Preface in Prose:
I have written pretty extensively about the history and recording output of my own band Here Comes Everybody in previous blog entries (see links below). In a similar listening challenge/blog writing series begun many years ago now, I started the project of listening to my neglected CD collection one artist at a time, A-Z, and writing about each album I spun. That project was different in that I vowed to listen to, not every CD in the collection, but at least one CD per artist. In some ways, that sounds more manageable than what I am currently doing, listening to almost every LP in my collection, but the difficulty I created for myself back then was that I was writing, not just about a couple of records by a single artist, but about every artist under a particular letter. That proved to be an extremely taxing set of parameters. I made it to the letter H and that took me nearly a decade, and then I quit. The last three entries I made in that blog series were essays about my band’s entire recording history, and it took me three entries (over seven years!) because I chose to write about every single recording that was released publicly. Only two of those recordings in the history of Here Comes Everybody were released in vinyl editions, and of course, I have copies of those in my collection, so now I embark on listening to my own music for an hour and a half or so while trying to think of an approach to a poem-like-thing that does not just repeat what I’ve already written or said.
H is for Here Comes Everybody
I
It seems dumb to describe this music
as if it were not my band. I can’t stand
outside of it, nor would I want to.
Listening to it is like looking into the
mirror. I’m no Narcissus, but I do like
what I see there, am proud of the songs
we wrote, these performances, these words.
And I can look away from time to time
so as not to turn into a flower.
As the songs for the Submarines album
started gathering themselves and
words started to flow, I realized these
lyrics were telling a story. They were
broad strokes, but even so, there emerged
a narrative arc, some character trajectory,
a thematic underpinning, and a boy with
one arm. It all started with that concept,
come to me out of seemingly nowhere,
I wrote and sang the first words that occurred
to me: She was driving down the highway.
She was listening to a song about a boy who lost
his arm in a turbine. Years later, still gripped
by the imagery and wanting to fill in the
substantial spaces, I wrote a work of fiction,
a novella inspired by the songs.
II
My Shakespeare obsession began in
high school when I was given the roll
of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. As a
19 year old college kid, I enrolled in an
entire year’s worth of Shakespeare classes,
where we read almost every play.
Fast forward to 2008, where I found myself
cast as Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, while simultaneously teaching
Romeo and Juliet to freshman and Hamlet
to seniors. Meanwhile, René and I were
writing music like fiends. What was I going
to write lyrics about? I turned to Shakespeare
and he practically wrote an entire album
for me. Over the next several years, those
songs for which I simply stole lines from
the three plays I knew better than any others
were polished and refreshed and recorded
for the album, Play: Songs from Shakespeare.
What I learned: for some reason, iambic
pentameter is almost the perfect rhythm for
pop music. It may seem from the outside
like a nerdy experiment, and that’s true,
but these songs and these performances
rock pretty hard and tonight they sound
surprising and fresh and they make me happy.
Notes on the vinyl editions:
- Submarines, Refrigerator Records, 2005, 2025, 20th anniversary edition, coke bottle blue clear vinyl.
- Play: Songs from Shakespeare, Refrigerator Records, 2014, 180 gram translucent green vinyl.
Links to the previous blog essays about the history of Here Comes Everybody recordings:
- Notes Toward a Musical Autobiography: 31 Years of Here Comes Everybody 12/29/2017
- Notes Toward a Musical Autobiography: Here Comes Everybody Survives the 20th Century, 12/30/2017
- Notes Toward a Musical Autobiography: Here Comes Everybody Into the 21st Century, 12/30/2024
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 