Rockstar by Nickelback
A letter to a friend, some naked promotion, and a few album reviews
I’m writing to you to do a bit of shameless self-promotion. My group, No Jersey (New York City’s only New Jersey-themed band) just released our actual real full-length debut record, MONDO COOL!, earlier this week. Congratulate me, you son of a bitch!
Just kidding. I know you won’t respond.
That being said, pride aside, calling it “our” debut album is a bit of a lie, because even though I’ve been in the group for a little over a year now, I didn’t actually play on any of these tracks. To me, the album has always been a preexisting collage of songs from years ago. I’m happy with how it sounds, and I’m happy to represent it, but when I stand onstage this Saturday and play those songs (at our show at Main Drag Music, 12/13, tickets $20 but there’s an open bar, doors at 7:30), I won’t be playing as myself, but as a representation of all of the different musicians who poured themselves into this record before I got a chance. I will perform as a guitar player reconstructed from the aggregate.
Not that I mind. I just love to play. I think I was always made to be a sideman.
It’s this singer-sideman dynamic that brought the two of us together in the first place. We were approaching friendship already around that point — we had met once before at summer camp (where you bullied the shit out o me) before you ended up in my homeroom class that fall. I guess you decided that in the context of a new school, if I was interesting enough to bully, I was interesting enough to befriend, so we quickly made up and started experimenting with being mean to other people instead of each other. We were already calling the English teacher fat and watching Newgrounds videos in class but didn’t actually hang out until we started talking about music. The connection was basically automatic: you had a big basement with a Casio keyboard and an old guitar amplifier with a twelve-inch speaker. I had a big book of Beatles chords and a left-handed Epiphone special. What more could you possibly need?
I remember one late afternoon, hanging out and trying to piece together “Helter Skelter,” you on your acoustic and me through the amp, when you gave up on playing, and instead decided that your role would be more dictatorial.
“I’m not much of a player,” you said. “How about I come up with the ideas, and you figure out how to play them?”
You didn’t need to tell me twice. Even then, I understood my purpose: I wasn’t supposed to be the guy in front, setting the topic and yelling and getting people on my side — that required an old-fashioned vulnerability, a desire to look cool so strong that you can accept looking and sounding stupid in the process — but I could absolutely be the enabler. The hired goon.
Now about 15 years after our musical project self-aborted, here in New York, I’ve found myself in basically the same position I was in with you. The band tells me what to do, I figure out how to do it, and in the process, I get to play loud and let the other guys worry about what we’re saying. Per my own request, I don’t even get a microphone onstage.
I don’t sing and I don’t want to. But I know you sing — regardless of pitch, timbre, vocal quality, or the key you’re in. And how do I know this? Well, just because it’s been a little while since you responded to my letters, I decided to look you up and came across your Bandcamp page. Or should I say “pages” — because for basically the whole ten-plus years since high school, you’ve been releasing music under different names, experimenting with different styles and genres but still remaining unquestionably you.
It’s nice to know that you kept going after we split up. And it’s slightly nicer to know, as I listen to them, that these are fully solo projects. No sidemen involved.
Now, I’m not trying to doxx you or embarrass you here, so I’m not actually going to link anything — not until you actually respond and give me permission — but I thought it would be fun to do a little listen through and review of some of your music. Don’t worry, I’m only talking about the good stuff, really — and I’ll leave out the rap alter ego, for old times sake. I just want to give you a reason to listen to my album (the one that I didn’t play on) and tell me what you think. Think of it as an opinion ransom.
The Imperfectionists - Sunny Disposition (2016)
This is the first semi-full-length release of yours I could find online. While it was released around midway through our (presumed) tenure in college, it still has echoes of the kind of sound we were trying to pursue back in middle school. Namely, it at least tries to sound like a real band fronted by a rockstar singer, even if it’s just you. The songs have a sort of earnest roots-rock twang to them, so the vocals, as if in response, are almost all delivered with an affected snarl that evokes the underground of another time, like a tweenage imitation of Lou Reed. Most of the choruses are whoa-ohs, yeah-yeahs, and the like, the kind of thing that sounds big onstage when everyone is shouting your name, but comes across as charmingly self-conscious when recorded on your own, in your room. This album — and I’m only saying this because I’ve listened to your other work — doesn’t sound like its own piece of art. Instead, it feels like a kid playing pretend, making a band out of dolls in his room.
