Crushing Krisis

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#MusicMonday: “Anything We Want” – Fiona Apple

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Fiona at SXSW this spring.

It was 1999, my freshman year of college, when Fiona Apple’s When The Pawn…dropped.

I don’t know if I would have called myself a fan of Apple’s at that time. I had picked up her first album in Junior year of high school thanks to the recommendation of my computer programming teacher, and saw her twice on the tour behind it.

Though I grew to love Tidal over time, it was always a little sleepy for me at the time. I loved “Sleep to Dream” from the start, plus “Criminal” and the thrumming “Carrion,” but on the whole it was subtle for my teenage years. So I can’t tell you exactly why I picked up When the Pawn… If only I had started a blog a year earlier!

What I can tell you is that I thought – and still think – that the LP is a work of utter genius. Every song is an incredible feat of songwriting. Fiona’s voice is throaty and lush. All of the arrangements are imaginative without being over-bearing. It is a five-star effort that I still listen to front to back almost once a month.

I followed all the Extraordinary Machine drama and, as you may recall, I didn’t love the finished product. I did still love the songwriting. It was another all-genius every-time effort. That’s not easy to do twice in a row, especially on your second and third releases!

I was notably cooler in my zeal when Apple’s The Idler Wheel… was announced earlier this year. Sure, new Fiona Apple record – great! But who knows if she could keep up the genius streak or find the right sound for her songs.


(Yes, I know, advertisement, but this performance is so amazing, it’s worth it. If you’re seriously opposed, here’s another great performance on YouTube.)

I don’t know that she achieved either, but she made an arresting, challenging work of art in the process, and she is delivering similarly arresting and somewhat terrifying live shows in support of it. At the Tower Theatre Apple looked like she might shake herself right off the stage, or simply disintegrate where she stands from the sheer intensity of it all. (She also sounded haggard, which is concerning, since we’re still early into her tour, but she sounds better on the video, just a week prior.)

While many are fixated on single “Every Single Night,” I thing early leak “Anything We Want” is the pièce de résistance on this record. It’s the one song where the minimalist pounding-on-things style of found-sound production definitely doesn’t detract from a song that clearly has some intricacies built in.

Also, the lyrics are quite genius – a story of seduction spanning time and space. Witness this clever device.

first verse
My cheeks were reflecting the longest wavelength
My fan was folded up and grazing my forehead
And I kept touching my neck to guide your eye to where
I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone

last verse
Let’s pretend we’re eight years old playin’ hooky
I draw on the wall and you can play UFC rookie
Then we’ll grow up, take our clothes off and you remind me that
I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone

That’s just stunning. The very oblique seduction in the first verse is resolved by very adult tryst in the final one. Yet, in the final verse she contrasts that lust with pretending that she’s eight years old. Kids kiss, and grown-ups take their clothes off. Is the “let’s pretend” a remembrance of her own youth with a now adult lover – a flashback to more innocent flirtations? Or, should we read the “Let’s pretend… then we’ll grow up” differently – that they are so effortless and comfortable with each other that they regress to their childhood selves and grow forward in the room together, until they are adult enough that he reminds her where she wanted to be kissed hours or days before, since forgotten?

Stunning. The turn of the lyrics keeps me rapt every single time I listen to it.

I want to believe Fiona Apple is healthy and happy at the moment – a recent giggling and quite normal appearance on Jimmy Fallon supports the theory. If she keeps laughing and living and releasing strong work, I’d say it was one of the best concerts I’ve seen in my life, and The Idler Wheel… is a brave experiment by a singer with a still-unbroken streak of excellence – even if it’s never the excellent we expect from her.

break it and build it again

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I wasn’t allowed to sing for two weeks. It’s a story I’ll get around to telling once it stops freaking me out quite so much.

That meant no Arcati Crisis rehearsals. My singing is much less central to Filmstar, so we kept rehearsing sans my mic stand.

Right now we’re in pre- pre-production for our next recording. For our last one we started with recording drums to click tracks, and even if is taking me forever and ever to mix them into something listenable it was certainly worth the effort. Being able to steal sounds from any take and blend them together seamlessly was totally worth the tempo wrangling. Plus, everything is nice and consistent!

