Diary Of A Song: "Happy Birthday, Marty Ryan"

Diary Of A Song: "Guy On Guy"

Diary Of A Song: "Tell Me What I Gotta Do"

Can We Kick Out The Jam?

Last night I watched Cameron Crowe’s recent biopic Pearl Jam Twenty. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Like many confused young men who came of age in the early nineties, I once endured a phase involving very loud music, marijuana, piercings, cut-off trousers and embarrassingly long, unwashed hair. I had worn out cassettes of Ten, Pearl Jam’s debut, along with Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Habitual and Alice in Chains Dirt while delivering boxed lunches in my Honda Civic to the bemused office workers of Nashville. I envied the way Eddie Vedder’s unkempt good looks and soft, stuttering interview style contrasted the spastic maniac he turned into onstage. I could often be found standing on the precipice of something, smoking cigarettes and staring long and hard into the distance between Nashville and the Pacific Northwest.

In 1995, just after the release of Pearl Jam’s third studio album, Vitalogy, I joined a classic pop band that preferred the internal combustion of tight 60’s office wear to the undefined freedom of flannel and cargo pants. I lost interest in Pearl Jam. So did a lot of other people, but Pearl Jam, apparently, didn’t notice.

The single-most remarkable aspect of Twenty is how it illuminates this period of the band’s history. While the film does a fine job of documenting the tragedy of Pearl Jam’s beginnings and the glory of its meteoric rise to the top of the Grunge heap, it really comes alive as the band enters into the wandering years following the end of the Seattle mania. Finding themselves on the long path down from of selling millions upon millions of albums, conquering the largest venues in the world and having an unfathomable amount of money to show for it, the band ran up against the eternal question that eventually plagues all of us: What’s the point?

Most of us feel like we never get the recognition we deserve for the work that we do. Whether we are mechanics, stay-at-home mothers, accountants or singer/songwriters, we often find that our work goes relatively unnoticed, seems to be taken for granted and never really brings the approval or acclaim we are hoping it will. This frustration blurs our focus and, occasionally, makes us wonder why we even bother.

Pearl Jam, in spite of garnering more accolades, adoration and rewards than most of us could ever imagine, faced a similar crisis of motivation, albeit for slightly different reasons: The amount of praise they had received was so great that none of it felt very real. It didn’t even seem related to the work they were doing anymore. Think about it from Eddie Vedder’s perspective: When you perform in a coffee house, you can see the crow’s feet around the eyes of the women in the back row; in a stadium, you need glasses to read the signs held by the kids in the first row behind the crowd barricades.

But Pearl Jam didn’t quit; they tightened their focus. They dove into their work and the community that had built up around it, releasing a series of albums that struggled commercially but let their fans know that they weren’t going anywhere, that they were trying to make sense of everything, that they still wanted to produce something new and exciting. They began documenting all of their shows for their fans instead of releasing a single live album that might document them at their ‘best.’ Instead of kicking back and stroking each other’s egos, they turned all of their energy outward towards their fans. While remaining one of the biggest bands in the world, they somehow managed to create a real intimacy between themselves and the people who loved their music. They recognized that the band was not the point; the process was the point. Everything became about the experience of experiencing Pearl Jam. Everything became about the present moment.

I still don’t really care for much of Pearl Jam’s music. But I am very inspired by and slightly in awe of the way they have gone about making it. With the exception of U2, I can’t really think of a band that has been around for over two decades without graduating into the goofy realm of nostalgia acts. It’s easy to ruminate on the glory days, but life is about what we are doing now, what we are creating in this moment. Our bodies will eventually wear out, but we will never get old if we can just stay focused on today.

Oh, Oooooh, I’m still alive. Yay-yay-yay-yay-yeah.

Diary Of A Song: "King Of The Crosswords"

Diary Of A Song: "I Can't Wait"

0 Days to Dudes: Le Dudes Est Arrivé!

Yesterday I returned from an 11-day jaunt through Europe as the support act for Fountains of Wayne. I played eight shows in six countries in four different linguistic regions (well, six if you throw Gaelic and Glaswegian English into the mix). The tour came about very suddenly, a by-product of having been provided a plane ticket (courtesy of Kickstarter patron David Morrison, for whom I played a house concert in Glasgow Nov. 12) and being tipped off by another Kickstarter friend (Ken Simpson) that my old buddies FOW just happened to be touring Europe around the same time. The entire thing fell together in such a serendipitous way that, in spite of occurring over the final weeks leading up to the US release of Dudes, I had to do it.

