What You Do Best (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

We are exactly one month from the release of TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition), a great time to pull back the curtain and take a look under the hood to find out how the sausage was made. We will do this over the coming weeks using several tools: photos, documents, and sounds. By the time May 10th arrives, and with it your pre-ordered copy of TVeF:D(10AE), you will know more about this album than even the most diligent music historians. You will be able to attend a trivia night where TV en Français is the theme, and win a veritable waterfall of free booze. Friends will bow to you, enemies will cower, your pets likely won’t notice a difference.

Today’s data bolt ⚡️ comes in the shape of sound. Here it is, the very first demo version of TVeF’s track 1, “What You Do Best”…

Let’s discuss…

KEITH: I like that we start TV En Français with this incantation, pushing for A-grade work. On the page, the lyric is sarcastic — what the song’s subject actually does best is to engage in avoidance, to shirk action, to quit. But then the band goes ahead and delivers a record that swings for the fences. On Barbara, we were energized by the great vibes Andy had brought to the band; we felt like a real, honest-to-god *rock band* for the first time. So, with that record we'd made a more “back to basics” album — a coiled python, one lunging muscle of a thing. Barbara was like a boxer who specialized in one-punch knockouts. TV En Français was more ambitious, more balletic; this guy was dodging, weaving, delivering sick combos to the torso, whatever they talk about when a guy is a well-rounded boxing champ. We all really wanted to stretch our legs together. So, even though the song itself uses the phrase sardonically, “What You Do Best” is a great mantra to guide us into the overall recording.

I don’t think we chose this song to kick off the record because its title neatly framed our work ethic, though. I think we just liked the final version’s intro as an album opener. The flexing, filtered bass part with the gurgling drums and ominous guitar swell creates a nice tension that lets us kick open the doors to TV En Français, when the song actually drops. I think that intro was something you and Chris Coady came up with?

CHRIS: I mean we knew the album needed to open with prominent bass guitar, because we wanted people to perk up and pay attention. We were tired of people snoozing through the first few measures of our albums. “Forget that,” we decided this time. Fuck, did it work. I don’t remember forging the intro filter with Coady, but I want to believe I did, and so I’ll take this opportunity to cast it as history: I did. I came up with that, with fearless, intrepid, resourceful Chris Coady by my side. 

I’m sure we’ll talk a lot about Chris Coady during this DEMO SERIES, and of course we’ll speak extensively about the good boy Andy Burrows — and when I write “talk” and “speak,” I mean “type,” unless some of these back-and-forths end up being audio (🎧?) — but real quick, and probably for the last time, I want to mention our old friend Dave Lowesohn, who went to college with us in Southern California. At that time (college), Dave was in a band we really liked called Speechwriters LLC, a kinda folk act, and we were pals with Dave and his bandmate Misha. And years later, when We Are Scientists would tour through Portland, where Dave was then living, he’d come out to the shows and it was always good to see him. And Dave — let me clarify — had absolutely nothing to do with the making of TV en Français, but a few years after its release, we were on tour in Portland, we were playing the esteemed Doug Fir venue, we were backstage before the show constructing the setlist and having a beer with Dave and maybe my high school buddy Ciaran, and we wrote “What You Do Best” down, and Dave went, “What?” And we were like, “What.” “You’re playing that?” asked Dave, and we were like, “Thinking so.” And Dave told us that was his least favorite song We Are Scientists had ever made. And for those reading at home, it should be kept in mind that Dave was a dude who had heard not just the stuff going back to With Love & Squalor, but everything before that, including the songs that dealt almost exclusively with monsters, with titles like “The Manga Ray” and “The Giant Awesome.” 

Anyway, we did go ahead and play “What You Do Best” that night, and I don’t think we changed Dave’s mind. I guess it’s worth remembering: works of art that engender broad consensus, positive or negative, probably aren’t worth a damn. 

KEITH: Oh, yeah, Dave Lowensohn got in my head real good that night. I’m pretty sure he repeated his objection after the show, couching the second volley in jarringly contrasting praise, like “That was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Those songs are incredible. Except for ‘What You Do Best.’ That one sucks.” We kinda phased it out of the setlist for a bit after that. 