An outtake from our recent Filmstar photo shoot.

Unless you are playing the most obvious 1-2-3-4 rhythm on the planet, when you play to a click it is like the musical world you are creating from within has had its gravitational value altered. Songs feel too slow when you play them quietly and deliberately, but too fast at full blast. Syncopation puts your emphasis off-click, which feels like swimming against tide. You discover parts where you subtly speed up or slow down, and the seconds of discontinuity give you musical vertigo.

To that imbalance, this week we have returned my singing to the equation, but it’s different, too. Yes, I am more cautious of my high notes, but it’s more than that. My voice doesn’t have that worn-in groove that it usually has, where I can settle in and belt. I have to actually think about where I am placing my notes, and how I will support them.

Add to that a new set of strings on my bass and a handful of new effects pedals, and it really feels like I am playing these songs again for the first time, relearning my parts piece by piece.

What makes that so interesting is that these are the songs we learned after I joined the band. The pieces are mine. The parts came from my brain. Instead of fiddling with someone else’s bass line that doesn’t quite fit me to begin with, I am rebuilding each song from components of my own design.

It is totally different. I get to ask questions about my own musical logic. I am tearing down old rhythms and fingering for things that are more efficient or intricate, or both.

I know it is the same band of the same four people and these are songs I have been playing for a long time – two years, for some of them – but I can’t help it: it feels new to me.

The next Filmstar show is on Sunday, August 5th at NorthStar Bar, where we will have the pleasure of sharing the bill with the darling boys of Venice Sunlight.

You should come.

Photo Shoot with Filmstar

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Editor’s Note: This post was drafted on this date but not finished or published. I believe that at the time I was waiting for one of the photos from the shoot to add to it. I’ve retroactively published it as one of my last written accounts of Filmstar prior to the band dissolving in September of the same year.

Being in a band involves a lot of activities other than playing music – organizing cables, sending emails, promoting shows, and posing for photos, among many other administrative and hard labor tasks.

You might assume photo shoots are the most fun of all the non-music-playing options. I mean, who can argue with being glamorous and having a photographer follow you around for a day?

I’ll admit, that part is pretty fun. But as someone who occasionally manages photo shoots for a living, I know it’s not all lipgloss and striking a pose. There is a lot of organization that goes into a good photo shoot, and when it is lacking it the quality of your photos can become a matter of chance.

That whole diatribe is for another time.

On Saturday all of Filmstar convened at new drummer Brad’s house in Northern Liberties, along with longtime fan Jake (not Arcati Crisis Jake), who was our photographer for the day. I’ve resisted in appearing in band photos since I joined, as I’m still technically a contracted player and not a band member, but with half of the band from the prior photos gone I had to submit to finally stepping in front of the camera.

We started out in an underpass. I know – bands and their brick walls, fences, and urban decay. So tiresome. Except, this particular underpass was rife with colorful, artful graffiti – some of which was dedicated to the recently deceased artist Moebius. So, not your typical graffiti. We also lugged a massive old monitor cabinet with us from Brad’s house to sit on and pose around. A great shot can be just a single prop away.

After the underpass we were intent on finding some other picturesque NoLibs locations to shoot. We had a few favorite bars in mind, but hadn’t had a chance to call ahead and ask for permission.

We walked towards Girard Avenue, debating the best approaches to springing a photo shoot on an unexpecting bartender, when we passed a fantastical wonderland of vintage lighting. It was a lighting fixture warehouse, whose massive load-in ramp was marked with a felled art deco lighting fixture that was flanked with high-backed chairs bearing decommissioned chandeliers.

Glam Decay. The perfect playground for Filmstar.

It turned out that the shop’s owner was a former owner of JC Dobbs from its 80s heyday. You find these sorts of connections all around Philly. He regaled us with stories of a young Kurt Cobain and renting light fixtures to Angelina Jolie movies while we scouted his shop for interesting photos. Well, I mean, the whole place was interesting photos, but we were trying to find one that we would look good standing in.

Feeling quite ingenious and victorious after our impromptu location, we headed into the bars and did what any intrepid band of beer-appreciators would do in that situation – we turned our photo shoot into a bar crawl. In an effort to not have to ask awkward questions about photography, we simply ordered a round of beers at each one.

