Penthouse in The Woods

I didn't sleep last night.
I didn't sleep the night before.
I'm pretty wound tight.
I couldn't empty out my head of the serious questions
that seem to eat my time away.

We were an archetype.
We found a Penthouse in the woods.
A garbage bag, airtight.
Now I only wish I could forgive
The glossy imperfection 
seemed to take my grip away.
Why'd you steal what you saw?
Why'd you steal what you saw?

From up above the light fell in needles down.
We took a look. There was no one around.

It didn't take long.
We burned our penthouse in the woods.
Tell me that I'm wrong.
Tell me that I should just forget
All the serious questions
Seem to eat my life away.
Why'd you steal what you saw?
Why'd you steal what you saw?

The glossy imperfection.
Seemed to take my grip away.
Why'd you steal what you saw?
Why'd you steal what you saw?


Words and music by Joe Pernice, Bony Gap Music (BMI), admin by BUG/BMG.

I wrote this song in early 1995 in Northampton, Massachusetts. I was living in a house with Steve from the Scud Mountain Boys at the time. Coincidentally, he and I grew up in neighbouring towns on the South Shore of Boston. (We’d tell people in interviews that we made “southern music” from the deep South Shore of Boston.) Anyway, Steve and I were sitting around talking about a very common and formative experience among dudes who were suburban kids in the pre-internet 1970s and 1980’s: Finding a Playboy magazine stashed out in the woods. It’s not like we found tons of them, but back in the day, any “adult” magazine was called a Playboy by my friends and me. Much like any canned carbonated beverage regardless of brand or flavor was a Coke.
”You want a coke?”
”Duh. Yes.”
”What flavor?”
”Grape”
”How’s it feel to want?’

Anyway, regarding the aforementioned publications, the pages were almost always waterlogged, swollen and blown out beyond legibility. But let’s face it: We weren’t really thinking about improving our reading comprehension. To a late 1970s eleven-year-old boy, water-damaged and therefore mostly-implied nudity was still both thrilling and mildly terrifying. And while I’ve certainly pondered it since, I don’t recall my friends and I giving too much thought as to why someone had actually stashed a Playboy in the woods. I guess we were just glad they had. Still, while we poured over we also kept on the lookout for “teenagers” from a rival neighborhood who might find us pilfering their loot. A kid could get a shoulder dislocated if he wronged the wrong up-and-coming sociopath.

So, jumping back to 1995, I figured Penthouse in The Woods as a song title had much more of what I needed than Playboy in The Woods. At first I started writing it as country tune. But the double meaning of penthouse got pretty corny pretty fast in that mansion on the hill or streets of gold way. And since my natural inclination is to go dark, I decided the song needed to be a longing, irony-free look backwards from a place less innocent and maybe none the wiser. And a penthouse would be just a Penthouse.

The chords and lyrics to the song came on fast. I realize I’ve been writing that sentence a lot while making these substack posts. But it’s true. Good or bad, songs were falling out of me. I had been listening to a lot of the bands Bread and America back then, and I’m sure I copped the major-to-major seventh change of the top of the verses from them.

I’ve searched high and low through my archives (two shoe boxes), and I can’t find any demo of this song anywhere. There’s a very good chance that the version that appears on Massachusetts is the only recording we ever made of the song. By the time we went into Studio .45 in Hartford to make the album I was well over the idea of the lo-fi, live-to-four track recording we’d done on our album Pine Box. If anyone in the group stopped us from making a crude recording of Penthouse it was me. Lot of drama in the 1990s.

In a future post I’ll get to talking how about how fantastic I think Steve Desaulniers’s singing, playing and songwriting are. But with regards to Penthouse, the enduring hooks of the studio recording for me are Bruce K. Tull’s Schecter Telecaster guitar line and Tom Shea’s mandolin rhythm part “doubling” my acoustic guitar. The song would have been no worse had it been just the two of them.

As for the recording included with this post, I tracked it live to my iPhone using my Shure SV88 condenser mic. It’s still cold here in Canada. You may or may not be able to hear our furnace turn on. I think that’s what the kids call an Easter Egg? Good timing, as my mother reminded me just yesterday that this is Holy Week. I imported the wav file into Logic, gave it a bit of compression, eq and a hair of reverb. Then I converted the file to an mp3 which is required by Substack.

As always, take care of yourselves and thanks for listening. -JP

(Quick shameless plug: Tomorrow is the last day to order the debut vinyl of the Pernice Brothers album Discover A Lovelier You. Kindly go to pernicebrothers.bandcamp.com for details.)