New/Old Release: Six O'Clock News

2010 called. They want their song back.

In 2010 a weird thing happened to me.

I was in Austin. Sweating, as one does. I was there for work, a trade show of some kind being held in one of the city’s brutishly air-conditioned expo halls.

One night after exhibition hall hours were over and our work was done, my coworkers went out partying with the client. Being the social guy I am, I went to a movie (Exit Through The Gift Shop, I believe) alone. I have heard some people say that a solo movie is a nightmare scenario for them, but I happen to love it¹. Anyway, when the movie ended, I walked outside to find the night had cooled the Texas heat a bit, so I elected to walk all the way back to my hotel.

That’s when my phone started blowing up, as kids used to say.

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Let’s back up a year or so.

A year or so (I told you that’s how far we were backing up) after I finished my second album (2008’s creatively titled Paul Jacobsen & The Madison Arm), the band and I found ourselves back in the studio with the idea of re-recording some of the songs from that album, all live at the same time; the premise being that our live shows had uncorked some different and interesting and unexplored elements and dynamics in these songs since their initial release. They’d come alive for us and helped establish us as one of the better live bands around². So we aimed to document it. Not because there was pressing public demand (there was decidedly not) but because, as often happens with art, we ourselves wanted to document it. We supplemented the regular live Madison Arm (me, Scott Wiley, Pat Campbell, Ryan Tanner, Brian Hardy) with a few of our friends—Ryan Tilby (bass), Nate Pyfer (accordion, other stuff), Dylan Schorer (pedal steel). We even brought in our friend Jed Wells to document it on video, so confident we were in what we could come away with.

What went down that day in the studio, though, was terrible³. And I don’t even mean the music necessarily (as the blessed pledgers to my last album’s Kickstarter heard, when some versions of these songs finally saw the light of day). It’s just that the band never quite felt like we connected. Vibes were suboptimal. I don’t know what was going on in each of our personal lives or at home or even interpersonally between the five of us, but—to put it generously—the feeling in the room? It just wasn’t happening. In a big and messy way.

Because I am a student of rock history, I can be extra-stubborn and determined on days like those. See, rock history has taught me that, a lot of times, trouble in the studio has been the necessary sand in the oyster to yield masterpieces. The National’s seminal album Boxer, for instance, earned its pugilist title for how it seemed to fight the band the whole way. I likely over-romanticized the proposition that “Making Art Should Be Difficult”, having seen it play out enough with the artists I love⁴. So I did my best to be undaunted, to take it in stride, to see it all as part of the process that would ultimately pay off. So, despite the vibes being off, we played a few times through a pump-organ-led version of “Lung”, shot beautifully by Jed (one shot! no cuts!) that you can hear/watch on YouTube. We tried “You’re The Song” less successfully. We tried other things. We took a stab at the then-still-unreleased “Apocalypse Wow” that was mostly toothless, which really deflated us all, as the song had become a consistent, energetic highlight of our live shows. We did a Radiohead cover⁵ that fell apart. We did the Bjork cover I released late last year.

Watching Jed’s video of “Lung” and knowing that we have since released a few song from the session, it seems clear that our feelings IN THE MOMENT might have been (ok, totally were) clouding what was actually happening; we felt—and no one could dissuade us of the contrary—that we were failing. The room felt infected, positively toxic, with failure. Yet, here we are, years and years later, and, would you look at that: I’ve released a handful of songs from that day. And not under duress!

At some point, we huddled and we let most everyone go home. The core band—Brian, Ryan, Pat, Scott, and me—stuck around. Just kinda marinating in the sour fumes of the depression of unfulfilled expectations.

Have you ever been shooting a basketball at a gym or on a backyard hoop and decided it was time to be done, but you had to make one last shot before you left? Like, you want to go inside or go home but want to do so on a good note? That’s kind of what happened here. The day was deflating and demoralizing, leaving everyone emotionally exhausted. For years we called them The Black Sessions with no irony intended.

But what about that one last made shot?

Ryan and I went into the tracking room and, not expecting anything to be recorded (really, we didn’t), started playing one of our mutual favorite songs. You can guess what it was, at this point. Ryan on piano. Me on guitar. Singing with all we had. Sinking our own unrelated sadness into the sadness of the song⁶. Reconnecting with the joy of just loving music and what it can do to (and with) how you feel.

And then Brian came in and started playing a little figure on the glockenspiel.

And Pat sat down with some brushes, real quiet like.

