This song ALWAYS gets me some decent busking coin. Sorry the vocals are so quiet in this video. I was standing far from the mic. And sorry about the brief but HUGELY NOTICEABLE two-chord fuck up @ 1:47-1:48.
Lyrics posted below video. Follow the bouncing ball.
I’m sorry people, our Better Days Are A Toenail Away™️ editorial team has just grumpily informed me that there is no bouncing ball. I guess you’ll have to read the lyrics normally. As in, follow allow as they are sung.
Take me for a ride
I hear you got a hunger with some fire on the side, that's just fine
I'm a heatseeker baby and you're just my type
Get me on the line, if you're tired you can call me anytime, you'll be fine
Put yourself in a place that you always liked
This might be out in the woods
Or by the ocean
That's my secret sleeping potion
Run down on my road
Follow the branches you can find it on your own, I'll be home
Put yourself in a place that you always known
This might be out in the woods
Or by the ocean
That's my secret sleeping potion
This might be out in the woods
Or by the ocean
That's my secret sleeping potion (x2)
Hold on, it's just one more hour to my place
My higher place
Hold on, it's just one more hour to my place
My hiding place
Oooooh
Ooooooh
This might be out in the woods
Or by the ocean
That's my secret sleeping potion (x3)
Thoroughly displeased about the lack of a bouncing ball, I call my chief editor Bronson and ask him why we couldn’t get a ball. “Nothing ever works at this blog!” I say, not actually angry but pretending to be. Bronson sounds bored.
“Uhhh….probably because we’re not a real publication with staff?”
“Okay, fair enough…”
“But you’re used to that Bee Gees bouncing ball shit, I get it, Dan. I get it.”
Bronson is one of the few people on this planet who I let call me “Dan” without consequences. Not like I dole out consequences anyway. Most people I know who want to be CEO’s want it for very wrong & disturbing reasons. Like having their own personal Joseph Goebbels follow them around in order to fashion a documentary to show why they are changing the world with every few seconds that pass. (Aside from making $100 000 every 3.4 seconds. I don’t care what the doc turns out like, anyone who makes that much money is my fucking enemy and I hate them.
Plus I’m too disappointed about the ball thing to care about anything else right now.
“Dan, chill,” Bronson orders. “Reading lyrics in any capacity, even on YouTube, is sooooo 1993,” he says.
“YouTube wasn’t around in 1993,” I note bitterly.
“Yeah but neither were weird-ass digital bouncing balls inside physical liner notes.”
“True that. I remember reading the liner notes to Nirvana’s In Utero. Along with all the lyrics, it even has bass and treble suggestions. Bass +2, Treble +5.”
“Danny, you could live to be 200 and you still couldn’t write a single song better than what’s on In Utero.”
“Take that back!” I bark, more shocked than angry.
“No!”
“SO you actually like the song ‘Very Ape’?”
“I do.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, I do. Like it, that is,”
“So you go home and throw on Track 7 of In Utero and think to yourself, now this is the pinnacle of songwriting?”
“Danny. Calm down!”
“NO!”
“Danny! calm do-”
“Shh! Listen. I’m reading to you now from Come As You Are by Michael Azerrad. The only official Nirvana bio released in Kurt’s lifetime. Would you like to hear what Kurt Cobain himself thinks of ‘Very Ape?’”
“Oh Jesus.”
“You ready?”
“Danny…”
“You’re afraid to hear this!”
“I am not afraid to hear th-”
“‘Even Kurt admits that the song is a throwaway.’” I read, with immense satisfaction. Not just filler. An actual throwaway! ‘There are a few songs on the album that could’ve been a bit better,’ he admits.’”
“He actually says that?”
“Yep. Should I fax you a copy? You’ll have the pertinent pages by 2024.”
“Just bring the book to the office tomorrow, please. What’s it called?”
“I just told you. It’s called Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad. It contains the only interviews with everyone in the band, the bands management, Courtney Love, Buzz Osbourne, etc, while Cobain was still alive. Widely praised at the time, the book is now considered a totally manipulative move on Kurt’s part.”
“How so?”
