During recording of Rockin’ the Suburbs—waiting for hours on edits
“Okay…which sounds better? This one…or…this one?” he asked, watching my expression for clues, his hand on a switch.
“God, it’s hard to tell. They both sound weird. Play it back again?”
“No, no, listen to the upper harmonics. Here’s choice A….All right, now here’s B….What do you think?”
Where’s the fucking stash of razor blades? That’s what I thought.
I just don’t know about these time-saving audio plug-ins. I’m not convinced they save time. I’m not quite convinced computers and cellphones save time in the end. But, hey, we got through. I wanted the Class of 2001, and the Class of 2001 is what I got. I’ll admit that I was uncomfortable with recording on computer because I worried all those digital seams would show through. Recording that way often seemed like a series of dental appointments, and I came home each night threatening to quit. But the computer is just another process, our era’s process. It’s the music that matters. I believe the album truly holds up. Ben Grosse taught me some important lessons in music, performance, and arrangement. You can indeed teach an old pianist some new tricks.
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The title Rockin’ the Suburbs struck many as silly and uncool. Especially the “suburbs” part and that’s exactly why I was attracted to it. Rock and roll was supposed to be about the darkest streets, not the cul-de-sacs with up-lighting. But I was interested in life in the suburbs, so why wasn’t it okay to write about it? Everyone in the nineties was so taken with the freaks, the losers, the weirdos, and the creeps. But I figure if you wanna talk to a real weirdo, just open the phone book, put your finger down somewhere in the suburban pages (if you can find a phone book), and call them up.
I felt that rock music and popular culture took the middle class in the suburbs for granted. Stuck somewhere between the rural and the urban, just beyond the strip malls and before the pastures, the suburbanites were expected to buy all the CDs, but their stories weren’t supposed to be featured in them. The suburbs were so uncool that there was even a book (a very good one) in 2001 called Bomb the Suburbs, by a graffiti artist named William Upski Wimsatt. (Interestingly, by 2010 Wimsatt had thought about it some more and followed it up with Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs, around the same time that Arcade Fire chimed in with their wonderful album, The Suburbs.)
On Rove in support of Rockin’ the Suburbs, with compulsory angry red backward baseball cap
Y’all don’t know what it’s like, being male, middle class, and white
—From “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” Rockin’ the Suburbs, 2001
I thought it was notable that what most of the music middle-class suburban kids were listening to, and making, was aggressive, loud, and angry. Modern-rock radio was 24/7 middle-class anger. No sad songs, no happy songs, no love songs, just pissed-off songs. So I wanted to write a song about it, but I wanted my song to sound annoyingly happy. As it happens, I saw a Spin magazine with some oddly familiar faces on the cover. Remember those hairy roadies I mentioned heckling us at the last Ben Folds Five gig? It turns out that was a famous rock band called Korn. According to Spin, they were “taking on the wusses.” That sounded brave, so I read on, putting it all together when I saw Korn’s quote, in massive type, beneath their photo:
BEN FOLDS FIVE ARE FUCKING PUSSIES. THEY PLAY FUCKING “CHEERS” MUSIC.
This was a reference to the theme song of the TV show Cheers. Awesome. Good association, I thought. Good melody.
It made me wonder, though. Why did the middle-class white suburbanites of that era consume so much anger rock? Why was Korn’s main mission that day taking on musicians with pretty chords and not-so-angry music? Were things really that bad? What exactly was in the air? I seemed to know as little about Korn as they did about me. Checking out their music, I had to admit it was pretty damn good. But it was striking how one-tracked it was emotionally, like the rest of the successful bands you heard pumping out of cars in the ’burbs. Something was definitely afoot.
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While writing the song “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” I thought a lot about Stevie Wonder, who grew up black and blind in the turbulence prior to the civil-rights movement. One can’t imagine that challenge. Don’t you think he had more to be pissed off about than the majority of white middle-class suburbanites? And yet, alongside some rightfully edgy songs like “Living for the City,” Stevie wrote songs about the full range of the human experience. All the emotions—sadness, happiness, empathy, despair. Why was the popular music of the suburban youth so “one-holler-fits-all”? Is there a line connecting all of this to the political landscape of 2016, when the now-grown-up consumers of this music decided a world-changing election? “Rockin’ the Suburbs” is just a fun observation—more a question mark than an answer, but it was something I was compelled to think about.
And speaking of Stevie Wonder, whatever happened to love songs? It didn’t seem anyone of my generation had dared touch the “Love Song” with a ten-foot pole. It wasn’t cool. There were some cheesy love songs on pop radio, as always, but more-serious songwriters didn’t seem to want to broach that genre anymore. From R.E.M. to Nirvana, it just wasn’t the “Decade of Love” for rock dudes. I’d never considered writing a damn love song either, until I was approached in 1999 by moviemaker Amy Heckerling, who’d made Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless. She had this glorious final long one-shot nerd-kissing scene in her new movie, Loser, which required a love song, so I took the plunge. I watched the scene over and over, taking in the camera pacing, and considered the lives of these two nerds embraced in a kiss in a final bold scene. I delivered the song to the movie studio kind of assuming I’d get some kind of award for it. But the whole scene was cut from the movie after a focus group didn’t like it.
As the song sat for a year, I came to realize it was incomplete. The third verse wasn’t right. It was a crayon scribbling of the concept of love, not the real thing. That’s the danger of writing a love song. Love is so hard to describe. It’s complex, and it’s easy to oversimplify and end up with dross. I suppose that’s why my peers had avoided it. When I was recording Suburbs, the ninety-year-old man next door to me died in his sleep, and his wife passed away days later. A lifelong partnership, like the one my elderly next-door neighbors had, was something we’d all be lucky to experience. It’s what I wanted so badly in my life, which, along with my wild impulsiveness, had led to my many stumbles and falls. And so that would be the third verse.