Note: All of the albums mentioned in this blog post are streaming on your favorite streaming services, but if you are a person who truly supports and loves independent music, and you’d like specifically to support Michael Jarmer and Here Comes Everybody, these albums are available for purchase HERE.
Prologue: In February of the year 2015, I set for myself an impossible challenge. Inspired by my newfound love and almost exclusive attention to my LP vinyl records, the project was to listen all the way through my neglected CD collection, choosing at least one album from each artist to listen to front to back, and to write a reflection in miniature of each title’s impact on my life and/or the memories it stirred up. Certain artists that were most impactful to me got a deeper listening than just one album. I listened to and wrote about several titles by my most beloved artists, and in the case of my own music, since this was, after all, an autobiographical project, I endeavored to listen to everything. And then, years into the project, for some reason, about half way through my own musical output, I got unaccountably stuck. So, here, I pick up where I left off:
The Letter H is for Here Comes Everybody
In the first 21 years of the 21st century, my rocking teen combo, Here Comes Everybody, into our second and third decade as a band (more accurately a duo), released five full-length albums. As part of my impossible project of listening all the way through the alphabet of my compact disc collection, I find myself here, in the middle of the letter H, writing a third installment about my own creative contribution to the music library. I have, you could say, been kind of paralyzed, stuck in this spot, until now, an astounding SIX years and some change after my last entry in this musical autobiography. Rereading the last two installments, I must laugh at myself as I was writing about a pre-New Year’s Resolution to finish writing about the entire Here Comes Everybody catalogue by the first of the new year: 2018! For years now I have felt the pull of this unfinished draft of a blog entry, and the unfinished business of this insanely ambitious music listening endeavor, so, perhaps this part of it, the listening of the rest of the Here Comes Everybody catalog, will be complete before the new year, 2025! Let’s do this!
Astronauts (2001) I think I have a theory about why my listening project was suddenly stalled in the middle of the Here Comes Everybody catalog. 2001, while it saw the release of an HCE milestone record, a record of which I am still exceedingly proud, it also brought on the most difficult years of my life. At 35 years of age, I was searching, deeply and desperately searching. Some of what I discovered was life-giving, inspiring, a period of unexpected and immense growth. I was doing inner work like a badass, but paradoxically, that growth was causing me to doubt the authenticity of every detail of my life. I felt this kind of gnawing desire for change. And I looked for that change in some really unfortunate places. All of this was precipitated by the composition of these 11 tunes, all of which, in one way or another, speak to this insatiable searching. The album opens with a song, “I’ve Got Time,” about not being in a hurry, is followed by nostalgic tunes about my grandfather’s Buick and my father’s love for the moon, and moves straight into a number of tunes about doubt, longing, risk, change, and loss. René and I then transition to a jaunty and playful cover of Gary Numan’s “Are Friends Electric,” the only cover song we’ve ever recorded, and then conclude the record with decidedly more optimistic fare, “Some Sunday,” “Found Something,” and “Sing My Song” act as a little self-actualization trilogy.
All of these songs were written and recorded before my life temporarily veered off the rails. I remember performing these songs live and barely being able to keep it together emotionally. It’s probably not too far fetched to conclude that the lyricist in question pretty much anticipated this turn, as if he was writing songs about the upcoming months before anything that might have inspired them had happened. I don’t want to make it seem too woo woo. Certainly, things were brewing. And while everything threatened to fall apart, we would tour all the way down to Los Angeles and back in the immediate aftermath of September 11. I was so self-absorbed with my own upside down life–I was incapable of sufficiently dealing with this National disaster. When the tour was over, the bass player quit, and the band took a hiatus so that Michael could get his shit together. It took him four years.
Listening. It’s a crisp, well-performed, decently recorded (my second serious full-length home recording), expertly mixed, and professionally mastered album. While I had become comfortable in the home-recording environment, my limitations as an engineer sent us back to Bob Stark for mixing and eventually to Ryan Foster for mastering. René had really come into her own as a song writer and her background vocals are inspired. Clearly, to me anyway, this was the dynamic duo at our peak powers. I don’t know that we have ever topped the title track on this record, “Yes, I Said,” the only song to reference astronauts specifically. It may be our best song ever. It never fails to move me–which is a funny thing to say about one’s own song–a testament, perhaps to the deep feeling I invested in the lyric and in the vocal melody–something that, as a kind of smart-ass funny guy, I had never done before, or at least, not with this result. As I move my way through these tracks, that feeling comes up again and again and I am a bit of an emotional wreck right now. This is why I resisted for so long. The last three tunes on this record, though, feel pretty good, even a little joyous.
