i was 8 when my parents divorced; my father ended up remarried to a friend of the family. she was a guitarist and a singer who led song worship in Catholic Mass, and her two sons ian and chris were something like 7 and 10 years older than i, which put them in late high school and early college respectively. at age 10, i was convinced that they were just about the coolest guys i could hope to meet. they were aspiring musicians, and they had a massive 70s and 80s rock collection. all cassettes of course -- i remember the homemade cassette holder that chris told me had been salvaged from a neighbor's garbage. the house was small and the neighborhood was rough but i loved going to my dad's house every other weekend for the music.
i remember chris and ian inviting me into chris's room to hear "something scary" -- it was Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil". "this song will give you nightmares," chris promised. this was back in the days when cassette dubbing was what it was all about. soon i dubbed all the great zeppelin tapes, the great van halen tapes, the great pink floyd tapes, the great ozzy tapes ("I Don't Know" from Blizzard of Ozz was one of the first songs i figured out on guitar, and the "Crazy Train" lick is still one of the greatest guitar licks of all time), and tons more that i can't recall right now. they also had a drum kit in the garage and a few guitars laying around at all times. they were always watching MTV and turning the tv set way too loud. i remember ian pounding out the beat to "Bullet the Blue Sky" on the drums one afternoon. fucking magical. i remember copies of Rolling Stone laying around everywhere.
around this time, my mother remarried, and we moved into my new stepfather's house. he had a son, aaron, close to my age -- a little older, but close enough -- and an older post-college son who was pretty much cut from the same cloth as chris and ian; he was a rad, rad guitar player with a Gibson Explorer (James Hetfield's guitar, y'all!). aaron and i became obsessive rock musicians.
my first instrument, besides piano, was a drum kit. my mother and stepfather bought me a pretty nice Pearl 5-piece and regretted it immediately. aaron was starting to noodle around with an electric guitar, and our first successful jam session featured him playing one riff over and over and over AND OVER, and me keeping terrible time and mutilating the sides of my drumsticks by pounding the cymbals on the sides rather than the tops.
drums, though, felt limited to me; my brain kept coming up with notes and chords and melodies, and i soon switched to guitar as well and began writing rock songs. aaron and i probably wrote hundreds of fragments of songs and dozens of actual songs. we learned hundreds of songs. we bought Guitar World every month and read the tablature to our favorite hits. Eddie Van Halen was our god. we began to get more into prog rock -- i swear to god, there was a time in my life when i considered Queensryche to be the best band ever recorded. aaron hated Guns 'N Roses -- he thought they were rough and anti-intellectual or something -- so i listened to them privately but obsessively. i was also becoming a pretty good singer; my mom had me audition for musicals in community theater productions since i was a kid, and aaron and i soon formed a band with myself as the frontman and him as the lead guitarist. i would practice my chops by belting out every track from The Joshua Tree through my cheap mic and practice amp. (i would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Ms. Guthrie and to the Hillers, our neighbors on either side.)
i had already been bathed in the music of the 60s by this time, but modern rock and roll seemed exciting, and it also seemed very, very serious (the deep conversations aaron and i had about Operation:Mindcrime are too hilarious to recount here, so i'll spare you). so, aaron and i formed a band, and eventually, by the time high school rolled around, we picked up a few more members, including my friend paul on bass. i swear to god, the first band name we came up with was "Whisper". not even kidding. aaron eventually had a better band name idea -- "Failing Nations" -- and we stuck with that for a while. we played around San Antonio in some cheap, terrible dives; someplace called "Showcase" and someplace near my house that i can't remember the name of. we were pretty young for that scene, but we thought we were the greatest band ever.
at some point, aaron and i outgrew the other members of Failing Nations and we wanted to go off on our own, and we formed a new two-person band. our parents had moved us into our own little house off Harry Wurzbach which my stepfather owned as a rental property. we got a terrific funk bass player named mike and became a total Dream Theater-esque math metal band to the absolute extreme. we called ourselves Requiem Eternal. we had huge, 10-minute compositions. aaron had purchased a pretty good Korg keyboard by this time and i played it while i sang. we got a drummer with a huge, 20-piece kit and we practiced and practiced. we also hooked up with Levann.
