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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years

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Split Single Interview: The Grift Is On

Photo by Nathan Keay

BY JORDAN MAINZER

After five years, Jason Narducy’s got a lot to say. Amplificado (Inside Outside Records), the new third album from Split Single, his solo project with a rotating cast of musicians, was mostly written and recorded by June of 2019. Its themes of Trump-era urgent anger were only heightened by a global pandemic that exacerbated many of the issues that rose to the surface in an era of political turmoil.

Since his second Split Single album, Metal Frames, came out, Narducy’s been nonstop touring and recording with Superchunk and Bob Mould, not to mention writing a musical, Verböten, named after and about his childhood punk rock band. Any free time’s been spent on canvassing for Democratic state legislature candidates, Narducy feeling like he needed to stay politically involved and motivated. There’s no more perfect soundtrack to his exhausted mind than Amplificado’s opener, titled and stylized “caPtAIN calamity’S crUde pRoCessiON”. The off-kilter, minute-long instrumental is less purposeful avant-garde experimentalism than 6th grade marching band practice with weird ringtones going off, as percussionist Dan Leu’s tempos change nonsensically and Narducy introduces tack piano and sound effects of cash registers. The song’s got a lot of hidden meaning, as Narducy would explain to me in a phone interview in early May, but from the surface, it’s most significant as a way to let the listener know that the rest of the record--for the most part quintessential Split Single power rock--was born from this place of confused chaos.

Indeed, besides the opener and the honest, stark “Adrift”, Amplificado is big and burning. “Blood Break Ground” is a song about breaking out from oppression. “Condescension comes with a price / Tear away all lingering ties,” Narducy belts, with drummer Jon Wurster providing propulsive blasts and the other main bandmate here, none other than R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, on bass and backing vocals. “Stone Heart World” calls out GOP hypocrisy, self-described “pro-life” politicians who speak about “barefoot children holding on to desperate mothers” as “others” and “animals.” Lead single “(Nothing You Can Do) To End This Love” is just as pressing, but positive, a message of support for the LGBTQ+ community.

As much as Amplificado deals with serious issues, from the pandemic-addled depression and isolation-themed “Worry” to songs like “Blood Break Ground”--the guy behind “The Sexiest Elbows in Rock Music” hasn’t lost his sense of humor or storytelling. Narducy writes about a formative childhood experience with a music teacher on “Bitten by the Sound”, a character in dire straits on “Belly of Lead”, and a ditty about aging inspired by being yelled at by his dentist on “Mangled Tusk”. And maybe the funniest thing about the album is its bio, written by comedian Jon Glaser. (“It has always been a dream of mine to write a bio for the third album of a somewhat known indie band,” Glaser writes, as he then goes on to describe his lunch, nightmares, and video game playing that preceded him writing the actual few-sentence bio for the record.) If you’ve ever seen Narducy play, whether on one of his many lawn shows he did last summer through SPACE in Evanston or opening for Guided By Voices, you know he, too, is both earnest and genuinely hilarious.

Read my interview with Narducy about Amplificado below, edited for length and clarity. He’s got a sold out record release show tomorrow night at 7 PM at Sketchbook Brewing Co. in Skokie!

Since I Left You: When you were writing the lyrics to these songs, did they come instantly or were they workshopped? They feel very emotional and direct.

Jason Narducy: Sometimes they took a while. The song “Mangled Tusk”, the demo was called “Jangle Tusk” because the guitar part felt like jangle pop to me. It was just a working title. The drum beat on the demo, which we didn’t end up using on the record, was kind of like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. It reminded me what song it was, instead of calling it “Song Number 32″ or whatever. I was recording vocals, and “Jangle Tusk” was last, and the recording engineer at Electrical Audio, Taylor Hales, asked, “When do we get to work on ‘Jangle Tusk’?” And I responded, “I don’t know, I’m still working on lyrics on that one...you’ve never even heard it, why are you so excited to work on that one?” He said, “I love the title!” And I thought, “I’ll put some thought into that, but those two words aren’t conjuring that much imagery for me.” I really like the word “mangled,” and I had just gone through this ordeal with my teeth and having to wear a nightguard. [laughs] So I started writing lyrics about gnawing and the enamel chipping away. It’s a song about aging, in a way, but I got that stern talking-to from my dentist: “We made you a nightguard years ago and you didn’t wear it, we made you one four years ago and you didn’t wear it, we’ll make you another one and you have to wear this.” I said, “That’s all I have to hear! I’ll wear it every night.” Those lyrics just came based on an odd encouragement from the engineer that liked one other word.

