"Concussed"
In early October, I mapped out some recording deadlines as a way of motivating action and enacting some project management for Juno Day, which was always an issue for us in the past. The first deadline was October 31, and the goal was to have three songs recorded as an EP to be titled In Double Rainbows. I already had titles and rough form outlines for each of the songs, and I at least had the concept in place for the lyrical content. All I had to do was nail down the form, write the lyrics, and record. It seemed completely possible to me, and, after several years without any tangible progress in my music "career," I wanted desperately to hit the goal as a way of proving to myself that I actually had some level of integrity. However, having just started a new job and moved to a new apartment at the beginning of the month, and with a busy month of attending concerts, including CMJ, and preparing for my first ever solo gig toward the end of the month, I found myself very busy, and October was almost over before I even knew it.
At about the same time I was mapping out a recording schedule, I downloaded a free 30-day trial of the Ableton Live Suite, a software program used to produce recordings. I had heard good things, and it seemed like a logical next step in producing my own music. Unfortunately, by Saturday, October 30, I had spent a total of about 15 minutes on Live, and I hadn't made any progress on the songwriting front either. I was facing a crisis of meaning in which I knew I would have to make a choice: either I stayed in on Saturday night of Halloween weekend and worked on the songs, or I accepted the fact that in spite of whatever I professed, making this music was not actually that important to me, and I had to seriously re-evaluate what I was doing with my life. While this may not seem like much of a dilemma, or that there was much sacrifice at stake, the thought of staying in on my first Halloween in New York City, on a Saturday night...the girls...alcohol...parties...24 years old...I'm single...all my friends are dressing up and going out...it's Halloween...I mean...come on. On the other hand was the project that is the love of my life, and this was the first deadline in the new life of Juno Day. Furthermore, I had just spent a weekend down in D.C. with Zac, in which we worked on new songs together for the first time since the band broke up, and I had shared with him all my hopes and dreams for what we might be able to build together. I had essentially stated that Juno Day was the most important thing in my life, and that things were different this time--there was a feeling of real excitement and possibility, and a sense that we were actually going to do it this time. I really felt that way. I still feel that way.
After some deliberation, I decided to stay in. However, while I felt I was making the right choice, I knew that it would be impossible to get three songs recorded by the October 31 deadline. Still, I felt I had to at least try to get something done. I thought a realistic compromise would be to get one song recorded, and it was at this point that I reflected upon my experience the previous Halloween and found some renewed inspiration for a song called "Concussed".
Halloween 2009 fell on a Saturday night, which also happened to be daylight savings, so clocks "fell back" an hour. I was living at home in the suburbs of Philadelphia at the time, still in limbo between Juno Day breaking up and me deciding whether or not I was going to make a move to New York. The Phillies were playing the Yankees in Game 3 of the World Series that night, and so I went downtown to watch the game at a friend's place in North Philly.
It ended up being a disappointing loss for the Phils, and we drank a lot of beers throughout the game...shocking. We then decided to go to one of the neighborhood bars at 17th and Fairmount, which is not exactly the best neighborhood in the city. At 2:00am, the clocks reset to 1:00am, and several rounds of whiskey were exchanged. We all quickly ventured into brown-out territory.
Upon leaving the bar, we witnessed an altercation in which two young men about our age were severely beaten, to the point of unconsciousness, by two other young men, who appeared to be on PCP or some other type of substance--it was an unrelenting beating, one of pure animal rage, and there was nothing any of us could do (furthermore, shootings were common in the neighborhood--we found out later that there was a shooting earlier in the night only a few blocks away--and so there was also the fear that weapons could become involved at any moment). It all happened fairly quickly, and with two young men laying on the sidewalk unconscious and bleeding, the assailants immediately fled the scene.
Once we made sure that the victims' friends were taking care of them and had called 911, we wanted to get out of there as well. Unfortunately, as were walking in the direction of my friend's apartment, we reached the next street corner and noticed the two assailants about 100 ft. down the block. We're not sure if they thought we were looking for them, or if they thought we were associated in any way with the conflict, but once they saw us, they immediately ran in our direction. There was no hesitation. There was no verbal confrontation. They simply attacked us. And there were four of us, so we had numbers. They went after the biggest one of my friends first, at which point I immediately jumped in and started punching the one guy in the back of the head trying to get him off of my friend. My other two friends were in a scrap against a brick wall with the other guy. It happened quickly, and we were all extremely drunk. It's a bit of a blur, but at a certain point the one guy backed off, and I then realized that there were now about a dozen people watching the fight, all of whom were very clearly not on our side. The last thing I remember is a female getting in my face and yelling at me that she was going to fucking kill me and not to fuck with her man, and then I looked down on the ground and saw my friend Mike holding one of the guys in a headlock. The guy was biting my friend's arm, and actually bit him so hard that he broke the skin and left a full-mouth tooth impression on my friend's biceps.
