Video Content!
With more behind the scenes on songwriting than anyone ever asked for
PROLOGUE:
Wanna know a word I hate? “Content.”
Not as in “contentedness”, like when you’re happy and satisfied. That’s word is fine, if not a bit elusive personally, as creatively itchy and perpetually overthinking and generally ADHD restless as I tend to be.
The “content” I’m referring to is the one that marketing1 teams toss around. Contextually, it makes sense, I guess, when you’re talking about corporate blogs or corporate social media. No one’s gonna confuse that with art2. It is absolutely “content.” That’s fine. It is what it is, as they say. But when people talk about real artists creating content, it rankles me. Obviously, if you want to get your art out into the world, there’s gonna be some kind of marketing/promotional stuff involved. But that’s a side thing, not the real thing. And it seems pretty reductive to call the actual art “content.” Which is exactly what modern managers and consultants tell artists they need to keep generating. Not art. Content. “You need to have a steady stream of content to please the algorithm3.” “If you don't continually trickle out content, you’ll be forgotten in the modern music landscape.”
Just imagine calling a new play by Shakespeare “content.”
You wouldn’t read a Toni Morrison book. You’d read Toni Morrison content.
“After I finish Hamlet, I’ve gotta dig me up some more Shakespeare content”?
“Toni Morrison followed up The Bluest Eye with some career-best content.”
C’mon. Nobody says that. Or at least nobody should say that. But that’s where it’s going.
End of rant/prologue.
Anyway, here’s some exclusive Paul Jacobsen video content for you: me playing three songs—just me and my blonde Gibson—opening for my friend Brian Bingham last February. The video would be four songs (I opened my set with “Western Skies”), but my nerves forgot to press record on the recorder when I got onstage (own goal) as Brian had carefully instructed.
Full disclosure: My jokes are bad, as usual. The banter is quiet and rambly and a little nervous, also as usual. It’s far from pitch perfect.
But I’m sharing it because the songs feel good. (My face in the YouTube preview? Less good. Yikes.) I like the way I played and sang that night, so—in an uncharacteristic fit of self-esteem—I’m sharing it. Does sharing feel a little bit like publishing my report card results on a banner in my front yard? Maybe. But so is having a Substack or social media of any kind, really (And look at all those A’s!).
I perform an old song4: “You’re The Song”, maybe the best love song I’ve ever written. I dunno. So far, at least5.
I close my set with what feels like a nice zag: a cover of 80s synth pop duo, Yaz’s “Only You.” Such a great melody. It feels good to strip the song of its 80s jelly bracelets and towering bangs and synthesizeriness and get to the heart of the song. Listening to that album (Upstairs at Eric’s) will always remind me of sitting in the middle seat of my aunt Georgia’s van, with my cousin Dave driving, while we chattered along on the washboard bumps of a Montana dirt road.
In the middle of those two songs, there’s a new-ish song called “Don’t Mind Me.” Read below the Share button if you’re into Behind The Scenes type stuff. Or just, in the words of Iris Dement, let the mystery be. Either way, thanks for listening/watching/reading at all.
A little behind the scenes on “Don’t Mind Me.”
The genesis of the song finds me in an old church in London, where I misheard Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones singing their duet “Don’t Remind Me.” I’d always wanted to write an Everly- or Orbison-esque song. My mishearing of the song’s chorus along with Thompson and Jones’ Everly-esque harmonies was all the spark I needed. The seed was planted.
What is it I love about the old Everly and Orbison songs? For starters, the simplicity6. The lyrics always seem really direct but still manage to exist on this side of poetic (usually). Another thing I love about some of the old songs: the sorta sing-song-y, Disney Studios staff singers-ish opening choruses—like in Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone.” My song actually shares significant getting-over-someone-and-so-sad-about-it DNA with Cash’s song as well as Lucinda Williams’ “Jackson” and Dylan’s “Most of the Time” in the way that the lyrics are a misdirect, attempting to veil the hurt beneath. The narrator of my song is trying, unconvincingly, to tell himself that he’s fine without her (whoever she is7).
Every time the chorus rolls back around, it’s the narrator trying to regain composure, find his feet, reassure himself that he’s gonna be fine. He may truly believe in “fake it til you make it” but he’s not fooling anyone. (I probably show my cards in my song more than Dylan and Lucinda but less than Cash, whose song could probably be sung—beautifully, I might add—by Eeyore.)
Speaking of the chorus, it’s my stab at the old school country play-on-words type thing that I first explored in my college country duo Hank Cash & The Duke of Haggard8’s song “It’s Too Bad (That You’re No Good)”. Classic country songs loved some wordplay, didn’t they? For this one, I felt like I’d struck gold9 when I stumbled on the colloquialism of “don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here…” as well as the repetition of “over” when I sing “I’ll just be over here, getting over you” and how, though unspoken, there’s even a third meaning to “over” and that is: THIS IS FINISHED.
The second half of the second verse is where I veered off of Everly Lane, trying to introduce some chaos and imbalance and edge, and unmask the narrator’s poorly-hidden hurt for a split second—the line “would he BLEED for you?” is many things but subtle is not one of them—before regaining composure. It’s also a stab at unexpected chord/tonal/rhythmic changes that some of my musical heroes (Punch Brothers, Madison Cunningham, Brian Wilson, Radiohead, St. Vincent) use to great effect. And, yeah, the musical changes help with upping the drama.
