*Cue the Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin classic, “Separate Lives.”*
I don’t really recall much about our last gig, at the Summer Sonic Festival 2000 in Japan, except that Robert spent much of the time walking around the stage holding his bass up and not playing it, trying to get the attention of the crew. And I remember some big hairy Americans, who I figured worked on Green Day’s or Weezer’s crew, heckling us from the side of the stage.
The next two shows were canceled due to a typhoon in Okinawa and political unrest in South Korea, so the tour ended early and I got to come home and surprise my kids. I was excited for them to try Pop Rocks, which I hadn’t seen since the seventies. Pop Rocks are a fizzy crackling packet of sugar candy that sort of explodes in your mouth. I was stoked to have procured two packs in Tokyo. The twins were not so stoked and there were tears. Wait until your kids are at least five before you give them exploding candy. #ProParentTips.
The twins were now walking, just well enough to get themselves in trouble. And they were now talking well enough to say all kinds of crazy shit. I was glad I wouldn’t be missing any more of that for a while.
* * *
—
Getting back into my domestic life, a few days after the tour, the familiar old school AOL, “You’ve Got Mail!” summoned me to the office, which doubled as a baby-changing closet. It was an email from Darren, and it wasn’t exactly a surprise. He had aspirations to write and sing his own material, and none of us was getting any younger. The email was a brief one, which just said he was done and out of the band. Before I could respond, my computer dinged again, “You’ve Got Mail!” This one was from Robert, who quickly replied that “It’s only a band if it’s the three of us. If Darren is out, then I’m out too.”
I had one child over my right shoulder and the other playing with my shoestrings. I don’t recall how I responded, but it was as brief as the two emails I’d just received. I just acknowledged that we would no longer be a band. I forwarded the emails to Alan, shut my phone off, took the twins for a stroll, and that was that.
ROCKIN’ THE SUBURBS
I WAS A NEW PARENT, in a new country, at the dawn of a new century, and I thought that Rockin’ the Suburbs should be a musical document of that moment. It should be memorialized with the musical stenographic equipment of the day, which meant using computers. Ugh. My comfort zone had always been the methods and sounds of good old-fashioned twentieth-century recording, but this was clean-slate time again, so I set my fears of twenty-first-century technology and all its evil editing ability aside. I wanted a time stamp on this one: Class of 2001.
Some producer with computers fixes all my shitty tracks
—From “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” Rockin’ the Suburbs, 2001
I sent a demo of the song “Rockin’ the Suburbs” to Ben Grosse when I asked him to produce my first solo record. He said, “About that line with the ‘shitty track fixing,’ you know that’s what I do, right? I record on a computer and fix everything. It’s the way I work.” I told him that’s precisely why I wanted him. He was a virtuoso in computer recording, and his records sounded very “now.” He had a few albums at the top of the modern-rock charts. It wasn’t music I cared for, but he knew exactly how to present it, how to dress it. We set up a digital recording studio in a church in Adelaide and I played all the instruments, even electric guitar, with the exception of a few overdubs here and there. I had spent the previous six months writing these songs and had demo’d them already. I put in more time writing and preparing for this album than I ever had before. I knew I had to make a great first solo album, or perish.
One of the first songs we recorded was “Still Fighting It,” the lyrical spark of which had come to me after witnessing the birth of my twins.
You’re so much like me—I’m sorry…
—From “Still Fighting It,” Rockin’ the Suburbs, 2001
People say your life flashes before you when you think you’re going to die, but that’s never been true for me. The few times I’ve thought it was lights-out time, nothing really flashed before my eyes, except for weird thoughts like, I wish I hadn’t eaten, because I’d like to die on an empty stomach. That would be more dignified. And I hope this doesn’t hurt for long. I found myself on a plane once that seemed certain to crash, and there was no time for sentimentality. The pilot was obviously convinced we were going down, as hard as he tried to sound cool. CNN was even waiting when we miraculously landed! But nope. During that flight, with loose objects and unbuckled people being tossed over seats, I had no deep thoughts, no flashing of my life before my eyes. But the birth of my children? Seeing two new lives as they came into the world, struggling for breath, shocked by light and sound, crying and scared, did bring it all back in a flash. It was profound and I wanted it in a song.
It sucks to grow up
And everybody does
It’s so weird to be back here
—From “Still Fighting It”
I suddenly saw life as a series of scary challenges in an exponential incline. One that never ends. You’re always fighting against something, facing challenges, for which you’re not quite prepared. Birth, then your first sickness, your first rejection, first humiliation, first breakup, first fight, first bad grade, first firing, a heart attack or cancer, and then you shit the bed and die. And who knows what lies beyond that. But once you’ve surmounted each new obstacle, you can live in some calm temporarily. Those problems become old hat, not so scary, until the next unknown storm. But still, life is wonderful, and I wanted that in my song too. It had never occurred to me that I would live my life a second time—its ups and downs, joys and fears—by having children. But my life has flashed before my eyes every day since.
* * *
—
I tried to hang on to the emotional weight of this as we recorded the first track of “Still Fighting It,” late one night with just piano. We got into a vibe and laid something simple down that felt special. Listening to the piano track the next morning, I thought it sounded like a classic track but…it was too slow. Maybe I had been a little too into my midnight vibe. No problem, I thought. It would be easy enough to record again.
“No,” Ben Grosse told me, “that piano track is magic. Let’s keep it. We can speed it up on the computer. There’s a program that will do that without also raising the pitch.”
Fine. I went to lunch to let him do his tricks. Hours later it became obvious it wasn’t going to be so simple. When Ben Grosse sped the track up but left the pitch the same, the piano suffered from what is known as “digital artifacts.” Subtle but nasty ticks and flutter trashing up the sound. The piano lost its luster. Soon, Ben Grosse was auditioning various “pitch and time” plug-ins from the internet. The hours turned into days. He had put so much energy into this, and we were not going to give up now. I was desperately trying to hang on to the feeling of this song about the miracle of childbirth and the challenges of life, but I kept having to reach for my credit card repeatedly as Ben downloaded trial versions of plug-ins and we compared the artifacts.