This had the added bonus of loosening us up a bit. Not that we weren’t loose and gorgeous in our pictures already.

she’s gone home

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Tonight we held our second Filmstar rehearsal sans drums, as we are now without Zina aside from a few wrap up recordings and gigs.

It is weird. This is the first time I’ve ever been a party to a change in band members. I keep thinking of all these little things, like friends of ours who never got to see us with Zina, or the fun riff we do together in “Weight of the World.”

Would a new drummer do the riff just like Zina does it? I made sure to do all of the old bass player’s riffs verbatim until I had a chance to ask about changing them, or feel that they could change.

I really like that riff, though.

I joined Filmstar as a unit of Glenn, Elise, and Zina, and I purposefully held myself apart from the unit. It was Filmstar, with Peter on bass. I didn’t want to be billed any higher than that, I tried not to vote on any official band business, and I fought to avoid appearing in photos. It was their band – I was just a hired gun.

I don’t know what I am now. Tonight Glenn and E talked about things that make us worth drumming with, and things we’re looking for in a drummer. At this point “I” am implicit in the “we.” I mean, am I really going to hold myself apart form having a say in my new partner in the rhythm section?

Ultimately it’s Glenn’s band and E’s voice, and whether I get a permanent vote on anything or not I’m there to support that and to try to help them execute their vision. That’s what I would want a supporting member of Arcati Crisis to do for me and Gina.

I don’t know if I would understand how to lead Arcati Crisis as a band without being a follower in Filmstar. I wouldn’t be as good of a contributor to Filmstar if I didn’t have the experience of needing others to contribute to my and Gina’s vision for Arcati Crisis.

I think somewhere in the midst of all that I stopped being able to claim that I don’t have a clue about what it takes to be in a rock band.

Do you know any good drummers?

hours in between

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Last night we had a “play everything” Filmstar rehearsal for tomorrow’s free show at Fergies with Cris Valkyria and the Opponents.

I joke that I love playing bass because only having to worry about one string at a time gives me plenty of time for choreography. It isn’t entirely a joke. When I am playing lead guitar or singing lead while playing rhythm I have no room for other thought. There’s not much room for mindfulness of how I’m standing or if I need to tighten up a rhythm or a change.

Playing bass leaves room for those thoughts. I can actually improve at every rehearsal, instead of simply maintaining.

It seems as though Glenn brings his new songs in pairs. The last pair, “Weight of the World” and “Silence Kills” were both incredible songs that I was lucky to get in on early. As a result, my bass lines are a big part of the backbone of each song, in some cases intertwining with Glenn’s guitar lines or Zina’s rhythms.

His new pair, “She’s Gone Home” and “The Hours In Between” are just as genius, but different. I don’t know if it’s that Glenn was farther along in his process, or that I hear them as more of a gestalt. Either way, I could tell immediately it wasn’t my job to act melodically or contrapuntally on these two.

Sometimes bass must be the basis.

“She’s Gone Home” clicked for me first. One of the first times he played it for us he remarked that it was slightly patterned after “She’s Leaving Home,” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Between rehearsals I listened to the album (never a chore), and realized a driving rhythm that matched Glenn wasn’t the right thing for the song. It would make it too heavy.

When we reconvened I had a neck-striding walking bass line. Glenn’s eyes lit – it sounded like it would fit perfectly with a riff he was working on.

“Hours In Between” is something else entirely. Try as I might, I cannot seem to pin down what it wants from me. I have some of the elements in place – a heartbeat pulse of bass on the verse, a quick hammer on the chorus, scales at the close. Yet, there’s something about its personality that I’m having trouble with. It goes from gray regret to wistfully sunny, and I need to be the ground beneath E as she sings us through the journey.

I’ll figure it out eventually. “Millionaires” used to be my least favorite Filmstar song, both to hear and to play, and now it seems like it might become the lead single from our next EP. How long did it take to figure it out? About nine months. We kept playing it during that time, of course, but I knew that it wasn’t right. One day it just clicked. Now I love the whole mess of it, a sweaty disco protest song.

I know the personalities of these songs better than mine or Gina’s.

As it turns out, not all my spare mindfulness is spent on choreography.