Submarines (2005) If the Astronauts album is, in part, about an exploratory mission that ends up flying apart, Submarines is an album decidedly about coming back to Earth. In 2004, we started writing music again after taking some time away. We wrote a couple of demos on René’s new baby grand piano, started to record a few of these initial ideas, and then something kind of miraculous happened. Three miraculous things, actually. One, a friend of ours, John Curtis, who had been living in Minnesota for a number of years was moving back to Portland, and wanted to bring with him, to share with his musician friends, a songwriting process or strategy he called The Lodge, the brainchild from an organization that called itself the Immersion Composition Society, wherein, one day a month, each participant in their own way and at their own little home studio, would write, record, and mix 6 brand new songs in a contiguous 24 hour period. He invited us into this collective, dubbed our chapter “The Veronica Lodge,” and our participation would begin the most prolific and productive songwriting years thus far of our entire lives. More about this later, but suffice it to say that about half of the songs that we wrote for Submarines began their gestation as Lodge tunes. The second miraculous thing would be that the person answering an ad we had placed for a bass player was a guy named Fred Chalenor, the bass player for local legends Tone Dogs and later Caveman Shoestore. I was a huge fan of this guy’s bass work and was absolutely blown away that he would call us, express interest in what we were doing, and would continue playing with us over the next couple of years. He would be a central contributing factor to the music that would eventually end up on the Submarines album. The third miraculous thing was that, as the songs were written, the recordings complete, release party booked, we learn in the early spring of 2005 that René is pregnant with our first and only child. 2004 and 2005 were pivotal years; they were monumentally inspiring, healthy, creative, life-altering, wonderful years.
Submarines was the first full-fledged concept album we had ever attempted. It told a story. It revolved around three main characters, a one-armed boy who lost his limb in a turbine, his neighbor Delores the painter, and her unfaithful husband Joe. The story is likely more coherent in my mind than it was explicitly on the album, because after these songs were written, I took inspiration from them to write a novella that fleshed out the entire saga. So the record is impressionistic. Listeners to the album alone might not come to the same conclusions, or have the same depth of understanding as they would if they had read the accompanying novella–and that’s getting ahead a little bit, as I would not start to draft that story for at least another year or two. As uplifting as this album is (it begins with the song “Hole” and ends with the song “Whole”), it is a serious record. There’s almost nothing funny in it. I had allowed the smart-ass funny guy to take a back seat in Astronauts, for Submarines he was entirely absent. The result was, I think, Here Comes Everybody’s best album. Not that there’s anything wrong with humor in music and my usual satirical or whimsical approach to lyric writing, but that there’s something about denying my automatic impulses, about forcing myself to approach things differently; it paved the way for some really strong work.
Listening. Recorded at home, my first Pro Tools project, our first recording made directly to the computer, mixed again by Bob Stark and mastered by Ryan Foster. This record sounds decidedly better, fuller, bigger on the bottom end, than Astronauts. It begins with this cheerful little song about a boy losing an arm, but shifts in the next tune to another character in the story, Delores, who hears the story about the boy with one arm, oddly enough, from a song she hears in her car as she drives to the Oregon coast away from her troubles. How meta is that? I’m immediately struck by Fred Chalenor’s contribution. The bass solo in “Turbine” through gobs of guitar distortion is unholy in the best of ways, and his fretless work in “Meanwhile” should make you cry, if the lyrics don’t. Like my experience with Astronauts, both “Meanwhile” and “Postcard” are tugging on my heart strings in a big way. More glorious distorted bass in “Postcard.” And more fretless in “Medicine.” I think René and I make fine music, but I have always marveled at how a third musician, particularly of the bass player variety, can complete the music in such a significant way. We have been blessed over the years with so many great bass players, but the work on this record, for my money, is astoundingly skillful, musical, inventive. Worth the price of admission all by itself. Damn, I forgot about those cello parts and how hard Bob had to work to tune them–but they are beautiful. Again, René’s background vocal work on this record is just terrific. She’s so good at that. Overall, and not just because of the conceptual work, this is the most progressive record we had ever made, and I don’t think we’ve made (or released) anything as progressive since.
At first glance, this album is darker than Astronauts, because, while the former record anticipated the shit, Submarines is about characters going through the shit–and emerging, successfully, submarine-like, from the depths. It’s dark until everyone kind of figures out their stuff, until they see what’s in their rear-view mirrors. It was therapeutic and inspiring to hear it again. This new year, 2025, is the 20th anniversary of Submarines. It’s possible that some kind of commemorative thing is in order.
