No Glitter in the Gutter

I have a short story in the spring issue of Rock Salt Journal. You can read it here if you’re interested. It’s not about music or anything but 2 points to anyone who can catch the Gaslight Anthem reference in it.

On with the show.

My friend Cody is teaching me how to play the drums. I’ve imagined myself doing this for half my life while Cody has actually done it for half of his. It is harder than it looks, and it doesn’t look easy. Every limb is working on its own and in tandem. Unlike the infinitely pliant imaginary drums, the real ones kick the sticks back at you. Action, reaction. And they’re loud as hell.

My foolish epiphany, “Oh! The drums have to play the whole song.”

You can’t stop or miss a bar or even a single beat like the bass or guitar can, because then everyone in the band has to stop. There’s no fudging. No shortcut.

Cody coaches me, “Don’t think too much about it.”

I managed a few basic beats, had a ton of fun, and learned more about music in a couple hours than I had in thirty years of casual listening.

An inevitable outcome of being raised on my dad’s diet of jazz fusion records was a long and powerfully held belief that virtuosity demanded blood. The greats in my father’s pantheon were archetypal heroes who struggled through grueling quests to return bearing a bounty of shredding guitar solos. Playing fast meant playing Better. I transubstantiated this struggle for some imagined idea of authenticity, and in my teenage years believed the distorted guitars and pounding drumkits of my favorite punk-adjacent practitioners were closest to the truth.

It's easy now to dismiss my own ignorance and the obvious dissonance that came from believing in virtuosity as an indicator of quality and my devotion to bands who did not stray past fifth-fret power chords. I couldn’t quite figure out what made good music: technical prowess or pure will. I didn’t have either, and wasn’t really looking for an answer.

I’ve never been a musician, though I played bass in several terrible pop-punk bands. It was always just for fun—which my musician friends assure me means I WAS truly a musician. It’s not a vocation I claim, in any case. I think it actually helped me justify the hallowed pedestal upon which I placed my sonic heroes. What they did demanded A Lot of Hard Work (which I knew I was not willing to do as a teenager), and anything that seemed like a shortcut was deeply dubious. Autotune was the most widely maligned (and used) example of a “shortcut”. Drum machines were obviously verboten. And for a serious section of my adolescence I despised most one thing: the synthesizer.

No, I was not entirely sure I could tell you what a synthesizer was. If you asked me to describe one I would’ve conjured up the Yamaha practice keyboard my parents got me and my sister which played “My Heart will Go On” if you pressed a certain button. I wouldn’t be totally incorrect, but I certainly didn’t understand the place synthesizers held in music and their near ubiquity in the early 2000s. Plenty of artists I liked used them, but I didn’t really know how to identify their sound. I associated them with the kind of lazy watered down white-people wubwub-step stuff that soundtracked Call of Duty compilations. (I maintain I was at least a little correct about that stuff sucking.) If you’ve ever interacted for more than a few minutes with a synthesizer, however, you know full well those things are plenty difficult to use. They aren’t a shortcut at all. Though, at that age I only knew how to paint with the broadest of brushes and so anything that smacked of synthesizers deserved my derision.

So it was with great trepidation and guilty over-the-shoulder-glances that I gave in to the gorgeously grimy synths of Toronto’s beloved Metric. A girl I liked gave me their 2009 Fantasies and even after our short-lived romance I couldn’t deny how much I loved that CD.

There are plenty of live drums and overdriven guitars in Metric’s bag of tricks, so it wasn’t a hard sell. Yet, my favorite track was the subdued and synth-forward “Twilight Galaxy”.

The melody line is elegant and simple, with the synth turned to the dial-up tone. Backed by drums that sound hydraulically compressed, it’s maybe the sparest arrangement on the record. The first verse rings a little cheesy, but every teenager of a certain disposition is vulnerable to Emily Haines saying, “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

There is familiar comfort in the self-described disaffected dreamer. I don’t blame myself for being romanced. I think this is also a brilliant setup for the switch in the second verse, where Haines turns that potentially woe-is-me lament into a far sharper sentiment:

All that wallowing won’t give you the feeling you really want. It won’t make you worthy. I don’t know if I knew enough to really hear this at 15, but it sticks with me now, the self-awareness of a singer saying, “All those tales of beautiful suffering are bullshit.”

As if the warmth synths weren’t enough, the bridge opens up and they take on a hymnal brightness, and Haines woven vocal tracks blanket everything. You can almost feel your jaw unclench and your hair roll down your shoulders as she draws out the vowels in “I’m all right, come on, baby”

She goes on,

That sorrow she described wasn’t just hers, but yours as well—whether you read yourself as the song’s subject or not. The sorrow shared is the sorrow halved. She deploys a subtly similar movement in the development of the chorus.

The first chorus:

The second chorus changes from a self-address to a direct address:

And in the final chorus the first-person pronoun returns for one refrain and then is replaced again by the second-person imperative “go”. The final line reverts to first person, but stops short of the full refrain:

“I’m higher than high.”

The singer and the subject reach escape velocity and the black holes of their sorrows lose sway. They’ve journeyed so far from the playful prurient naivety of the first verse to a place of real connection. Just splendid.

Haines says “Twilight Galaxy” was one of the last songs the band finished for Fantasies. It “started out as an upbeat electro-rock track with a lot of sections and some very involved arrangements. No matter what we did it just never sounded natural, it sounded like three different songs stuck together that didn’t want to stick.” (Drowned in Sound)

Simplicity is its own challenge. When there are no fancy fireworks to fall back on, the songwriting had better hold up.

I ask my friend Cody to show me the pedalboard setup for his guitars, which is the birthday present every guitarist truly wants. He flicks one on and plays a lick that makes me laugh.

“This one’s called Soul Food.” So the guitar sounds deep-fried. “Nirvana pedal.” Everyone knows what it sounds like. “And this one.” Sounds like an alien pool party. It doesn’t matter what notes he plays. He can alter the sound seventeen different ways at the push of a button.

When I ask about synths, I should be able to anticipate his answer. He has a shirt of his buddies’ band MSPAINT that reads simply, “SYNTH PUNK”.

He says, “Everything is a tool.”

He assures me, none of it is easy.

I’m still selling posters for Palestine. They’re $15 each and all the money goes to gofundmes for families in Gaza. Let me know if you want one.