First, some news: Last year was rough on drummers, from the Foo Fighters on down to us tiny indie acts. Charlie called it a drummerpocalypse, and I have no better term. The two acts I play with the most both had their drummers go on indefinite hiatus. Zach will still be contributing to Baguettes work as he is able, and he'll appear on the new record on both drums and mandolin, but for our upcoming live shows, Molly Walburn will be behind the kit. Any such transition is inevitably bittersweet; a creative ensemble is more than the sum of its parts. Considering that a global pandemic intervened, we were pretty damn lucky to get twelve years with the founding band members.

As we discussed set lists in one of the first rehearsals with Molly, someone (Charlie? probably Charlie) came up with the idea of a sadness index, plotting a song's lyrical content against its musical content. I attempted a rough graph. It's hard. Minor/slow and major/uptempo often correlate, but they don't always, and as it turns out, a lot of my minor songs are on the fast side. I also don't tend to write purely happy yay-for-love, it's-a-sunny-day lyrics. So I had to consider whether the words are sad but funny (a favorite landing spot), or whether the song describes something tragic but responds with catharsis or constructive anger (another one). 

These things are subjective, of course, so rendering them as quantitative data is a little silly. But it's interesting as a songwriting and set-building exercise. I don't think it's a coincidence that the bottom left quadrant (slow/minor/sad) contains the most songs we've never performed; we've played "White Flag," "Ghostlight" (once), "Teflon" (once), and a swamped-up version of "Negative," but that's it.  The main thing I learned (and I sort of knew it anyway) was that I lean into paradoxes—songs whose music suggests some meaning beyond the lyrics, perhaps operating against them.

I managed to set off the smoke alarm while cooking the traditional black-eyed peas this morning. It wasn't a true disaster; I just got caught up in a band chat and a little social scrolling, and the next thing I knew, a bit of pork fat had scorched and the cat was hiding while I fanned the balcony door back and forth in the cold. But if there is meaning in the tradition—and why else would we do it?—then there must be meaning in the bungling as well. It was as though life was saying, "Oh, you want luck? Well then, fucking pay attention." This is always how luck works. But it's easy to forget.

At my first-ever NYE music gig, in a mixed-arts warehouse space of the sort that has become endangered, there was a bonfire. People were invited to create a symbol of something they wanted to leave behind them in the new year, and then cast it on the fire to burn it away. Someone said it was a pagan tradition, but of course that label is so broad as to be almost meaningless. Nonetheless, I recreated that tradition for a number of years: in the fireplace, when I had one; on concrete doorsteps and balconies. Did it work? I don't know. I remember what I threw on the fire, that first year, and it is still with me more than I'd like. There are some things I've managed to leave behind. Most of the things one wants to burn, though, are too complicated to be purged by a single act. 

This winter, a friend introduced me to a variation on the fire ritual, one in which you write a number of intentions on scraps of paper and burn them at random, one a night, starting with the solstice and ending January 2 with a single intention, which you keep throughout the year. After a chaotic few years, in which rituals of destruction have felt redundant and explicit resolutions laughable, it's rather appealing to leave some intentions to chance. The mere act of writing desires as positive statements felt far more constructive than my previous approach. So, starting at the solstice, I dutifully burned a few scraps. Then I went to visit my family and left the bowl of paper here. And when I returned, Chicago was so desperately cold and windy that I couldn't bring myself to venture outside for the minute it would take to incinerate the nightly scrap. So now I have a backlog of papers to burn. One doesn't want to get too precious about a ritual from Instagram, of course, but the form does matter. If there is magic in the practice, I suspect I have consigned myself to a year in which nothing happens for a long time and then I get it done all at once. That is the opposite of healthy and sustainable. Whether it's art or intention—and for me, they're nearly synonymous—you're supposed to do a little bit every day. In returning to the practice, you remind yourself of what matters, you guide your attention, you build your own luck. 

I don't always get NYE gigs, but they're supposed to be lucky too. I've never been sure how much I believe in that superstition either. But last night's gig felt lucky, when I recognized the silhouettes of friends who'd come out to listen, when I got to meet the new booker at a venue I love, when I stayed later than I planned because the the closing act was burning up the stage with a series of songs I adore—a fire that felt communal, welcoming, not merely destructive. This, too, is the simple luck of paying attention. If you do that, it can be enough.

