Start Choppin

In my senior year of high school, I wrote my first song. I don’t remember the words or the melody or really anything about it, except that I felt like I’d done something very few people ever do. Or even attempt. It was exhilarating. I ran downstairs and then ran back up because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I still feel that way a little bit every time I finish a song. I wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be the singer. But I had tried to get a band off the ground my junior year and it went nowhere. Because I couldn’t do anything. Like, I couldn’t even sing. Much less play guitar. So even though I was trying to write lyrics and singing along with the bands I liked, there was no path toward being in a band unless I could play and write music.

I found my dad’s old guitar and took a few lessons, but after learning Brown Eyed Girl and a simple 12-bar blues structure, I abandoned it and started teaching myself from a book by Ralph Denyer called The Guitar Handbook. There’s one page where all the basic cowboy chords are perfectly illustrated and photographed from the top down, so I could see where I was supposed to put my fingers. I figured if I learned these 15 chord shapes I could start using them to play and write songs. I’d sit in front of the TV for hours trying to move between the chords quickly and accurately without looking.

And because I tend to approach things systematically and obviously, I started buying music by all the great songwriters I had been reading about in magazines. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon to start with. A lot of Dylan. And then I got deep into the Stones’ Exile on Main Street and* Sticky Fingers.*

I got into the Stones because, of course, I loved The Black Crowes. But I also became curious when I read a Keith Richards quote inside The Guitar Handbook that permanently changed my thinking. Not just about guitar, but about everything:

What interested me about Chuck Berry was the way he could step out of the rhythm part with such ease, throwing in a nice, simple riff and then drop straight into the feel of it again. We used to play a lot more rhythm stuff. We’d do away with the differences between lead and rhythm guitar. You can’t go into a shop and ask for a “lead guitar.” You’re a guitar player, and you play a guitar.

I hadn’t even thought about being a lead guitar player. I thought that was something separate and beyond my abilities. But Richards made me think I could be just good enough at it to be dangerous. That I could learn scales and incorporate that into my writing.

What I understood from it, even though I wouldn’t have articulated it that way at the time, was that I could be a generalist. I could be just good enough at lots different things, I could solve for aspects of different problems and be useful to a band, because I did more stuff. If I wrote the song, and played the song, and could maybe write a bass line or a lead part too, they’d have to let me be in the band. Because then it would be my band. Except I still couldn’t sing. I mean, I had an okay voice if I wanted to do church choir. I had a pretty good Mick Jagger impression. But I didn’t sound anything like me yet.

Freshman year at Baylor, my friend Chris got me into Dinosaur Jr., and things clicked into place for me. J. Mascis is a god-tier guitar player, but that wasn’t what intrigued me. It was his voice.

There are lots of singers who aren’t great but have made a career anyway. Mascis and his conversational, childlike warble convinced me that if he could find the voice that was perfect for him, so could I.

I started singing into the answering machine at first. Then a tape recorder. And then finally I got 4-track and started recording my songs. I had to spend time with my voice and learn the way I really sounded before I could sound the way I wanted to sound. To hear myself the way others heard me, and make that sound as good as it could be.

I wasn’t trying to sound like Mascis. But I did start there. Just speak-singing into the mic and then gradually iterated until I found the voice I still pretty much have today. Which a lot of people say is much more Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan than J. Mascis. I never heard the Corgan thing, but you know what? I’ll take it.