Excuse Our Mess

I always have wanted to have a song written about me. I’ve resolved that I will never write a good song; so to demonstrate my passion for music I will make myself available to any good writer as a song topic. In this fantasy I’d even like to be the subject of Dylan’s Positively 4th Street, the clown that embodies the ridicule of a generation. My friend, the musician Quarterbar, was the first guy I knew who ever wrote beautiful songs. Whenever he’d play a new one, I’d ask, “Is it about me?” The best I ever got was that was it was about everyone and thus me. So it was about me the same way a Bjork, Dylan or Ashlee Simpson song is. It was about the human spirit.

But I think I got one. I think there is now a song about me. Check it.

OK. I can’t prove it, but I will state my theory.

The song was written by Josh Arce of Addison, a band that plays around San Francisco frequently. I went to high school with him, and both of our lives changed and became intertwined when our high school Government teacher offered extra credit for working in a political campaign. Both Josh and I in separate sections with the same teacher asked, “What if we run?” That’s how I remember it. We had other connections, having grown up in the same suburb at the same exact time. He remembered coming into the baseball card shop I worked at. I apparently asked him what kind of cleats he had over his shoulder. That story kinda illustrates the way we differed. He played, I watched from the sidelines with slightly nerdy binoculars. So, I became his campaign manager as he ran first for the largely unknown but widely voted on position of Community College Board of Trustees and then for California State Assembly. I quit the campaign after he won the primary in a particularly classy way. I scribbled on a piece of notebook paper, “The official letter of my resignation is K.” Like OK? I dropped the note off in my blue Ford Escort and scooted up out of Chatsworth, California back to the University of California, at Santa Barbara where I tried to learn how to write and got stoned.

Impossibly Josh let me back into his life later as he graduated law school in San Francisco. We became friends and collaborators again. This time we decided the problem was that were running for office when we should have been starting a band. We started playing open-mike nights. Beatles and Dylan covers and a couple of Josh’s early originals. It all feel apart quickly when one night Josh encouraged a older drunk woman to pick up on me. I felt impossibly alone and mocked for it. Alone back at Josh’s office where I was sleeping, I looked up jobs in Santa Barbara. I got a phone interview the next day. I moved out a week later.

So check for yourself. Does it sound like the kind of behavior that this song describes? Embarrassingly enough it does. Of course, there is other, probably less embarassing stuff that I won't reveal, but I think it's about me. And I will defend that even to the people I let down when made the same case about Shaggy's It Wasn't Me. You can trust me. I have learned how to blog. But I also thought most of NWA’s last real album EFIL4ZAGGIN was satire. I also thought that Bill Clinton personally responded to me mocking his laughter by playing it way more cool at a speech at Santa Barbara City College.

I love Josh as a musician. Lyrically he is closer to George Harrison than any other writer I can think of. I think that has to do both with his quiet, stewing personality and his passion for and understanding of Dylan. Musically, Addison can be as poppy as Blink or as arcane as Badfinger. The lyrics are deceptive, smart and on the cut. And as I hope I proved, they are about something. As an exercise, download (Don’t) Shoot the Messenger from the band’s EP Songs in the Key of Y, and see if you detect the mixing of baseball and religious metaphors. That’s pure growing up in the SF Valley kind of shit.