Greetings,
Tomorrow at 10:50 ET I’ll be publishing the full post (including an audio recording) for my tune Working Girls for my paid subscribers. If you’d like to receive the full post (and all future posts in-full), kindly join my paid subscribers for $5.00 USD per month. A bad cappuccino to-go will cost you a fiver, which is pretty shocking. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from tomorrow’s post:
To give you an idea of how different things were then, I remember saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could digitize our press kits? Instead of mailing 8” x 10” photos, promo CDs and photocopies of press releases and clippings, what if we can get all of that on a single CDR?!? Holy shit!!” We spent about $2,000 on a CD burner you couldn’t give away today, and we scoured Al Gore’s internet for discount coupons at Staples and Office Depot. We had stacks of cheap CDRs teetering about the office while the burner churned all day like the-little-train-that-might-not. Spotify wasn’t around yet. Napster was. I for one didn’t see at the time that the convenience of digitizing our press kit was the prelude to the death of an era of the music business. But give me a freakin’ break. I’m a musician, not a stock broker or mind reader.
I wrote Working Girls in the late Fall of 1999. I know that because I had not yet moved from Northampton, MA to Brooklyn. And I vividly recall writing it on my early 1970s Gibson acoustic while sitting on a scratchy third-hand wool upholstered chair with annoying wooden arm rests that interfered with my guitar. Too lazy to move to the sofa five feet away. The song came pretty quickly. Most of the songs from that album surfaced in a cluster around each other. (I am certain I wrote the shape and hook for Our Time Has Passed the next day in my kitchen while on the phone, on-hold with either the gas company or an insurance company. I wrote Endless Supply a day or so later while seated on the sofa I’d been too lazy to move to a few days earlier. I was watching TV, and a Volvo car ad that featured either Stereolab or a Stereolab clone got me thinking.
I was going to spell Girls the way Alex Chilton did, as an homage, but I’d already written Bryte Side and getting cute with the spelling of Girls would have been a hat on a hat…
Might have been Ivy on that Volvo commercial.
Great story. I remember the first time I heard The World Won't End very vividly. I won't go into my usual long-winded nostalgia trip, but as a musician, recording engineer and a music fan, that record (yes, I'm calling it a record) had a massive impact on me. It even directly inspired a song that we'd record for the next Curtain Society album called "Diver." It's still among my absolute favorite albums that I always know I can rely on when I don't know where I am or what I want to listen to.
Folks should subscribe. It's only the cost of a bad cappuccino, but without the shits. So far.