I normally spend the final weeks leading up to an album release buzzing around my house like a ferret with a big smear of peanut butter over its nose, so it was a little odd to be spending the release countdown thousands of miles away from the heart of the action. But the experience made me realize that the ‘heart of the action’ around Dudes is not, and has never been, in Nashville at all. From its inception, the energy around the album has been generated from enthusiasm and support that has come in from all over the world. From its financing to its recording to its current position at #9 on the ITunes singer/songwriter chart (Go team!!!), Dudes has grown because of the community around it, not me.

It is a supremely lucky thing to be able to have anyone actually hear and react to the music you make. There are many people in the world far more talented than I who never get this opportunity. I used to think that I and the music were the determining factors in this equation, but I have finally learned otherwise: The music is important, but your experience with the music is what really determines its value. My experience with the songs on Dudes has already changed dramatically; for example, it’s funny how different ‘Bocce Ball’ feels when performed in Madrid as opposed to Dublin. I expect these metamorphoses will continue to occur for me and hope that they will for you. The best I can hope for is that your experiences with Dudes are simply real.

Thank you all very much for participating in the process up to this point. The proverbial cat is now out of the bag. Who knows what happens from here? Thankfully, the fate of Dudes is in your hands now: Every five-star review, radio broadcast and late-night television performance in the world will never rival the importance of one friend simply telling another that a piece of music really meant something to them. If Dudes serves no other purpose than to initiate a bunch of good conversations between people who care about each other, then it has been successful. As my new friends in Belgium might say:

“Vous avez de DUDES!”

1 Day To Dudes: "Dudes"

About a year ago I started a weekly gathering called Dudes Coffee. I figured that my friends and I had attained the appropriate age to justify a weekly gathering dedicated to discussion, some catch-up and a little bit of grumbling. I set a time and place, wrote up an email and sent it out to all of my male friends.

The word on the street is that men, for the first time in a long time, are having it hard. Construction, manufacturing and high finance, the worst hit industries of the Recession, are decidedly male-dominated. These jobs probably won’t ever return in their pre-Recession numbers. This news comes along with the revelation that this year, for the first time ever, women hold the majority of American jobs. To add insult to injury, America is laughing about the whole situation: Just turn on your television and start counting the commercials featuring some sharp-as-a-tack wife besting a clueless, overweight husband in a decision regarding which product to buy next for the family.

Maybe we had it coming. No one could argue that men, in spite of some pretty brilliant moments, haven’t made a lot of pretty dumb-ass moves in the past 100 years. Some serious gender equality was inevitable and should be welcomed. But men seem to be having a difficult time adjusting to their new status. Guys are great at popping beers and celebrating when things are going great; they’re even capable of some back slaps and words of encouragement when things go to hell. But, finding themselves stuck behind the proverbial eight ball, men seem to be faltering.

A lot of guys just don’t have enough back-up. Men are not nearly as talented at building the networks of friends that women seem to accumulate as easily as breathing. Women generally have little problem expressing their emotions; it bonds them on a level that most men never experience.

Now seems like a good time for men to drop the macho façades and start embracing reality. It is time for us to lose the egos and make an honest evaluation of our lives for each other. Our wives and girlfriends will only understand so much, and mama is not coming over to make it all better anytime soon. It takes a brave fellow to admit that he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing, but there is a lot of freedom in that admission. It’s a starting point.

Dudes Coffee has evolved into a small but battle-hardened group of guys ranging in age from 31 to 60. We have different jobs, different marital statuses and different sexual preferences. With some practice, we have reached a point of not being as concerned with the group opinion of our lives as much as the fact that there is a group of fellows who care enough to have an opinion at all. The gathering has had a profound effect on my life. As my buddy Marty Ryan once said, “You have guys in your life that are, like, friends. Then there are guys who are dudes.”
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2 Days To Dudes: "I Can't Wait"

When I was a kid, I loved reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books. They books were the literary equivalent of a maze, novels that let the reader decide what the main character’s next move would be and then provided multiple endings that corresponded to the reader’s choice. The books were (and probably still are) enormously popular with children, which is no surprise since children generally don’t feel like they have much control over their lives.

