Today and for the next few weeks we’ll be handing the reins over to poet-in-residence J.E. O’Leary, so he can tell the story of his band Trousers as he goes track-by-track through the band’s only release, 2004’s We Pitched a Hut and Called it Providence. Today: Track 7, September 10th

One of my favorite things about being in a band and starting out was those hour long jam sessions. No agenda, no “working on” anything, just the band, some beers, some weed, and saying GO. It’s an exercise in improvisation, in creativity, and in endurance, both mentally and physically. We had to physically be able to play for that long – wasn’t the goal headlining shows? We would have to be able to play without taking breaks. We wouldn’t be able to walk off stage in the middle of a set and take a smoke break. Long jamming sessions also tested my mental creativity, and listening skills. If we could keep things interesting for long stretches, just jamming, not working on material, that meant we were listening well and exploring, flexing those creative muscles. These sessions were also great for writing as a band. I loved writing a song and bringing it to the band, but I also loved coming up with something brand new as a foursome. September 10th was one of those songs.

There’s no big meaning behind us calling it September 10th. The jam session where we came up with the skeleton of what became the song was literally on September 10th. We probably passed the tape around and at subsequent rehearsals would label it “September 10th jam”. Also we thought the jam sounded foreboding and sinister, and naming it after the day before an awful day seemed to fit. I don’t remember specifically how it came about, but I remember collecting those basslines from a D minor jam and putting them together – the arrangement just kind of came together. I tried to write words for it once, but the vibe was really off putting. I think in the Tape Box somewhere there is a really early version of me singing over it, but we ditched the idea pretty quick. It didn’t need a vocal part.

I definitely sound like a broken record at this point, but Joey’s guitar parts on this are perfect as usual. He had such a great feel for the dynamics of a song and how to push it forward. And having a classically trained musician like Becca in the band was such a great asset. She was always careful to never overwork any part, and knew exactly how to find her place in a song, even loud of busy parts. I could probably count on one hand the number of times we got too loud/busy/crazy for her and she just threw up her hands and was lost. There’s such a great achy quality to her parts here, especially in the first movement.

There’s a little studio magic happening in the way the two sections were bridged, but listening to it all these years later, it sounds fine. George is really hustling and pushing on the second movement, and though there’s a bit of a hesitation as we come out of the first, you can hear the moment we click, and it really takes off. The overall performance is solid, and, like Nothing Is Wasted, a good representation of what we were doing when we were at our best, and indicative of the kind of collaborative, urgent vibe we would have pursued, given a little more time.

When we walked in to the studio for the first time, we saw they had a gong set up behind the drum kit. “I don’t know what song it’s going to be,” George said. “But I’m hitting that gong on something.” We were all in agreement. When we were listening to the first mix in the booth, we all kind of looked at each other at the same time at the part. George made a hitting-the-gong motion. We did the overdubs right there. It sounds righteous. We were all so thrilled to have a gong on the record, we specifically called it out in the album credits.

None of us were sure where that little curly tail of a note at the beginning came from. It’s definitely Joey, We assume it was a trailing note left on the tape from whatever song we did before, but we did not notice it until it came time to master the recording. We’d gathered at a little basement in Chinatown on a Sunday with a “budget” master guy we found off of Craigslist. The little note is another one of those happy accidents that you find during the process. But by this time we were already aware that the end was near for the band, and the mastering sessions had an air of melancholy to them, even though we were all finishing something we were really proud of.

The one thing I remember from the mastering sessions is that it ended up being more expensive than we thought. I came in to it thinking it was going to be $60 each, but I must have read the email wrong because it ended up being almost twice that, and I went out to one of those bodega ATMs to get more money. It charged me a fee and left me with less that $20 for the week, and that depressed me even more than any of the other stuff going on. I remember thinking, at the ATM, I’m flat broke and I’m losing my band. If this isn’t a sign I need to get my shit together, I don’t know what is.

It would take me a little longer, in fits and starts, two steps forward one step back, but more than anything that was the moment. By that time next year I would have a new job, and more money, but I was in a new band I wasn’t happy in. But that’s a story for another series.