“Kurt did was doing way more heroin than he let on in the book’s interviews. Azerrad was used to clean up his and Courtney’s image so they could get Frances Bean (their kid) back. See, Courtney Love had done that Vanity Fair interview with Lynn Hirschberg where Love admits using heroin after knowing she was pregnant. That interview cost them their child. Family services took Frances Bean away. To this day, I’ll never understand why Love didn’t just claim to be lying. Like…‘oh I’m sorry your honor…I was just trying to sound like I was living a rock star existence. Does the prosecution have any of my blood or urine samples from the time period in question?’ Otherwise…go to hell.” Like…isn’t the onus on the prosecution to prove misconduct?
“Not with a child abuse case. And new, first-time mothers have to give urine and blood samples constantly.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, if Love wasn’t kidding, the proof would have been there.”
“This convo is getting too heroin heavy. All I’m saying is that ‘Very Ape’ is a terrible song. To put that song on the album instead of ‘Sappy’ or ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,’ was just stupid.”
“You said Kurt thought a couple songs on In Utero could have turned out better. What other song is he referring to?”
“Ummm.” I thumb the pages. “‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.’”
“What? I love that song!”
“So do I. It’s only ‘Very Ape’ that sucks. But ‘Rape Me’ is pretty bad too. Say Anything’s Max Bemis does a great A/V Hate Song interview where he explains why it’s so bad. After reading it, he convinced me.”
”Just bring the Azerrad bio to the office tomorrow, okay?”
“Well, I would if we actually had an office. And you actually existed. It’s a running joke I’ve taken too far that Better Days Are A Toenail Away is like…Blog TO or something. With an office and fifteen young opinionated indie rock kids and one or two token Black hires.”
“Lemme guess. As your fictitious boss, I get to the be one of the token Black hires right?”
“If you want. You don’t exist. Pick whatever job tickles your fancy.”
“I think I wanna be the boss.”
“Then boss you are. I gtg though. Talk soon.”
“No we won’t.”
“No. We won’t. So long, fantasy boss. Just remember one thing. Please.”
“What?” He sounds impatient already. Anxious to fire underperforming phantoms.
“‘Very Ape’ sucks. That song is the definition of filler. Cobain admitted as much.”
For a much more accurate depiction of Kurt’s drug use during the band’s very short heyday, read 2001’s Heavier Than Heaven by Charles R. Cross. It contains a hertbreaking scene in which Krist Novoselic drives Kurt to airport so Kurt can go to rehab, but once at the airport, Kurt changes his mind and runs off.
“Kurt!”
“Fuck you!”
“ ‘After that I knew I’d never see him again,’” says a still heartbroken Novoselic.
Jesus.
Anyway.
Click.
Let’s change the channel.
Here’s Two Hours Traffic with their own version, their own much much better, more polished version. The album version, from 2007’s Little Jabs, is available but I just thought “hey why not show the difference between PROFESSIONAL musicians and some guy who busks 20 hours and week and does 25-30 hours for Stats Can?”
In other words, the difference s huge.
And here is their GORGEOUS hit song “Happiness Burns” from 2009’s Territory.
If nothing else, I hope I’ve made a fan out of you. The band broke up because Canada is an extremely hard country to be a middle-tier indie rock band in. If you’re not selling out t-shirts and records at every single show, gasoline costs alone will eat your “profits,” if your tour even makes you any. I did a six week tour where we paid for one motel room in East St Louis (our clock was broken, so we were woken by four OBVIOUSLY illegal motel cleaners, a mom holding a vacuum cleaner, a boy holding a mop bucket, a sister holding a mop, and a dad glaring at us with an expression of pure hatred.
I looked around the parking lot. This particular motel had over 400 rooms. I did not see a single vehicle save ours.
“Can you let us…dormiendo…one more hour? JUST…one more hour dormiendo. Por favor.”
Even though it looked like everyone did work except the father, who just stood there not holding a mop or paper towels or cleaning products of any kind or a vacuum cleaner, they all deferred to him for the answer. Frowning, he nodded angrily and I fell straight back to sleep.
An hour later with the family back at our door, we kept trying to explain to them that the fact that they were standing DIRECTLY in front of the door made it harder for us to carry our amps, drums, and guitars outside and into our minivan. But whatever. Eventually, it all got done.
