like a toothache . . . When we were still innocent enough to listen to poets . . .” It’s amazing how many things I’ve been singing for years that I’ll find highlighted when I revisit the warped City Lights paperbacks I traveled with circa Summerteeth. I’m a little embarrassed to admit how much of the imagery from “Ashes of American Flags” is sprinkled throughout the first 150 pages of Tropic of Cancer. None of it is in the same order or context as the song, but the language is almost all there.
“I assassin down the avenue” from “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” doesn’t really mean anything. It comes from a writing exercise. A lot of my lyrics originate this way. You could take, say, all the verbs from an Emily Dickinson poem and set them side by side with all the nouns from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and see what happens. It might start as gibberish, but it’s amazing how hard it is to put words next to each other without some meaning being generated. It would have been so much harder to memorize some of my more abstract lyrics if they had remained just gibberish.
Originally the line was “I assassinate down the avenue,” it started as an exercise where you make a list of ten or twelve verbs that you may associate with a vocation, in this case “a spy,” and a list of random nouns. For the next step you take a pencil and draw lines randomly between the two, until something surprising happens in the way they interact. Can I assassinate an avenue? Can the avenue assassinate? When we’re left to our own devices, verbs and nouns tend to pair up in clichéd ways, but when a verb is acting on an unfamiliar noun it can really be exciting. It stimulates the language. In the end the noun “assassin” sang better within the meter of the song and, for me, having it used as a verb made it somehow even more disorienting and evocative. I love it when words wake up and sound new again.
I have an easier time explaining the process of writing lyrics than I do explaining what they mean. Do people really need to know? Does it make the songs more enjoyable? Does it really matter if what they think a song is about is vastly different than what I think it’s about? I assume part of the reason I feel that way is because when I listen to other people’s songs, I’m never particularly interested in knowing what lyrics are “supposed” to be “about,” especially after I have already found them to mean something to me.
Knowing this about myself might have given me the confidence not to sweat being too clearly understood lyrically. Most songs are open to interpretation anyway, so why not leave a few more gaps for the listener to fill in with their imagination? The trick I was trying to teach myself at the time was how to find a balance between leaving enough room for someone to pour themselves into a song and giving them something concrete and engaging enough to want to be intimately collaborating with you on meaning. “You Are My Sunshine” is the perfect balance to me. I’ve never come close, but that’s the ideal I’m always aspiring to. Most people think of that song as being simple and easily understood, but I don’t know anyone who agrees on exactly what it means.
After a song is created I’m really kind of done with it. I can enjoy the process of writing and recording it, but after that, it’s not something that helps me disappear anymore. It stops being useful to me as anything other than another song to write on a set list. It’s other people who give it a long or short life. Songs become vessels for other people to pour themselves into. And that’s great. That’s amazing, but that’s as far as I can go.
Unless it’s “Heavy Metal Drummer,” in which case I can tell you exactly what it’s about. It’s a reminder to myself to lighten up occasionally. That’s all. I guess a lot of my songs function this way, now that I think about it. If I have some epiphany that I’m sure I’ll eventually forget, I make a mental note to stash the basic premise in a song somewhere so I can have the lesson refreshed from time to time. In this case, I was reflecting on the sudden realization I had once while watching a heavy metal cover band at a club in St. Louis after an Uncle Tupelo show. I’m not proud to admit this, but we were snobs. Just miserable. Hanging out on the sidelines stock-still in thrift-store flannel and work boots watching the spandexed gyrations of our peers—these pimply kids with massive hair actually having a fun time and yet still convinced of our superiority. Based on what? Our inability to enjoy ourselves? That is the kind of bullshit I need to remind myself not to indulge in, with song if need be.
THANKFULLY, AT SOME point I stopped giving a shit. In a good way. I don’t mean I stopped caring about music. I stopped caring about things that don’t matter, or at least things I can’t control. For instance, I don’t have control over how someone judges a song I write. If I can entertain myself putting a song together, and several months later still care for it enough to share it with the world, and then it turns out someone takes a strong dislike to it, those are pretty low stakes. No one gets hurt. I didn’t leave a surgical sponge in someone’s abdomen. It’s okay.
I just like writing songs. It’s a natural state to me. I like to believe most people’s natural state is to be creative. It definitely was when we were kids, when being spontaneously and joyfully creative was just our default setting. As we grow we learn to evaluate and judge, to navigate the world with some discretion, and then we turn on ourselves. Creating can’t just be for the sake of creating anymore. It has to be good, or it has to mean something. We get scared out of our wits by the possibility of someone rejecting our creation.
It bugs me that we get this way. It bugs me a lot. I think just making stuff is important. It doesn’t have to be art. Making something out of your imagination that wasn’t there before you thought it up and plopped it out in your notebook or your tape recorder puts you squarely on the side of creation. You are closer to “god,” or at the very least the concept of a creator. I understand destruction can be creative, too, but I think it becomes a lot more thoughtful and intentional when you’ve allowed yourself to be a creator. I’m pretty naive, I admit, but I’ll always believe that destruction would be an impulse a lot more difficult to indulge if more people were encouraged to participate in their own tiny acts of creation.
I also kind of believe that even the greatest works of art ever created mean almost nothing individually. If a work of art inspires another work of art, I think it has fulfilled its highest duty. People look for inspiration and hope, and if you have it you share it. Not for your own glory, but because it’s the best thing you can do. It doesn’t belong to just you.
The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. “I’m content with the same old piece of wood,” he said. “I just want to find another place to pound a nail . . . Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred.” If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren’t sacred, then nobody’s songs are sacred. Nobody’s. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, “Thank god I didn’t make that song. Thank god I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank god I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world.” Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I’m writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad’s bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn’t kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.
I said this recently to my son Sammy, when we were talking about creative choices and how much weight to give other people’s opinions. I told him: “You can’t pants me anymore. I’ve had my pants taken down enough times in my life.” I meant that both figuratively and literally. I’m hard to shame by an outside opinion. Obviously, there are still things that could happen during a show that might rattle me and knock me down a peg. Somebody in the crowd could shout out, “You suck,” and it would make me feel less than enthused about myself. I’m still a person. Mostly, I’d be curious why they would bother to spend their hard-earned cash to inform me of my lameness.
Here’s what I still think about when I’m writing songs. I think about when I moved to Chicago twenty-five years ago and I was using this crappy RadioShack cassette recorder that didn’t work all that well. It was just something to get ideas down on tape so they wouldn’t disappear, but it was an awful machine. So Susie let me use her old-school Dictaphone, about the size of a dictionary. I was in love with it. It sounded so much better than you’d ever imagine, considering it was an arcane piece of clunky seventies technology. It had a plastic handle so you could carry it around like a lunch box. Susie would get cassettes from bands who wanted to play Lounge Ax, and the ones that didn’t pass muster I would confiscate and record over with my own songs. (I’m sure most of them were perfectly fine bands, and they made songs that they cared about a lot. It wasn’t personal. I promise it won’t happen again!) I’d fill up an entire tape with new material, coming up with a new tune every night as my set goal.
I’d sit in our apartment with my guitar and Susie’s gigantic Dictaphone and I’d listen to everything on the tape, whatever I’d recorded the previous nights, everything up to the blank space on the tape. Then I would imagine, “What comes next? What does the next song sound like on this album I’m making up as I go? If I was a teenager again, listening to an album in my bedroom, what would I want to hear next?” There’s so much power in that silence, just imagining what could happen but hasn’t happened yet.