Do you think some weird pride-based psychosis had him convinced that the song was a stab at him? That he saw himself openly flogged in the lyrics? Does he think the line is “And when I said that you were Lowensohn/I didn’t mean it as a compliment?” Hard to say.

If I recall correctly, on that night I also opened a bottle of natural wine that the promoter had given us as a gift or maybe, actually, as sabotage, because it had a bottle-cap atop it, rather than a cork, and when I cracked it open, the effervescence of the wine sent the metal cap flying into my eye, which I then couldn’t open for like two days. It made me look like I was winking lasciviously at everyone in the audience at the next night’s show in Seattle, which isn’t ideal. 

Pretty sure this photo is from the eventful backstage green room under discussion. In any case, it was shot the same night, and has come hurtling forth from our photo archives to deliver an important message.

But this is not a venue in which to dissect emotionally-scarring live performances!  

Around the time we were writing TV En Français, I was way into the The Walkmen album Heaven. Which is weird, because I’d never been particularly into The Walkmen; I liked them okay, every once in a while they’d pump out a jam that I could vibe with. Heaven really worked on me, though, which is funny because it seems to be the album that ended their career — they released it and then immediately went on a decade-long hiatus, in shame(?). But I dug it, and I think “What You Do Best” was an instance of me absorbing a little of that The Walkmen mojo — those long, loping syllables and jangling chords. I guess I thought that all The Walkmen needed were some big hooks and choral harmonies.

CHRIS: Heaven was a fine album indeed, and now that you say it, the pre-chorus moment in “WYDB” where you sing “you give up WAAAAY too easily” has that Hamilton Leithauser caterwaul appeal. This song is also noteworthy for being one of the latest We Are Scientists songs to feature group non-verbal backing vocals (“ohhhhhh”) on the chorus. (I’m making that claim completely based on gut feeling, without having done the hard work to verify it.) Such backing vocals, which I think of somewhat lazily as being Beatles-esque, were once very common in your songwriting — a near constant in the pre-With Love & Squalor days, and even on that album pretty common (“Great Escape,” “Can’t Lose,” “Lousy Reputation,” “Worth the Wait”). They hung around for a couple tracks on Brain Thrust Mastery and Barbara, but mostly had disappeared by TV en Français, where your inclination toward backing vocals that sing along with the lead largely takes over. My sense, as one of the guys who nowadays has to learn a bunch of damn words in order to do my b.v. duties, is that the “sing along with the lead” model ended up thoroughly winning out at the Keith Murray Institute for Songwriting. “What You Do Best” was kind of a relic, in that sense. Perhaps Dave Lowensohn was simply a zealot for progress, and saw in this track a tendency that, in the context of your songwriting, he deemed regressive. One way to find out would be to blanket our next album in “ooooh”s and “ahhhhhh”s and watch closely for Dave’s reaction! 

KEITH: I think that the “backing harmony as choral pad” element of our music has indeed waned, mainly (I think?) because there’s a lot more actual synthesizer providing harmonic bedrock in our stuff. You’ll notice that the Beatles themselves also did it a lot more in their earliest days, as a lean-n-mean guitars-and-drums foursome, and (again, this is just going by gut) lessened in like 1965, which is when I guess George Martin finally bought an iMac loaded with software synths? 

So, yeah, I’m gonna posit that those extended harmonies are largely on WLAS and Barbara, our more stripped-down records, although they do still pop up, here and there. “Sentimental Education” has them. That second verse of “You’ve Lost Your Shit” deploys them to great effect. Um, I’m sure there are others on Huffy, whereas synth-centric Lobes is defying me to name a single instance of the phenomenon within its tracklist. I guess it’s just simpler to play a synth than to debate what phoneme (“ah” versus “oh” versus “eh” versus “brrrrrrr”) is the easiest to hold for a specified number of bars at a certain pitch. We are living more peacefully, as that is now a Jupiter-8’s problem.

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) is out May 10th. To preorder the double-vinyl, the zine, the t-shirt — any of that sweet junk — click through to this node.

♡,

K/C