Someone Great
Someone Great
Skinner’s album was released in early 2007 to a full-throated pan on Pitchfork —2.3 out of 10!—that unceremoniously dumped all of Luke Skinner’s dreams into an industrial-strength incinerator. “Least Worst Night” had been given prime track four placement on the album at the last minute, but who cared after that review. The night it posted, Zoe and Melissa banged on my bedroom door with a bottle of tequila and a rented High Fidelity DVD to cheer me up, but I felt oddly fine. There was justice in that 2.3, proof that labels couldn’t turn shit into money through force alone, which pleased me even though that shit had my name on it.
I would not have handled it so well if it weren’t for the fact that “Bay Window” had just been released as a belated second single on Strong he had a girlfriend, a bed full of guitars. After that, I kept the links to a bookmark folder.
Video: Caroline Live on Late Night
Caroline’s first late-night appearance last summer went as expected: they played their new album’s obvious single, “Britpop Night”; the band sounded great; lead singer Joe Morrow oozed his usual talent and charm. The song was a critical darling and a feel-good hit of the summer in certain scenester circles. But nobody expected Caroline to be back again on TV many months later singing a tearjerker ballad your mom would love, nor that said tearjerker would outpace the success of “Britpop Night.” Watch Morrow sing the shit out of “Bay Window,” and grab the Kleenex…and your mom.
I knew Joe wouldn’t mind being labeled pop, but I did start to worry a bit when the commentary took this “your mom” slant. Was this my influence? Oh, how they’d mocked me at Amoeba for my love of k.d. lang.
I was right: from “your mom,” it was a quick line to backlash. From one of the bloggers in my network:
RIP Caroline. Funny Strange remains one of my favorite albums of the decade, but they are jumping a big fat shark right now. Strong the days swam in San Francisco’s seasonless muck. At work I’d been given a promotion and a twenty-two-year-old girl to send crisscrossing the country in search of trendsetters, which was clearly a good thing—one more 3:00 a.m. breakdown in a hotel might’ve sent me out a city-view window—but I found myself longing for a swampy Miami cab ride or a bracing winter walk through Manhattan, anything to shock my system and mark the time.
When the dancing bodies began to tighten around me, I chastised myself for drifting so close to the stage. I started fighting my way out, my eye on the exit to a mezzanine, but then I noticed the faces of the dancers. Several local musicians I respected, one of whom had opened for Caroline on the Funny Strange tour. The owner of a legendary SF studio. An electronic artist and DJ I’d recruited as a trendsetter years earlier. I felt a hard snap of loneliness: I still wasn’t in the club.
The band started playing “Someone Great” and I decided not to fight the throng. I closed my eyes and let the sweaty flesh bounce off my own. Elbows skimmed my forearms; heels jammed my toes. After spending weeks untethered on the internet, the physicality felt good, even as it scared me a little, even as it sharpened my loneliness to a point. Luckily it was the perfect song to be lonely to.
“Someone Great” is about loss. Actually it’s about the death of James Murphy’s therapist, but we didn’t know that then, or at least I didn’t; Murphy was cagey in interviews. To me it was about how it feels when you’ve lost someone, and the one person you want to talk to about it—the one person who could help you grieve—is the person you’ve lost.
It hit me hard, as Murphy sang, how badly I wanted to talk about “Bay Window” with Joe. How cruel it was for him to deny me that.
I could feel the song’s groove in my blood, the jumpy electronic melodies that had no business being as emotional as they were. I remembered learning in school that the human heart has an electrical system: that was the sound of “Someone Great.” Each skittering beat and record-scratch squeak corresponded to the flares my heart sent up when I thought about Joe—the love, the jealousy, the anger—but they didn’t build to a crescendo. They flickered off, and on again. They kept coming.
I opened my eyes and watched Murphy onstage, singing with his chin raised, clutching the mic like a life preserver. His bandmates twisted knobs, tapped keys. Gray tufts poked out of his temples. He had lost someone great, but he was someone great too. And his pain over this loss would keep coming until the day it stopped, when someone great would be mourning him.
Envy arrived, almost by habit—how lucky Murphy was to be able to express this pain, achieve such catharsis—and suddenly I felt so incredibly bored with myself I wanted to jump out of my skin. I wanted to pull the plug on my own damn heart. I had my name on a Billboard -charting hit, and I still saw myself as a musical idiot. Was I no better than Luke Skinner, dumbing my life down to fit the limitations of my talent? Why couldn’t I follow the advice I’d given him? Why couldn’t I be someone great?
—
The next day at work I hired the agency’s designer to help me fold my blog into a professional website. I sketched out what I wanted: Percy Marks, Song Jerk, in old-school soda-fountain lettering to clarify the pun, with three buttons: Songwriting, Producing, Writing (where the blog lived). It still felt ballsy to call myself a songwriter and especially a producer—no matter how little musical talent Rick Rubin had, I was certain I had less—so I didn’t tell anyone about the site. I just let it sit there, waiting for someone to google me, or more likely to google “who wrote Bay Window.”
While I waited, I bought myself a keyboard, which I set up in the window of my bedroom next to the desk, and my own marbled composition notebook. I used them to finally scratch a lifelong itch: jotting down a line here, a couplet there, molding them into melodies. I sat in my window every morning before work as I drank my coffee, brutishly picking at the keys. My activist ex was now working for the Obama campaign and had given us a stack of Shepard Fairey posters, which we’d plastered in our windows to such a degree that the morning sun sent a pleasant blue-and-red cast over my room.
And then, while I was visiting Indiana for the holidays, sitting on my brother’s bed, it happened. I got an email through the site from Meg Vee, an objectively badass indie front woman I had admired for years.
Hi, so, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a boyfriend-slash-musical-collaborator but it really sucks to find out he’s been cheating on you with your fans so you kick him out of your band and then you have nobody to write with. And everyone in Brooklyn’s already in bed with each other song-wise. So I was asking around and Dennis from Lowtop Studios mentioned you, then I looked you up and was like OH HER! I’ve come across your blog a bunch of times, always so good. Any interest in punching up a few songs for me? Might be nice to make music with a woman for once in my damn life.
I dropped my laptop and screamed into my brother’s pillow.