When we are young, we dream of the day when we’ll be old enough to determine our own fate, to make our own way in the world, to seize days, to move mountains. But as we get older we begin to realize that, whether we want to admit it or not, the Universe does not revolve around us and is infinitely larger than our wishes and desires for it. We suddenly get a very real sense of our own insignificance and mortality. We think about the idealism of our youth and see that it was usually more a badge of identity than an actual intention. We look forward to our old age and see nothing, nothing except the examples our elders have set for us.

There are two logical paths forward from this point: Suicide or Acceptance. The first is obviously a quick, simple and relatively boring solution. The second probably takes more than a lifetime to truly achieve.

I used to think acceptance was the same as ‘settling for,’ i.e. giving up. But acceptance is simply acknowledging that you have very little control over things. You can plan, create, make goals, network, achieve, etc. as much as you want, but you will never really know what the outcome of any of these activities is going to be. You’ll never know what they mean to you until they mean something to you. It’s all up for grabs.

I once attempted to control my world through a lot of different means: creativity, exercise, eating, planning, drinking… let’s take drinking, for example. When I started drinking in my late teens, I thought I was expanding the boundaries of my mind, breaking down inhibitions, opening myself up to new possibilities. And I probably was, at first. But when I found myself still abusing alcohol in my mid-thirties, it finally occurred to me that there was no more mind expansion going on, that, in fact, I was merely repeating a behavior because it was familiar and it gave me a sense of control over my environment. Getting loaded was as sensible for me as creating a revenue report would be for an accountant. I drank because I couldn’t accept that I ultimately had no control over my life.

I used to wake up and be immediately gripped with worry and fear about how I was going to control the day, which was quickly followed by shame and guilt about the fact that I would, most likely, fuck it up. I am done with that shit. The idea of not having control is frightening, but it is where the real adventure begins. “I Can’t Wait” was meant to be an acknowledgement of the fact that every day is a story, one that we are not writing. In real life, you don’t have to choose your own adventure; just jump headfirst into the one you get handed every morning.

4 Days To Dudes: "Twenty Girls Ago"

I spent a lot of 2007 on the road, playing keyboard in my friend Emerson Hart’s band. One day we pulled into Albany for a radio show at the Palace Theatre. Upon arriving for sound check, we met our opening act, an up-and-coming singer/songwriter named Ingrid Michaelson. Ingrid and I struck up a quick friendship that would blossom through the Autumn months, mostly via late night instant messaging sessions from hotel rooms in disparate locales all over the country. The nights were always bad for me, blurry drunk anonymous hours that felt lost forever until Ingrid would pop up on the computer screen with some smart-ass remark. She got me laughing at my sorry predicament, made me laugh about feeling so sorry for myself. She made me want to hit back, to start moving forward. She was the funniest girl I had ever met.

Ingrid invited me to her family’s Christmas Eve party on Staten Island that year. I baked an apple cake, fired up the Honda and set out towards the Verrazano Bridge. Her family’s three-story Victorian was wrapped in blinking lights and pine boughs. A Christmas tree glowed in the bay window and revelers overflowed onto the front porch. Inside, the house was crowded with family and friends in various combinations of brightly-colored sweaters. The whole place smelled of apples and mulled wine. One man wore a reindeer hat.

Later in the evening, Ingrid’s father began playing carols at the piano. A group of sweaters gathered around and began singing along. They were really enjoying themselves. Ingrid beckoned me to join them, but I couldn’t. It was all like a Norman Rockwell cartoon. Or a scene in a snow globe, one that I happened to be outside of.

Over the next few months, Ingrid and I lost touch. I moved back to Nashville and she got very busy. I haven’t spoken to her in years, but I sometimes I think about her Christmas party, the sentimental swirl of holiday music, the warmth of family and how wonderful and frightening it all was. It was, and it mattered. I have since learned to never miss an opportunity to lock arms with people, to sing around a piano, to be in the cartoon.

To wear the reindeer hat.

There was a sparkle and lightness to Ingrid; she was the kind of girl who knew how to throw a Christmas party.
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5 Days To Dudes: "Last Train Home"

Bill and I wrote “Last Train Home” after he returned from a visit to his parents’ house in New Jersey. He showed me the first verse of the lyric at his piano one day and I got the basic layout of the music pretty quickly. It was good. I assumed the lyric was a nice reminiscence about two lovers spending a day in the city but, as we began honing the individual lines, Bill sheepishly confessed that the song was actually about being on the train back from Manhattan with his mother. During the ride she had fallen asleep against the window. The fluorescent lighting cast a certain pallor on her face, and Bill was hit with the realization that, someday in the not-too-distant future, she would be gone.

