Eris Temple (EP)

She Disowned My Life

People who write, know: what you tap into when you write can be an anticipation of circumstances in your life yet to come. Turns out, I wrote She Disowned My Life in the fall of 1995, in my dorm room (322 Holmes Hall) in North Halls (the artists’ dorms on campus), in State College, Pa, while attending Penn State. Musically, I was thinking both Big Star (who I had discovered that summer via my friend Steve Kurutz) and early Elvis Costello, who liked to write, early in his career, in the key of E. What was I writing about? It seems to me, with twenty years’ hindsight, I was tapping into what was about to happen in early ’96; my first long-term relationship, marriage, with Jennifer Strawser. Not to get catechistic, but did she disown my life? Sort of; we were just kids, but she was looking for a sense of intensity about her and total dedication that I didn’t always have to offer, and when we broke up in the fall of ’96 (I was “disowned”), that was one reason. 

Fast-forward a dozen years: I brought the song to the Eris Temple to record in ’07, having had it in my back pocket for an extended period of time, and booked drummer Pete Leonard, who had played in my high school band, to do the session. The day of the session I felt rather unhinged about what was going on. It sounded chaotic and messy to me. Another writer’s quirk, especially when music is involved: you can’t hear a goddamned thing when you’re too close to what you’ve just done. So, whatever I was tapping into when we were recording (probably my break-up with Mary Harju six months after), the recording was shelved for eight years. Eight years, and I finally see that Matt, Pete, and I stumbled onto a new kind of rock magic that day in North-West Philly.

As per the icing on the cake peccadillo: the Eris Temple studio is "underground"; beneath street level. Yet, most of the studio space consists of a room with a relatively high ceiling. What is recorded in this room thus sounds airier, more expansive, than what was recorded at Main Street West in South Philly. The Eris Temple studio space is also crepuscular, i.e. not particularly well-lit. Every major session at Eris Temple was a kind of night session. The one street-level window, in the south-east corner of the room towards the ceiling, lets in almost nothing. Physiologically, Main Street West was more comfortable and comforting; Matt's books and CDs strewn all over the place, large windows, ample lighting. The sturm und drang around the Eris Temple studio space was about strangeness, odd angles, and (often) physiological discomfort. The Eris Temple was made as a studio space to drag performances out of musicians who didn't know they it had in them. In retrospect, She Disowned My Life works that way for me. 

Leaving Me Lonely

From She Disowned My Life to Leaving Me Lonely; by the late fall of ’96, I had broken up with Jennifer Strawser and was seeing a theater major named Carrie Thomas in State College. I was also listening to a lot of early Neil Young, particularly his first solo album. I found myself amused by the parallel to Neil: writing songs for an actress named Carrie (Neil briefly married actress Carrie Snodgrass in the early 70s). So, it came into my head to write a Neil pastiche about what my time with Carrie was like. Leaving Me Lonely is, in fact, a pastiche of I’ve Been Waiting For You and What Did You Do To My Life from the aforementioned first Neil solo album. If it didn’t come up to be recorded in the late Nineties or Aughts, it is semi by accident and semi because I couldn’t find a meaningful place for it on any of my records.

Be-Bop Deluxe: Axe Victim

Be Bop Deluxe’s Axe Victim is a sickening lurch into the gutters of the music business. It’s also a rock masterpiece. Be Bop Deluxe, guided by Bill Nelson, were clearly a formative influence on Glenn Tillbrook and Squeeze, but what’s being squeezed here, via nauseous tempo changes, turgid assaults of expert lead guitar, and touring imagery interspersed with free-associative poetic similes and metaphors akin to ones employed on Third/Sister Lovers, is the sense that by 1974, Bill Nelson was just as fed up with the rigors of the music business as Alex Chilton was. That Axe Victim is a kind of aural horror movie distracts attention from how painstakingly honest it is, from the sad amps in the back of the tour van to the curvy, murderous road to Hull and back again. Axe Victim, in fact, is so intense as a rock experience, in line with Big Star’s Third, and expresses such nihilistic emptiness, in brusque, macho fashion, that it may attract a long-term audience who can only stomach the starvation and the squalor at intervals; and, indeed, Axe Victim, despite its musical and lyrical excellence, is not the kind of tune to put on endless replay, except (perhaps) on Halloween.