Today and for the next few weeks we’ll be handing the reins over to poet-in-residence J.E. O’Leary, so he can tell the story of his band Trousers as he goes track-by-track through the band’s only release, 2004’s We Pitched a Hut and Called it Providence.

Nothing Is Wasted was one of the last songs Trousers came up with. I had the riff – just a basic 1-4-5 plucked with the pick, but really nothing else. We jammed on it for a while before lyrics came, and the bridge is just a minor 6th – pretty standard Songwriting 101 stuff. I don’t even have any drama associated with this song. The lyrics aren’t about anything or anyone in particular, the recording sounds really good, and aside from one vocal miss (there’s supposed to be a big scream on the last “see the worrrrrrrrrrld!”) I’m happy with how I sound personally.

The song starts off with George on the drums, and it’s probably his best performance on the record. The beat is strong and fun and driving. I think had Trousers continued, we probably would have done a lot more stuff in this vein, upbeat dance-y melodic songs. There was a lot of that going on in Brooklyn in 2003-2004, and it probably would have gone over really well. The cowbell is classic – we’d been waiting for a song to use it on, and this was perfect. Joey’s sliding notes really push the song forward, and are where most of the dynamics come from. He always had a great knack for that stuff.

As you can tell, there’s not a lot going on in this song, so we added another track with Becca on the Wurlitzer, split off to the right. There’s a really great off-note at around 1:16-1:18, it comes in flat, but it sounds so good. One of those happy accidents you hope and pray will arrive at recording time. Her call and response vocals are great too. That is another element I think would have wanted to move to the front had Trousers continued. Her voice was really perfect for a lot of our material. I think we had a real streak of optimism, playfulness, and humor in our music and her voice was really expressive in that lane.

I think there’s a relatively celebratory tone to the lyrics. “Nothing is wasted” stands as kind of the faster, complimentary song to “When I go” – there’s a lot of the same tone to the lyrics. Which is interesting to me because when I initially wrote When I Go it had a similar vibe to Nothing is Wasted (though a lot slower). They both had that root-5, root-5, root-5 picking on the bass and a minor 6th chorus.

I think there’s a little distortion on my voice in the low end (?) – probably the engineer trying to cover up the fact that my voice was a bit thin that day. The only thing I’m not happy with in this song is the second “nothing is shorter than June” – where I draw “June” out and it sounds flat (emotionally not musically, though maybe there too). But overall this song stands as a good representation of where we were as a band and where we potentially could move: tighter band, better dynamics, more involvement up front from the other members. Something I learned pretty early on (and shocked me when I did) was that not every emotional song needs to have high drama around every element of its execution. I knew this for fiction writing, but it took me quite a long time to put that particular two and two together. It was quite a relief when I did.

n.b. the song’s title (and main theme) is apparently stolen from Charles Bukowski, whose “Dark Night Poem” reads: “they say that / nothing is wasted / either that / or / it all is” … Now, I don’t remember specifically lifting this, but I was quite the Buk fan at the time, so I without a doubt had come across it. Sorry Chuck. But thanks!

Today and for the next few weeks we’ll be handing the reins over to poet-in-residence J.E. O’Leary, so he can tell the story of his band Trousers as he goes track-by-track through the band’s only release, 2004’s We Pitched a Hut and Called it Providence.

It took a long time for me to get this right. The song started with the bass riff that kicks off the song, but I was hearing the whole symphony in my head from the beginning. The version that ultimately got laid down on tape was – the best word I can come up with for it is correct. All the parts are there, the notes are there, the verses are in the right sequence, but something is missing. Listening to it now, the thing that’s missing is me.