i don't know where Levann came from, but we'd seen him play for other local bands. he was a huge, 6'5" muscular African American rock guitar player who convinced us that he was a rock guitar god known all the world over for his monster shredding ability (which was totally real -- he could shred at least). he took an interest in aaron and began to "groom" us to tour with his band in Japan. we were suspicious about the fact that he always needed us to pick him up in spite of his boasts about his dozen sports cars in some other city, but his rhetoric and his playing ability made us look the other way on that stuff. Levann started to come to all our rehearsals, motivating us, threatening us, complimenting us, even challenging poor Mike to a fist fight at one point. we got pretty good...but we never played anywhere. Levann kept telling us we weren't ready. and at this point we were pretty afraid of him. we were still in high school.
eventually we realized that Levann was just a talented local guy with a big mouth and too much time on his hands. it wasn't clear what he got out of rehearsing with us day after day and pretending that we were headed for Japanese superstardom; maybe he just wanted to feel important. it took us a while to face facts but when we did, aaron and i were pretty much devastated. we felt like we'd wasted years of our lives, which doesn't make a lot of sense in retrospect but things seem bigger when you're 17. fuck rock music, i thought.
around this time, i'd begun to participate in more community theater, and i got interested in the musical storytelling in some of Sondheim's work. i was in a pretty cool local production of Assassins that got attacked from all sides (San Antonio is pretty conservative -- a mostly military town, really). i began to get disenchanted with rock music. it seemed to be a dead end. the new rock music that was coming out -- the big Seattle explosion of the early 90s -- seemed really cool, but began to recycle itself by the time i started to retreat from rock and roll. i wanted serious music. i began to listen to only classical music, along with the more adventurous musicals of sondheim and leonard bernstein. 88.3 was the only station on in my car. rock and roll seemed like lifestyle music; the chords and the rhythms and the lyrics seemed too simple; my math-oriented brain hungered for more complex patterns.
when i was 18, i submitted a new musical i'd written to a young playwright's festival in los angeles. to my surprise, they picked it and ran with it, taking it beyond the initial festival and giving it a full mainstage production. it felt great.
i ended up at berklee shortly thereafter (aaron was attending, and it seemed cool), but the pace of the classes was pretty slow. i was kind of a bad fit for the school -- it's really set up to accommodate instrumentalists, jazz musicians, studio musicians, professional engineers, those types of people. of course, i was trying to study classical composition. i tried to get money to produce another musical i'd written at the school, and got pretty pissed off and self righteous when the administration wouldn't give it to me, since i thought that if i were a jazz sax player organizing a music showcase i would have gotten help with no questions asked. i left berklee for new york city. i was 20.
flash forward a few years; i'd been exploring fusions between classical music and theater music, getting more and more into John Adams and minimalism in general, and i tried to incorporate his style into a theatrical setting (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) with the next two musicals that i wrote. all dead ends. maybe i hadn't found my calling after all. i grew disenchanted.
in february of 2003, i moved to vermont for a year to see what the world of politics was all about. all i knew was, i wanted to write speeches for a presidential candidate. howard dean caught my attention. i started as a volunteer and ended up as his primary speechwriter (which sounds more exciting than it was; howard dean hated giving prepared speeches, and most of my work was entirely theoretical). it ended up being probably the most significant experience of my life.
i met ryan j. davis on the dean campaign. he was a theater kid from new york as well, and we drove from burlington, vermont to iowa together in a snowstorm. we listened to hedwig and jesus christ superstar and outkast and almost killed ourselves driving through snow. we resolved to hook up again in new york after the campaign.
after the iowa caucus disaster, and the infamous scream, we came back to the city. ryan worked with me on one of my John Adams-esque musicals for a bit, but soon he had a new idea: he wanted to do a bleak satire of pop music and propaganda about a white supremacist teen pop band, based on the real-life preteen group Prussian Blue, sort of recalling the prince/sondheim experiments of the 70s. i immediately was interested. i came up with the title White Noise, and i began to write songs like i hadn't written since i was a teenager: pop songs, rock songs, country songs, three minutes and thirty-three seconds. i was good at it and i felt inspired again.
i'd also recently purchased an MBox, which is an inexpensive version of the professional music studio software Pro Tools. there is no piece of technology aside from the piano that has had such a profound influence on my understanding of music. Pro Tools laid out music like i'd always pictured it -- as a series of shapes and structures that changed over time. i had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time, and i began to experiment with Pro Tools every day.
