The Nepotist

Set List, 9/30/2011

Hang or Be Hung

Our Love is Gonna Last

Stay the Year

Strange Birds

Lies

Nothing New

Worry Hard

Economics

Waltz

The Weights

I believe this was the first time I’ve played New York as The Nepotist. It won’t be the last. This was such a fun set.

Temporary Fixes

Calf Audio is mostly a concert sound company, so working for them mostly meant working on site at gigs. But Calf does have a shop, where they store gear, fix it, and do the office work that keeps a small business running. Their shop has a door — has three, actually, but I’m remembering one in particular.

For the five or so years I worked there, the front door had no knob. Instead it had a square bit of plywood covering a knob-shaped hole. Todd had drilled through the plywood and threaded a string through it, secured at one end with a knot and tied at the other to a wooden dowel. To open the door from the outside, you pushed. To close it, you grabbed the dowel and pulled the string.

After a few years, it occurred to me to ask how long the knob had been missing.

“I think since 1992,” Barny said.

I haven’t been to the shop in a while, but if there’s a knob on the door, I’ll eat my hat.

New York apartments survive on temporary fixes. The people who own them live elsewhere, and the people who live there don’t own them. Who’s got time for a permanent fix to somebody else’s problem?

Calling Kate

I called Kate last week. She’d been upstate all summer, acting in some plays. We’d hardly spoken. “Hey,” I said. “What state are you living in?”

“Um, New York?” she said. She sounded unusually guarded. Maybe it was was just that she’d been upstate, not out of state, and she doesn’t like stupid questions.

“Great,” I said. “What city?”

“Um,” she said. Then silence. Finally, “New York. Why?”

“Because we should hang out.”

More silence. Was she mad at me? Was it my fault that we hadn’t spoken in more than a month? No, that’s just what happens in New York, and everyone knows it, so why would she be mad at me? Had I missed her birthday? Fuck. Maybe. When is her birthday? I can’t remember.

“Who is this?” she finally asked.

She’d lost her phone, and all her numbers with it. I felt first relived, then irked that she hadn’t recognized my voice. Then, after a while of feeling silly about feeling both of these, I settled on feeling confused. Why is it okay that New Yorkers go months without talking to their favorite people? Why is this not alarming enough to take action?

Drum Machines Have No Soul

It must be true. It was on a bumper sticker. “Drum machines have no soul.” But the car belonged to a drummer, and I’ve seen his band play. You might think it’d be hard to decide who has the least soul in an almost soulless bunch, but it wasn’t. The drummer had zero soul.

That was more than a year ago. This weekend Hayden and I were demoing a new song. We spent hours finessing the drum loop before we started tracking. It had to swing just enough, but not too much, with just the right dynamics in the high hat part. The kick drum had to accentuate Hayden’s bass line without burying it, without getting too busy and without being boring.

This was yesterday. I was, yesterday, really excited about the demo. It’s a good song. We had fun making it. I opened the session this morning and pressed play, expecting to be reasonably pleased.

Nope. Something was off, and often when something is off, it’s me. So I muted the guitar. No dice. I put the guitar back and muted my singing. That didn’t help. I muted the bass, and started to worry the demo was beyond saving. Then I put the bass back and turned off the drum machine.

“Holy shit!”, I thought. The demo now has a hole where drums need to go, but muting the machine gave it space, movement, and soul. I know there are producers who can make drum machines sound alive, expressive, and useful, but after many years of trying, I’ve finally realized that I am not one of these producers.

Drums on future releases by The Nepotist will be played by a human, at least until I change my mind. Which human? I’m not sure. Not the guy with the bumper sticker.

Perhaps I Need a Hat

“I’m considering learning to wear pants.”

If a man told me that, I’d wonder.

I’m considering learning to wear hats.

Nobody told me that. It’s actually something I’m considering. Wonder if you want, then listen.

When a man in a hat passes a pretty woman on the street, he can tip his hat to her. It’s a polite way of saying, “You’re lovely.” Unless what he’s saying depends on the kind of hat — perhaps a backwards baseball hat says something closer to, “I’m a dick.” Being someone who doesn’t wear hats of any kind, at all, ever, the distinction is academic for me.

I don’t wear hats because I feel silly wearing them. But suppose I could learn not to feel silly in a hat — not a baseball hat, but something classier. Then I’d have a respectable way of telling lovely strangers they look lovely.

Are there other ways to do that? Why don’t I know about them?