The process of writing is so strange. With “(Nothing You Can Do) To End This Love”, the lyrics came so fast, and I was just done. I might have written the bridge this year, but the verses and choruses are the heart of the song. There’s a song we recorded called “3/4″--again, a working title based on the time signature--but we couldn’t get lyrics to it, so it’s sitting on the curb, lonely, without words attached to it. Lyrics are last for me every time. “Belly of Lead”, I was recording the demo in my friend Grant [Sutton]’s house, Clampdown Studio. I didn’t have lyrics to the song, so I picked up a lyric book of Lead Belly’s songs, and I was reading random words off every page so I’d have something documented on the demo. From that, I came up with the word “Belly of Lead” and wrote a story based on someone who made poor decisions in their life, coming to the end, trying to write a letter to his son and others, saying goodbye.

SILY: Was this your first time working with Mike Mills?

JN: I had opened up a show for his group The Baseball Project. I met him a number of times, the first time at the 40 Watt Club in Athens in 2006, when Jon and I were playing with Robert Pollard from Guided By Voices. Mike Mills was at that show, and Jon knew him--Jon actually recorded with R.E.M. on one of their Christmas singles. But he introduced me back in ‘06, and throughout the years, we’d run into each other at shows, or Scott McCaughey would be coming through. Just a lot of mutual friends. We always got along great. I didn’t expect him to say yes when I asked him to record. I felt like it was a longshot. I’m really grateful. I like him as a person and am a huge fan of his work with R.E.M.

SILY: What are some of the Easter eggs in the opening track’s title and aesthetic?

JN: There are a lot of layers, for it being a 1-minute instrumental. This [album] is my re-entry into doing Split Single work, since the last one came out in 2016. I write pretty consistently, so there were some songs I had the ideas down for already. But because I was so frustrated with the direction our country was going in, I kept putting down the guitar and thinking, “I can’t do this right now, I need to get out and do something.” I became very involved in this group called Sister District [Project], and I was doing postcard parties where I’d gather friends and others from the community and started working on state senate races across the country. It was very rewarding work. It provided some camaraderie with others who were wondering what the hell we could do. It also had an impact. I canvassed with a state senate candidate in Michigan, I wrote postcards for state senate races all across the country. Thankfully--and I think this has to do with the technological vetting Sister District does--all the candidates we worked for won. That was rewarding. It felt like I had an impact. I was also working on a musical about my very first band Verböten, and that took up a lot of time. Between Verböten and activism, my focus wasn’t on making another Split Single record. Plus Superchunk and Bob Mould were very busy making and touring records.

Back to the song: I wondered if there was a short audible message that I could make that was a little bit of a set up song. “Blood Break Ground” is such a gut punch, so how could I set this up after four and a half years? The sound of that marching band is sort of what I was feeling and hearing during those years. “That’s not supposed to be there: Why is there a tack piano in the marching band? This tempo isn’t right. Why is it slowing down now?” I put in an old cash register sound, so [it’s like] the grift is on. This is all about making money. If you look at the title, if you look at the letters in the title that are capitalized, it spells “PAIN IS UR CON”.

SILY: Sequencing-wise, you have “Adrift” as the emotional and personal centerpiece. It’s not outwardly political like the other songs. It’s also very downtempo. Did you consciously try to mix the album up in terms of tempo, aesthetic, and subject matter?

JN: There’s a defiance in the first three songs [after the opener]. I thought “Adrift” was a really strong song that kind of sounds like an album closer, but I didn’t want to put it last because I felt like it was too important. It was very difficult to figure out what would come after it, since it was so different. “Bitten by the Sound” has that long intro that builds up, so I thought it was a good transition. You can hear thematically how “Belly of Lead” is a completely different, not personal story, and [the album] closes with “Worry” and “Satellite”, which are very personal. Overall, the up-tempo songs are the ones I’m excited to play live. Besides “Adrift”, you could play all of them that way.

SILY: On “Belly of Lead”, you sing, “My word will make no difference.” Your experience with Sister District Project was the antithesis of that sentiment, but was that line in any way referential to anxiety you had about speaking out?

JN: No, that was just the character [in the song]…in “95 Percent”, though, I addressed something I felt and that a lot of liberal-minded Americans feel, which is we’re very clear that we’re not 100% behind the ones we support. There are things I disagree with Barack Obama about. We’re not a part of a cult. I support equality and equity and true justice, not law and order justice, as the other side claims.

