I’ve started.
It’s 13 notebooks and sundry loose sheets.
I’ll be updating this page as I get through the process of extracting the songs from the notebooks.
New York City Comedown
December 17th 2024
It’s going to be tough. It wasn’t the best time. See Difficult Pieces. The detail is there.
There’s inevitable overlap between this album (which wasn’t released) and The Negatives which, eventually, was. And consequently overlapping notebooks. Ideas which were unfinished in 1996 and completed for The Negatives. I expected a few of those, and Music IAFL, even. What I didn’t expect were several ideas which eventually ended up on Antidpressant, a decade later.
So it’s a conflicted feeling, looking back on this year. I was, for sure, all over the place. I would say that the ratio of bad ideas to good was close to an all time high. But there were lots, and lots of them. And between the confusion and the snivelling I still manged to crank out some decent work. Some excellent.
We’d just lost our apartment, where I had, idiotically, only 4 years before, installed a studio at a cost of about 50% of my net worth. How about that for confidence? We were in a small rented apartment, still in the West Village, and burning though our savings at a rate of knots. At some point, I suppose, I did come to terms with the fact that my career wasn’t in great shape any more.
By this point I was aware of the difficulty involved in addressing the here and now, and mostly, over the previous decade, I’d had litle inclination in this direction, and when I had, I’d hidden it under the third person, or some other guise. But here I was at 35 writing
In the prime of your life
At a time when a crisis is common in men
Old enough to know better
and
I was just hoping you might know
Where did my angel go?
and
… furthest from my mind
Was the thought of my refection
Coming back from the machine which said
Everything is gone
No more carry on
I was bound to fall
I had it all
And I said to my wife
Do you think I've said too much?
She said
Well, isn't that what your job is?
I took a studio space in Tribeca, unbeknownst to me, just around the corner from Sonic Youth, and I installed what was left of my studio there. I went to work 5 or 6 days a week. I had a family to feed.
It wasn’t all grim. The studio was part of a larger complex - Harold Dessau - my neighbour was (The The) Matt Johnson. I’d rehearsed at Dessau and made demos there before. They were good people. I had the Love Story touring band still in place - Neil, Rafa, Amanda and Chris. All great players. I still had Quine. It was a decent team. The weak link was me, but, for better or worse, I wasn’t aware of this, yet.
___
Across The Water
December 18th 2024
So, for an album which was never actually released as intended, maybe it’s almost appropriate to open with a song I never finished.
I’m starting with it because evidence suggests that it was the first idea for the project. The large purple plaid (tartan) notebook dates from the end of 1994 and also includes She Loves You which was one of the last, if not the last song submitted for the Love Story project.
There are a lot of loose sheets, mostly torn from other notebooks. I don’t know why, but I deduce, from this and the sheer volume of the notes over a lengthy time period, that I was pretty keen on this idea. And still there isn’t even a demo with a guide vocal. The instrumental demo is here.
What’s worthy of note, here, I think is how little headway I made with the lyric. The entries repeat the same phrases over and over again. Maybe there are small incremental improvements to the phrasing, the potential lilt. Maybe. But it’s not much. I often start songs with only a hint of an idea, maybe a phrase, or a feeling. But when the writing process is sucessful, this grows into something more substantial. I don’t think that happened here.
The song Fool You Are, which I’ll get to later, also deals with flight as a means of escape from troubles, sins, past, etc… I’m not sure I ever got that one quite right, either.
I didn’t have a ‘lyric guru’ I trusted at this time. I’d never had one. It had always been down to me to make all the calls. The one time David Bates tried to tell me that there were too many ‘babes’ and ‘babies’ in the Love Story lyrics I told him that he was the A&R man and I was the lyricist. He didn’t speak to me for quite a while after that. He was right.
In a year or so I’d meet Dave Derby and I’d start playing keyboards in his band Brilliantine. After a while I’d trust Dave to give me gut reactions to lyrical ideas. Just thumbs up, or thumbs down. I still trust him with this, and Chris Hughes, too.
I wish I’d had one of them around at this juncture. Maybe one of them would have said ‘maybe this isn’t such a great starting point for a lyric?’?
