Britpop Night
Britpop Night
July 1, 2006
Caroline, Strong six minutes long, and still it zips by; packed with candy-floss hooks, but emotionally resonant at its core. “New Order on the rocks, two shots of Siouxsie / And I am an animal who’s found his family,” goes the chorus: a sweet expression of belonging, fueled, in the grand human tradition, by the seamless fusion of music and booze. Never have we needed this more. You heard it here first, nerds: “Britpop Night” will be indie’s song of the summer.
The rest of the album fails to reach the heights of its opener, though it’s not without some nice moments. “The Pond” is a long-distance love letter in which the ocean represents emotional distance: familiar but well executed, with an easygoing melody sailing over a sea of jangle-pop guitar. And “Bay Window,” a piano ballad about one man’s intensely personal experience of an event much bigger than him (9/11, presumably, but not too obnoxiously), hit me right in the gut.
A more polished production brings Joe Morrow’s elastic vocals forward in the mix, unlike the first album, which smothered them in reverb—a welcome change, but one that puts more burden on his lyrics, which are spottier this time around. “Soap Scum” appears to be a song about how nobody cleaned his house for a year in high school, with metal guitars attempting to fill the holes created by broad metaphors and vague storytelling. And the second-to-last track, a power-pop ditty called “You You You,” features a lyric so terrible as to be subtractive from the album as a whole: “I love you you you / I sure do / More and more and more / For and for and for / Ever”? It’s hard to imagine this coming out of the mouth of the man who made Funny Strange .
Morrow has my forgiveness for these missteps, though. Because with “Britpop Night,” he gave us the instant classic we deserve this year. Excuse me while I go back to my uncontrollable smile.
“No,” I said, my body rising from my chair.
“No to what?” said the designer who sat across from me.
I stared at her face without processing what I was seeing. I’d forgotten I was at the office. Finally I shook my head and walked to the office bathroom, where I locked the door and sat on the toilet.
“I am an animal who’s found his family” was from my “Mis-Shapes” post. “Bay Window” wasn’t one man’s experience; it was our experience. “You You You” didn’t seem like it came from the mouth of the man who made Funny Strange because Funny Strange had been my mouth too. None of it, suddenly, seemed okay. At the same time, I felt drunk with exhilaration.
I put my head in my hands, forced myself to untangle my thoughts. First: “I am an animal who’s found his family.” He was clearly reading my blog, which was thrilling at first, but the more I thought about my line in his song—my published line—the more confused I felt. Was this Joe’s way of reaching out, trying to tell me something? Or was my blog just a convenient resource for him, a public-access portal into the brain he sometimes borrowed?
And “You You You”: over my dead body would that monstrosity have made the album if I’d been involved. “For and for and for / Ever”?! I could hear the quarter-note melody with some stupid music-theory change thrown in somewhere: one of those songs he would dash out in five minutes back in Berkeley and decide was genius, until the next day when I would shit all over it, and nobody would ever know it existed. He really does need me, I thought meanly.
Then came a rush of pure, heart-stopping excitement for Joe. Oh, Joe. I lifted my head from my hands, a smile cracking open my face. This was a gushing rave, if not for the album then for its single, which I knew enough to know was huge. This would change everything. I saw him as that little boy waiting on the suburban curb and felt like I might choke on my joy.
I went back to my desk and began googling fiercely, breathlessly. Press was already trickling in even though the single wasn’t out yet, and the album release date was still two months away. There was even a feature article in a Bay Area lifestyle magazine—“East Bay Boy Eyes Indie Fame”—that read like a Rolling Stone cover story, with descriptions of how he held his fork (“lightly, like he might be asked to leave the restaurant at any minute”) and this revealing bit:
“I went through a period of writer’s block,” Morrow says by way of explanation for the four-year gap between albums. Pressed to identify the source of the blockage, he hesitates and says, “There was a girl,” before laughing at himself. “It’s not quite how it sounds, but let’s just leave it at ‘there was a girl.’ I don’t mind being a cliché.”
As pressure mounted from the label and his bandmates, Morrow found the best way out of his block was to “flip the fuck-it switch.” “We started giving ourselves more permission to mess up,” he says. “Me in particular. ‘Britpop Night’ is basically a pastiche of hooks. A Frankenstein’s monster, which never works, but this time it did. That’s why we called the album Strong he was on another level now. I jammed my headphones into the laptop port.
“You okay?”
My boss was standing at my desk, her bob still swinging from a brisk stride.
I lifted out an earbud. “Hi! Need something?”
“Oui. The final for the Miami deep dive.”
“First thing tomorrow,” I said. “Sorry.”
She called me a millennial and clipped off.
