Courage (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

Good morrow. Today we arrive at TV en Français’ halfway point, or rather the first half of its halfway point, “Courage.” A unique song in the W.A.S. catalog for reasons that we’ll get into below, the demo we’ve included in this post is also a bit strange in that it was neither the original songwriter’s sketch (which you can hear elsewhere), nor was it really a rough take on what would become the final studio cut. It is instead a sonic approach to the song that was abandoned in favor of something we ultimately preferred — what billions of people now hear on TV en Français nearly every day — but this version retains plenty of charm; and, like all of these demos, it offers insights into that fascinating, forbidding place: the Artist’s Mind. 🔮

KEITH: I could be wrong about this, but I think “Courage" is the only We Are Scientists tune that wasn’t written in the between-album interim immediately preceding the album upon which it appeared. We’re pretty brutal in selecting our favorites from a given songwriting streak, making an album of only those very favorite tunes, and then never looking back. It can mean that unless they’re saved by garbage-salvaging projects like Dumpster Dive, many songs that we’re really into never see the light of day, either because we can’t make them fit into an album’s aesthetic or we’re just too lazy to make them as great as they need to be to make the strict ten-song-per-record cut that we impose. Keith Carne’s favorite WAS song is one from the Megaplex era that never even made it past the home-demo stage, simply because our ranking system found it at an untenable #11, or whatever. We generally just get too excited about the new stuff we’re working on to look back at the musical detritus we’ve left in our wake.

So it’s pretty wild that “Courage,” a song that predated even the writing of With Love and Squalor, was given a second chance at life on TV en Français. I’m not sure exactly when I wrote it, but it had to be in 2001 or maybe 2002, because I distinctly remember recording it in my grandfather’s house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where we all lived when we first moved to NYC and were looking for jobs and more centrally-located apartments. It existed in the solo acoustic form that we released on the TVeF-accomanying EP Business Casual for, I guess, a decade, before we decided that we should rework it and slap it onto this record. But I have no idea how the conversation about resuscitating it started, do you?

CHRIS: Like The Youth, we are truly fixated on the new, or at least on things that are new to us, at least when it comes to songs, at least when it comes to the ones we’re considering putting on our new records. So I’m not exactly sure how it is that “Courage” managed to fight its way out of the gloom and shadows of the past, crossing the Desert of Forgetting, and collapse, exhausted but very much alive, on TV en Français’ doorstep. Concerning the exact details of its origins, my memory is fuzzy, but my gut tells me “Courage” is even older than you think. I would place its birth sometime during the two years after we graduated from college but before we moved to New York. Indeed, the following email back-and-forth between me and Andy — dated January 1 and 2, 2012 — corroborates my sense that I saw you perform “Courage” solo acoustic, which could surely only have happened in California in the terrible confusion of post-graduate directionlessness:

First Andy writes:

"Broseph,
I totally get you re Keith and new songs v's old songs - I continuously have a battle in my head about not being able to use old songs because one always wants to use the newest freshest shit from the brain box...
AND don't worry - have deffo been bigging up loads of his new offerings over past two months - I think he's writing great stuff..
BUT - that song 'courage' is a motherfuckin HIT yo - well-done for getting him to seek it down, and throw it in the mix... 
I believe it's proper next level shit- & quite frankly with a song like that, we can go places 
I know you know it - but I just feel I had to reiterate this ... Cos it's great”

Then I respond:

"Yeah, Courage is a goddamn winner, through and through. It's been rattling around my brain for ten-plus years. I think I saw Keith play it at like two open-mics, way back before WAS existed, and I literally still remembered like half the lyrics when I begged Keith to hunt it down a couple weeks ago. It's a hit, and we must nail the production.”

The little guy’s a survivor! That’s all we can know for sure. But I recall that we went through quite a bit of back and forth figuring out what it should sound like on the record, in part because of the wickedly acute case of “demo-itis” that original recording fomented. (Perhaps the older the demo, the more inviolate its form.) I still love the original recording that appears on Business Casual, but also feel like we got it to a great place for the TVeF version (that gorgeous piano…). What’s the story with this demo we’re playing people today? Do you remember the conditions under which you recorded this echoey treat?

Jan. 6, 2012: Andy lays down some triangle on a demo of “Make It Easy” we made with Ariel Rechtshaid in Vampire Weekend’s DUMBO studio, he and Chris probably whispering between takes about the importance of “Courage.”