Sadly, Fred Chalenor passed in 2018 of complications from early onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was 63 years old. I am forever grateful to have met him and to have worked with him during this short but profoundly important time. His contribution to the record was epic. We kind of just slipped out of communication with each other over the ensuing years, and the next time I heard anything about him he was already very ill. Next thing I knew he was gone. Damn it, people: keep folks who are important to you close. Don’t let them slip away if you can help it.
The Veronica Project (2008) This album, named lovingly after our songwriting collective The Veronica Lodge, is the first album made up entirely of songs we wrote as part of this crazy challenge of committing one contiguous 24 hour day a month to writing, recording, and mixing 6 brand new songs. In the years that we were involved in this endeavor, roughly between 2004 and 2012 (with some late last recordings as late as 2019), René and I wrote close to about 600 songs. The songs on this album were our earliest and, at the time, the finest of the first four years of the Lodge recordings. In any forced creativity experience, and this was certainly one of those, the goal is to produce something and produce it quick, so most of those habits that keep us from creation (being overly critical, having unreasonable standards, thinking too much, worrying about perfection), all have to go. It is fast and dirty. Often it produces garbage. Sometimes it produces the miraculous. Even if the odds were that out of 6 tunes only one would be decent, that would have still produced for us about 100 decent songs in eight years, although, I’d argue our track record was much better than that. This album has 17 tracks on it and clocks in at just above 40 minutes, which brings us to another artifact of this particular forced creativity experience: if you write and record six songs in a single day, they can’t all be four minute pop songs with bridges and solos and the whole nine yards. Nope, they’re gonna be simple stupid, out of necessity. The longest song on this album is 3:40; the shortest is 46 seconds long. Often, we’re talking about verse/chorus and repeat. Sometimes, there’s an A section and no B. A joke of ours in the Lodge was that if the thing had a track number on a CD, it was a song. And even though the prevailing spirit, in service of making music happen, was to lower your standards, the songs on The Veronica Project are all pretty great, in my estimation.
Listening. A radical move, to open the album with a mellow, jazzy thing: “The fog is lifting.” Super simple, as many of these tunes were, and acoustic. Piano, bass, drums, vocals. Few overdubs, barely any synthesizers. Here’s the second one, a quaint little song about people who can’t stop “talking” on their cell phones, you know, when people used to use their phones as phones, and the most annoying thing about the technology at the time was that it allowed people to talk on the phone 24/7 and in public. Out of desperation to complete six songs in 24 hours, the smart-ass funny guy lyricist makes his return: a silly little literary thing about Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, a song about a sherpa, and the most vulgar tune we ever penned, a lyric in “Vodka” created expressly to make René curse repeatedly in a recording. But there’s a lot of sincere, sweet stuff on this album as well. “Ice Cream,” a song that contains a bridge to die for, “Valentine,” and “Spring,” are all sort of groovy and nostalgic and sentimental–and that may have been new for me; my lyrics are rarely sentimental or romantic. I haven’t mentioned this before, but a crucial aspect of the songwriting lodge was that, after one of our monthly listening parties, we would create assignments for the next month’s “day album.” So my inclination not to write love songs might have been countered with an assignment to do just that. And I would have never in a million years written a song about a sherpa if that wasn’t a word drawn from a hat that must be incorporated somehow into a song. The lodge provided a perfect combo of characteristics designed to pump up creativity and bolster productivity. Our listening sessions were never opportunities to offer criticism, only pure celebration for having completed another group of six brand new songs, and we learned a lot from each other by asking about our processes and strategies. The only punishment, for ignoring assignments, for not making six songs, or for writing no songs at all, was to bring extra snacks to the listening party. One of my favorite bits on this album are four tracks in a row, that I’m pretty sure were all composed in the same session, the same day, that form a song cycle, a mini-concept album if you will, celebrating the life of René’s dad and simultaneously exploring Melville’s Moby Dick. Yeah, I know.
Bob Stark mixed this album as well, and Ryan Foster again at the mastering desk. Every time we worked with these guys the album sounded sonically better than the last one. It might also be true that I was developing more skills on the front end. Since 1997, we have done all our own tracking in the home studio. I have to say, too, that I really like my singing on this record. It’s maybe my best vocal work to date.