In our time Sleep For The Nightlife played over 40 shows in Toronto, 20+ in Brampton, 20+ in Mississauga/Streetsville, a 9-day U.S. Tour, a 3-day Toronto-Ottawa, Montreal long weekend (Monteeal had the best turnout by far, but those people already knew us. I mean, sure, we had a newly designed t-shirt, but all our fans were undergraduates. Even in Montreal, where monthly rent is $280, $20 is a lot for a fucking t-shirt. And you just feel like an asshole insisting, or at least “pitching” new or old merch to friends you’ve known and liked forever, It’s a sleazy feeling.
$20 in Montreal is like…3 fuckin’ nights of drinking if you go to the right bar in the Plateau. As long as you don’t want blow.
2010’s 6-week US Tour is what killed Sleep For the Nightlife. It nearly killed The Big City Nights Band but we are a recording concern. We make albums. We can play good shows, and we have. But rarely. Most of time, this being 2021, people don’t wanna try to talk over a band that sounds like Guided by Voices had a baby with Hayden and Neil Young’s flawless 1970s output. I’m not saying our output it flawed. I’m not even saying his was flawless. “Don’t Be Denied,” and “Goin’ Back” are irritating songs.
I just don’t like it when Young gets too literal and auto-biographical. Ans as cool as the riff is in “I’m the Ocean,” the vocal just fuckin grates and grates at me for five minutes until finally Young and all the Pearl Jam dudes sing the title, over and over, while Young goes “I’m a giant undertow.”
He’s talking about his capacity to mesmerize people. Some have it. Some don’t.
I don’t have it. I’ve come to peace with this fact. Every other Sunday back when my ex-wife and I used to hit up Rexall before doing errand stuff, there used to be this Black man who would sit directly outside the entrance playing Neil Young’s “Thrasher,” a song I love with all my heart.
All. My fucking. Heart.
But the old man never sang anything. Several times I tried to sidle over to him and just…sing those fucking beautiful words, but it never came to pass. Now, that’s not my ex-wife’s fault. I could’ve been more assertive about it. Like “Babe, this is one of my favourite songs. I know you wanna go to that furniture store at Spadina and King so we can stare at furniture (more like she would stare at furniture and I would stare at her) but can you gimme 5 mins with this man?”
After a few weeks of “Thrasher” every single Sunday, acoustic, I never saw the man again. There’s only so many times you can play to nobody and nothing, trust me.
I’ve played to more nobodies than bodies in pinball halls, bars, church basements, houses, backyards, forest keggers, spontaneous highway-side AC/DC jams where I was expected to be Malcolm. MALCOLM. The best rhythm guitar player who ever lived. I did my best to get through “Overdose.”
But back to Sleep for the Nightlife. Our 2010 tour started on a Saturday night in Ithaca. So I’d tried to book a weeknight tour of small cities in Ontario with The Big City Nights. Lesson learned: DO NOT BOOK A WEEKDAY/WEEKNIGHT TOUR OF YOUR LOCAL AREA, NO MATTER HOW LONG YOU’VE BEEN AROUND OR HOW MANY FANS YOU “THINK” YOU CAN DRAW.
3 people came to the Brampton show on Monday. Brampton is our hometown and 3 fucking people came. I’ve seen weaker men cry. As the soundguy kept going out for smokes, there were more people onstage than anywhere else in the venue. That was rough.
On Tuesday we played Brockville. 10-15 people there. One old guy wearing a Detroit Red Wings hat latched onto us & loved us because Bob Probert had passed away that same week (July 5 2010) and during out set we asked for a moment of silence for him. Love him, like him, hate him, Probert was the most feared fighter in the history of the NHL. We drank for free that night. If I’m being honest, the Probert fan told me a little TOO many times with Ryan in earshot “Your voice is rough, ok? It’s rough. But his…?” Pointing at Ryan. “He can sing.” I just kept nodding gamely. Like…dude. I am aware I have the weaker voice in the band. But he was buying.