KEITH: Well, the historical fog is only thickening here, because not only do I not recall writing “Courage" in California, but I don’t even recall ever playing these open mics that you’re referring to! My brain is a quickly-deteriorating pudding-pile suitable only for half-remembering my own lyrics plus some of the more choice lines from BASEketball. Probably, though, this specific lapse in memory serves a pride-preserving function; I have long hated the "solo acoustic singer/songwriter” idiom, and so I likely pushed those performances out of my head-jelly the moment they were over. I do recall playing maybe two open-mic nights as a duo with original WAS singer Scott Lamb in the SF Bay Area in like 2000, when he and I were trying to get people to call us The Yum Yums, after our favorite Southern California donut chain. We wouldn’t have played “Courage” at those, although we did have a pretty good song about a dog who could run very fast.

Anyway, you’re right that there was much hand-wringing in 2012 about how best to present “Courage” on TV En Français. I think I took a few stabs at the dreaded solo acoustic form, but none of us felt very inspired by that presentation. If nothing else, it seemed like a real waste of the great Chris/Andy/Keith trio. Andy, in particular, has long excelled at crafting these sort of tender, exposed torch songs; his catalogue is stacked with sterling examples. So, I’m fairly sure that he would have been the one to lead us to that final arrangement. And thank god.

This demo version was clearly recorded in the interim, when we knew that a solo acoustic version just wasn’t going to cut it but a full-band concept hadn’t yet come together. So here was my flailing little concept, surely recorded alone at like 2:00am in our writing space off of Prospect Park. A desperate, delirious attempt. I guess this version is where the idea of the arpeggiated lead guitar came in?  I gotta admit that I still think that the tremolo guitar effect is pretty cool, and that backward-masking thing which I clearly deployed as a smattering of pig-lipstick is pleasant to the ear.  Overall, this version is kinda the missing link between the original demo and the final, full-band version. Or not the “missing link,” I guess, because it’s right here on SDIR.

Here’s a question: do we have any other waltzes in our catalogue? I want you to think about it for me, because, remember, my brain doesn’t work. Are people out there waltzing to We Are Scientists?

Keith in his 2011 writing space. Pictured, two of his most valuable creative tools (the fan is blowing heat).

CHRIS: The only other thing I can think of with a waltzy feel is “KIT," but its tempo is a bit too brisk to invite actual waltzing. I think? I’m saying that as someone who hasn’t waltzed since fifth grade. Heck, maybe there are dance jocks out there who could waltz to the verses of “Your Light Has Changed,” then switch to a jogging-in-place movement for the choruses. (Did I just coin a TikTok craze?!) Tell ya what, we should slap a proper waltz onto his next album. Stick that idea into your pudding pile and let’s see what comes out! 

I’m of course aware of your longstanding antipathy for solo acoustic performance, but I also know there’s some internal tension there. For you and I did very often attend solo acoustic gigs back in 1998-99 — dudes like Glen Phillips, Matt Nathanson, and Willy Porter received many of our hard-earned fifteen-dollar bills around that time (for some reason it was a super-male dominated crowd?). I don’t think you spent those shows marinating in schadenfreude — how do you square your allergy to you yourself solo-acousticizing with your (at least onetime) appreciation for the format when others deployed it? 

KEITH: Not to be a dick, but I think those shows did deliver a little bit of the “there but for the grace of God go I” vibe, for me. Apart from Nathanson, who always delivered a show with a cheerleader’s suspiciously-unwavering smile, those events always had an air of lingering, ineffable despair. Like, the craft of the songwriting was high, but we never really left those shows feeling quite as enlivened as when we saw the full bands we were into at the time — your Creeper Lagoons, your Dismemberment Plans, your Jimmy Eat Worlds. There was a certain resigned futility to those singer songwriter events; one could almost imagine that these troubadours were traveling from town to town by hopping onto passing train cars.  Much better to join a band and have fun with one's friends at the afterparty than to split a can of baked beans with the other vagrants in the rail yard, it seemed to me. Just as “Courage” needed the full-band scenario in order to come to life, so did I.

CHRIS: Amen, brother.

February 12, 2013: Max Hart injects bittersweet pedal steel into our cover of “Take My Breath Away,” which filled out the Business Casual EP, the world’s introduction to TV en Français. Also pictured: Claudius Mittendorfer, who mixed the non-TVeF tracks on Biz Casual, and would go on to mix Megaplex, Huffy, and Lobes.

This photo, along with the one at the top of the post, is dated April 16, 2009, and appears to depict Keith playing solo-acoustic on some kind of TV program. Chris shot the photos, but neither he nor Keith can remember anything about that day. Perhaps performing without the band was so psychologically defacing that our minds simply failed to record any data.

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) is out June 28th. To preorder the double-vinyl, the zine, the keychain — do a click.