I love it when a song begins to feel like it matters, like there is no longer an option to not write it. After Bill revealed the true intention behind his lyric, we couldn’t just make it another cute nostalgic ditty about young love. It had to be more immediate, more relevant. Approaching “Last Train Home” as a history of a mother and son’s relationship moved the song out of the past and into the present tense. Everyone’s parents die. I had barely processed my own feelings about it; suddenly I needed to write the song as much as Bill did.

This all had a huge effect on how I would later approach writing the songs for Dudes. It showed me that, by getting more detailed and specific about an experience, it was possible to actually expand the possibilities for emotions a listener might experience with the song. If “Last Train Home” had been written as a simple love song, it would have only resonated on one level. But because it stayed true to the specifics of Bill’s experience, it became a love song, a memoir, a tribute and a rather comforting dirge, among other things. To wit: ABC eventually used the song in one of its programs, specifically in a sequence featuring people arguing and then ending up in bed together. Go figure.

I don’t claim to understand how all of these interpretations connect. I don’t really want to understand it; as a songwriter, it’s not my job. If I put something into the world that is honest, it will most likely attract honest responses. This is all I can hope for. This is success.

6 Days To Dudes: "Rainy Weather Friend"

I’m not sure why it took me so long to start writing songs with Bill DeMain. We had known each other for the better part of a decade before we ever got around to making music together in 2006. I had no idea what an important relationship it would turn out to be.

Bill and I actually tried to write a country song the first time we got together at his condominium in West Nashville. Mercifully, this effort deteriorated in about half an hour, and we ended up composing a fun little murder ballad called “Goodbye Marie” instead. The process was alarmingly copacetic. Once we stopped trying to write a ‘money’ song, we freed ourselves up to draw from our deep well of common reference points. Bill actually liked Harry Nilsson more than I did. Bill understood the connection between Richard Rodgers and Elvis Costello. Bill loved to play the ukulele and, on occasion, wore ascots. He was my kind of fellow; he spoke-a my language, bebbeh. It was as if I suddenly had someone finishing my musical sentences for me.

Good writing partners don’t just create good songs together; they also inspire each other to become better writers. At the end of our first session, Bill gave me a manila folder of lyrics to take home with me. Among others, it contained “Little Boats” and “Rainy Weather Friend.” I loved how sparse the lines in these songs were, how delicate yet powerful the imagery was. Bill had a real gift for extracting tiny details and using them to maximum effect. I needed this. My life was overwhelmed with large, amorphous issues that never seemed to get resolved. While songwriting had always been a way for me to control my environment, if only for three and a half minutes, I had lost my focus in a blur of touring, alcohol, credit card debt and marital tension. Working with Bill’s lyrics was like a meditation practice for me. I put music to “Rainy Weather Friend” in about fifteen minutes at home one afternoon. It was that easy; I can’t explain it.

Sometimes people show up in your life at just the right time. Whether he knew it or not, Bill DeMain showed me a way forward. It is very easy to get overwhelmed and disoriented in the swirl of life. Bill reminded me that the best cure for dizziness is to keep your eye on one single fixed point.

7 Days To Dudes: "Reminded #1"

The Voices Of Fessey Park was a short-lived vocal quintet comprised of Brad Jones and myself. Our only paying gig was on Tangerine, our existence called forth into being when I made a late-night decision to do an a cappella arrangement of a song called “Reminded #1.” We disbanded shortly thereafter.

TVOFP is the only fictional element of the song, unfortunately. The rest of it was culled directly from countless ‘morning after’ conversations between my first wife and myself that occurred in the house we shared in Nashville, circa 2005. These talks were generally the product of a misunderstanding, namely my own inability to comprehend exactly why the Olympian drinking binges that I regularly undertook with my friends made her feel unsafe and alone. I could never get my head around the fact that, when I was epically inebriated, I was basically useless and unavailable to her. When the topic arose I would suggest that, at these unfortunate times, she should simply function as she might have before we were together. When she would point out the fact that she married me in order to avoid having to function the way she might have before we were together, I would roll my bloodshot eyes and make an insensitive comment. At this point she might tear up. Or leave the room.

After a brief reprieve, I would change tack and attempt to reassure her that my excessive consumption had nothing to do with her. That it was just something I had to do occasionally to get back in touch with myself. That, in fact, it reminded me of the horrible hole I might have dug for myself had she not appeared in my life. That, in a roundabout way, my drinking was actually a tribute to her goodness and grace.