When my girlfriend finally moved out in May 2002 I had the whole house to myself. I was alone all summer in the east end of Brooklyn. The few friends I did have were either in Manhattan, Long Island, or the Bronx. So I had a lot of time to myself I smoked weed and cigarettes and drank beer and played around with my four track. I jammed on C-Am forever. I did little fills each time. I was channeling something larger, something I wasn’t ready for. So I waited and waited. There was the first part. The second part was C, B, then descending to something else. I could hear it in my head but didn’t know where it was on the bass. I tried every note in the C scale, but none of them worked. Eventually I found it – A flat with an E over it. I remember how amazing it was to hear it, finally. I didn’t know why it worked – but it did. From there, I was able to get the third part – F – Am. Then resolved it back to C, where verses would come in. From there is came together pretty quickly. I added the verses and then by the time it got back to the F part, there would be a quiet part into a loud jam. It would be a real showstopper – a multi part epic ripe for long jams at the beginning and a fierce rock out at the end. The kind of song you could stretch out and have wild live versions.

After George and I jammed that first time, we started making plans to put a band together. Our first guitarist was named Tom. We spent about half the time working on his songs, and half working on mine. When I brought this unnamed song to the band, none of us had the musical vocabulary we needed to be able to describe the parts, so we ended up diagramming it out on big sheets of paper and hanging them up on the wall. Verse part one > Verse part two, etc. Everyone was into it. George named the song; at one point I was clarifying something on the chart and he stood with his hands on his hips looking sideways at it. “Es complicado,” he said. This is complicated.

As far as the band was concerned, we had a name – Sketch – and plans to add another element to the mix. I was pretty set on getting a cello player for some reason, but we did bring in a couple of keyboard players. One day we brought in a guy named Kartik. He had a huge 88 key Yamaha and serious chops. He was blowing us away. When it came time to do this song, we broke out the charts and hung them on the wall. When I was telling him the chords for the different sections, I brought up the mystery A flat chord. “I don’t know what this chord is, but it works,” I said. Kartik ran some scales and we went through the part. He squinted while he played. Then he landed on a chord that rang out. “Oh,” he said “It’s E7”. I didn’t understand how E7 could fit into a C major key (still don’t) but I was grateful to finally have an answer. Kartik didn’t work out (I think we all thought he was too good), but I’ll always remember him giving me that chord.

The recording is pretty close to how I heard it in my head, bass-wise. Re-listening now I think there could have been fewer runs, especially during the first part, but there were so many notes in there that I’d come up with, and I wanted to put as many down on tape as I could. The real stand out here is Becca’s cello part, absolutely perfect, especially her haunting sustained notes at 5:00 – 5:15 or so. I hate my voice here. It’s thin and weak as a result of being out all night and not getting any sleep – tossing and turning over a girl that I was infatuated with. This was someone I had known as a friend for a long time, it briefly turned into something more before she pulled back. We basically got to have one perfect day – a day that became its own song.

In the moment, I was devastated. It’s just too bad that the worst day for me just happened to be the day before we were recording vocals. I couldn’t hit notes. I was totally unfocused. The whole band was pissed, and rightfully so. The next day of recording went better, but we didn’t have time to re-do Complicado, only auto-tune some of the worst parts. It’s hard to listen to now, only because I still hear what I heard that summer when I was writing it in my Canarsie basement. It’s not a track about which I’m really able to give a fair judgement. Except to know that I could have, should have done better. And that’s not really the way you want to feel about anything you’ve done that was supposed to be important to you. So listening to it now just makes me melancholy.

But the song itself? One of the things I’m most proud of having written. Despite the tongue-in-cheek lyrics, I love the melodies, I love the arrangement, I love the “stop love” breakdown. It really brings back 2002-2003 to me – hanging out in Williamsburg with George, then heading back to Canarsie on the L, crushing on hipster girls who wouldn’t get off their cellphones, reading missed connections, hoping. I love the honesty of the lyric “I know you want to see the west as bad as I do”. I still hadn’t been out west yet, despite my lifelong obsession. There’s a double meaning in the lyric, for when paired with the next line, I’m then talking about west Brooklyn. It’s funny that there’s a Trousers connection to when I finally did get out west, as it was to visit Joey and Becca, who’d moved away. There’s a self fulfilling prophecy within all of us, I guess, if we just listen for long enough.