This was 2010 and I still drank. Ten pints and I’m just getting started, mofo. So Tuesday in Brockville was a “BCN success” by which I mean we did not pay for a single drink, we played two sets instead of sharing the stage (and sharing mics) with some other band (in 2010 indie rock was getting incredibly pretentious…at every other show you’d meet a band from Indiana who recorded not a double album but a TRIPLE ALBUM about Hoosier poets. In Connecticut I one played with a band called Hammer No More the Fingers whose lead singer could literally not sing a note unless her also played the same note on guitar. This sounds kinda cute bit it was really fuckin annoying after song…well, one, where the singer said he grew mushrooms really well. “They grow like my cock.”) Listen to this asinine moronic “song:”
It’s not just YOUR band you have to put up with on tour, it’s the army of other bands. And bands are full of alpha male shitheads who ALL hate each other. I played with a band called Zona Mexicana whose white-as-white-bead drummer ran out of the venue during one song to drum on a mailbox across the street. Which would have been cool if anyone in the venue actually KNEW what he was doing. Except they didn’t. They thought Zona Mexicana’s drummer ha just quit mid-set. Lol.
But back to Brockville. Someone requested a song and we actually played it well (“You Got It” by Roy Orbison) and I finally got to play a song I'd been DYING to play live and we did not get booed. “Fuck Edwin” was the track in question. Might’ve been harder to invite such clappery if we’d been playing Tattoo Rock Parlour, where Edwin was head bartender. But, we’re the Nights. We have fun. If Edwin was there we would have either deliberately attempted ‘So Gently We Go” without ever practicing it, or played one of the I Mother Earth songs that the guy who replaced Edwin sang on like that “Like The Sun.”
Anyway, at the end of Tuesday our bill comes and all 3 of us do the fake reach for the wallet while Probie man grabs it. I glimpse the number. Something like $90. But hey, we’re the Big City Nights Band. Just cuz this guy doesn’t give a fuck about our music and is only buying beer cuz we asked for a moment of silence for Probert doesn’t mean I’m not gonna let ‘em buy the stuff.
Like. Yes sir. I know Ryan is an incredible singer. It’d why I asked him to join the band. He’s also a great bassist, but it’s his voice you cannot replace.
The next night, in London Ontario, we played to nobody. Not one person came. SO we played to the bartender, who was on her phone to entire time.
Oops. Maybe having local opening bands do matter. A dog came though! He ran right up and hung out with us onstage. After the show the bartender paid us a six-pack of Blue Light.
On Thursday in Toronto 20-30 people came. We sold one t-shirt and one album. Sigh,
On Friday we played Brampton again, Tracks, a bar crucial to our history. The turnout was excellent. We made 45$.
Starting to see a pattern?
Even in the Golden Horseshoe, where venue are near each other, it’s impossible to make a living solely from music. Try being from P.E.I. like Two Hours Traffic was.
From their Wikipedia page:
On October 28, 2013, the band announced a farewell tour to take place in the coming December, covering several Canadian cities. Corcoran clarified that a major reason for the split, despite the band's success, is that it is difficult to sustain an income in this business.
Lead singer Liam Corcoran claims to be “active as a solo artist while also teaching high school in Charlottetown, P.E.I.” This means he probably has 4 or 5 songs up on Soundcloud or Bandcamp. I haven’t checked. Let’s check. Ok, in 2015 he released a “mini-album,” whatever the fuck that means (oh…it’s an EP) called Rom Drom. An LP called Nevahland followed.
Not everyone can make it work. Not everyone is Hayden. Or maybe he just doesn’t pay his backing band. Their payment is the privilege of being around him.
But honestly, I get Two Hours Traffic ending it all. Beyond two good song, they’re kinda mediocre. But a band that can write a song this good being unable to sustain jobs as musicians makes me hate this late-capitalism shit EVEN MORE THAN I ALREADY DO. Which is a lot. This might just be my fav song of all time:
Anyway, back to THT (Two Hours Traffic). Whenever a band breaks up, they swear to God, they swear up and down they’ll keep making music. I remember posting something to that effect to Noyan of Five Blank Pages non-fame.
Me: Why not just keep the band together and play less shows? I mean…you’ll still write songs.
Noyan: Damn right I will.