The song was pure and brilliant and totally new for Joe. Updated synthpop with a snaking bass line that made me wiggle in my desk chair, my hips even more excited than my brain. The vocal line was so melodic I could hardly identify the main hook: Was it the McCartneyesque verse, the jarringly different pre-chorus, or the rousing chorus, where my “animal who’s found his family” line scaled an octave and a half before landing on a pillowy resolving chord? The full lyric contained no other direct lifts from my “Mis-Shapes” post but was thematically almost identical, the same sense of awaking from loneliness on a dance floor, the same winking generational call to action.
There was a video too, blessedly low budget: vintage Madchester-style club footage interspersed with the band performing on a black box stage. If it had been some shiny MTV cheese I might’ve passed out at my desk. Joe’s showmanship came through, though, his swagger behind the mic exaggerated for the camera.
I yanked out my earbuds and put my head back in my hands. I would’ve killed “You You You,” that was for sure. But would I have killed “Britpop Night” too, inadvertently? The way that pre-chorus sounded like it was spliced in from another song—I would’ve fought him on that, and I would have been wrong. Had I been keeping him in some sort of middle lane, avoiding catastrophes but falling short of his full potential?
I sent an apologetic email to my boss and then I unloaded to Zoe over IM. She convinced me not to confront him yet, to wait until the album came out. A single on the internet was devoid of context, she said, which I decided was fair. Maybe he’d credited my line in the booklet; maybe he’d mentioned my blog. And there was still “Bay Window”—which bridge had he chosen? How many copies of the CD should I buy? At least three, I decided—one for listening, one for posterity, one to FedEx overnight to my mom.
The days before the album’s release dragged. I kept busier than usual, meeting up with co-workers for happy hours, filling weekends with museums and shows. It would’ve been a great time for a business trip, but I was in the “analysis” portion of my work cycle, writing reports and PowerPoints, packaging up all that trendsetter intelligence. I permitted myself only a handful of “Britpop Night” plays a day, in an attempt to keep my head above a tide of emotion that rose higher inside me with every listen. The precise nature of the emotion was always shifting, moving from rage to embarrassment to magnanimity, but always building in intensity. The rage would simmer at low heat until the embarrassment arrived: Who was I to get so puffed up? I wasn’t Dylan; I wasn’t Shakespeare. “Like a lost animal who’d found its family,” I had typed into my work-issued laptop at three a.m. in a Miami hotel. An average line, at best. But of course, it wasn’t average in the song, with that melody and his warm voice and all the lush instrumentation sprouting up around it like wildflowers, a whole ecosystem of beauty. Then came the magnanimity: How lucky I was to be part of it! To have had any hand at all in this masterpiece! To hear my average words transformed into such magic! And that is when the rage would return.
—
On the album release day I left work at lunch and bussed to the San Francisco location of Amoeba. I found the CD right away on the New Releases rack, a black-and-neon graphic cover with two stickers: “NEW” and “Featuring the single brITPOP NIGHT.” I bought four copies and tore off the cellophane as soon as I got outside.
Just the lyrics, the studio credits; no extras.
“All songs written by Joe Morrow, with special thanks to Percy Marks.”
My hands shook. A loitering punk asked me if I was okay. I started walking, first toward home, then veering off Haight toward the Panhandle. I was still holding the jewel case open in one hand; with the other, I found his name in my phone.
He picked up after one ring. “Percy!”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“A little pissed?”
He swore lightly under his breath. “We were up against the wall to deliver a single, and the whole lyric just came out of me after I read your Pulp post. Didn’t realize I’d bitten a line until we’d laid down the track, and by then it was like, well, that’s our hook. The band all decided you’d understand. We’re loving your blog, by theway.”
“Clearly,” I said. “First question. Why no heads-up? ‘FYI, old pal, you’re about to be plagiarized’?”
He paused for a second, and when he spoke it was heated. “I don’t know, Percy, same reason I haven’t called you five hundred times over the past three years? Because you told me to leave you alone!”
“Did I?” I said. “I believe I said I wanted to stop helping you with your music, a request you somehow found a way to violate entirely on your own. Well done.”
He was quiet, and I felt a moment of triumph at having articulated the betrayal so perfectly. I jaywalked across a busy one-way street, beating a rush of oncoming cars, and entered the park.
“Anyway, it’s, what,” he said tiredly, “eight words?”
“Fine,” I said. “Forget ‘Britpop Night.’ What about ‘Bay Window’?”
He sighed. “What about it?”
“I co-wrote that song and you know it! I wrote the bridge entirely myself!”
“Well, the bridge melody was mine—”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“I made it good.”
“Classy. And totally beside the point. Even if I’d just written the lyrics, that’s a co-write.”
“For normal people, yes, it’s a co-write!” His speech was finally quickening to meet the pace of mine. “But that’s not our arrangement!”
“Our arrangement?”
