Numbers, Jake

WHAT A MONTH!

And I don’t just mean the last two weeks.  Jumped immediately from the tour in June into a full week of home improvement tasks, then was the stupid July 4th holiday week, then we had some family from overseas in town, during which time I also spent a truly lovely week in Asbury Park, eating at Cat’s Luck Vegan in Neptune every day while producing the new TAMI HART record!  You may know Tami from her many years as TAMI HART and as a member of MEN, and if you didn’t know them, perhaps you saw Tami and band at one of the shows we played in the northeast last September.  In any case, I hope you WILL know Tami when this new album comes out on Don Giovanni soon.  I’m really thrilled to be a part of the project - I think Tami’s an amazing songwriter, singer, and musician; I absolutely love this batch of songs; and I loved working with the band (Tami, Adrienne, and Larz) and Eric at Lakehouse Studio in Asbury, AS WELL AS special assistant engineer MARISSA PATERNOSTER.  It was a blast and I thank them for having me along.

At the end of all that, I was a little afraid I wasn’t going to come up with the goods for a new song of my own this month, but given that the last couple of months have been covers, I really wanted to; and I’m happy to say that through a combination of sitting/staring/ennui and forcing myself to just keep playing and writing until something clicked, I managed to pull this together in about 24 hours.  To be fair, the whole thing grew out of the higher arpeggiated part that comes in in each chorus, which I found by plumbing the depths of my voice memo app.  I go back to that from time to time to get ideas because, obviously you don’t remember every idea that passes through your head, and I’ve been pretty bad about using it recently, but there’ve been times when I was so on top of throwing a little voice memo down when I DID have an idea, that there’s areal trove of stuff I can sometimes spark an idea with when I’m stuck.

There’s also a slew of things I will never use because upon revisiting, I am either utterly confused by it or it’s just BAD.  But that’s to be expected, I guess.

It’s not a new idea, but if you’ve ever thought about doing it but haven’t, I do recommend it.  For a solid twenty years before smart phones (or… before I had a smartphone, anyway), I used a micro-cassette recorder, and wrote The Ballad of The Sin Eater on one while driving in shitty traffic on Rte. 128 outside of Boston, going from somewhere to somewhere else (I don’t remember that part), for whatever that’s worth.

Anyway, a lot of the newest of the new songs I’ve been writing have been self-sorting into “very folk” or “pretty punk,” and I’m not fighting either one or trying too hard to wrangle things toward the center of the Venn diagram that is me.  This one, obviously skews pretty punk, as, now I’m thinking, whatever next album happens to happen may skew as well.

Hope you enjoy, and if you get a pit going, make sure it’s an old-school fast one, because there’s no mosh breakdown.  Pile-on sing-alongs still encouraged, though.

(MP3 attached below)

NUMBER, JAKE     JULY 26, 2024

Threads will fray while we’re weaving cover

But there’ll come a day, we’ll be leaving, lover

’Til then, no thoughts of getting out

’Til then, from redoubt to redoubt

’Til then we play at staying devout

How many is it gonna take

Before the dam is gonna break

How many is it gonna take

Tell me the number, Jake

Catching a stray for the grieving mother

I can’t allay all this cleaving, brother

’Til then no thought of trying to thrive

’Til then you’re caught but you survive

’Til then the best we get’s “alive”

Nobody signed up for today

Nobody wants to feel this way

How many is it gonna take

Before the dam is gonna break

How many is it gonna take

To shake a soul awake

Tell me the number, Jake