The line “If it stays broken, it’s just a heart anyway” was salvaged from another song that failed to achieve liftoff. And yet! It’s the one piece of this song where I still don’t think I landed the fish. Not quite. The line is good. I liked it enough to save it from its previous dead end song, right? But my phrasing—how I time it, the melody—never quite emphasizes the lyric the way I’d like to. There’s still time, I suppose.
FOR ONLY THE DEEPEST OF NAVEL-GAXING DIVERS: DEMO VERSIONS
I take forever to write songs. It used to embarrass me and brutally reinforce my impostor syndrome. These days I try to give myself more grace, accept it as my personal process and recognize the instances that the long duration of my writing/editing has actually allowed me to stumble on good ideas/lyrics/changes in time (even if there’s gotta be some middle ground in between taking 7 years and writing a song in an afternoon).
“Don’t Mind Me” is a real case study in that long and winding road. I have around 40 separate Voice Notes in my phone, workshopping ideas for this song alone. Here are a just a few different choruses I tried out before landing on the one you hear in the video. We start seven years ago (in case you thought that “seven” was hyperbolic).
May 30th 2016, a chorus titled V2, so there was something before this that I must’ve erased. You can hear me experimenting with how to properly emphasize the lyric “…or trying to.”
May 31st 2016: the day after V2, there’s this one, Version 6A, which indicates at least 4 other iterations in that 24-hour period. You can hear my confidence right there at the end…
August 29th 2016: pardon the excruciating ick of me breathing too close to the microphone, but sometimes it’s just an a’capella thing sung into a phone in hopes of capturing the lightning. The shape of the ultimate chorus is starting to show.
September 14, 2016: here you’ll hear a verse melody (with mumbly non-lyrics as placeholder) that I discarded but—listening today—I think is kind of cool, so maybe it’ll become a song of its own? The verse transitions into a chorus that is getting a lot closer to the song’s actual chorus. Again, my confidence shines through at the end.
Too navel-gazey? Probably.
Full disclosure: marketing pays my bills.
It reminds me, for whatever reason, of the Low song “Plastic Cup” in which the lyrics talk about someone having to take a drug test by peeing into a plastic cup and how the cup will outlive us all in some landfill. The last verse, taking a poke at the fetishization of old things, goes:
They'll probably dig it up a thousand years from now / And how
They'll probably wonder what the hell we used it for / And more
This must be the cup the king held every night / As he cried
Seems not all that far off from appeasing volcanoes with occasional virgins.
(Also, yes, I have dibs on that band name because it’s elite: The Occasional Virgins.
We’re gonna be huge.)
It’s a full-blown teenager! I think the first version—recorded late one frigid December night in my NY apartment—was burned onto a CD and given to Holly for Christmas 2004.
One of my favorite lyrics is from a Jon Brion song where the chorus goes:
You’re the love of my life
You’re the love of my life
You’re the love of my life
So far.
Or deceptive simplicity. I once made a nerdy, color-coded chart to visualize “Wake Up Little Susie”’s song form, with each color representing a separate idea (motif? section?). It’s not The Mars Volta or Sorabji or anything. Which is why I used the term “deceptive simplicity.” It has some tricks up its sleeve.
I get asked occasionally how I write breakup songs without getting divorced. Usually the questions are just indirectly wondering how autobiographical my songs are. I would say a lot of the time my songs have a lot of me in there and sometimes there’s just enough so that I can sing it credibly. But even the most true-to-life song of mine takes poetic license/artistic liberties.
Hank Cash & The Duke of Haggard were responsible for my song “Pen To Paper” off of my debut album You Might Regret You Ever Cared. I was the Duke. My friend Jeff was Hank. He was my gateway to so many country legends—Tom T. Hall, Roger Miller, Loretta Lynn, Ernest Tubb. HC&TDH was our attempt to pay tribute to those.
Not actual gold. And not even, like, Hit Song Gold. (Turns out there’s not much of a market for Everly Brothers-influenced sad songs on Spotify playlists dominated by Bad Bunny and The Weeknd.) But “gold” in that it felt really good to me. Take it away, Cormac:
So many things I want to say here. I will write it in chunks as I partake of all the nuggets contained in here.
First of all I just want to say that I am SO HAPPY that you recorded and shared this performance. I came to that show to see you! I know Brian and love to see him perform, but I was heading out to see you. Single fatherhood and 2 IT Software jobs always make my life unpredictable. By the time I arrived, I missed your performance! I am happy to see what I missed. What an amazing version on Only You. I would love to sing harmony on that with you one day.
I love that you are sharing your voice memos to illustrate the evolution of a song. I know that is a big share. My voice memos have taken on their own persona and almost become human. I talk to my voice memos like it is a fellow songwriter as we co-write together. That's deeply personal and I love that you shared this.
I enjoy your writing and experiences here on Substack. I think we are similarly aged and both had very similar "growing up in Utah" experiences balanced out with living through and participating in several amazing musical eras.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this. It was very meaning for to me. Also, I think it helps to occasionally let people know that the words they put out into the world do find a listening ear and a thirsty soul, ready to listen. I know that it can feel like no one cares, reads or hear what you post. (notice I did not refer to it as content).
I loved hearing your the three songs you did as an opener. You always sound so good to me, but I have to say the Blonde Gibson stole the show. Of course, YOU were pulling the sound out of it and it was a beautiful, rich, deep sound. That said, I loved the third voice memo when you sang without the Gibson, just pure Paul. That was the best. Glad to read Judd Warrick - you should hear those things from someone beside your Mom :).