I appreciate your patience if you’ve been waiting for an update-so here it is! Enjoy!
Anything
Anything was a song that was written probably in the ass end of the 1990s (1997 to be exact.). I wrote it in one sitting at a laundromat while I was living in a really, really shitty house in Chester, New Jersey. It corresponded with the death of Princess Diana (the “People’s Princess” as she was called.) The song is about the feeling of being lost in consumerism or specifically, other people’s expectations and not really being able to feel much of anything as a result. This is actually closer to the original version of the song then the first version of it that was recorded with a band I was in called Dear Enemy.
Dear Enemy was the first band that I joined in Pittsburgh, right before my first daughter was born. As it got closer her to be born, I decided that I wouldn’t continue performing. (This would be later retracted when I recorded the album that you we’re talking about right now.)
In any case, it was a four-piece combo and it was also the first band I’d ever been in where I was purely the lead vocalist. I didn’t have to play guitar or bass or switch back from either or and also do the singing. This meant that my equipment haul was really really low. I just had to show up. It was a beautiful time to be alive. Lead singer!
The only really crap part about it was the rehearsal space was in the basement of the guitar player, Jason Corrie. Jason is a great guy and great musician. As my luck would have it however, he had dogs and I am stupidly allergic to dogs. I could get about 45 minutes in each practice before it started to kick in where I was unable to breathe or do anything without coughing or sneezing. And then, more sneezing, sneezing and sneezing.
Oh yeah and sneezing.
I’d go through a whole box of tissues just because I couldn’t stop fucking sneezing. The version of Anything from that band is a 2 ton heavy thing. Growly vocals, sick guitar solo. It was magnificent in all of the violent heavy duty barrage of sound that emanated from it. I loved it. Jason’s brother-in-law Tony Mosco was the bass player and Jeffrey Lees was the drummer. (Probably one of the best drummers that I ever played with. Jeff is still playing about somewhere in the state of PA. I hope he’s really kicking lots of ass, but back to the song.)
The Blood and Cigarettes version of Anything is as close to the original version as I could muster. It was more of a straightforward 4/4 feel and meant to be played by a traditional rock combo. No blistering guitar solos, no screaming your guts out lyrics. (This is a lie. I mean come on, the first lyrics of the song aer “I know life sucks.”) It’s a good song I think and it really said a lot about what I was feeling at that time. But don’t we all say that? I mean, isn’t that a traditional singer, songwriter line of shit? “ I was really feeling the moment“
I wrote a lot of songs in that laundromat in Chester and frankly this is the only good one that came from it.
The rest of them were absolute bullshit.
I know life sucks
And it’s long and consuming
I know what I think
It’s all money and grooming
And I know faith in numbers
Only get you to count it
And I know life sucks
But I’m starting to doubt it
And everything I know I’m sure I’m armed with
I am still needing
And everything I know I’m sure I don’t know
Anything
I know I’m trapped
With the things I’ve acquired
And I know that’s why
I’m so uninspired
I know no change
will ever come and arrest me
And I know I’m trapped
And that’s why I detest me
And everything I know I’m sure I’m armed with
I am still bleeding
and everything I know I’m sure I don’t know
Anything
You get born,
You got to school
You go to work and then you’re dead.
And everything I know I’m sure I’m armed with
I am still bleeding
and everything I know I’m sure I don’t know
Anything
Annabelle
Yes, I named my daughter after this song, not the other way around. It was enough of a problem to tell my daughter that the movie about a haunted doll named Annabelle and Annabelle comes home was not made about her, but rather a haunted Raggedy Ann doll.
I grew up in a small town called Boonton, New Jersey. In the early 90s. I had a band with my friends Chris Preston and Lou Tambone (T-bone as we liked to call him.)
Annabelle was written in the same 15 minute session as Worst Thing had been written so you know I was cranking this shit out on the regular. It was very competitive to be the other singer-songwriter in the band (whose name was the Automatics. We wouldn’t find out until the advent of the internet how many bands were actually named the Automatics. Frankly it was heartbreaking. But I digress.)
The story of where the song came from was actually very sweet and innocent. I’d gone to a 5 and 10 which we still had back in those days. At the time, I had really long curly blonde hair and I don’t think I was actually able to grow a beard until I was around 26 years old. I still looked pretty dangerous and there was an adorable little girl about 4 years old in a pink raincoat with little boots. “Little Wellies” as they say in the UK and she bumped right into my bell bottom jeans. She looked up at me with big brown eyes and smiled. I absolutely melted. What an adorable little girl and her mother about 20 feet away saw that her adorable little girl had just bumped into a long-haired hippie freaky kind of guy looking at pulp books in the paperback aisle.