SILY: On “Bitten by the Sound”, you sing, “Sat in a classroom led by an old nun / Sister thought she knew all about rock n roll / But instant karma got the best of her / When she lied about holding Lennon’s hands in her own.” What’s the story behind that line?

JN: I had a music teacher that was a nun in 6th grade. She had a story about meeting John Lennon and holding his hands in hers and giving him advice. Even [as a] 6th grader, [I] looked around and thought, “She’s full of shit.” Now that I’m older, I think if you’re gonna want to impress people and make up some bullshit, why pick a famous person who just died who can’t back up the story? It was part of my childhood that affected my relationship with authority and trusting adults. Music was everything to me, so don’t fuck with that! Don’t make up a John Lennon story. In the song, I talk about that. I was 9 or 10 years old, and my mom lived on the South Side of Chicago, 53rd and Woodlawn, and we woke up one morning and looked out the window, and her car was sitting on brick. All 4 tires were stolen. I just didn’t even know that was a thing. Those are formidable years. You discover music and find solace and peace. Everything feels good with music when everything around you is shaken and uncertain.

SILY: I don’t know whether it’s the mixture of the Christianity and the rock history references, but I heard the line and could hear Craig Finn singing it.

JN: That’s funny. I should mention that I was not at a Catholic school, which is why it’s weird a nun was teaching a music class. That song not so much [musically]. I think the song “95 Percent” definitely has some Hold Steady in it. There’s something about The Hold Steady that’s unabashed, “We’re gonna play rock and roll.” It’s a cool thing. “Yeah, I’m gonna take a guitar solo here.” It’s not too-cool-for-school indie rock. “95 Percent” was influenced by Mac [McCaughan] from Superchunk, a little bit of Springsteen, a little Hold Steady. Just need to add a girl’s name, and it would be very Hold Steady.

SILY: Were there any other prominent or newfound influences on this record?

JN: “Adrift” is so different for me. I learned this from Bob Mould: He writes way more songs than the record needs. You never know. A number of times, he’ll have a song that he thinks should be a B-side, and I’ll raise my hand and say, “I think that should be on the record.” “Fire in the City” is an example of that. I was like, “This song is too good.” It ended up on Beauty & Ruin. We don’t always end up using it, but it’s a good influence. I went into this record and thought, “I have extra time--it can’t hurt to keep going.” I ended up going back to a power pop song that I don’t even know had a title. There was one part of it I really liked. I picked up an acoustic guitar and didn’t even have a pick near me. I strummed the chords with my thumb very quietly and slowly and “Adrift” just fell out. Words and everything, just super fast. I had never recorded a song that vulnerable, that personal, that dark. I don’t think I’ve recorded a song without a guitar pick either. You can hear my stomach growl at some point.

It just so happened I got a text from Alison Chesley who was in Verbow with me, and I asked, “Can I send you a song? Can you put some cellos on here?” She came back with this beautiful arrangement and even a piano part. I think it really elevated it and made it a much more engaging song. That’s the first time Alison and I had recorded in 22 years.

SILY: I thought maybe the experience of looking back with Verböten inspired you to reach out to her. It’s funny that it was just a random text from her that started it.

JN: I think the musical influenced this record in two ways. Not that one. I wrote so many punk rock songs for Verböten, that it reminded me that I like it when I write up-tempo songs. I definitely pushed more high energy songs for the record. [And the other is] “Blood Break Ground” happened because I had to do so much revisiting of emotions from my childhood [for Verböten] that there were other parts of my childhood that I hadn’t addressed yet.

SILY: How did the album’s bio come about? Did you want Jon Glaser to write a legitimate bio, and he came back with something absurd instead?

JN: I mean, he’s a comedian. I know it’s the job of the publicist and the journalist to have as much information presented as possible, but I also think there’s value in not taking it too seriously.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the record title?

JN: The trauma of the Trump years combined with the incredible trauma of the pandemic, which will take a very long time for many of us to recover from. I feel like everything’s amplified. I thought about calling the record Amplified but found that there were a lot of other albums called that, and it was also a pretty basic word. So I thought, “What’s a little twist we can put on that?” A friend of mine, Alberto, is fluent in Spanish, so I asked him for the proper version of that word for this situation.

SILY: What about the cover art?

JN: That’s a Chicago artist named Yvonne Doll. I follow her on Instagram and have been friends with her for years. She’s a musician and a painter. That particular piece came up, and I couldn’t stop looking at it, so I asked whether we could use it for the artwork. Thankfully, she was cool with that. When I presented that and some other photos, the designer, [Chris Tillman], ran with that red theme.