That's the last thing I remember. Apparently what happened next is that as I was looking down at my friend getting bit, I got blindsided with a sucker-punch to my right jaw/chin area. It was a one-punch knockout, and I immediately dropped.
I regained consciousness in a hospital bed in the ER of Hahnemann Hospital on Broad St. near the Vine St. Expressway. I was dizzy, had a headache, and had blood on my shirt, but was in relatively good spirits all things considered. I asked my friends what happened. They told me. Apparently in the ambulance, I would ask my friend Dan, "What happened?" and he would tell me, "You got knocked out," and then ten seconds later, I would ask him again, "What happened?" Apparently I did this four or five times, but I don't remember any of it.
After a CAT scan and getting stitched up, we all left the hospital at about 5:00am, and then drove back to the suburbs, still very much drunk.
The experience put some things in perspective for me. For one, it made me realize how lucky we were that no weapons were involved and that a concussion was the worst of our injuries; the fact that someone was shot and killed in the same neighborhood only hours before made me realize how random and arbitrary life can be sometimes (notwithstanding the lesson of which neighborhoods to avoid in North Philadelphia); had any of us been more seriously harmed or, God forbid, killed, I'm not sure what sort of meaning there would have been in that experience...it simply would have been a tragedy, but then these things seemingly happen all the time. Second, I realized that when you're unconscious, you don't remember anything. I had realized this before, as I had already had several concussions from playing ice hockey growing up, but this time the realization was more profound. It made me think of a quote from my favorite movie, Vanilla Sky, when Tom Cruise's character, David Aames, says, "Here's what you remember from a coma: nothing." The implication for what this might mean for us in death is something I had thought about before, but I hadn't experienced it in such a vivid context.
Earlier on Halloween day--before all that nonsense--I had come up with a pretty poppy, bouncy chord progression on my toy Casio keyboard. It had no title, and I'm sure I didn't think much of it--I was coming up with new chord progressions and song ideas on a daily basis at that point, and knew that most of them would be ignored. But, a few days after the incident, I found myself wanting to write a song about the whole experience, and thought it would be funnier/more effective to do so in the context of this very light, whimsical, straight-forward song form. I called it "Concussed" and wanted it to be a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for the end of the world and end of the human species. I decided it would be the lead track on an EP that I would entitle A Post-Apocalyptic Comedy. I was living at home at the time and had some basic recording gear set up in my parents' basement, so I laid down the simple keyboard part, and then attempted to record drums, but had trouble staying in the pocket with the metronome. I made a very loose pass through the song with the bass. No lyrics were written, and overall it was a very unfocused effort. That was on November 5, 2009, and I never came back to the song after that day.
That is, until Saturday, October 30, 2010, when I realized that I was going to stay in and work on a song instead of dressing up and getting drunk. It seemed appropriate to revisit "Concussed" and I got to work setting up the song on Live. I used the keyboard from the previous year's attempt, and even sampled some of the drums from that recording. I then got to work on lyrics, and was pleased when I came up with laughably straight-forward lyrics that for whatever reason just felt right ("Last Halloween when the Phillies played the Yankees I got punched in the face..."). After a couple hours of working, however, I realized that a part of me really wanted to be out partying and in the company of other human beings. Hence the next section of lyrics ("All I wanna do is go get drunk and laid tonight...") which I found to be so intentionally bad, but so incredibly honest, that it could almost work...I felt like I was writing a Ke$ha song. Since the song was already so laughably different from any other Juno Day song, I decided to push it further and insert a rap verse. I'd been half-seriously toying with the idea of rapping since the summer, when I had chaperoned my younger brother's high school basketball team on a trip to Montana and was inundated with hip hop/rap in the car rides for the entirety of the trip...aside from Jay-Z Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life in 5th grade, it was my first time really listening to rap for any extended period of time, and it really resonated with me. We listened to a lot of Drake, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kid Cudi, Lil Wayne...I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I found that my notebooks quickly became filled with rap verses instead of my usual "lyrics". For the time being, though, I decided I would work on the rest of the song and finish the rap verse last.
The song wasn't finished by the next day. So I decided to forego the Halloween Parade and a day/night of drinking at my friend's apartment on MacDougal St., and once again I stayed in. But after staying up until 4:30am for a second night in a row, the song was still not done. So I called out sick from work the next day in an effort to finish it before my Ableton free trial expired, on November 2. This date would then inform the underlying meaning of the song, as I realized that the song would be finished on All Souls' Day.