I have been wrestling madly with distraction lately, and it has been getting the upper hand, which usually means there's some big thing I need to do or write. (I'm fairly sure that in this case there are several such things, but I'm also genuinely overbooked and still grieving, so...those things will come when they come.) Stuff that has kept me going:

• Watching my neighbors mobilize to protect and support each other. I was able to put in some volunteer hours last week, and we collected tips for CyclingxSolidarity at last weekend's show at Gallery Cabaret. I love this city so much.
  
• Rediscovering Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series through the prequel books (which somehow I was unaware of until a couple of weeks ago?!). I'm enjoying them so far—particularly the way he explores the everyday structures and workings of his menacing authoritarian state, much as Andor did for the original Star Wars trilogy. I love a fantasy series that grapples with the very real banality of evil. And the flood in La Belle Sauvage so perfectly captures the surreal nature of a world-altering cataclysm.
  
• Speaking of floods: They Might Be Giants were live on KEXP, and of course it was delightful.
• I always enjoy Austin Kleon's thoughts on creativity, but this line, from his Tuesday newsletter, got me where I live: "Middle age is really the time, I think, that the tamped-down parts of yourself, anything you’ve ignored, any dreams you left behind, come first trickling then bursting back up out of the place you’ve put them in, and the foundation of the structure you’ve build to survive in the world and get to this point starts to get washed away."

There is plenty of other band news—a flood of it, you might say—but it merits a separate post, so we'll leave it at that. Take care of each other, friends.

Not that long after I moved here (Wikipedia informs me, rudely, that it must have been 2003) I saw the Chicago Opera Theater production of a pair of short operas, Brundibár and Comedy on the Bridge. Tony Kushner had recently given them new librettos. Maurice Sendak directed, as well as designing the sets. They were lovely. (It looks like the 2006 production had the same design, as far as I remember?)

Brundibár might best be known as the opera that was performed by children in a concentration camp. The composer, Hans Krása, was Jewish, and developed the opera with the Jewish orphanage in Prague; when the Nazis took over, Krása and nearly all of his artistic collaborators were sent to Theresienstadt. The Nazis used a performance as evidence that conditions in the camps were happy and humane. Somehow—for a while, anyway—they ignored what everyone in the audience knew: the titular villain was a stand-in for Hitler. Eventually, Krása, the children, the director, and most of the musicians and designers were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.

I have gone on making art as our country has enabled and perpetrated genocides: we need art. We need it as a respite, we need it as a source of connection and joy, we need it as a howl of outrage, we need it as a stubborn reminder of shared humanity. 

Mephisto is another Nazi-related story that has stayed with me over the years. It follows the German actor Henrik Hoefgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) as the Nazis rise to power. Hoefgen wants to make Brechtian shows on an underground black box stage; he doesn't like the Nazis. But he doesn't speak any language but German, and he doesn't think he can perform anywhere but Germany. In a decision familiar to every performer, he takes a high-profile role to pay the bills. Unfortunately, the Nazis see the performance and declare him exemplary: exactly what German theater and German actors ought to be. Suddenly his artistic career depends on his willingness to be a mascot for the Third Reich.

You have to know where you stand. You have to know what you'll do and what you won't. You have to know if you have a price.

I was in The Designated Mourner with the Right Brain Project in...oh, I guess 2006 or 2007. Wallace Shawn does not write easy work. To do it any justice, you must dig into the squirmier parts of yourself. (Roger Ebert's review of the film does a nice job of that.) Mourner is about a group of artists in an unnamed country where an unnamed totalitarian regime is coming to power. They're a familiar type of New Yorker bohemian, intellectual, arch, certain that their oblique sonnets count as political action. The regime tolerates them, until it doesn't.

You do have to go on making art. You also have to call, write, march if you can, donate if you can, triage when you must, blockade, inform yourself, inform others. And you have to know why. These three works are some of the ones that crystalized it for me.

There's a concentration camp in Florida. What are you doing about it?

This past weekend involved a productive band session based on an inefficient plan: start with the cake (another Yossy Arefi recipe), listen to recent recordings and demos, discuss ideas, and only then pick up instruments and start trying stuff. "Cake first" is the sort of idea that most management experts would probably dismiss out of hand, but it worked for us.

I've posted before about the usefulness of joking and messing around. The cake might have predisposed us to that, or that might just be what we do when we get together. Anyway, when it WAS time to play, we started by recording "Last Call" with a different feel than we'd tried in the previous session. (It's always felt like an Old 97s song, but the previous session settled into midtempo Merseybeat. Charlie said he always had Merseybeat in his brain. There were jokes about a Homer Simpson–style cutaway to reveal an old-timey animation, the Mersey Moose.) That evolved into a very fast punk version—which eventually collapsed under its own speed, but might serve as an entertaining outtake.