It pains me to attribute such a pretty song to such blatant narcissism. But “Reminded #1” is basically a first person account of addiction, and addiction is basically a highly evolved form of narcissism. If you’ve ever wondered why artists often seem to do their best work during their most fucked-up periods, remember that most artists are born narcissists who might excel to great heights when given permission to indulge themselves freely. It is their most natural state of being.

I used to say that I would never regret anything. Why bother? Everything that happens in life is useful experience from which some kind of wisdom can be gained. But that is only half the story: You can learn something from any experience, but you can never reverse the consequences your actions have on other people. Those consequences take on a life of their own, they move away from you and they are gone forever.

Some things are worth regretting, if only to ensure that you don’t repeat your mistakes. And there are things that I deeply and most definitely regret.

8 Days To Dudes: "Hallelujah, I Was Wrong"

“Hallelujah, I Was Wrong” once had a twin called “Hallelujah, It’s A Girl.” The latter was a letter of encouragement to my first wife when I once thought she was pregnant. The former, a different lyric set to the exact same melody and music, was a missive of comfort in case she was not. If ever more flagrant musical opportunism has bared its ugly teeth, I am unaware of it. (As I write, a long and luminous bolt of lightning is approaching me from a great height.)

"Hallelujah, It's A Girl" Demo, 2005


"Hallelujah, I Was Wrong" Demo, 2005


I am finishing this in Valencia, Spain. For the past three days I have been enjoying the multiple entertainments that arise from encounters between an American who speaks little Spanish and Spaniards with no interest in speaking English. Spanish appears to be a much more contextual language than English; multiple meanings can be derived from very similar grammatical applications with the most subtle variations. The devil is in the delivery. Sometimes seemingly identical phrases may only be differentiated by whether or not they are delivered with a raised eyebrow, or a shaken head, or a shrug. Viva!

I appreciate this. Songs can also mean entirely different things on different nights. So can proclamations of love, expressions of affection, firings of missiles and cries of infants. Some people say that the greatest thing we have going for us is our ability to adapt to new situations. I would not disagree, but would add that our inclination to interpret things in a unique fashion is also an essential, if underrated, survival skill. None of us see things in quite the same way. It takes different strokes to move the world, baby.

¿Qué estoy hablando? I don’t know, Pedro, you lost me at ‘missiles.’

9 Days To Dudes: "Chatterbox"

Some of the finest advice ever uttered about conducting a healthy heterosexual relationship comes courtesy of the comedian, Chris Rock:

“Men, ya’ll have got to learn to listen. And women… ya’ll need to learn to shut the fuck up.”

Tangerine was intended to be a concept album about marriage. As a new husband, I was just beginning to understand the unexpectedly odd circumstances I had landed in by signing up for the most iconic of conventional institutions. I was also acutely aware of the dearth of pop music written about the interior of connubial bliss, that infinite space between the beginning and the end. Itching for a fight, I was determined to melodicize as much of it as I possibly could.

The result was a pretty eclectic album, one that changed the way I approached music forever. In fact, Tangerine is still probably my favorite album in my catalogue. I like how its musical polish counteracts its lyrical weirdness. This dichotomy probably sums up my first marriage about as well as anything: An afternoon drive through the country on a perfect Spring day, the floating hours during which things are said and more things are left unsaid.

Regardless of its conceptual intentions, Tangerine seemed to leave a fair amount of people wondering what the hell had happened to the soft, acoustic intimacies of Indiana (A conundrum probably not helped by the intervening release of the Wherever You Are EP). The album sold poorly and, to this day, hardly any of of its songs ever seem to get requested at shows, streamed online or put on anyone’s favorites list.

This is something that still bothers and befuddles me. But I think I have come to understand it better as the years pass. In retrospect, Tangerine, for all of its musical gregariousness, might have been too intimate on the lyrical level. I wonder if the whole thing came off as a closed conversation, full of inside jokes and references that very few listeners could have been expected to understand.

It did, however, include some of the poppiest moments I have ever had the pleasure of getting on tape. “Chatterbox” actually grew out of a song that I had submitted to an A&R guy from Jive records some years before called “The Words Of A Woman”. It sounded too R&B for me, too obvious, too catchy… so I gave it away. To the best of my knowledge, no boy bands ever cut “The Words Of A Woman.” “Chatterbox” was my attempt to reclaim the best parts of it for a worthy cause.