(I WANT TO BE) ALONE

Dug up this old warts-&-all demo and then wrote about it:

Download: (I Want To Be) Alone

So when we moved to Austin in 2007, I was feeling pretty good. My gal-pal's graduate studies brought us here, so I wasn't being some douche who moved to Austin to "make it in the music business" (not sure who I'm quoting here). We were relieved to be ending our two-year stint in Los Angeles: despite Austin's growing rep for rush hour traffic and gentrified neighborhoods, it was downright quaint relative to the 405 and East Los Angeles.

There was also Austin's musical reputation - live music capital, supportive scene, SXSW, blah blah, etc. A few records that I was excited about came out in 2007, so I was feeling good about music in general. We moved into a house with wooden floors and high ceilings, and I imagined that it would be perfect for home-recording. My friend Dave and I immediately set to work transforming Sinners, Repent! from a one-person recording project into a real band. I met a guy at a Halloween party (he was dressed as a Sad Clown and I was dressed as the Super-Ego), and he came on as guitarist/vocalist/harmonica player, despite the fact that he was in the US only semi-legally and would be returning to Canada shortly. Our very first Craigslist crawl for a drummer brought us an enthusiastic Guided By Voices aficianado.

So we were barely a band. I went to a few shows. Some friends' bands came through and we hung out. The weather was still beautiful in October (Arriving in August we'd missed the floods and humidity of June and July - warm weather wasn't yet an enemy). I was feeling quite good.

When I lived in Chapel Hill NC my old band had a nearly impossible time infiltrating the local club scene. This was in the early '00s and I think that Chapel Hill was still reeling from its mid-1990s brush with being "The Next Seattle". Merge Records, at the time, seemed in the business of putting out their friends' records - and that cohort of indie rockers was now in their 30s, settling down, starting families, and becoming web designers. The younger scene was suspicious of what the future might hold. Every week I would bring new 4-track demos on my fledging band to the local all-ages venue (Go! Studios - now the Reservoir) and hand them over to the person who did booking there. We'd talk about music for a little while, I'd test the waters about getting a show there, and he'd look at the calendar, say something non-commital, and then trail off. I continued to try to get us in with the local clubs, to no avail. We played our first show in Washington DC, we played house shows in Chapel Hill and Raleigh, we bought a van and booked our first tour, landing shows around the country. We released our first EP. Unexpectedly an influential local show host was enamored with the release; other local radio followed his lead. A year and half after I'd brought our first demos to the booking agent - local radio had our backs, 20-odd shows in other cities, we'd even had our first member quit - we finally booked a Tuesday night at the venue.

In short, based on this experience, I knew it was a pain in the ass to book a show in a musically over-saturated city. The day that Dave and I sat down and half-assed our way through a couple Sinners, Repent! songs, I started contacting venues. Starting from zero, I wrote to some pretty fancy people in the Austin booking pantheon, counting on perceived naïveté to cover up my presumptuousness - and also counting on zero responses.

I was shocked that people started getting back to me the same day. Shocked. Startled. Amazed. Gleeful. My heart was racing as I read fairly standard responses: "hey... sounds cool... what dates are you looking for?" I thought to myself "Wow, Austin really is supportive of local music. They aren't just shoveling it." Two weeks later our zygote of a band played at Mohawk, by then my favorite club in town. The reality of preparing a set of songs and learning them so quickly took its toll - after the show we didn't rehearse again for weeks.

That first experience of booking in Austin was great. I was happy to be here. It seemed like the right place for Sinners, Repent! to take shape. Finally, my life wasn't being brutally dictated by music (working full-time as a graphic designer), and it felt like I might be able to enjoy playing again - that somehow magical, something-from-nothing creative process. Perhaps we lost some initial momentum following the first show, perhaps it was beginners luck, but it was never as easy again. But for the next few weeks I was excited - I'd seen more shows in three months than I'd seen in two years in Los Angeles, and starting a band was seemingly effortless this time.

Buoyed by my initial experience as a musician in Austin, I wrote and recorded a few new songs (lets say, January 2008). I was walking around the house, playing an unplugged electric guitar, and annoying my future wife. Whatever I was noodling away at became a song, and I sang it - using the phrase "I want to be alone" as a lyrical placeholder. My sexy lady – whose usual unimpressed countenance briefly cracked – stopped what she was doing...

SEXY LADY: What's that?

ME: Oh, a new song. I don't know how its going to go. This is just what I'm singing for now [in creaking falsetto] I want to be alone, I want to be a-lo-oh-oown... Its just the words for now; I'll think of something better.

SEXY LADY: No, that's good - its got like a sexy, turn-down-the-lights, soul song feel, but the words could be saying "get away from me". You should keep it like that.

ME: Ok, I will.

SEXY LADY: Great. Now its quiet time.

"(I Want To Be) Alone" was completed in a couple days - which is more or less like writing a song in 5 minutes by my protracted songwriting calendar. I recorded this version some night in the high-ceilinged, wood-floored living room of the house. (We never recorded as a band in that house; we got robbed. Four dudes showed up with a truck and matching outfits and kicked in the door. They stole my computer and all the main files of my recordings, including this one - but I'd made an MP3 of this song and emailed it to someone, so I still have it.)

When I finished this song, I was feeling good. The beginning of anything always looks good in retrospect - free from consequence and reality, made entirely of possibility. In the months that followed, we were haunted by a "drummer curse" - our drummers kept having to move; generally, they would get good jobs someplace else (like Vancouver, New York, Houston). When drummer #3 (Chris) left, he seemed to take the secret of playing this song with him and it fell out of our repertoire. But here it is, feeling good and in all its rough-cut, cracking falsetto glory. This song reminds me of how excited I was about playing and writing again; it hadn't been a particularly long dry spell, but it was nice to enjoy it.