“Yes! We talked about it back at school—you said you didn’t want credit, that the songs were mine, you weren’t a songwriter. ‘I just like helping,’ you said.”
“Did I! Sounds like something a twenty-one-year-old would say to her crush.” I glared at a man who crossed my path in pursuit of a basketball. “And of course you never questioned it, because girls have been doing your homework for you your whole life.”
He exhaled noisily, a wounded scoff. “You don’t know half of what I know about self-reliance, Percy.”
He knew how to get me. I yanked off my cardigan—I had worked up a sticky, cold sweat. “?‘Bay Window’ was different,” I said.
I heard some shuffling, a relocation, and he sighed again. “It was a little different,” he admitted.
“Why not credit me, then? Was it just too awful, the thought of not seeing ‘All songs written by Joe Morrow’ in your liner notes?”
“Percy.”
“Were you worried people would think you’re not really writing your own songs, because you have a co-writer? Don’t you know that only happens to singer-songwriters who are women?”
“Percy. I really thought you wanted nothing to do with me. I actually wondered if you’d be annoyed that I even gave you the special thanks. I mean, honestly—it’s been three years .”
The way he said it sapped the energy from my stride. The catch in his voice was so familiar. I sat down on an iron bench.
“I do love how ‘Bay Window’ turned out,” he said, when I didn’t say anything. “A bit out of place on the album, but oh well.”
“It was always out of place in your oeuvre.”
“I guess. What do you think of it?”
“I haven’t heard it yet. I just walked out of Amoeba.”
He started laughing. “How do you know I even used your parts?”
“I just know,” I said, but I bit my lip. Why did I call so quickly? I didn’t even remember making the decision to dial. I looked down at the four identical jewel cases in my hand. “Did you?”
“Don’t worry, you were right. It’s the same bridge.”
“Which one? ‘Zoe comes over in the afternoon’?”
“No. ‘What a day to be so weak.’?”
I smiled slightly, against my will. He was filing the edges off my anger, but the bulk of it still loomed inside me like a tumor, hard and immovable. He wasn’t copping to it, but he’d wanted “All songs written by Joe Morrow.” Of course he had. Just like he wanted the girls. He wanted it all. I put my sweater back on and started walking again, looping back around toward Haight. A mom jogged by with a crying baby in a stroller.
“Where are you?”
“Panhandle.”
“Mmm. Foggy?”
“Like a graveyard scene in a horror movie.”
“New York is roasting. I’m living in Greenpoint now—”
“That’s nice.”
He sighed. “Did you at least hear the single?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s brilliant, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Yeah?” he said, waiting for it.
“Okay fine. I can’t get over how different each piece of the song is, and yet they all work together. I don’t even understand how this song is possible. I’ve listened to it probably a hundred times and I’m still not sick of it.”
I could feel him glowing through the phone.
“The title is dorky, though,” I said. “I would’ve gone with ‘Animal’ or ‘Animals.’ But nobody else is mentioning it, so whatever.”
He cleared his throat. “Since when do you care about dorkiness? You blogged about ‘Just the Way You Are’ last week.”
“You asked for my opinion,” I glowered.
He sighed. “Fine. What can I do? ‘Bay Window’ isn’t a single—we might only get one single. It won’t earn much in the way of royalties.”
“It’s not about royalties,” I said. I was back on Haight now, walking into a tide of tourists. “It’s about how it feels to be used.”
“Oh, come on. Used?”
“Is that so crazy? I had my hands deep in those early songs, very deep. And who gets all the glory?”
“I do,” he said forcefully. I winced; it was the wrong word, “glory.” “Because I did all the work, Percy. I was up until four a.m. every night making Funny Strange . I played every part. Then I had to teach three randoms how to play those parts, how to show up to rehearsal on time, how to not become drug addicts on the road. I lived in a van with them for a year of my life, for God’s sake.”
I turned onto a side street and sat on the bottom stair of a Victorian stoop. I wanted to say that I wasn’t asking to be credited for playing the parts or being his road manager; I was asking to be credited for writing. But I was scared of what other petty accusations might be waiting in my mouth. Who cared about glory? I wanted the pride.
“I know you deserve the glory, Joe,” I said finally, quietly.
“But it still makes you mad.”
“It does,” I admitted. “And jealous. I can’t help that. The jealousy was what tipped me over the edge that night at the wedding. It was always there. I will always be jealous of you.”
“Fine. I will always be inspired by you, even when you tell me not to be,” he said.
“And I will always be critical of you too. I can’t stand it when you don’t live up to your talent.”
“And I will always be destroyed by your criticism.”
I pulled the hot phone from my ear, fighting an impulse to throw it into the street. What more could be said? When I told Zoe later, she said it sounded like we had exchanged a perverse version of vows. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation ended, who hurled the first goodbye; it was just extremely, obviously over.