The point, I guess, is that messing with genre is an extremely effective way to challenge your assumptions about a piece of work. I think it might even be useful regardless of medium (change a romcom to a thriller! change a comic to a Victorian illustration! change a sonnet to a sestina!).

And if Herb makes an appearance in one of our videos, that's why. Now you know.

My sister gave me Snacking Bakes for Christmas, because she gets me, and the band tried out the Chewy Cocoa Brownies at yesterday's rehearsal for Aloft Sanctuary.

Duuuuude. These are so good. The recipe deviates from standard brownie prep in that you don't just melt the butter on the stove—you brown it before pouring it into the sugar. This recipe also uses cocoa rather than unsweetened baking chocolate (that cruelest of childhood lessons); I was afraid it would turn out too sweet, but nope—great.

Modifications: I added about a teaspoon of instant espresso powder with the cocoa. The recipe calls for half a cup of any kind of chocolate chips; I used Ghirardelli bittersweet, because I always have those around. (I would probably reduce the sugar in the batter if using a lighter chip.) Next time I want to try adding some warm spices (probably cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom), which I think would sing with the brown butter. This may become my new standard brownie.

The band gathered last night for a run-through of Friday's set at the Burlington (https://www.theburlingtonbar.com/). It was brutally cold out, and comfort was important. I tried Shilpa Uskokovic's gingerbread cake (https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/dark-chocolate-orange-gingerbread-cake, from the December 2024 Bon Appetit; no, I do not know why my browser is suddenly not allowing me to link words). Verdict: yes. Cook this and put it in your face.

I made the recipe more or less as written (with the addition of a little Chinese Five Spice, which is my default flavor enhancer on gingerbreads). Next time I will double the orange zest and add some finely chopped candied ginger, along with the grated ginger root. But I'm having a little leftover slice right now, and this cake rules.

A couple of weeks ago I started a new music notebook, which meant going through the old one to glean usable ideas for St. Jerome's. In the process I noticed a scrap in the Google doc, a chorus and most of a verse, at least a year old. The lyrical rhythm had always suggested an uptempo alt-country melody, which combined with the content to suggest a sort of cheerful nihilism I enjoyed. I thought of it as "Bottom of the Barrel" after the most recognizable line.

A few days later a couple of other lines arrived; they seemed to have their own melody, but once I thought about them in the context of "Bottom of the Barrel," everything slotted into place. A day or two after that, the bridge showed up in similar fashion. Hard to say if it counts as memory or new creation when it works like that.

Verses took a little longer (you can see at least one lousy first draft on the verso above). I asked the band for help. The exchange that followed yielded the final rhyme—Thomas's suggestion—as well as exposing an embarrassing gap in my education.

I retitled it "Last Call" and recorded a demo. Only after sending it to the band did I figure out how to strengthen a line in the second pre-chorus. So the final version is draft four, I think, depending on how we count the scraps? It's kind of fitting, for a song that's ultimately about finding meaning in a life that has unexpectedly fallen into bits and pieces. 

Here's some of the songwriting stuff that's been making me think lately. (The post is overdue, but I logged about fifteen hours of solo performance this week on top of the two day gigs, and I'm just happy to be putting anything here.)

• Ted Gioia on Sappho and the badassery of love songs. God, this is awesome. One thing Gioia mentions is the contempt that critics often have for expressions of emotion, despite the bravery and vulnerability such expressions require. (He doesn't get into the causes of that contempt, but I would bet there's a healthy amount of neo-Platonic sexism involved, the same bias that considers physical expression vulgar and dismisses the pop that teen girls enjoy.)
• Lyrics or music? Where does your ear go, what do you write first? I like hearing from other musicians on this. I rarely write a melody that doesn't come from a line of lyrics. The music is so tied to that meaning for me that I'm always a little awed when I encounter someone who can work on a melody without needing the words.
• An example of one of those people: The NYT Amplifier blog compiled a playlist of Eno tracks. (I have not yet seen the Eno movie, whose contents are digitally shuffled into different orders at different screenings. One of the most interesting classes I ever took was on narrative structure—how the order of the telling, a.k.a. fabula, influences our understanding of the subject—and I suspect I could spend a year analyzing this thing.)
• The Guardian discusses whether lyrics can ever be literature when they are divorced from their music. I tend to think of this sort of a question as a trolley problem—interesting in the abstract, pointless in practice. It's largely irrelevant to the working artist. Still, I'm gratified to know that critics do consider it, when a lot of listeners ignore lyrics entirely. 
• Art Levy breaks down writing an album, song by song. Levy's music incorporates visual art, and his experimental approach makes me feel as though my own long, roundabout process on Posthistoric might not be quite as dysfunctional as I tend to assume. (Coincidentally, he did much of this work on an Ibanez Artcore, the same guitar I usually play live. It's a lovely, versatile instrument.)