Today and for the next few weeks we’ll be handing the reins over to poet-in-residence J.E. O’Leary, so he can tell the story of his band Trousers as he goes track-by-track through the band’s only release, 2004’s We Pitched a Hut and Called it Providence.

The first time I ever played music in front of a crowd, it went about as badly as it could have possibly gone. I was playing with my first band, a jam band called IT, at legendary NYC venue CBGBs at one of their Sunday night showcases. As a huge fan of the CBGBs scene in the 70s and bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, I had hyped up the gig in my own head past the point of any realistic expectations. However, literally four measures into the first song, I popped a bass string for the first time in my life. I didn’t even realize what was happening at first; I’d never broken a bass string in almost ten years of playing. The string just kind of disappeared under my fingers. Once I put it together, I panicked, as I didn’t even know if I had extra strings and my gig bag wasn’t even onstage. I ran off the stage and frantically tried to find my gig bag in a sea of identical black gig bags. The band meanwhile, just started improving on the main riff of the song (an E blues). Eventually I did find it, and it had my extra strings. I put it on as fast as I could and got back onstage. The rest of the show (for me) was a mess, finding myself out of tune more than not. At one point while I was tuning, I couldn’t get it, and Nolan, the guitar player, had to come over and tune it for me. It was a pretty embarrassing spectacle, even more so given the stakes I’d given it, along with the fact I felt I’d let the band down. We didn’t get asked back, and were broken up less than two months later anyway. So by any standards, it was a disappointment.

Despite all the craziness however, it was unbelievably fun. We had a bunch of friends show up, smoked blunts in the basement, partied at the bar, and brought the whole circus back to Nolan’s Brooklyn apartment where we smoked and drank and played music all night. I had my acoustic bass there (I would end up moving in pretty soon, but am unsure if I was already in by that point) and we just spent the night jamming, reading poetry, smoking weed, and getting drunk. Any bad feelings from fucking up the gig were a million miles away. Everyone was having a blast. At one point, I started playing this bassline, based around an Am scale, just up and down. Kinda funky, kinda dirty. I looked over at our keyboard player, Daryl, and he was deep into a vibe, singing something. When I listened closer, I could make it out. “It hurts me… it hurts me more… it hurts me… it hurts me more…”

A few years later, when George and I jammed for the first time at his loft on North 6th street, we were mostly just improvising, feeling each other out. I was never the kind of guy that knew a lot of covers, so we were kind of wanting for material. At some point I busted this riff out and we worked on it. I had the lyrics – we’d never really turned it into a formal song, mostly because the band broke up, but I loved the riff/lyric combo, and it was easy to play & sing at the same time, so it was one piece that was always in my repertoire. So it was kind of natural that it would be a song. I always wanted to keep it fast and short, and real simple, some kind of cross between Violent Femmes and the Ramones. Two verses, a cello solo, a guitar solo, and a third verse and that was it. It clocks in at 2:22, but it always seemed long even at that.

I never liked the third verse. I couldn’t decide between the lyrics we eventually ended up with and my alternate version:

It hurts us, it hurts us more than them
It hurts us, oh, and it will ever end
It hurts us, oh it hurts us more than them
It hurts us, oh hurts us more than them

lost third verse

That would perhaps be more natural after “It hurts me more than you” and “It hurts you more than me”, the two lyrics that start the first two, but I think I was going for more of an edge at that point, and chose what you hear on the album. Reflecting back on it, it seems pretty clear that I chose poorly.

There’s not a lot to say about the recorded version. There’s a nice reverb on the cello, and I have some nice bass figures under the guitar solo. But it is what it is. And to my knowledge it’s maybe the only song from the IT era that survive in some official recorded form. I did solo acoustic versions of our songs “The Ballad of Bubbe and Zayde” and “Breath of Life” a handful of times, and I still know the basslines to most of the songs, including Nolan’s ” Pimpin’ “, the song on which my A string flew out from under my fingers at CBGBs all those years ago. But as a recorded song, it stands alone. I don’t think it was ever going to capture the manic raw energy of those Brooklyn years, but how could it? I mean, check out this completely spaced out version from a 1999 rehearsal:

Or the insane “Where the fuck am I?” energy from this version from the one time we played in Maine, at a place called The Wharf (4/24/2000 according to the tape):

Perhaps some things are best viewed from a distance.