This conversation occurred in 2008 on Stillepost. Since then, Noyan has released exactly zero new music, under either his own name or the Five Black Pages name he played under for like a billion years, so desperate for label support that he actually signed his indie band to a rap rock label called E-Z Star Records. Then he started his own City Mouse Records. I’d link to his stuff but…honestly, Noyan’s Five Blank Pages output was/is the reason people find indie boring, unadventurous music. It was paint-by-numbers boring shit. Plus, his response to my friendly encouragement was shitty and arrogant, so fuck Noyan. Fuck the annoyin’ prick now and forever. Don’t be a dick to people who are nice to you.
So off you go, Noyan, and have yr kids and live in the suburbs. The world is a vampire. Do whatever the fuck you wanna do. I’m a heroin addict and I still manage to release new stuff here and there. Listen to Ryan and me in the chorus. Them’s some ravaged vocals. But we still goin. So fuck Noyan. Did I mention I have a grudge against this prick? Hell, this song may even be about him. Annoyin’ Noyan, the small-dicked prick
The Two Hours Traffic singer Liam Corcoran, like Noyan, promised he would keep writing. But unlike Noyan, he wasn’t lying!
From Wikipedia:
In March 2020, Corcoran released his latest album, Giving Tree and Other Songs ー an album split into two parts: simple acoustic songs and more elaborately-orchestrated songs, each with their own flavour including punk, rock, alt-country, lo-fi, and indie-pop. His first two releases also feature extra-musical themes: Rom-Drom explores separation from a distance, and Nevahland tells the story of three couples fleeing an oncoming disaster.
In other words, Corcoron is still teaching because NOBODY is buying his albums. But he is still making ambitious albums, which makes him an artist. Good for him!
Former Two Hours Traffic lead guitarist Alec O'Hanley had the unlikely good fortune to join a second successful Canadian band. I’m not much for their stuff but they are called Alvvays.
The remaining two members Andy MacDonald and Derek Ellis are part of Charlottetown band Golden Cinema and will likely spend their 30s paying off the debts they accrued in their 20s, trying to “make it” with Two Hours Traffic.
I’ve been there, dudes. Trust me. Here’s my old band playing a packed house (a literal house…a basement). I think we got $35 for this show?
Here’s a montage of our 6-week North American tour. The most we made was 190$ USD at a show in Ithaca. Calgary was good too. Other shows were cancelled moments before they were set to begin. We were all completely broke when we made it home.
At our final stop at a Wendy’s/Tim Horton’s in Barrie, Ontario, I didn’t even have $1.69 for a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger. Neither did Brandon. Devon was -$500 and called TD to ask for an extra 100$ overdraft, They said no. Mitch was even broker than the rest of us.
So we went home. We’d met hundreds of people, played over 20 cities in 18 states, played B.C., Alberta, and Manitoba en route home, sold over 250 t-shirts at 20$ a pop and countless copies of our debut EP Human People, and we wee still totally broke when we got home.
Pere Ubu frontman is famous for his quip that “Rock music is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other in the back of your car.”
It’s also very difficult not to make money from, but just to not go broke playing music.
It’s a lot like being a heroin addict, actually. You are constantly bumming smokes, you never have much money, and your non-band friends usually just feel sorry for you. You can see it in their faces when they run into you. “Whatcha up to?” you ask.
“Oh! Just got a job with KPMG. You still uh…um…?”
“Playing music and broke? Yep!”
It takes a lots of guts to keep doing it past 30. Most bands seriously scale back after that age. The best essay I’ve ever read on the topic is by Chloe Lum, whose band AIDS Wolf called it quits after a thoroughly humiliating 2012 tour. Here’s a great passage from the break up post:
In many smaller centers, our friends moved to the bigger cities, and we’d arrive in a college town where our previous crew had moved to Chicago/LA/Brooklyn/ect , each night was like starting from scratch.
But being the scrappers that we are, we got home and chalked it all up to bad luck / bad timing and got on mixing MVBAG1, feeling chipper and more certain than ever about what we were doing creatively. Then the requirements for US touring visas changed. All of the sudden the price doubled & we needed signed contracts from every promoter 3 months before petitioning for the visa. As one might imagine , getting contracts from DIY promoters 6 months before a gig is as easy as teaching your cats how to play the drums.