About a year ago, René and I received in the mail a royalty check for something like $350, something that had never happened to us before. After some sleuthing, digging through the pages of data in our cdbaby records, we finally figured out that this gift came to us via the second to the last song on this album, the one minute and 44 seconds of “You Are Not Dreaming,” a tiny gem of a song that, totally unbeknownst to the two of us, had been used for someone’s musical backdrop in some online creation, a video, a film, a porno (there was no way to know for sure) and eventually viewed a boatload of times. It was a super fun moment, to be actually paid for a recording we made, but alas, it didn’t last and since then has never been repeated.
Play: Songs from Shakespeare (2014): Raising a bouncing baby boy is hard work, joyous hard work, but it inevitably took René and I out of the music business for awhile, even though through the first 9 years of our son’s life, we continued our participation in the Veronica Lodge songwriting circle, miracle of miracles. We weren’t gigging. We weren’t releasing any new music, but we were writing. What I remember most about that experience, though, is that first, spending 24 hours was absolutely out of the question, so our task became how to write 6 songs in five hours, or three, or two, or if René was incapacitated, how can Michael (whose only instrument is the drums) use the technology at hand to compose something resembling music. At any rate, we managed. And here comes this record, at least five or six years after the initial composition of the songs over several months of lodge writing, songs written using the words of Shakespeare for lyrics primarily for two reasons: 1. I was tired, and 2. I found myself in 2008 as Bottom the Weaver in a community theater production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So when it came to write lyrics for the lodge tunes, with Shakespeare on the brain and practically nothing else besides work and the resident three year old, I grabbed the plays and lifted speeches and conversations wholesale from three plays, Midsummer, R&J, and Hamlet. These tunes, as they sat with us and as we refined them, became the songs on this new album.
Listening. Maybe it is just because I am accustomed to Shakespeare and he does not intimidate me that it feels and sounds like his words and pop music are a perfect match. His iambic pentameter and the 4/4 (sometimes 6/8) signature of rock and roll is a marriage made in heaven. At first this surprised me, but as I kept doing it over and over, accumulating the 16 song track list for this record, it became obvious to me. Shakespeare’s lines scan like the beating of the human heart and work really well over the top of a groove. And one could not find a deeper, richer vein of great ideas, lyrically speaking. I often joke that these were the best lyrics I’ve ever written. And you know, the drumming is good, and keyboards are excellent, and the singing is strong, but the bass playing! I’ve said this above, but it’s worth repeating because our absolute luck with bass players continues on this album. Alumni David Gilde, whose stints in HCE date all the way back to the early 90’s, leaves his indelible mark on a handful of tunes, and the genius of another Dave, Dave Captein, is featured on the rest of the album. And we encouraged him to just go to town. So, again, bass player enthusiasts will find a lot to love here. The bass playing on this record often brings the tunes to an entirely next level. And for the first time ever on a Here Comes Everybody album: trombone solos! Another first: René on lead vocals! It’s really stupid, when I think about it, that we had never done that before. Her vocal on “Ophelia’s Song” is delectable, in my humble opinion. And René is on the drum set for a couple of songs! For continuity lovers, the tunes are arranged by play; Hamlet is first, then A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then Romeo and Juliet. The songs offer, not entire plays, but a kind of trailer or highlight reel, a greatest hits, if you will, of the best moments. With one exception: “The Insult Song” lyric collects some of Shakespeare’s greatest insults from a wider variety of the poet’s oeuvre. Bob Stark, again, mixed these songs, but for this record, we chose a mastering engineer that would be our go-to guy for the next ten years, Dana White at Specialized Mastering. I’m listening to the CD version now to be faithful to the mission of this autobiographical project, but it’s important to note that this is the first Here Comes Everybody record in 28 years to appear on vinyl! Translucent green vinyl, baby! Self-indulgent? Maybe. An album with a limited appeal? I convinced myself otherwise, but the jury might still be out. I kind of felt like we were doing something that had really never been done before–which is unlikely, and not really true, but it felt to me like a rare, unusual bird, and totally worth doing.
