Don't Blow It (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

One of the great journeys in historical research, music analysis, and combative badinage nears its conclusion today as we unearth and reckon with the demo recording of “Don’t Blow It,” track nine on 2014’s TV en Français. A sort of hidden gem on that record, “Don’t Blow It” has received precious little attention at our concerts over the years — meaning we never play it. But that hasn’t kept listeners at home from streaming it with much greater frequency than TVeF’s other non-singles, a sure sign that if we weren’t such stubborn jerks, we’d have nurtured this into a live favorite.

This is no place for counterfactuals, though. Like our sister publication The Oxford English Dictionary, here we value plain, descriptive truth. What really happened. How it actually went down. Who, what, where, when, why for.

With that in mind, here’s “Don’t Blow It,” as demoed at Brooklyn’s Seaside Studio in January of 2012, absent all studio trickery, exactly as it really happened.

KEITH: I don’t really remember when in the songwriting process “Don’t Blow It” showed up, but it must have been fairly early on.  It’s one of the four demos we recorded during our session at Seaside — along with “Sprinkles,” “Take An Arrow,” and “Slow Down” — which suggests to me that those were the only four songs we had at that point. I do recall that it’s one that Andy got very excited about really early on.  My initial notion for the song was to deliver it as a Creedence-style guitar romp, but even in this version, it’s already become more of a piano tune Maybe (probably?) this was because the studio had all of these keyboards lying around, and not much else — it was pretty bare-bones — and we let Andy loose on whatever instrument he felt like tackling. Apart from being a ridiculous drummer, Andy is a stupid-good rock pianist, and you can tell he’s having a lot of fun just blasting through the one-take  improvisation on the Fender Rhodes. I distinctly remember getting a mix of this demo from Max Hart (we were shopping for labels in London at that point) and listening to it in the bottom bunk of Andy’s daughter’s bed (you were in the top bunk, not her) at his old flat in Belsize Park and getting really excited about letting him loose on the song once we got to a real studio.  

Do you remember what your first impression of the song’s vibe was? It seemed like it could have gone in bunch of different directions, but, no matter how we approached it, it seems fairly out-of-character for us, especially following up from the rock party that was Barbara.

CHRIS: I can’t remember a version of this song that didn’t depend on a keyboard instrument, which is either a function of my eroded smart-sponge or of this song’s insignificant earliest stage. My doctor, whom I met in the lobby at Nabisco, assures me it can only be the latter. 

I think my first impression of the song, truth be told, was provoked by the lyrics, which I find even now upon reflection to be a pretty nice example of the Keith Murray Tentatively Positive School of Romantic Philosophy. 

When we talk about love
It's not a discussion

If you want it enough
Then you gotta do something

There’s an insouciant, maybe even fatalistic hopefulness — it’s a real tightrope walk, to be honest, and you’ve pulled it off many times. I have to assume that much of our audience is made up of worldweary romantics. And does it sit well over a bed of keys? Sure it does, like chickpeas on arugula, or birds on a power line. 

I think one cool thing about this job is how many times we’ve stayed in children’s bunk beds over the years. It must also be common in other lines of work, though none come to mind. 

KEITH: Ah, Chris, I’d say that every good adult job involves sleeping in bunk beds — submarine crewman, logger at a remote sawmill, financial analyst at Bear Stearns. Pretty much every job you dreamt of pursuing as a little kid involves bunking up with your buddies. I still think you chose the best career, though.

Seeing it written out there is reminding me of the direct influence of great American short story writer Raymond Carver, who is probably most famous for his collections Cathedral, Where I’m Calling From, and, most appositely, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Well, actually, he’s probably best known for having had his work collected into the kinda-anthology film Short Cuts by Robert Altman, which is too bad, because that movie is about as bad as filmmaking by a certified Movie Master comes. I haven’t yet seen Coppola’s latest flop Megalopolis nor Costner’s career-torpedoing Horizon: Volume 1, though. Maybe those are worse? I doubt it.

Anyway, I first encountered Carver when I transferred to our alma mater, Pomona College. I shared a dorm bathroom with a slew of other transfer students including our mutual friend, the highly-idiosyncratic Josia Lamberto-Egan. One of Josia’s many quirks was that he was always leaving books in the bathroom. At the time, I thought he was being generously cheeky, providing communal commode reading material. In retrospect, it seems more likely that he was simply too lazy to lug his latest book back and forth from his room to the crapper.  

Most of the books he left there were forgettable; there was a lot of erotica and the occasional Encyclopedia Brown story. But one day, I waddled into the bathroom to find something else altogether: Carver’s collection Where I’m Calling From. I perused it enough on my daily sojourns to the mud-hut to quickly fall in love with Carver's terse prose and his steadfastly miserablist outlook. I think my stance on romance was probably a little more influenced the American modernists like Steinbeck and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, all of whom I was way into in high school and who tend toward my personal brand of wistfully optimistic melancholy, rather than Carver’s scorched-earth tendencies. In his books, every love story ends with quiet dissatisfaction, at best. At worst, the kids die and the wife leaves with another mediocre guy and the husband drinks himself to death on discount-brand alcohol. Good stuff. It’s funny that I was so affected by Carver’s pessimistic take on what it is we talk about when we talk about love — in his stories, almost nobody ever talks about love at all, at least not directly. They either scream and throw furniture or just kind of stop talking altogether and quietly walk away for good. There is precious little furniture-throwing in the WAS lyrical cannon. Is there any?!

CHRIS: There isn’t, not that I can think of. (The song under discussion actually contains the only non-trivial references to home furnishings that my onboard meat-AI was able to find in the WAS canon during a RapidSRCH™ (0.5-30.0 seconds). Readers will correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.) No, I would say that if you were influenced by Carver, it wasn’t by his characters and their entanglements, which as you say tend toward the truly, bleakly dissolute and desperate, but by his written style. Broadly speaking, Carver’s writing is “Hemingwayesque,” which is to say unadorned, but where Hemingway’s humor was mostly wry and detached, Carver had a real ear for hilarious awkwardness and sadness, which are not uncommon in a Keith Murray bar. Your lyrics, I would say, do share some of these guys’ resistance to sesquipidalian antics, though less messianically. Indeed the other writer I can remember having had an especially strong influence on your prose — David Foster Wallace — has in the long run lost against Carver & Hemingway the war for detail vs. simplicity, at least on the battleground of We Are Scientist lyrics. But your lyrical mood of choice might be closer to DFW's than to either of those earlier grumps. (All three are famous grumps, of course. With the exception of Lee Child and R.L. Stine, your favorite authors unanimously are, I believe.) 

If I had to choose a cultural artifact that I think has the most resonant frequencies in common with your work, though? (It will be interesting to see what readers think.) Kicking and Screaming (1995), dir. Noah Baumbach.

KEITH: Hey, as long as it’s not his adaptation of White Noise (speaking of desecrating the works of timeless authors)!

Some things that happened in 2014…

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) is out now, and can be found streaming digitally in the usual spots, and is on offer as a physical object  here.