#3.14159: Union Station

Download mp3 (6.1 MB) (or subscribe)

This week “we” interrupt your regularly scheduled Shoebox Full of Tapes to bring you a brief plug for my friend Joe’s band, Industrial Theme Park. The band is Joe and a rotating cast of others, including myself at one point; “Union Station” is a song we did for a comp in 2004.

Joe has just started putting new Industrial Theme Park stuff online, and it’s really good. Please check it out, and I’ll see you back here next week with an actual new song. Thanks for listening. (The license I’m using for the rest of SFoT doesn’t apply to this week’s song because I didn’t write most of it. However, I hereby apply said license to the keyboard and vocal parts. Whee!)

7 Comments »

#3: Practice

Download mp3 (5 MB) (or subscribe)

Someday, when the Perfect Drummer shows up on my doorstep, this one’s getting the full-on power-pop treatment. Well, actually, whatever, “this one”. When that happens, they’re all getting the full-on power-pop treatment.

A postcard from last April…

Your back seat’s cluttered with our morning haste:
Best of Bowie in a Promise Ring case.
I scraped both knees on the way to the train for you.
You know I’m always twenty minutes late,
you know I think that your stupid puns are great,
and now you know that I’m gonna wait for you

’cause I’d been waiting for so long
for someone else to value spontaneity
when you said, “Let’s buy that house.”
And now I’m waking up again like I knew I would,
and it’s taking everything I’ve ever learned.
It was never so easy to fall so hard.

I want to always have fading rubber stamps
from shows we went to on my wrists and hands.
I want to always be making crazy plans with you.
Headphones seated low and tight,
cables dressed for four-hour flight:
I’ll be in Portland at 9:25 with you

’cause I’d been waiting for so long
for someone else to value spontaneity
when you said, “Let’s buy that house.”
And now I’m waking up again like I knew I would,
and it’s taking everything I’ve ever learned.
It was never so easy to fall so hard.

Waking up again like I knew I would,
and it’s taking everything I ever learned:
All the mistakes that I ever made then
and every trace of wisdom I ever gained from them,
every time I ever second-guessed myself
when I tried to be someone else,
whenever I couldn’t stand to just read my lines
was practice for this time.
My whole life feels like practice for this time.

15 Comments »

#2: Recent Scars

Download mp3 (3.6 MB) (or subscribe)

This one was written about a year and a half ago. It’s pretty much the same six-chord pattern the whole way through, but the lyrical line is shorter than the ostinato, which I hope gives the song a nice forward momentum and saves it from feeling overly repetitive.

On this recording I managed to get the pronouns wrong at the end of the second verse, so for best results imagine a nice, deliberate, dripping-with-portent “but they…have…too” instead of whatever I sang.

It’s the way that you sit so you can reach everything from there
All angles and eyelashes, beat-up shoes and scruffy hair
It’s the things that you say
It’s how you make me concentrate
That I might catch the edge to every inside joke you make

It’s the way you speak in riddles and how you choose your words:
Hesitate a little, so I know you thought them through
as much as I will
And I’m sure the others wonder what it is with me and you
Well, let them wonder more
I’ve been wrong before, but they have, too

Glitching live heartskips we both pretend to concentrate
These days, who cares?
What’s maturity anyway?
Leaving here with recent scars
From each miscue that got us this far
And I’m glad you know me well,
but I wish you couldn’t tell I try this hard

17 Comments »

#1: Reverting to Type

Download mp3 (3.3 MB) (or subscribe)

There’s a passage in Mona Lisa Overdrive in which one of the main characters is trying to find a friend of hers who has disappeared. When she asks what happened to him, she’s told, “He reverted to type.” Just like that. Back to living on the street like he’d done before they’d met. That sentence stayed with me for a long time after I finished the book. Something about how world-weary and dismissive it sounded — and, of course, the whole idea that people can’t change, that our “types” are inescapable for better or for worse — made a pretty strong impression on me.

With these lyrics, I’m trying to treat the concept of “reverting to type” with importance, to observe and describe it, but without necessarily claiming to understand it — certainly not judging it as either good or bad. A neat trick, if I can manage it. Thanks for listening.

You wait until door meets door
And you’re sure that he’s gone
And then you sway and sing in the elevator
All the way down
Rushing down Sherman to MAB
Breathless on the crooked stairs
Reaching for the most familiar keys
Reverting to type again
Reverting to type again
Returning to what you were then
And every time you say
that this time you’re sure you’ve really changed
You always end up reverting to type again

He must have caught you sitting up straight
Instantly no longer bored
Trying slightly harder to concentrate
Failing at it slightly more
With no excuse to communicate
No use in being heard
We’re both still hoping
Both still reloading
Still hanging on every word
Reverting to type again
Returning to what you were then
And every time you say
that this time you’re sure you’ve really changed
You always end up reverting to type again

20 Comments »