“Annabelle, get over here now!” she said and the little girl looked up looked up at me, smiled, gave a little wave of her fingers and then took off towards your mom. That was the day that Annabelle became one of my favorite all-time names and it stuck in my head all the way until I got home, opened up the pack of cigarettes I’d bought and started writing the song that would become known as Annabelle.
Again, the song is not written about the little girl or anyone I knew at the time. (Okay, maybe that’s a lie. It probably is about somebody that I knew at the time but damned if I can remember exactly who-we all knew an Annabelle at one point. In any case, it’s probably for the best that I don’t remember because I would probably tell you who it was. That’s the kind of guy I am now. Or am I?)
Anyway, I named my first daughter after that song not after the doll that the Warrens had decided was evil and stuff.
But the real fun of the song for me is lyrically, the song is a contradiction. Lines that I would have probably thought were throw away turned into a juxtaposition like “kiss and slap me honey that ain’t cool” which is a very pop song ideal which you don’t really hear or don’t hear spelled out that specifically. Especially towards the end of the song; “Annabelle. I love you. Why can’t you say the same Annabelle you love me. You just have really awful aim.”
I remember Chris, in a rehearsal sang “You have a fucking stupid name,” and we would laughed our heads off. I did it in the middle of a show once which inevitably cracked up the rest of the band and at a certain point, our goal when we were playing live (at least for Chris and myself) was to make each other laugh because there’s certainly wasn’t a whole ton of people there to see us. (Probably because of shit like that…)
The ultimate fun favorite part of the entire song, however, is the part where the guitar solo would have been…had I written a guitar solo. I intentionally left the guitar solo out. Didn’t want to play a guitar solo. Had no intention of playing a guitar solo and if I was able to get out of a song without having a guitar solo, all the better. I am of the camp that I played guitar well enough at the time to barely pass an audition to get into my own band.
The “solo” section was B minor into a G major and the goal became to get a room full of people to to sing “Doo doo doo” in harmony which was really kind of avant for a mid-90s rock band. As a band, we were fond of saying “We’re in this to hurt ourselves and hurt other people. That’s rock and roll.”
Yes, it is safe to say that effectively, we were a bunch of twats.
I don’t know what you’ve been thinking.
I don’t know why you put me down.
I don’t know why you consider
me another stupid love sick clown
If you hate me so much
why do you call me on the phone
If I’m so out of touch,
why don’t you just leave me alone?
Annabelle, you never tell the truth
Annabelle, you always want the proof.
You’re just a bad liar in love
I don’t know why you keep calling
every time to tell me I’m a fool
I don’t know just what to think
you kiss and slap me honey that ain’t cool
If you’d admit you’d love me
you wouldn’t confuse yourself.
If you’d admit you love me,
you could take your love right off the shelf.
Annabelle. You never tell the truth
Annabelle. You never want the proof.
You’re just a bad liar in love
Annabelle, I love you.
Why can’t you say the same?
Annabelle you love me
you just have really awful aim
Annabelle, you never tell the truth.
You’re just a bad liar in love
Annabelle you only you always want the proof.
You’re just a bad liar in love
The “Real” Annabelle
Leaving
Leaving has a really really unnecessarily long title in its original form which was Leaving (Grace Lord Park Boonton New Jersey.)
Why would I do such a thing?
Competition.
This is another hold over from the Automatics. Chris and I were the main songwriters for the band and Chris had introduced a song with a title longer than our hair (collectively speaking.) In trying to keep up, I added all of the extra stuff at the end of my song title, but realistically all kidding aside, the song is just called Leaving.
Now, subject wise, the song is really kind of a sad farewell which was matched behind a really happy chord progression. I was especially proud of this song because of how sad I became writing it, but as it had the very happy sounding chorus, I was aware that it was deceitful as hell.
That sadness kind of corresponds with the whole “hurting ourselves and hurting other people” routine that we had attributed to this band. However, it didn’t feel like that at the time. All I know is that the song had really come out of a place of tremendous sadness for for myself and I was having a pity party but, I was also trying to find something redemptive in just walking away from a relationship that that either wasn’t going anywhere or couldn’t for whatever reason go anywhere. I spent a lot of time in that park feeling downtrodden and it’s an actual place. Grace Lord Park in Boonton, New Jersey is an actual park with a gazebo and I found out by accident one day that you could plug in anything in that gazebo because power was running constantly. And ultimately we wanted to do a show there (and we did after accidentally raking the mayor through the mud at the time which was hilarious.) It was kind of cool to play that song in that park for which had been named.
