Why Am I Doing This Now?
It’s like one of those questions David Byrne has given you permission to ask
Years ago I wrote and recorded a song that was intended as a response to the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” I’m not going to try to come off like a deep-cut TH fan. I’m not. I have all the respect in the world for the band, but they were before my time, and like many, many bands before my time, where there wasn’t someone teach me the catalog album by album, I mostly know the hits.
That song in particular I love. I associate it with Stop Making Sense and the over-the-top yet quotidian vibe of that era of the band.1 My response song to “Once in a Lifetime” is a gimmick—I sort of pretend to misunderstand the song. You see, in OiaLt David Byrne wails repeatedly, “you may ask yourself [insert question XYZ]!” Of course, what he means is that a question along the lines of XYZ might occur to someone—that’s it’s likely even.
The premise of my song (hi, Eli Cash) is that rather than suggesting certain questions are likely to occur to you/one (the actual meaning/intention of the song), David is rather granting the listener permission to ask certain questions. What questions, you ask!
The questions:
How does this work?
How did I get here?
Where is that large automobile?
What is that beautiful house?
Where does that highway lead to?
Am I right?
Am I wrong?
My god, what have I done?2
Why explain why now by talking about these songs?
One of the things I love about OiaLt is its emphasis on the quotidian, to go back to that word. Thematically, lyrically, the song is about looking up in medias res life-wise and wondering, “Well, how did I get here?” What we once called a midlife crisis, is one way of putting it, though that feels a little crass or negative—or a little too close to home. And the song does this—reflects on the midlife situation—without disparagement. This is not a fuck-the-suburbs-I-don’t-want-to-grow-up anthem. There are plenty of those out there. Rather, this song takes an empathetic perspective while still honoring the confusion of the midlife-reflection moment.
I’m feeling a bit of that these days—the midlife wonder. It’s NOT a bad thing. It has motivated me. For instance, this very Substack,3 which is my attempt to instantiate a form for a piece of extended writing (a book!) that I’ve been think about for a few years now, was jumpstarted by an adjacent project: releasing an album. All of this out of the realization that I’ve never properly released any music.
To put a bow on all of this: My response-song to OiaLt, which is called “Questions David Byrne Has Given Me Permission to Ask,”4 feels to me like the first real song I wrote (circa 2012) and was a harbinger of the kind of material that is finding its way onto the forthcoming album. And the subject of that song—midlife wondering—is also the reason I’m doing all of this. (cf. fn. 3 below)
More on the album soon. But for now, that’s the answer to the question no one is asking: why this now?
That concert movie, Stop Making Sense, which is worth your time, was directed by Jonathan Demme who also did at least one of Robyn Hitchcock’s concert films and put him in The Manchurian Candidate.
Under my facetious interpretation, the song also gives you permission to tell yourself a number of things. My response-song does not address these.
Meta again, as in the stub post
Not on the forthcoming album