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 10, “Becca’s Song”.

I don’t think we ever tried out more than three or four guitar players, but Joey was our clear favorite. According to him, though, he wasn’t sold on us right away. The first rehearsal was fun; Joey took off his shoes before playing, which is the first time I’d ever seen anyone do that before. He had a real distinctive vibe that was referencing a lot of the music we all liked (Modest Mouse, Neil Young, among others) but also had a voice that was very much his own. He vibed real well with all of us. But he wasn’t hyped to join until the second time we got together, when I asked him to play something for us to jam on. He played a simple G major chord progression that became the verse riff for our “closer”.

That rehearsal I remember pretty well. Becca was hungover, as was I, probably. There was a real mellow vibe to the room and I was anxious to get Joey on board. It can be intimidating going into a rehearsal where the band is pretty much all set, has songs, and is just looking for YOU. I wanted to be clear to him that we were looking for a final member, not just a guitar player, so I thought it would be worthwhile to see right away what kind of music he would be bringing to the table. We jammed on his chord progression (I’m a sucker for G major) for a while, it felt real nice. He didn’t appear to have any lyrics (he’d told us from the start he didn’t sing much) so I started improving vocals, starting with describing the room and moving on to describing Becca’s hungover morning. I don’t know all of what we ended up keeping but definitely “woke up with the lights on” “wine stained cups” and “heads or tails of it” were all from that first session. It’s pretty cool to think that vocals I just improved on the spot made it on to a record and then I’m still thinking about it almost twenty years later.

The rest of the arrangement, however, was a group effort. We decided that the chorus should change speeds, not chords, and worked out spots for us all to have solos. The song came together pretty quickly, because it was on our first demo, recorded in the Spring or Summer of 2003. It’s a little looser, a little clumsier, with a couple of ham fisted drum fills and flubbed bass notes, but it does have some redeeming qualities: the chimes before the verses, and a pretty sick bass line (6:09 – 6:15) coming out of the last solo.

Returning to the album version, it’s much tighter. Joey’s sustain is perfect, Becca’s plucked notes really stand out, George is in the zone. My vocals, while stronger than the demo version, are really dragged down by the throat problems I was having that weekend. Josh and co, in the booth, had to really lay on the reverb; the falsettos are thin, the low notes don’t really land the way they need to, and the half-spoken parts kind of disappear in the mix. However I did get one great scream in at 4:00 (“make the best of it”)

This leads into a great bridge solo – first Becca comes in with these huge bowed notes, then Joey crunching these great chords as I lay into some sixteenth notes before the last half-verse. I like my vocals here, including one good last scream at 5:39. Then comes the great finale: a triple solo where Joey, Becca, and I are weaving in and out so perfectly. Its one of my favorite band related things ever caught on tape. During the mixing process, we were all hounding Josh to bring up our parts down to the individual note, which caused him to look over at us exasperated and claim “but you’re ALL soloing!”. He did a damn fine job though.

This was the “hold up a lighter” song for us, the big crashing finale. It had everything that made Trousers Trousers: dramatic lyrics, a mood change, big power chords and crashing drums, solos. It was a seven minute song that never felt like it dragged. It was a story that moved smoothly from one part to the next. The kind of song that would have been in our setlist forever. It’s also fun to think about having so many great songs that you drop a song like this and then bring it back years later and the crowd goes wild.

Some kids grow up thinking about hitting the big home run in the world series or winning a big race, I dreamed of having a band that played to a sea of people, all singing along with the lyrics and having an incredible time. As you grow older you realize that dreams are just that, dreams, and even if they come true, it’s not always the way you imagined it or wanted it. The “coming true” part isn’t the point of having a dream. Dreams and goals are, however, without a doubt important for one thing: they are the things that get you out of bed in the morning, turn you in one direction and pat you on the back – the rest is up to you. And luck.

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 9, “Life As a Movie II”

This song has a weird life, and almost never made it on to the album. I’m pretty sure we did this song towards the end of the day on the last day of our studio time. We had two other songs “The Breakup Song” and “The Outer Limits” and while mixing them, we had more or less agreed that the takes we had weren’t that great, at least they weren’t as good as the other songs we’d tracked. These two songs ended up on my first solo record a few years later, but it was a drag realizing the takes weren’t good enough, because they were really fun to play. The Outer Limits, especially, would have sounded pretty great on the album in my opinion.

We already had a little instrumental jam that we’d recorded and were planning on using to round out the album (more on that in two weeks) but we felt the album still needed another full length song to beef up the tracklist. So while the rest of the band went and got sandwiches, Josh set me up with a mic and an acoustic guitar and hit record, and we ended up with a pretty good version of a song that the band loved, but we’d never worked on.

I wasn’t too keen on putting a solo acoustic song on the album for a few reasons. For one, I didn’t really play guitar. I’d fucked around on the instrument for sure, but I didn’t even own one at this point. Also, as much as I was the primary songwriter of the band, I was extremely proud of the collaborative nature of the group, and didn’t want to highlight anything on the record that might take away from that. So it was optics to a point. I didn’t want people to think I insisted on including it. It wasn’t even my idea. I’m pretty sure Joey is the one who suggested it, and we only ended up doing it because we needed another song and didn’t have time to set up the whole band again to try another take of one of the two songs we’d decided weren’t working.

The song is actually the third version of the song that exists. The first version, “Life as a Movie” was from the first batch of songs I’d ever written. I recorded it in the basement of my apartment in Canarsie in 2002, when my girlfriend had just left me and I had a whole summer where I had nothing to do but write songs and smoke weed. I’d recently gotten a 4-track Tascam Portastudio, and spent most of the summer learning how to record songs. For Life as a Movie, I’d recorded a version with long instrumental verses which lead into the chorus, and wanted to do a spoken word part for the verses. I chose selections from a long, rambling piece I’d written in my journal about my feelings about my girlfriend leaving me. I would read from the journal, stop when the chorus started, then start reading again. The result was pure lo-fi magic.

But that chorus! Still to this day one of the best things I’ve ever written. This needed to be a song I could play live, but I figured there was no way I was going to be able to memorize all those words, and I wasn’t sure I wanted the song to be as long as it was anyway. So I reworked the poem into actual lyrics, sped up the tempo, and chopped the run time in half, and “Life as a Movie II” was born.

I wasn’t playing shows in those days, but every time I brought the bass out to a park or subway platform, people always loved this song. It was one of the ones I brought to the band, but we never really figured out an arrangement that worked. I would have loved to do a full band version with Becca on backing vocals. But we have to settle for the version that we got done. We never played this one live, but I might have a rehearsal space version of it somewhere.

The actual recording was done in one take, which shocked the hell out of me, because as I said I didn’t even own a guitar and probably hadn’t played one in weeks if not months. But the bottom four string are the same, so I just pretended like the top two strings didn’t exist and just tried to be real careful. My voice was working ok that day so we added some backing vocals which worked nicely. I insisted on leaving in the “All right, take one” part because I always loved the Violent Femmes song “American Music” which starts with Gordon Gano sheepishly saying “Can – Can I put in something like, ‘This is American Music, take one.'”

I guess this is technically a cover of “Life as a Movie 2” and not part three. Not sure what a Life as a Movie III would look like. Eighteen years and a million beers and cigarettes later, my voice is in a much lower register. Maybe a piano version in a different key? It’s been a long time since I’ve revisited this song, and I’m happy with it. It’s the kind of song that makes me wish I’d had more success as a songwriter, not for me, but I would have loved it if more people had heard this song. I think as an artist that’s all one can really hope for – that you write material you believe in. That is its own kind of success.