So the expenses are going up , the paper work is going wayyy up , the audiences are going way down and most of the bands we liked , if they weren’t packing it in , where seriously scaling back. The whole thing started feeling like more trouble than it was worth but we were so confident in our record that we went ahead despite any lingering doubts. We felt on top of our game , stoked to share our tirelessly worked songs , rehearsed to precision, with our peers. Then the actual tour happened, where by the time we had played to less than 5 people several gigs in a row , being a scroungy jammer seemed less like a fun hobby / challenging art practice and more like an exercise in humiliation. At at least half the gigs, the opening bands would split right after playing, without even acknowledging our presence. In New Orleans, attempts to chat with one of the opening bands got us eye rolls.
^ That there, and the entire post, is easily the best I’ve ever read on how hard it is to be a musician in Canada. Could you imagine if those two didn’t have Seripop, a highly financially successful artistic endeavour?
They’d be like me. 35 and with 20 cents on the floor of my room. Paid rent though!
They’d be like all those friends who “scaled back.”
[M]any of our peer bands had either disbanded , or stopped/seriously slowed down on touring. “I’m in debt and can’t afford the time off work anymore” they’d tell us , or “I want to start a family / go to grad school / get an adult job”. “I can’t face another empty room , it’s futile , pointless , ridiculous , demoralizing”. Same story everywhere and no surprise , we were getting older and so were our friends and what’s marginal at 20-something becomes much more so at 30-something or 40-something. But beyond many of our cohort moving on, there where significant changes in what was deemed “underground” , what could get booked where and under what circumstances. It seemed that as a bunch of 30 somethings in an extended van full of big amps and a loud as hell P.A. had become an anachronism.
All of the sudden bands doing ads for soft drink companies or department stores were considered “underground”. So where did this leave the actual underground, the one that couldn’t sell cars/soda/computers even if if wanted to? Because it was weird/ugly/dangerous/challenging? It left it in a cave.
She hit the nail so hard on the fucking head. When I started playing shows, there’d be punk bands with commercial potential, sure, but there were also bands like The Viking Club who, even though I hated them, played uncompromising music. DD/MM/YYYY was Toronto’s most famous export for a long time, more famous than Brampton’s most famous export who’d signed with Vagrant Records in 2003 (signing with Vagrant Records in 2003 was like signing with Vice Records in 2007. It just made you fucking cool. And it made people care about the music, and listen to every single track on your album. 2006’s The Red Tree did well for .moneen. but it was a year or two late. If it came out in 2004 or 2005, they would have RULED the emo scene. Instead, they took WAY TOO FUCKING LONG to make a paint-by-numbers emo album and watched as their peers in Alexisonfire leapfrogged them. For every album Moneen sold, AoF sold 15. By the time Moneen released The World I Want to Leave Behind in 2009, nobody gave a fuck anymore.
In music, you have to strike while the iron is hot. Otherwise you end up like The Junction, whose singer Brent Jackson is so ill-prepared for the world, he basically had to become a rock star.
I once heard a story where Brent arrived 30 mins late to his shift at Sunrise Records. After apologizing, he doubled down. “Um, I’m sorry, but I didn’t get a chance to eat anything yet today,” he told his manager. “Do you mind if I just go grab something to eat?”
Only future rock stars act like this. No normal employee would make such a request. But the sheer audacity of the ask, coupled with the fact that Brent was a terrible worker anyway saw the manager accede Brent’s request. So off Brent went, inside Bramalea City Centre, a mall with roughly 85 places to eat.
He did not return for 2.5 hours.
Now the manager is actually mad. “What the fuck, dude? You show up already late, you ask to leave to get food, I tell you yes - against my better judgement - and you come back two-and-a-half hours later?”
Turns out Brent was craving Wendy’s that day. One of the few restaurants that wasn’t at Bramalea City Centre. So he left the mall, took a bus to a Wendy’s, ordered and ate his food, took a bus back to Bramalea City Centre, and arrived finally “ready to work,” whatever that means when you suck at working, 3.5 hours after his shift had begun.
