Show Me

Here’s a holiday treat for one and all: a video. Yes, that’s right! It’s like a song, but with moving pictures. You might know it as a “movie” or a “talkie”. Appropriately, I’m covering a song called “Show Me”, by the great Joe Tex, Mr. Skinny-Legs-and-All himself.

This video was recorded last July, when I participated in the Satellite Soul Review, a night of soul covers performed to celebrate the birthday of our booking agency, Satellite Booking, and its wonderful henchman-in-chief, derek becker. This clip fills me with holiday cheer and goodwill, making me realize how fortunate I am to be part of this great Chicago community of musicians and artists. The guitar playing (Michael Saenz and Jeff Thomas), the drumming (Jon Steinmeier), and the horn section (Mucca Pazza) are all vital and forceful, and the camera work (Steve Niketopoulos) is luminous.

But it also puts a different kind of smile on my face. As you regular readers know, the battle to make peace with who I am — who I really am — has been a defining feature of this blog, and of this time in my life. I’m currently 29 years old, and I’ve been performing rock music publicly for about ten years. When I was twenty, I firmly believed that I was possessed of that mysterious substance called “star quality”. (This is embarrassing to talk about, but hey, it’s just the Internet, right?) The point is, I believed that anyone watching me perform would pick up on my intense charisma, nod with profound understanding, and then elbow the person next to them and say, deeply, “This guy’s…. going…. straight to the top.”

Watching this video, however, helps me understand Abraham-the-frontman as he actually appears. As fate would have it, it seems that my particular kind of “charisma” goes as deeply into the traditions of game-show hosts, stand-up comics, and Muppets as it does into those of rock stars. And that’s cool, you know? I mean, it’s not “cool” in the Jagger-esque sense, but it’s its own thing, and it’s good to have your own thing.

And the best part is, we’ve all got it!

Lie Detection

Anyone remember (from a few months back) my tale of writing two songs at once, one of them taking hours of blood, sweat, and melodrama, and the other being tossed off in fifteen minutes? Hey, is this thing on?  Well, just as a refresher: The first song (the one that took all that time) was passed over by Baby Teeth; the second one, “Taste the Wine”, became a staple of our live set (though we don’t play it much anymore) and was included on our last album.  Moral of the story: write ‘em quick, don’t look back, dance through life with a swing in your step and a sprig in your soup.

Well, here’s the other song, “Lie Detection“.

I still really love it. I love the melodrama of the lyrics, and the way that brassy synth enters on the chorus, bringing with it chunks of “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin. I like that it doesn’t use many chords. I love the clumsiness of the mix, in which the background vocals somehow ended up louder than the lead.

Most of all, I love that this song contains some of the most overcooked lyrics I’ve ever composed:

TV’s on and I could watch it for days

Treacly songs of malleable malaise

A self-flagellator who pushed too far

Hitched himself to a shooting star …

When lyric-writing goes to that extreme, I think the spectrum just explodes, and the lyrics are reborn, all manly and Hemingway-esque, in some alternate universe.

Listening to this song again after a couple years off, it really is about something: a control freak who has a dalliance with a free-spirited lover. He loves her but fears that he doesn’t understand her. He’s so task-oriented that he dreams of doing (or giving) the thing that will satisfy her (“Give me the chance to live up to your demands”), but our heroine will have none of it. She has a Buddhist perspective: nothing is permanent, and all possessions are lost (“I don’t know what is left to slip through my hands”). The protagonist admires this attitude from afar but fears he will never truly understand it. The relationship having failed, this difference in perspective was apparently a wedge that drove them apart.

The protagonist requests that all donations and gifts be sent to his favorite charity, The Tony Robbins Foundation.

Line Check

Here is a song called “Line Check“, which seems to me now like it’s about impatience. Seeking the goal too quickly and not watching the scenery.

It’s a couple years old and was not too much of a hit with Baby Teeth, largely because its parts don’t really hang together. But then again, the members of the Li’l Rascals gang were quite different from one another, and they got along splendidly. Truly, you never can tell. The arrangement develops nicely I think, in a way that evokes the demos of Jim Cooper, even if the various parts are not exactly bacon and eggs.

Dig the faux-Stephen Malkmus sprechgesang technique that first rears its head at 1.24. Years of conservatory training finally paying off.