Today and for the next few weeks we’ll be handing the reins over to poet-in-residence J.E. O’Leary, so he can tell the story of his band Trousers as he goes track-by-track through the band’s only release, 2004’s We Pitched a Hut and Called it Providence.

In 1998 I moved from Albany, NY, where I attended college, to NYC. The days that followed were completely magical. I’d fallen in love, formed a band, played live, was doing some of the best art of my life and had a tight crew of some of the best friends I’d ever had. Two whirlwind years later I was out, on my way to Maine, having run out of money and goodwill. I came back about 13 months later, but much had changed. A lot of those friends had left the city. When those that remained would get together, it was different, stressful. I was learning the hard way that when people changed they changed all the way, and that while the past might not be past, one could live in such a way that it effectively was. By the time Trousers formed in late 2002, my life looked pretty different. My girlfriend had left me, and I was now living by myself. One by one the friends that remained left the city, or moved on in their own way. I guess I was pretty lonely a lot of the time.

This song was inspired by a chance encounter, sometime in 2003, with an old friend from that era. We decided to get together for a drink one night and she ended up coming home with me. Our fling itself was pretty brief, fraught with old anxieties, resentments, and brought up a lot of unpleasant stuff on both sides. What brought us together was this feeling of having been discarded, and that kind of hopeless, frustrating, desperation is not exactly the kind of thing that makes for long, happy love affairs. It is kind of perfect for a rock song however.

The song started with the bass figure that I end the song with. I’d written that two note ringing figure on the acoustic bass I had, itself leftover from the pre-Maine days. But when the song was complete enough to bring to the band, it was clear that that riff wouldn’t work for the bulk of the song, as it made everything too busy. So I reworked the verses to be this kind of plodding E-string riff. Joey kept things real simple on guitar to contrast with the power chords on the verses. The final version features some of Becca’s best cello work; in retrospect, all her parts on all the songs were so tasteful and perfect. She had such a great ear for where to put her notes – you can hear this clearly on the “bridge” of this song, where her and Joey do a double-solo, weaving in and out of each other seamlessly.

The thing that made this song perfect, however, was George’s insistence on doing this four-on-the-floor figure in the chorus. We couldn’t really seem to make it work for anything but I remember this so clearly: one time in the middle of rehearsing it, when George was getting ready to do his thump-thump part, Joey and I stopped playing at the same time and then crashed back into it. It was so perfect, we all looked at each other like YES!! and it was done. One of those magical moments in the studio I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It must have been towards the end of the session because when we were wrapping up the next band (they were either called X the Owl or they were the refugees from when X the Owl broke up) came in and seemed even more excited about it than we were. “We were listening outside, that was great!” one of them said. It was one of those artistic moments where you just know you have something great. We worked the song into our live sets pretty quickly.

I have a pretty decent vocal performance here, though I don’t really remember it being that way. This was one of the songs I was having a real problem with, as it was at the higher end of my register and I had all those high note screams to do. But listening back it seems ok. There are decent rasps where I wanted them and was able to summon my best Gordon Gano impression for the last bit of the third verse. Lyrically I was extremely satisfied. At the time I considered it one of my better lyrical efforts even though ended up I literally going through a thesaurus looking for words related to “Leftover” and worked a bunch of them into the song: “retrieve” “salvage” “scrounging” etc. I think the song has a lot of power. There’s a great reverb on the cello, and Joey’s guitar soars on the outro. I don’t recall any specific conversations about the recording, but knowing that we all had pretty similar ideas about album track placement, we must have been super high on it, slotting it in the coveted “track #3” slot – where generally the best song is supposed to go.

As for the subject of the song, I’ve said enough, though she eventually did hear the song. She said it made her “sad”, but not much else. I probably felt pretty satisfied about that at the time, though I no longer try to evoke that emotion in people. There’s more than enough around already.