The song wasn't finished by All Souls' Day, though, and on that day, the Ableton trial expired. I had to get back to my job that actually paid me money, so once again, "Concussed" was on hold. I exported what I had, which ultimately wasn't much--none of the vocal takes were satisfactory, and there was still a massive hole where a rap verse was supposed to go. The gospel-esque section at the end was a cacophonous mess with far too many parts, none of which were arranged or mixed properly, let alone sung very well. I was essentially yelling for most of it.
But the song meant something to me. It was perhaps the worst song ever created, but its intent was honest, and I had to be pleased with my effort. It made me smile. And when I played it for my roommate, who is also a musician, he started hysterically laughing--hey, I'll take it...at least it was some sort of a reaction! The song was so bad, though, it just might be good...
Obviously I wasn't going to release it in any public forum, though, because it was unfinished. While I had initially been shooting for a October 31 "release date", and then compromised to November 2, when the Ableton trial expired, I then decided to put the song on the back burner once again and re-record it at some point in the future, with the consolation that it was at least now partially written, with partially complete lyrics and form, etc.
But, as I soon realized upon sharing it with a few more close friends, part of the charm in the song was that it was not finished...not even close. But in a way, it spoke to a larger truth, that we, as humans, operate as time-bound beings and there are finite limits to our creations. Coupled with a maxim I saw in an article about Facebook around the same time, that "done is better than perfect," I decided that maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all if I just put it out there. I had/have no delusions that anyone will ever want to listen to it after even a single play, if that...plus the fact that basically no one on Earth aside from my Grandmom is going to hear this song, at least not any time soon...so...who cares?
"Done is better than perfect." For someone who has spent the past several years waiting to find a perfect way to do things, this is somewhat of a revelation. It's also informed our intent with In Double Rainbows, which will hopefully be done by Christmas, in the context of limiting ourselves only to the tools available to us while we were in Spain in 2007 (GarageBand, a basic keyboard, and an acoustic guitar), and a finite deadline, and with a specific and relatively non-hostile audience: our parents (a Christmas gift to them...we'll see).
So it's done. That's the story of "Concussed".
In early October, I mapped out some recording deadlines as a way of motivating action and enacting some project management for Juno Day, which was always an issue for us in the past. The first deadline was October 31, and the goal was to have three songs recorded as an EP to be titled In Double Rainbows. I already had titles and rough form outlines for each of the songs, and I at least had the concept in place for the lyrical content. All I had to do was nail down the form, write the lyrics, and record. It seemed completely possible to me, and, after several years without any tangible progress in my music "career," I wanted desperately to hit the goal as a way of proving to myself that I actually had some level of integrity. However, having just started a new job and moved to a new apartment at the beginning of the month, and with a busy month of attending concerts, including CMJ, and preparing for my first ever solo gig toward the end of the month, I found myself very busy, and October was almost over before I even knew it.
At about the same time I was mapping out a recording schedule, I downloaded a free 30-day trial of the Ableton Live Suite, a software program used to produce recordings. I had heard good things, and it seemed like a logical next step in producing my own music. Unfortunately, by Saturday, October 30, I had spent a total of about 15 minutes on Live, and I hadn't made any progress on the songwriting front either. I was facing a crisis of meaning in which I knew I would have to make a choice: either I stayed in on Saturday night of Halloween weekend and worked on the songs, or I accepted the fact that in spite of whatever I professed, making this music was not actually that important to me, and I had to seriously re-evaluate what I was doing with my life. While this may not seem like much of a dilemma, or that there was much sacrifice at stake, the thought of staying in on my first Halloween in New York City, on a Saturday night...the girls...alcohol...parties...24 years old...I'm single...all my friends are dressing up and going out...it's Halloween...I mean...come on. On the other hand was the project that is the love of my life, and this was the first deadline in the new life of Juno Day. Furthermore, I had just spent a weekend down in D.C. with Zac, in which we worked on new songs together for the first time since the band broke up, and I had shared with him all my hopes and dreams for what we might be able to build together. I had essentially stated that Juno Day was the most important thing in my life, and that things were different this time--there was a feeling of real excitement and possibility, and a sense that we were actually going to do it this time. I really felt that way. I still feel that way.
After some deliberation, I decided to stay in. However, while I felt I was making the right choice, I knew that it would be impossible to get three songs recorded by the October 31 deadline. Still, I felt I had to at least try to get something done. I thought a realistic compromise would be to get one song recorded, and it was at this point that I reflected upon my experience the previous Halloween and found some renewed inspiration for a song called "Concussed".
