Note: If you read my Welcome post, you know that I was once a music critic and was recently writing a book of essays on music until, you know, life interfered and I focused instead on fiction. As I said in that post, I would be bringing over some of those essays (some of them updated, and newer ones in time) under the banner of “Resounding,” which was the title of the book since it was focusing on songs, singers, bands, and albums that were mostly already released, but also served as a resounding endorsement for all of the music I was writing about. (Yes, always with the clever). Well, here it is, and I’m kicking it off with something a little…odd, but lovely.
This is the story of a song. About me. Normally, I would never listen to a song about me because, well, would you? I don’t know. But this is different.
I suppose I should start by mentioning that I’m a huge fan of Clem Snide, which is a band not a person and, if we wanted to reroute this toward television, is the band whose “Moment In the Sun” was the theme song to the second season of the the late, lamented, underrated NBC comedy, “Ed.” (You may say, actually, TIM, the theme song was “Next Year” by Foo Fighters — which is correct, but it switched to “Moment In the Sun” for Season 2 and then, I think, back to the Foo Fighters after some money issues were resolved, which is the most Clem Snide turn of events I can imagine.
Here’s that song:
Clem Snide the band was/is fronted by singer-songwriter Eef Barzelay, which of course means that I also love Barzelay’s solo stuff. They are different sounds, though (update: this was written before Barzelay just went back to using Clem Snide for everything, which makes a lot of sense) — the former done with a truly talented, exceptional band through a number of excellent studio albums. Eef, the dude, is a whole mood though. He’s quirky, shy, thoughtful, funny, passionate and…well, yeah, eccentric. I mean, He just is. I saw him play a house concert in San Francisco right before the pandemic hit. If you don’t know what a house concert is, well, an artist basically shows up in someone’s living room or in their back yard as the venue and plays to a collection of devoted strangers who are also sitting in some stranger’s living room or milling about their back yard. It’s…intimate, personal, real.
As I said, Eef’s solo stuff, some of it starkly acoustic, is a different vibe. I like it for different reasons. Years ago, while Eef had put Clem Snide off to the side for a very extended period, I was tracking down more of his solo stuff that, life being life, I’d somehow missed. (There was a lot. I hope you will discover more of his work and in so doing you will realize that, holy hell, among other things that man knows how to cover a song and reinvent it). He did an EP of Journey songs, of all things, and I’ve been known to use it to stun friends by playing those songs without telling them what it is or who is singing and the slow realization that it was a Journey song would just blow their minds. Now, for the sake of this story, I’ve ruined that little party trick for you, but here, check it out:
But let’s get back to “Tim,” the song, shall we?
So years ago I came across an album of solo acoustic songs from Eef on Bandcamp called Songs We Made Vol. 1, and each one was titled with a woman’s name: Lizzy, Sarah, Misty, Leah, etc. It was quirky and fun and really personal. I bought it. I played it a lot. And my appreciation for it spiked when I found out that these were songs that people had asked him to write. Life as a musician is some hard shit, you may have figured out. And smart people have been working very creatively to find ways to get artists paid. Spoiler: It’s not going to be Spotify or Apple. Eef found his own way with something simple: He had a thing going where, if you wanted, you could pay him to write a song — I’m assuming this would be about someone you loved, but I didn’t really research that part. I’m also assuming people didn’t pay for songs about themselves, or at least it didn’t sound like that on Vol. 1.) Eef put 10 of those on that first album and nine more on Songs We Made Vol. 2.
I told that Eef-is-partially-supporting-himself-writing-songs-for-people story to a lot of friends and loved ones. Unsurprisingly, one of those people was my partner, who filed it away in her busy and thoughtful brain, then remembered it toward the end of 2019. She looked into it and found that it wasn’t really something Eef was advertising, but he was indeed still doing it.
How does he do it? Part of the deal is you write details about this person you want a song for and send it to Eef, who reads all your loving blather and takes from it what he will and then writes said song. The story I got after the fact from my partner was that she was kind of embarrassed that she wrote a very, very long missive about me, about us, and in particular about this new opportunity, new career path that had come my way at the end of 2019, when I left being a TV critic and got a development deal to write TV shows. It felt, she said, like a change worth celebrating. So how about celebrating it partly in a song? That summer we had celebrated this life change around a roaring camp fire in Big Sur, with lot of natural wine and the slightest bit of trepidation about me abandoning a successful career for a kind of wild creative swing. We were celebrating a new plan. I woke up on Christmas and got the song, “Tim,” at the top of this post.
If you’ve got this far, it’s time to play that song.
Let me tell you that it’s sublime to have a song about yourself. It’s also a lovely gesture (and a generous thing to do for someone, obviously). Every time I played it, the strangest sensations came about. And yes, of course I cried. Later I would find out that a few people who knew my partner was doing this said to her, “Holy shit. Well, you win Christmas.” It’s a pretty great gift. (It keeps on giving!)
It’s also super relevant in one way because this new “plan” as Eef references, found me quite luckily being able to do a number of things creatively while getting paid to write a prospective TV series, so something I plotted when not working on the pilot was a long gestating story about someone in the music business weathering the difficulties of a changing marketplace, of age, of love, failure, regret, resilience, of….well, you can read the book (or miniseries!) if it ever gets done. But the important element to this little story is that more than a decade ago I came up with that idea and several musicians and their real-life stories play a central part in the fictional version I want to tell and, yep, one of them was/is Barzelay. Obviously, this was well before I got my own song. It all connects now, though. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it (update: I started it; haven’t got very far) but at least I have a song whose very creator reminds me in a personal soundtrack why I want to try.
P.S. In 2020 Eef Barzelay worked with Scott Avett of the Avett Brothers and turned out the terrific Clem Snide album, “Forever Just Beyond” that got a lot of acclaim and also a lot of attention for this majestic song, “Roger Ebert,” (that Roger Ebert’s widow, Chaz, also thought was wonderful and touching as it celebrated his cosmic dying words).
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