People like this, if they don’t become rock stars, end up sleeping on friends couches for the rest of their lives. Which, last I heard, is what Brent is doing.
That’s Brent in the middle, looking pleased just to have a floor to stay on. The floor is Mikey’s, the drummer on the left. The band has not released any album since the above Grievances in 2012, and nobody knows just what the fuck they’re up to.
Like AIDS Wolf, like Sleep for the Nightlife, like Two Hours Traffic, they realized they didn’t wanna drive back and forth across the continent 4 times a year and come home with $80 to split between the 3 of them.
If Canadian bands like Ladyhawk and Wintersleep2 (who I love but haven’t kept up with since album #3 cuz they got kind of annoying. I loathe that song “Weighty Ghost” and “Amerika” equally) and Constantines, bands with thousands of fans couldn’t make it work, what chance did my band have? Or AIDS Wolf have? Or any band without a considerable trust fund?
I’ll leave you now with a few of my favourite Wintersleep songs. I love the way Paul sings the line “in the lost…lonely night.”
Here’s “Listen (Listen Listen),” probably the sweetest love song ever written.
Here’s a great one from their s/t debut in 2003. Another great love song.
A great one about wanting to be…something when you grow up”
Here’s a profoundly heartwrenching one for those of us afraid to fly:
Here’s Ladyhawk’s amazing (but still only second best song ever):
And here’s their fucking home run. One of the best songs of the 2000s. I love the singer’s “shouting down a hallway” vocal style, and I LOVE the line “laughing and backing away saw your dark eyes shine like a city skyline.”
You’ll be happy to know that even though Ladyhawk made an album since 2012, that album No Can Do had some great stuff on it:
P4k made a great point that lead singer Duffy Dreidger is so sharp lyrically that in this song he makes sure to note that he’s “pacing up and down the carpet of his rented apartment.” This is what I’ve been talking about this whole post. Musicians are broke. And if they keep making music, they get broker.
PS: If you like Ladyhawk, their drummer made and released a wonderful album with a side-project band called Sports in 2009. The album is called Drumheller, which is named for a desert-like canyon in Alberta near a jail I’ve played hide-and-seek in several times. Here’s me in Drumheller in July 2003:
So here is Drumheller by the band Sports. Don’t know why they picked that wintry scene for an album named after one of Canada’s only cactus-filled desert-esque canyons, but whatever.
Duffy, from Ladyhawk, tried his own solo album with a backing band called The Doubters. But it sounds to me like he needs his Ladyhawk drummer more than the Ladyhawk drummer needs him.
From Sam Hockley-Smith’s Pitchfork review:
If you're not paying attention to lyrics, “You Read My Mind” is the most uplifting song Ladyhawk have ever written, but it's always been about the details with these guys. Driediger now writes with economy, no word is sacrificed. He doesn't just pace around his apartment when he's sad, he paces around his rented apartment. The fact that he's staring down his 30s in a place he doesn't own clearly isn't lost on him.
Nor is it lost on any of his fans. Or on other musicians of similar ages like Chloe Lum of AIDS Wolf, though again, being 50% of seripop gives her and her bandmate/partner Yannick Desranleau a large and steady income most musicians can only dream of, trying as we do to continue making music without being so broke we can’t buy presents, even little ones like books, for family members come Christmas.
Thinking of Ladyhawk makes me think of George Saunders, who I’ve been a HUGE fan of every since stumbling across this New Yorker piece last year:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/chicago-christmas-1984
This is the sentence that just grabbed me and never let go. Saunders got himself a fan for life with this gorgeously observed thought:
There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.
A good friend of mine Lisa also introduced me to the Saunders theory of the Braindead Megaphone. You could be saying nothing of value. But if you are saying it louder than everyone else in the room…they will listen to you and only you.
Anyway, with the above Saunders quote in mind, here’s the end of my really long post. Prollty my last for a week or so. It’s another Ladyhawk song about losing and how losing gets harder & harder when you’re older. You’re gonna stop losing, aren’tcha?
Then you continue losing.
Goodnight & good luck.
Their new album at the time, Ma vie banale avant-garde (2011), still available from Lovepump United Records.
what a fantastic band name, eh?