SILY: How was the experience of playing lawn shows during the pandemic?

JN: It was incredible. I was so thankful to Jake [Samuels, Managing Partner and Talent Buyer] and SPACE for coming up with the concept and thankful that people were enthusiastic about doing them. I did about 53 of them last year. It sort of emotionally and financially saved me. I loved how creative it was. I could tell you so many crazy stories about different situations like planning for a rainstorm to come, a small crowd, a huge crowd where the cops showed up. It was great. I’m excited to do more of those.

On Saturday, I played at Thalia Hall to a private show of 20 people. It was honestly euphoric. It was the first rock club show I had done since January 3, 2020 with Superchunk at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro. So many things that I hadn’t thought about, like setting up on a stage and the camaraderie with the crew and talking about different lighting setups and sound options, walking to the dressing room. It was incredible. It felt so good. Even for 20 people. And they were there to party. They weren’t just sitting down drinking wine. They were standing up, dancing, leaning up on the stage and screaming. It’s gonna take time, and it needs to be safe, but certainly with the outdoor shows, there are a lot of options being explored, and hopefully by the fall, there will be many more people vaccinated.

SILY: The album’s really up-tempo, as you’ve said. Have you thought about adapting these songs to a solo style of play?

JN: I think any of the songs besides the marching band one I could do live.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading that’s caught your attention?

JN: Oh my god, there are so many new bands I’ve been listening to. New Pagans. There’s this band called Kestrels. It’s very 90′s, like if Built to Spill or Dinosaur Jr. had a baby. CONTROL TOP. I like the new Real Estate record. Sinai Vessel. I love that English band Shame. I think their new record’s really cool. Miss Grit. I get really inspired by newer artists. It’s something I spend a lot of time with.

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apostleofsilence · 6 years

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Vaguely Rhymes with Dance Bincard.

Well, actually, this one was a bit of a stretch, but I figured that not only would this be more fitting, it also further obscures his identity by referring to him only in vague rhymes of one of his older aliases. Anyway.

So yeah, my buddy, we'll just call him "Rhymes-with-pants", or just "pants" for short. I dunno why, but the wordplay helps with this. Easier to talk about if I can jest about it, and bonus points, the narcissists into constantly googling themselves can't just find this by accident. If they arrive here, they have earned their way into my stream of consciousness. Unless one of them has discovered me by cheating!!! and browsing my phone without my permission. In which case, good job, I guess. You found the warpzone to the final level or something. Whatever. I'm procrasrinating, because unlike all that came before, this story hurts the most to tell.

Not because he is more important to me than everyone else I have lost for any period of time, but because this one is the one that will never, dearest reader, have a "good ending" so to speak.

Pants was my best friend for the all-important and influential second to fifth grade. We did fucking everything together. He was like the brother that I would tailor make at Build-a-Brother workshop. Of course, rational folk like you (and me, some twenty-something years late to the party) know that such an arrangement can only breed destruction.

Take that how you will.

The nature of my seclusion was nigh absolute growing up, with few exceptions. But blessedly, there was school. And at school, I had at least one person I could call a friend. And, at the time, the cynical circus show of school still held the occasional pat on head, and the dopamine rush that came along with it. I was a smart student. But always quiet.

Pants could bring out something else. A desire to play games with friends. Interact with others. This led me to Magic: the Gathering. I loved playing against friends. It was a great way for me to make friends with others who liked to play. It was invariably led me to meet many people in middle school. My cards always got confiscated by Celery, the Spoiled Hippie Produce (but we will shorten it to just Celery, because it amuses me). She was concerned that Satan was trying to get in my head and sent me to a whackadoo shrinky-dink who could somehow charge $100 a session for years to finally say that I really just needed Jesus. Ugh. Anyway, this is a huge digression, but it's important. To **me**. You see, the Tragedy of the Schitzotypical Pants is a tale of many compounding, intertwining tales that build to an ironic creschendo, dear reader, one that I promise has a payoff. If my writing style hasn't completely repulsed you by now, I urge you on.

So off to the Pentecostal hellhole I was sent. I was made to stay away from the people I fit in with. I replaced them with people I more worried about than identified with. The Pastor's daughter was blonde and doe-eyed. Her token Asian best friend looked like she patented Resting Bitch Face^tm at birth. The rest of my creepy Hellhole Fan Club were males, and not the well adjusted type. I guess Youth Pastor Crow was pretty alright. Well, until the night he wouldn't let me leave the Wednesday night group until I quote, 'let Jesus in'. Which, in every day parlaince meant that they wanted me to "speak in tongues". I did all the things I was told. But this poison "gift" would not come to me. So by God, I did the only thing that seemed rational.