Last, this isn't a songwriting link, but writer Sarah Gailey has compiled a thorough list of resources for political actions Americans can take against the continuing genocide in Palestine, as well as ways to donate to victims, refugees, and communities. Here's your reminder that music is one of our strongest weapons against despair.

Thanks to the great karaoke experiment, I have been thinking a lot about the hidden workings of cover songs. You don't have to read that post before this one, but it might clarify a point or two.

In 2016, I was part of a loose ensemble that played tribute shows every so often. As November approached, we were rehearsing a set of TV theme songs. It was silly but fun; many of the songs represented fond memories from childhood and adolescence, even if we knew as adults that some of the shows weren't actually all that good. 

The show was the Friday after the election. I went into it thinking I didn't want to do it at all. It was time for punk, the harder-edged art of outrage and resistance. But as we played, people began singing along, and it could not have been clearer that they were clinging to these familiar songs as to a lifeline.

Since then I've learned that people do in fact turn to familiar media in times of depression or fear. (I can't remember where I read about this study. Someone measured it, though.) This seems both wonderful and dangerous. On the one hand: what a testament to the power of art. On the other: well, it's not as though things have gotten any less depressing and scary, and we cannot spend the rest of our lives retreating into the comforts of childhood TV when the times call for new ideas and actions.

In her lovely and terrifying piece "The Great Unconformity" (s/o to Hope Rehak for reminding me to read it), Sarah Kendzior mentions that the current media landscape makes shared experiences more difficult. Various digital archives have been deleted; many people have chucked their physical media; the number of channels and stations has expanded, fragmenting audiences into smaller and smaller subgroups. 

Kendzior's beat is fascism, but what she's describing matches my experience in the world of cover songs. Beyond a few obvious hits, finding music that a good chunk of the audience will recognize usually means reaching back twenty years or more. It makes me uneasy for the same reason that the TV gig did. 

Media fragmentation is only part of the problem here. The new songs themselves are fragmented too, popular because they are shared in 90-second clips via TikTok or Reels or whatever. There are riffs and hooks I know solely because they're featured in ads. (I suspect some songs are even engineered to be optimal for these shorter clips—the full songs do not reward familiarity.) So the crowds continue to shout along to "Sweet Caroline," because there is so little to replace it.

Ted Gioia notes that sales of old music have been outstripping sales of new music for a while—not because the new music isn't there, but because the mechanisms of profit currently encourage the rights holders to exploit their existing properties. Anyway—and maybe obviously—the people profiting from the sales are often not the artists; they're the shareholders and private equity D-bags behind the consolidation of media companies. As the money flows to them, fewer artists can afford to make music at all. Eventually, more listeners may have to turn to the old stuff for meaning. If that's the only hard media you own, and the streaming landscape is so cluttered with AI and payola algorithms that you can't find new releases, where else can you go?

In effect, multiple engines of media are pushing us to nostalgia. Kurt Andersen, in Evil Geniuses, discusses nostalgia as a cultural touchstone of conservatism and fascist movements. It helps reinforce the myth of a bygone Golden Age: the era, in fact, of the bumbling white sitcom dad and his eternally patient, eternally hot stay-at-home spouse. 

This is not to say that all nostalgia is bad. Familiarity is part of the pleasure of music, after all. But it can't be everything. If an American nostalgia evokes the music of the 1950s and early 1960s, then it presents a cultural landscape with very few women's voices, one in which the Race Records are safely segregated away from the impressionable ears of white kids. As listeners, as musicians, we owe it to ourselves to ask what familiarity omits.

Andersen credits the architects and executors of contemporary fascism with more intellect than I'm certain they all deserve. I don't believe the executives of Spotify give a shit about any cultural consequences when they engineer streaming royalties away from artists; they just want more money. But indifference and venality can enable fascism quite as easily as genius can. All they ask you to do is sing along.