And pretty soon Scott was in there too, on the banjo.

And we hit record.

And we were all on the same page.

And we felt better.

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So back in Austin. I’m probably somewhere near South Congress at this point and I’m getting a bunch of texts. Most of them don’t know I’m in Texas. Some of them assume I have somehow orchestrated what is happening.

But, at this point, I still don’t know what is happening. I have a fragment here. An excited “DUDE!” there. But I’m still just vaguely understanding that “something” has taken place.

As it turns out, a friend/coworker who used to DJ one weeknight on our beloved Salt Lake City radio station KRCL, had played a song of mine on his show. Now, KRCL had played my music before (and still does! THANK YOU, KRCL!), going back to Teri Mumm having me on her afternoon show before my first album. But this was different. This was an unreleased song. A bit of sleuth work revealed that (I think) Ryan Tanner had sent a Dropbox link to our cover of “Six O’Clock News” to fellow music lover Dainon Moody. Maybe Dainon had shared it with Dave Morrissey (friend and coworker and KRCL DJ) who had played it on his show that very night. I could have some lines crossed there, but that’s the gist.

It’s hard enough to get your official music on the radio in the first place. And suddenly I had an unreleased song on the radio. Who did I think I was?

Dainon, it turns out, had also sent the song to his friend Heather Powell Browne, whose music blog (remember those?) I Am Fuel You Are Friends was one of my favorites. And she had loved it. And, like a true music fan, dived deeper into The Madison Arm and our music. And suddenly?

Suddenly, The Madison Arm was featured on one of my favorite music blogs. Without even soliciting it myself. Was this how success in the music industry happened?

I dared so much.

I dared to hope that Kathleen Edwards would hear it and love it (she did neither, or at very least not the latter).

I dared to dream that this was our version of Jose Gonzalez’s “Heartbeats”⁷ or Gary Jules’ “Mad World”⁸ or Red House Painters’ “All Mixed Up”⁹—cover songs that put (or helped put) some songwriters on the radar. (It didn’t.)

I dared to believe that maybe one of the cool bands that knew Heather would reach out to have us come open their theater tour. (Still waiting¹⁰.)

I dared to think I’d have music supervisors knocking down my door¹¹.

Most of those things didn’t happen. For a million reasons. Some are easy to understand (I didn’t know the song was going to find the world and thus didn’t have any way to capitalize on it, best illustrated by the fact that I’m finally releasing the song NOW in 2024, lol). Some are more mysterious (luck, the way the wind blows, the unaccountability of taste, timing, trends, etc ET FRICKIN’ CETERFRICKINA).

But the song remains. And I hope you like it (and enjoy the fact that you finally don’t have to be in possession of the top secret Dropbox link to hear it).

It comes out Friday. Pre-save it now, if you dare.

1. My friends Eric & Alex Peterson actually wrote a song about this—”Movies By Myself”— years and years ago, with their band Big Suckin’ Moose.

2. He said, quite objectively.

3. He said, objectively as ever.

4. “There’s no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it’s like drilling rock and blasting it out with charges.” - Ernest Hemingway

“The creative process is more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey-cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it. And it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful, and yet there’s something inevitable about it.” -Leonard Cohen

5. “Airbag”, for those keeping track at home.

6. The song is heavy. We were not dealing with watching the father of your unborn child in a shootout with the police on the six o’clock news.

7. Gonzalez’s most-streamed song on Spotify at a dizzying 499,345,086 streams vs. the original by The Knife’s 86 million streams. The least streamed song on Gonzalez’s album featuring “Heartbeats” still has 5.6m streams.

8. Jules’ most-streamed song on Spotify—257,996,539 streams—also outstreams the Tears For Fears original (137,249,463).

9. Interestingly, even after being featured prominently in a Gap tv ad campaign, Red House Painters’ version has a not-unrespectable 661k Spotify streams versus The Cars’ original’s 6.5m. Weird, to me, considering the original is just kind of….weird. This coming from a big Cars fan.

By comparison, Low’s version of “Little Drummer Boy”, used in the same Gap campaign, has nearly 900k Spotify streams.

10. Though The Damnwells did reach out at one point. And that was pretty cool, even if nothing came of it.

11. I eventually had one really kind guy from HBO contact me based on my other songs, which felt really good. He was a VP of Music Rights and far kinder than he ever needed to be. We emailed here and there. Writing this, I looked him up and found out he passed a few years ago.