Halloween 2009 fell on a Saturday night, which also happened to be daylight savings, so clocks "fell back" an hour. I was living at home in the suburbs of Philadelphia at the time, still in limbo between Juno Day breaking up and me deciding whether or not I was going to make a move to New York. The Phillies were playing the Yankees in Game 3 of the World Series that night, and so I went downtown to watch the game at a friend's place in North Philly.
It ended up being a disappointing loss for the Phils, and we drank a lot of beers throughout the game...shocking. We then decided to go to one of the neighborhood bars at 17th and Fairmount, which is not exactly the best neighborhood in the city. At 2:00am, the clocks reset to 1:00am, and several rounds of whiskey were exchanged. We all quickly ventured into brown-out territory.
Upon leaving the bar, we witnessed an altercation in which two young men about our age were severely beaten, to the point of unconsciousness, by two other young men, who appeared to be on PCP or some other type of substance--it was an unrelenting beating, one of pure animal rage, and there was nothing any of us could do (furthermore, shootings were common in the neighborhood--we found out later that there was a shooting earlier in the night only a few blocks away--and so there was also the fear that weapons could become involved at any moment). It all happened fairly quickly, and with two young men laying on the sidewalk unconscious and bleeding, the assailants immediately fled the scene.
Once we made sure that the victims' friends were taking care of them and had called 911, we wanted to get out of there as well. Unfortunately, as were walking in the direction of my friend's apartment, we reached the next street corner and noticed the two assailants about 100 ft. down the block. We're not sure if they thought we were looking for them, or if they thought we were associated in any way with the conflict, but once they saw us, they immediately ran in our direction. There was no hesitation. There was no verbal confrontation. They simply attacked us. And there were four of us, so we had numbers. They went after the biggest one of my friends first, at which point I immediately jumped in and started punching the one guy in the back of the head trying to get him off of my friend. My other two friends were in a scrap against a brick wall with the other guy. It happened quickly, and we were all extremely drunk. It's a bit of a blur, but at a certain point the one guy backed off, and I then realized that there were now about a dozen people watching the fight, all of whom were very clearly not on our side. The last thing I remember is a female getting in my face and yelling at me that she was going to fucking kill me and not to fuck with her man, and then I looked down on the ground and saw my friend Mike holding one of the guys in a headlock. The guy was biting my friend's arm, and actually bit him so hard that he broke the skin and left a full-mouth tooth impression on my friend's biceps.
That's the last thing I remember. Apparently what happened next is that as I was looking down at my friend getting bit, I got blindsided with a sucker-punch to my right jaw/chin area. It was a one-punch knockout, and I immediately dropped.
I regained consciousness in a hospital bed in the ER of Hahnemann Hospital on Broad St. near the Vine St. Expressway. I was dizzy, had a headache, and had blood on my shirt, but was in relatively good spirits all things considered. I asked my friends what happened. They told me. Apparently in the ambulance, I would ask my friend Dan, "What happened?" and he would tell me, "You got knocked out," and then ten seconds later, I would ask him again, "What happened?" Apparently I did this four or five times, but I don't remember any of it.
After a CAT scan and getting stitched up, we all left the hospital at about 5:00am, and then drove back to the suburbs, still very much drunk.
The experience put some things in perspective for me. For one, it made me realize how lucky we were that no weapons were involved and that a concussion was the worst of our injuries; the fact that someone was shot and killed in the same neighborhood only hours before made me realize how random and arbitrary life can be sometimes (notwithstanding the lesson of which neighborhoods to avoid in North Philadelphia); had any of us been more seriously harmed or, God forbid, killed, I'm not sure what sort of meaning there would have been in that experience...it simply would have been a tragedy, but then these things seemingly happen all the time. Second, I realized that when you're unconscious, you don't remember anything. I had realized this before, as I had already had several concussions from playing ice hockey growing up, but this time the realization was more profound. It made me think of a quote from my favorite movie, Vanilla Sky, when Tom Cruise's character, David Aames, says, "Here's what you remember from a coma: nothing." The implication for what this might mean for us in death is something I had thought about before, but I hadn't experienced it in such a vivid context.