Unfinished Business, Volume One (2021): During the pandemic, sequestered at home, schools closed, social activity curtailed, I had some time to kill. What do they say about idle hands? Something having to do with the devil’s work. At any rate, I started culling through the nearly 100 lodge sessions in that decade between 2004 and 2014 and I started to realize what a treasure trove that was, at least in terms of an archive of our musical duo’s creative output, about 600 songs, most of which, save the tunes from the last three Here Comes Everybody albums, would never be heard, ever, by anyone but me and my dear René. So I started playing a little game, envisioning a series of rarity albums, fantasizing, as I did as a child before I even became a musician, about records that I could make. I made my way through every lodge recording, skipping quickly over performances or ideas that were obviously shite, and pulling out, organizing, and sequencing the gems. I ended up creating 6 playlists, each about the length of a short 35 minute album, and I titled them in my Apple Music Player, “Unfinished Business, Volumes 1-6.” And I extracted from those playlists a number of tunes that were holiday themed, saved for another fantasy album, what might be Here Comes Everybody’s first Christmas album. So, essentially, I culled seven albums worth of material from the collected and unreleased Veronica Lodge Recordings. Now what? Why not release the first volume now? Why not?
In keeping with the spirit of a true rarities record, most of the tunes I chose for volume one, except for two or three songs, are the original lodge recordings, and because I had lost the original multi-track files, they haven’t even been remixed. I’m pretty good at archiving my shit, but this is one lapse that I regret: after moving over the last twenty years through two homes, maybe four or five computers, and a half a dozen storage devices, I lost track of the original sessions. But I felt too strongly about the goodness of these tunes to just let them slip away. So from a technical standpoint, only a few songs had been performed again in a more formal way, and NONE of them could be remixed. The advent of stem technology was not yet on my radar, software that will break a stereo track into component parts–drums, bass, vocals, etc. As a result, “Unfinished Business” is likely the most lo-fi production in our catalog since the days of the multi-track cassette tape studio! Nevertheless, this record, thanks to the mastering prowess of Dana White, working with stereo mixes as MP3 files of all things, sounds pretty darn good.
Listening. I think what stands out about these recordings is a pretty high weirdness factor. A lot of these tunes, short melodic alt pop songs, keys, drums, and vocals, represent pretty typical but singular Here Comes Everybody fare, while others, some of the crazier and shorter things born out of desperation to get six songs done in a single day, are weirder than anything on any other HCE record. Mood pieces, experimental and improvised things. Lots of René lead vocal, maybe my favorite thing about this album. Songs without drums. Performances that are far from perfect. Mundane subject matter: falling asleep, a child collecting plums, unfinished household chores, a list of favorite things, bad novels–you know, usual pop music material! The lyrics are often super abstract, again, born out of writing in a hurry, like this from the chorus of “Is This It”: “Is this it? What is this? What is this? Or, please take out the trash, okay?” Non-sequiturs R US. But while these tunes are weird, they are decidedly and mostly mellow and meditative. There are few rockers here, the standout being my favorite song on the album (and maybe my favorite HCE tune ever) “The Martian Invasion.” Other favorites, as in, almost all time favorites: “Like, You Know, Whatever,” “Looking Up,” “Accident Waiting.” These are pop rock bangers, perhaps worthy of rerecording. I mean, all of these tunes would be worth refining and polishing, but part of this embarrassment of riches that was the result of The Veronica Lodge, is that to finish and release everything that was good from this catalog would be a herculean task, a life-long endeavor! And I’ve got five more volumes of this and a Christmas album! Will they ever see the light of day? I don’t know. It would be kind of a ridiculous and selfish project with a very tiny potential audience. I’m not famous after all, right? Who cares? Am I worthy? Practical questions, perhaps, but also silly ones, imposter syndrome stuff. Just this morning, I was having a conversation with René, and she was telling me about a question one of her colleagues on the staff of her high school Indoor Percussion group asked their drummers before a performance at a National competition: Do You Deserve To Be Here? The only correct answer, of course, is Hell Yeah. And that explains my entire motivation behind the rocking teen combo that has been Here Comes Everybody now for 38 years: Do we deserve to be listened to? Hell Yeah, even if it’s just me and a handful of friends. But it’s true: I am my own biggest fan.
Phew. That was a lot. But it brings us to the end of the recorded musical history of Here Comes Everybody. I’m pretty sure, but not certain, that it will continue. I hope it does. I don’t think I can truly thrive as a human being unless I am generating original music, so while my Partner in Crime is devoting most of her creative energies to directing an award winning high school indoor percussion troupe, I have found a new Partner in Crime in Here Comes Everybody alumni Adam Fagelson, the other half of Project MA. In this moment, I am more excited about this project than I have been about anything else for a very long time. Please check out our debut album “You Are Here,” for sale at the Here Comes Everybody store, or stream Project MA on your favorite streamers. New music is coming in 2025! I did it! Happy New Year!
michael jarmer 