White Noise ended up being a pretty big hit in the NY Musical Theater Festival, and even got optioned for a Broadway run, though i doubt it will ever end up there for real (the production is still pending, as of this writing). i kept exploring pop music. i heard Late Registration, and it blew my mind. hip hop had never sounded so musical, and pop music had never sounded so full of possibility. i dove into hip hop.
i was abusing my computer on a daily basis with Pro Tools sessions far too large for the poor machine to handle. i got into the Neptunes, Timbaland, Just Blaze, Madlib, and any other hip hop producer that piqued my curiosity. what was thrilling to me about hip hop was the abstraction of the elements of pop music. a snare could be an actual snare drum, but it could also be a popping sound. it could also be a blip. it could also be a burst of white noise. it could be a noise made with one's own mouth. it could be a combination of some or all of these. this blew my mind. the most exciting producers were abstracting the instruments themselves, creating new sounds that suggested old ones but were informed by the modern world. i discovered The Grey Album about 50 years after everyone else. i shocked even myself when i started to write and record r&b and hip hop, since my early queensryche-loving days were so far removed from that vibe, but i figured what the hell and just got to work playing around with new sounds. i began to record the tracks for a new musical, Street Lights, which tells a sort of modern day civil rights story about an inner city high school and the students who are trying to save their music program. i'd always hated the sound of theater music, so it was my intent to make every track sound like it could credibly be played on Hot 97. the first full track i ever produced, "Not Enough," was a Timbaland-inspired pop song that i still am proud of to this day. i felt like i was becoming an honest-to-goodness producer, beginning to form a clear picture of all the elements in a pop song. but i knew nothing about the "indie rock" scene.
i have to confess that scenes have always intimidated me. i've never been good at playing a character, which is part of why i shifted more into writing and composing rather than performing. to become established within "indie rock," whatever that means, seemed an insurmountable task and besides, my rock and roll days were over. but a friend directed me to Pitchfork, which i'd never heard of. my now-fiancee Cassie has pretty incredible taste in music, and she kept feeding me new sounds that were blowing my mind. Franz Ferdinand! White Stripes playing Jolene! Beta Band! TV On The Radio! i got wind of a little band called Arcade Fire. i devoured Pitchfork's free mp3s. here was an entire ecosystem of music, musicians and critical appreciation that i was completely unaware of. it had its own historical touchstones and musical lineage. the music was new, it felt vital, but it wasn't synthetic; it had a seriousness of purpose that i hadn't recognized in rock and roll before. i bought a Les Paul.
at this point i was still producing weird pop-ish tracks with the intent of selling them, or producing a pop artist, or i don't know what. in reality, i was just experimenting, finding my voice, not really caring what happened to the tracks after they were done. i began to produce nearly a full song a day. at some point, i recorded something different. i felt like it should have a rougher, dirtier sound. i bought Speakerphone, which is a completely excellent plug in that i recommend to all producers and bands, especially DIY types like me. i put my piano sound through a guitar amp sound. my world opened up. i realized i was writing a rock song. well, what the hell, it's not like i'd never done that before. i picked up that guitar i'd bought, but had barely played so far. i kept writing. i realized i wanted to not only write these songs, but perform them. i hadn't sung, or played an electric guitar, since i was 18. i thought those days were over, but i guess i was wrong.
and now here we are in the present. rock and roll doesn't seem dead to me anymore, the electric guitar doesn't seem obsolete to me anymore. rock feels as vital, as alive, as the first day i jammed with aaron on my drum kit. (aaron and i no longer speak for reasons that i won't go into here, but he was my first musical collaborator, and whatever else happened between our families, i can't deny his influence on my life.) storytelling in rock music, which once seemed to me to be a relic of the past, started fueling the fire for a new collection of songs that i began writing and recording on my Mbox.
this is going to sound sentimental i guess, but here goes: i believe in rock music. at its best, it pulls from our shared musical and cultural heritage and creates something that tells us who we are, who we were, what we're trying to become, and encourages us to sing along. i used to be embarrassed and self-conscious about the way my favorite rock songs make me feel, but those days are over i think. now i just want to create the kind of music that i love to listen to. that sounds pretty simple i guess, but it's the hardest damn thing to get right. anyway, that's what i'm going for with Blueyed Son. it's weird how i spent a good fifteen years learning how to write songs from other people's perspectives only to find that the most difficult perspective to write from was my own, but that's how these things go i guess. so i'm back where i started, making rock music and trying to capture that lightning in a bottle just like i was when i was 14 years old.
