Category: Blog

My Beatle Paul

I was ironically delighted by this article, as it seemed to reinforce all of my personal gripes about how Gen X youth culture was covered, so I wrote this song to bookmark the moment.

First, the obvious thing. This song is not about Paul McCartney. It’s a little bit about how Baby Boomers view everything in the world only through the lens of their own experiences. Doesn’t matter what it is or who did what, what matters is how it affected them, and this is never more true than when discussing art and music. Unfortunately for the rest of us, The Beatles represent a cultural milestone that does actually belong to their generation. Like so many other things, this is a fact of which they have never been too tired to remind us.

Let me start again.

Rolling Stone Magazine was an insufferable mess by the mid-1980s. It oozed with a nostalgia that its readers would never acknowledge (here is where I point out that even now a Boomer would never admit to listening to oldies. Their half-century-plus-old music is “classic rock”). Their writers clearly felt an obligation to translate current trends into something that would make sense to the thirty-somethings who were their main advertising targets, and who, thanks to their embrace of the emperor-with-no-clothes Ronald Reagan, were finding themselves with plenty of social services funding cuts money to spend.

Welp. Take 3.

There was an album review in RS that referred to the Replacements as The Rolling Stones for Gen X, and pitted them against REM as their/our Beatles. This made no sense to anyone who understood anything about these bands, or music (although, to be fair, the Mats probably gave the Stones a run for their money on the substance abuse front). I was ironically delighted by this article, as it seemed to reinforce all of my personal gripes about how Gen X youth culture was covered, so I wrote this song to bookmark the moment. It does all of the following:

  • It casts Paul Westerberg as McCartney. This is fine, actually
  • It flips the Rolling Stone narrative and makes the Replacements into the Beatles. No one else in the world would care about this except me
  • It rips off the premise of the Mats song “Alex Chilton”. I assume Paul would despise it, but in my defense, The Posies did this already with “Grant Hart” so I feel like I’m on solid ground here
  • Circular references! Why would they “start hanging ‘round with Big Stars” if not Alex Chilton in the first place?
  • The rhythm guitar parts might was well be Keith and Ronnie, so we’re ripping off the Stones while all this is going on
  • Easter Eggs! That mandolin bit might be from “I Will Dare”, I dunno

We played this song at our live shows for years and it was always fun, even if no one had any idea what I was going on about. I’m thrilled to have it finally available. If anyone out there can find a link to the Rolling Stone review that caused this mess in the first place, please message me. I need to know that this isn’t all a decades-old hallucination.

Friday the 13th

On Friday, March 13th 2020, school ended for the year. We had no idea at the time, of course, but students were not to set foot in the school building again. For undergraduates this was, although a big deal, not necessarily catastrophic. For seniors, though, it was everything. Prom. Concerts. The spring musical. Graduation. Everything gone, and even worse, it was a slow drip of cancellations over many weeks until we realized there was nothing left.  We spent some time figuring out how to teach our classes into computer screens, but the bigger questions were left unanswered; namely, how do we replace the irreplaceable things? With my daughter a senior herself, I had a decent insight into what they were going through. There’s nothing that can take the place of a concert, but technology still allows us to make music. So that’s what we did. Every senior, instead of polishing and performing their usual classical solo, picked a piece to record, for an album we would release by graduation (whatever that ended up being). For copyright purposes, we needed to stick to either original music, or songs that were at least a hundred years old. We ended up going down a rabbit hole of 1890s hits, looking for those that still somehow spoke to us in the modern age (and trying not to be horrified by how incredibly racist so many of the other songs were). This was the beginning of what became “From the Inside Out”.

“Wayfaring Stranger” was the first song chosen for the album, after “You Love”. There was never any question that it would be a feature for Colby Dagwan Santos, whose unique voice and wonderful sense of ornamentation were a perfect fit for this plaintive old folk song from the early 19th century. The arrangement is in 4/4, rather than the original 3/4,  with a mix of strings, slide guitar, and old Fender amp vibrato. I had Emmylou Harris in my brain, the whole time we were recording it, even though the song sounds nothing like her version. Her inspiration gave us this, though, and we are incredibly grateful.

You Love

I started “You Love” about three years ago, as a lyric-writing exercise. I do these a lot, because writing lyrics is a never-ending struggle to fill a bucket with a hole in it. If I can occupy my mind with arbitrary rules about rhyme structure, then I don’t spend as much time wondering what in the world to write in the first place. Also, I thought it would be fun to write something in second person, like “Captain Jack” or “Kid Charlemagne”, except about love and hope and not, y’know, junkies. It took a while to finish, and then sat in a note on my iPad for even longer. Eventually, I was looking for something to use as my next choral piece, so I wrote the arrangement over the summer, and taught it to Vocal Ensemble soon after our winter concert. We were on track to perform this new piece at the RIMEA Choral Festival in March, and then the world went into lockdown. 
We would have recorded it anyway, but once COVID-19 took over, we couldn’t even use our meager recording facilities at the school. So each student sang their part into a phone, while listening to the backing track with earplugs, and we began the INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS task of manually assembling a chorus. I’d guess that each track took at least an hour and a half of cleanup before it was in decent-enough shape to add to the project. Then the real fun started, with lining up entrances, fixing timing and tuning, and just generally being obsessive. The audio for this three-minute song probably took eighty hours of work. I’m not complaining, though; we got something special, and it sounds like what they sound like when they sing together, which is to say, fantastic.

From the inside, out

We left school in March, on Friday the 13th, telling each other, “well, see you in a month or so!”. We knew that we probably weren’t going back, but no one was ready to process what that actually meant. In the two months following, everything on the school calendar was canceled: concerts, the spring musical (Legally Blonde!), proms, class awards, graduation. The country has endured a terrible year, with tragic losses. However, our high school seniors have endured a different kind of terrible year. While their families have lost income, and possibly loved ones, they have also lost all of the milestone events to which young people look forward for most of their school careers. 
Each year at Mt. Hope, we do a recording project with Vocal Ensemble, our audition choir. The first couple were graduation songs (see “To Belong” and “Timeless”), which we were honored to present at the graduation ceremonies their respective years. For 2020, we had a new choral piece, entitled “You Love”, which we had planned to debut at the RIMEA state choral festival. This festival was, of course, canceled, so we were at a loss as to what to do with it. Out of sheer desperation, and a desire for a project around which we could rally, we decided to record it remotely. Twenty students, all singing into their respective iPhones, on a choral song that relies on precise timing and shared dynamics. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Also, since the difficulty level evidently wasn’t already high enough, we figured we could record all of our seniors’ solos, and make an entire album out of the resulting material. 

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Well, so, a lot. However, we stumbled into a fantastic project, which brought us together in a myriad of ways, and which gave our last quarter of the school year real purpose. Over the next few posts, I’ll document what we did to make “From The Inside, Out”, as well as the accompanying videos and fundraising project. If you would like to cheat a little and find out ahead of time how to contribute, click here.