Just an Empty Room - Some Strange Angel (2017)
This record feels almost self-consciously like a step back in order to go forward. While the previous album was, as messy as it sounded, an attempt at garagebanding together the sound of a full band — the kind that we wanted to form as kids — this album sounds and feels completely different. Gone are the classic rock trappings, and in their place are three-chord acoustic guitars plugged directly into the interface, redlining the signal, and howling, desperate vocals. It’s a deliberate evocation of Neutral Milk Hotel, The Microphones, Daniel Johnston — no longer the project of someone who was imitating the cool rockstar, the stick-up ego that comes from being the lead singer of a group, but the opposite: a radical intimacy that comes from a project that is entirely the self. If your previous album sounded like an echo of what we wanted in middle school, this sounds like a rejection of it. Instead, this is the kind of album someone would find in a bargain bin and post on /mu/ back in the day, prompting years of speculation about who was responsible for such genius, only to realize it’s not a forgotten misanthrope from the 90s, but someone from today. They usually call those albums “lost media.”
Dressing Rooms - You Should Hate Me (2018)
So you’ve discovered drum loops and autotune. That’s good! You have not figured out how to make the autotune stay in the same key as the song, but that’s OK, there’s a learning curve. This is another record that seems more like something to be discovered than something to be made, if that makes sense — again, I would be totally unsurprised if this is the kind of album someone online unearthed and revived as a forgotten masterpiece. The vocals are softer and more approachable than the last album’s Neutral Milk Hotel shouts, but the subject matter feels similar, lots of surreal depression and ennui. These songs are less my style, but I’m intrigued about the cryptic titles. Each of the song names follow the same format — “For” and then a pair of numbers, I assume a date. I have no idea who or what 10.12 or 19.26 or 14.8 are, but I know they meant enough to you that you didn’t have to name them any other way. This isn’t a bad album. It reminds me of Suicide occasionally, and Yung Lean slightly more often.
Dressing Rooms - At Odds (2020)
If the previous two albums were you wrestling with the two modes of independent music construction for Insecure Younger Guys (the singer-songwriter and the songwriter-dj), this album is the synthesis, at least in places. No, maybe the autotune isn’t always keyed correctly, and there are a couple songs where there’s so much reverb the songs sound like incomprehensible memories, but the song “Sleeping/Dreaming” is a track that nails this combination so much that it actually floored me. The simple, heavy synthesized bass, the piercing keyboard melody, the shaky, earnest vocals and lyrics — it’s as if you regenerated Digital Ash in a Digital Urn from first principles. But the shine really comes in the song’s second half, where everything fades from the track except for a loop of high banjo plucks and the sound of your voice doubled on itself, both halves of you singing at the same time, falling together on the sound of the word “dreaming.” Listening to this was the first time since seventh grade that I was really, properly jealous of you.
The Book Club - Friendo (2021)
The song “Friendo” is the simplest thing you produced since Some Strange Angel back in 2017. But while that album was an expression of pure solitary self, one person alone in a room conjuring something, “Friendo” is something different. The sound of someone evoking another person through himself, generating a friend through music.
“Friendo” begins with an acoustic guitar and a single voice — you in your typical vibrato-less baritone — intoning a couplet of sentences over and over: “Friendo, pass me the benzo. A star jumps through the atmosphere.” They don’t rhyme, don’t even properly go together, but they generate meaning from repetition, like a zen koan. As the song goes on, atmosphere builds quietly, the sounds of electric guitar and synth twinkles beneath the guitar and voice. And then, as the song reaches what should be a chorus, a second voice — yours, but on the other side — joins in, repeating over and over another seemingly random sentence: “I’ve got my swear word t-shirt on. I’ve got my swear word t-shirt on. I’ve got my swear word t-shirt on.” The two voices circulate each other, overlapping and fighting for space the way two people would, even when it’s only yourself, building in momentum and energy until—
The song cuts off, leaving only the guitar and the two voices, now singing as one. And we know it’s you — everyone listening knows it’s you — but there’s just enough pitch difference between the voices that you can tell they’re supposed to be two, like the two halves of your music, like the two halves of us, singer and sideman eternal. Except I’m not there and all you can do to evoke the gap I left is copy yourself, sing over your own voice, and pretend it’s a second one there in the room with you.
I’m not mad that you could create a second self and call it “friend.” I just can’t help but think, having listened to your oeuvre, that maybe you should’ve just had a sideman this whole time.
Talk soon.
Love,
Henry
No Jersey’s debut album MONDO COOL! is free to stream on every major platform and available for purchase on Bandcamp. Tickets to the album release show are available here.