I fucking pretended.

If there had ever been a possibility that I could just be a good little Christian ever again, it ended with my face in my hands, on my knees, begging for the touch to speak through me..and nothing. The veil was lifted. The magician has shown his hand, the illusion crushed. These people were no better than any other, why was *their* flavor of God the only way? Hell, the ginger boy Steak would get his ass beat so bad at home he wouldn't be able to come to church. People would ask questions.

They already did, dear reader.

So, while I was forbidden from having normal friends that I had shared common interests with (and I'm still sore that my dad lost track of my cards...prolly thousands of dollars worth of Legends, Arabian Nights, and Revised Magic cards), I was instead hosted a front row seat to this shitshow. So when I turned sixteen, I told everyone I'd had enough. Went and stayed weekends with Pants, playing d&d (another verböten activity under the tyrannical reign of Celery), and why not experiment with some grass while we're at it? Sure. Pants had the keys to escaping reality. And when it came to escaping reality, Pants was like Houdini. I didn't mind, it gave me a chance to decompress. Up until now, I had existed to participate in a series of show dog style obstacle courses, told how high I was expected to jump, and roundly ignored when I regularly jumped higher and higher to show someone that I was dying inside.

Those stiffs at the Pentecostal Hellhole didn't understand me. Nobody did. Thankfully, there was one person out there for me with the patience and generosity to help build me into the relatively better adjusted man writing here. She's the best!

So with my newfound liberty to come and go as I please, I got into plenty of trouble with my compatriots. I won't issue a confession to anything here, nice try NSA. But goddamnit if I didn't feel alive. And all this while, I wrestled with feelings I had no words to express until well into my twenties. And in tiny pisswater towns the nation over, if you wanted to suck cock, you were a faggot, and that made you a bad person. Why? No reason. But that couldn't be me, because I am a connoisseur of the feminine form. I love them all. Every bit of it. Nay, the mere idea that I could be bisexual didn't hit me until twenty five, and didn't feel official until the year after. So I guess I've been openly bi/pan for like...eight years? So, yeah. I had a crush on Pants. He was very rough around the edges. Stank most of the time. But I was attracted to the person I saw in him, and not the person he let everyone view. But when you don't have the words for "I like both shut up don't judge" for another ten years, you just get more confused, more infatuated with what amounts to an idea.

Part two to come. Maybe I'll just edit part two in here to make this whole thought superfluous. Sweet sleep please take me.

<3 Rev.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Hookay. Part two. More lucid tonight. Maybe I can fix that before too much longer. But not yet.

I was a bit latchkey off and on, here and there. The best part about my main job back then was the ability to ask to be taken off the schedule indefinitely, and show up six months later to be put back on. I lived there for awhile. I don't know if Pants felt the same way about me, but we never talked about it.

Eventually we drifted apart for awhile, and reconnected in the education program we both enrolled in. And once he was out, I helped him find a place to crash for a couple weeks. Weeks became a couple months. Nobody wanted him around anymore. It strained my relationship with my partner, and her mom to boot. I really tried to help that sonofabitch. But I wasn't gonna look the other way while he continued to treat people I care about like shit. We drifted apart again.

I would sometimes see him at mutual friends places, and we'd be mostly cordial, but no longer familiar. What I didn't realize was that he was in the middle of a psychological break. Lots of magical thinking and psionic orgasms. Or something like that. And finally, the bombshell.

So his friend, whom we will here refer to as dickhead (an allusion to his nickname that like six people will get), had given him a bible in all this mental anguish. And he latched onto the Book of Revelation. So, imagine my shock when one day he looks me right in the eyes and tells me that I am his great desteoyer, and that I will bring him ruin. Total fucking insanity.

So yeah. There is much more I could add here, but I would rather not have this get out, and end up sued over things I can no longer prove. Until next time, Space Kittens. Watch this space, I think next time I will discuss Celery the Horrible. You ready to strap in? This is where reality's thin veneer starts to peel ominously, places where I believe my madness was hand picked for, whether intentional or no.

I think, with this next tale, we wend inexorably onward toward the heart of the matter. Care to come along?

#mentalillness #nobodycareslol #friendship #bisexuality

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