Gigantic.24
Unsigned
I woke up the other night wondering: is it possible that lyrics and chords come from different sides of the brain?
I refused to Google it. I don’t want A.I. claiming to know my brain better than it knows itself.
I do know back when we were in Elephant Gun, Bill wrote chords, I wrote lyrics, and they were pretty good.
In the two years that followed, I churned out half a shoebox of cassette tapes. Some interesting chord progressions, but I just couldn’t write lyrics that would stick.
It was as if the pressure for being responsible for a complete song was just too much. Sometimes I still feel this way, but I’ve written so many songs in the years since, it’s hard to remember exactly what it was like when writing a complete song seemed impossible.
I’d broken through one major barrier, I could play guitar. But as a solitary musician, at that time, I was incomplete.
I needed a band.
Bill and I had talked about getting something together. Maybe we played a few times at his apartment on the Lower East Side, but turning it into something remained theoretical.
One night at Blanche’s on Avenue A, I can’t remember who I was with, we were drinking beers and blabbing when this grumpy dude in a black leather jacket sat down at our table. Everyone suddenly shut up. Except me. It’s not so much that I was completely unaware of social cues, I just didn’t always care to follow them.
The guy glared at me a while, then finally steamed off.
“What’s up with that guy?”
“He just got signed,” one of my friends told me.
“Big fucking deal.”
Whatever band the guy was in, I’d never heard of them. And yet, it was a big fucking deal, and I sorta knew it. The Iron Curtain had come down between the USSR and the West, but a new one had come up between the signed and the unsigned.
With the coming of the 90s, it seemed like everyone was talking less about music, and more about the music business. A&R, management, points, units, merch. There was something sickening and distasteful about it. And yet, I could scoff all I wanted, as one of the unsigned, I was on the wrong side of the new Iron Curtain.
I’m not sure when I learned that Bill and a few other friends had formed a new band. I went to see them play. They didn’t sound like the band I had in my imagination, but they were good. A year or two down the line, they’d get signed themselves.
If I were going to form a band now, I’d have to build one from scratch. The task was daunting.
For a quick fix, thinking back to what I’d done in Seattle, I hung up some Drummer Available flyers on St. Mark’s Place. Everyone needed a drummer, right?
I drummed a few times with a singer/songwriter at Sin-é. That didn’t work. I wasn’t a drummer.
Sin-é was a hotbed of singer/songwriters at the time. Why didn’t it occur to me this could be a path forward? Why didn’t I just try standing up there at the mic myself?
Maybe it was because I didn’t have any songs yet. If the left and right sides of my brain had been better acquainted, it might’ve occurred to me.
—
Click below for…
I don't know about a strict left / right brain divison in those terms, but I have long observed a distinction between those who primarily hear music first, and those who are more drawn to the word. As with most things there is of course a spectrum within that, for instance I'm much more drawn to the sound and rhythm before words and verbal expressions, but I also adore lyricists like Leonard Cohen. It is often fascinating to compare notes with people who love the same songs as I do, but we sometimes fix our attentions on very different things. Numerous people have told me that they have to hear all the words before anything else can penetrate. There's a lot yet to be explored in this, it seems.