The content and lyrics structure of the song was almost secondary to the vocal acrobats that I tried to pull off and for the most part. Every once in a while I could pull off the whole song, including this really soulful David Lee Roth scream at the very end of the song which really didn’t work a lot of the time. But when it did work it was kind of cool. I tried so hard to be sincere with the lyrics and I think for the most part I achieved it. I still really like the imagery in the chorus where the character in the song says “I used to think that there wasn’t enough blue in the sky for you,” which is simultaneously really romantic and really heartbreaking at the same time (or as they say, cringe.) I’m sure if I ever said that to someone in my home state of New Jersey that they would have punched me right in the side of my head as hard as they could and I would have had it coming.
Why won’t you believe in me?
I’m not going to get down on my knees.
Who was I supposed to be?
I’m not going to beg you please.
I thought that love should be enough.
It’s not supposed to be this tough
Why won’t you ever listen to me?
I’m not a god, I’m just a man.
I just loved you the only way I knew
I didn’t have a plan
You used to love me for who I am.
Who am I now? I don’t understand
I used to think that there wasn’t enough
blue in the sky for you
and everything that I believed in
I believed in for you
Can you hear what I’m saying?
Was I so wrong to give you my heart in a song?
Why couldn’t you just love me
the way I used to love you?
Did you enjoy living above me
and split this one in two?
You made me think that love could rule the world
and all you showed me was a flag unfurled.
I used to think there wasn’t enough
blue in the sky for you.
Everything I believed in
I believed in for you.
Can’t you hear what I’m saying?
Was I so wrong to give you my heart in a song?
I don’t think I need to stay here.
I’m leaving
Billy Forgets
Billy Forgets was never intended to be on this album. It wasn’t written for this album. It wasn’t written to have any kind of musical accompaniment whatsoever – it just sort of happened. I was noodling around with different guitar tunings and stuff and I found something that I really kind of liked and could play. It sounded a lot more intricate than it actually is. It was just tuning the guitar in a different way and played some some interesting chord phrasings and stuff. It was a pure accident and I couldn’t think of any lyrics but I had a really short story literally lying around. I had written it and done nothing whatsoever with it and I wonder what it would sound like if I put it to this music and just read it out loud while playing. After a couple of passes, I sat down the recorder and just recorded it as is. It kind of led me on the course of what came of calling my live performances as anti-folk and the shows turned into music and spoken word kind of performances.
So I would play this song and then I would tell stories about some of the other songs that I had written and it was really a lot of fun to perform that way because I didn’t have to sing all the time. It was a built-in excuse to shut up and just talk to whomever happened to be wherever I was playing. which was really fun.
There was a coffee shop in Bellevue in Pittsburgh that was literally around the corner from where I live. At any given point the place could either be filled up with people or it could be empty. And one night it was me, the barista and some kid who sat in a very large comfy chair right in front of me. I’m singing and talking to pretty much just him. I don’t know what the guy’s name was. I don’t know where I lived. He was extraordinarily vocal. He would just start having conversations with me and you know at the end of a song and you would let me know what if he liked it or not. I ultimately gave him a copy of Blood and Cigarettes for free. He was pretty engaging and he asked really good questions. He laughed at the jokes that he got and he was very funny.
So, I played a very spirited version of Billy Forgets. When I was done, he said very plainly,
“Wow. That was dark.”
I said “I didn’t mean to bum you out,” and he’s like “No no.”
“I liked it a lot.”
At the end of the day, that’s all you need sometimes.
Billy found his father’s corpse on the kitchen floor lying in a pool of blood. A huge knife sticking out of his back. Billy screamed. His scream was heard as far away as five houses in the neighborhood.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d only killed him an hour before. But Billy had no idea how hard it would be to become a killer with a short-term memory problem. 15 minutes later he came into the kitchen and screamed again his reason for screaming would leave him as soon as he left the kitchen to call the police.
5 and 1/2 hours later, Billy discovered his father’s corpse lying on the kitchen floor for the 19th time that day. He was aware that his throat hurt, but couldn’t remember why. He tried to scream but but all that came was a squeaky little croak. Pondering his throat problem. He stepped over his father grab the coffee cup and filled it with water. The water seared going down his throat but after a moment it felt better. Maybe he was getting a cold. He walked out of the kitchen with every intention of telling his father that he needed to make an appointment with the doctor.
By the time Billy’s mother came home, he was sitting on the floor watching TV and eating a cough drop. His throat was killing him. He looked at his mother and smiled weekly. He pointed to his throat to indicate to her that his voice was gone. “Poor dear,” she said and walked into the kitchen.
The album is still for sale and I have no immediate plans on recording any new stuff…but never say never. I might have something left in me musically.
I’ll see you all soon!
Nelson
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