Earlier on Halloween day--before all that nonsense--I had come up with a pretty poppy, bouncy chord progression on my toy Casio keyboard. It had no title, and I'm sure I didn't think much of it--I was coming up with new chord progressions and song ideas on a daily basis at that point, and knew that most of them would be ignored. But, a few days after the incident, I found myself wanting to write a song about the whole experience, and thought it would be funnier/more effective to do so in the context of this very light, whimsical, straight-forward song form. I called it "Concussed" and wanted it to be a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for the end of the world and end of the human species. I decided it would be the lead track on an EP that I would entitle A Post-Apocalyptic Comedy. I was living at home at the time and had some basic recording gear set up in my parents' basement, so I laid down the simple keyboard part, and then attempted to record drums, but had trouble staying in the pocket with the metronome. I made a very loose pass through the song with the bass. No lyrics were written, and overall it was a very unfocused effort. That was on November 5, 2009, and I never came back to the song after that day.
That is, until Saturday, October 30, 2010, when I realized that I was going to stay in and work on a song instead of dressing up and getting drunk. It seemed appropriate to revisit "Concussed" and I got to work setting up the song on Live. I used the keyboard from the previous year's attempt, and even sampled some of the drums from that recording. I then got to work on lyrics, and was pleased when I came up with laughably straight-forward lyrics that for whatever reason just felt right ("Last Halloween when the Phillies played the Yankees I got punched in the face..."). After a couple hours of working, however, I realized that a part of me really wanted to be out partying and in the company of other human beings. Hence the next section of lyrics ("All I wanna do is go get drunk and laid tonight...") which I found to be so intentionally bad, but so incredibly honest, that it could almost work...I felt like I was writing a Ke$ha song. Since the song was already so laughably different from any other Juno Day song, I decided to push it further and insert a rap verse. I'd been half-seriously toying with the idea of rapping since the summer, when I had chaperoned my younger brother's high school basketball team on a trip to Montana and was inundated with hip hop/rap in the car rides for the entirety of the trip...aside from Jay-Z Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life in 5th grade, it was my first time really listening to rap for any extended period of time, and it really resonated with me. We listened to a lot of Drake, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kid Cudi, Lil Wayne...I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I found that my notebooks quickly became filled with rap verses instead of my usual "lyrics". For the time being, though, I decided I would work on the rest of the song and finish the rap verse last.
The song wasn't finished by the next day. So I decided to forego the Halloween Parade and a day/night of drinking at my friend's apartment on MacDougal St., and once again I stayed in. But after staying up until 4:30am for a second night in a row, the song was still not done. So I called out sick from work the next day in an effort to finish it before my Ableton free trial expired, on November 2. This date would then inform the underlying meaning of the song, as I realized that the song would be finished on All Souls' Day.
The song wasn't finished by All Souls' Day, though, and on that day, the Ableton trial expired. I had to get back to my job that actually paid me money, so once again, "Concussed" was on hold. I exported what I had, which ultimately wasn't much--none of the vocal takes were satisfactory, and there was still a massive hole where a rap verse was supposed to go. The gospel-esque section at the end was a cacophonous mess with far too many parts, none of which were arranged or mixed properly, let alone sung very well. I was essentially yelling for most of it.
But the song meant something to me. It was perhaps the worst song ever created, but its intent was honest, and I had to be pleased with my effort. It made me smile. And when I played it for my roommate, who is also a musician, he started hysterically laughing--hey, I'll take it...at least it was some sort of a reaction! The song was so bad, though, it just might be good...
Obviously I wasn't going to release it in any public forum, though, because it was unfinished. While I had initially been shooting for a October 31 "release date", and then compromised to November 2, when the Ableton trial expired, I then decided to put the song on the back burner once again and re-record it at some point in the future, with the consolation that it was at least now partially written, with partially complete lyrics and form, etc.
But, as I soon realized upon sharing it with a few more close friends, part of the charm in the song was that it was not finished...not even close. But in a way, it spoke to a larger truth, that we, as humans, operate as time-bound beings and there are finite limits to our creations. Coupled with a maxim I saw in an article about Facebook around the same time, that "done is better than perfect," I decided that maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all if I just put it out there. I had/have no delusions that anyone will ever want to listen to it after even a single play, if that...plus the fact that basically no one on Earth aside from my Grandmom is going to hear this song, at least not any time soon...so...who cares?
"Done is better than perfect." For someone who has spent the past several years waiting to find a perfect way to do things, this is somewhat of a revelation. It's also informed our intent with In Double Rainbows, which will hopefully be done by Christmas, in the context of limiting ourselves only to the tools available to us while we were in Spain in 2007 (GarageBand, a basic keyboard, and an acoustic guitar), and a finite deadline, and with a specific and relatively non-hostile audience: our parents (a Christmas gift to them...we'll see).
So it's done. That's the story of "Concussed".
