Shelved
Lyrics
I wanna ride the hydraulics
Lit up like the North Star
I wanna wallow in the spoils before the crowd
I wanna play my guitar
Not gonna sit up and beg
Not gonna do tricks
Not gonna stand here on a sound stage
Tethered to a crucifix
The ride's over, I know
But I'm not ready to go
I wanna flash my pastel colors by the rail
On a windy day at Pimlico
Don't want to write songs with this clown they set me up with in a Los Angeles rehearsal studio
Not gonna tour with Trent Reznor
Third of three, bottom of the bill
You can't pay me to make that kind of music
Not gonna swallow that pill
The ride's over, I know
But I'm not ready to go
Maybe Dad is right
I'm still young
And I can write C++ just as good as anyone
I know this guy at LucasArts
He says they're looking for hands
In fifteen years I'll be puttin' back beers
With my feet in the sand
Banter
- When you make a record album. When you make an album. Jordan can I get some more tequila. When you make an album, the idea is that it will then be released. You have this sort of feeling of faith. When you make a record, it's really, you spend, generally speaking, there's a lot of ways to do it, there's as many ways to do it as there are bands, but the pattern tends to be, everybody shows up at a studio, and tells everybody else in their life that we won't be around for 3-10 days, or if you're fleetwood mac, 2 years. And then you become what's known in the business as a studio rat. You don't see daylight. You're inside the ocnfines of a building, and you go micro. You don't - you don't think about other things. And it gets real funny, because in the age of social media, you look at Twitter, and Twitter says, oh, the world's going to melt, and there will be none of us left in 8 hours, and you go, yeah, I know, but I have to double this vocal. It's - you shut everything else out. It's a very intense experience. It's comparable to a relationship. You give everything you have to it, you shut everything else out, you tell all your friends, 'I don't know you anymore, I'm working on this thing, it's important to me, so if you like me, you will stop writing to me for the moment and I will just be here locked in.' And you share this with your friends, your band, and by day 7, nothing exists except the studio environment. If someone leaves the confines of the studio to, go, like meet their friend or something, they are judged, as really kinda having failed the compact. But it's a veyr intense process. When you finish it - the record's not even mixed yet, so it's not even half done, but you feel like you've done the thing and you have the thing in your hand. In the old major label system, you could do all that, and then get it mixed, which is its own very heavy emotional process, where somebody mixes it and you listen to it and go, hey, where did the - I played a little guitar solo, where'd it go? Well, you weren't in key, we can't, and you go, no no, I really felt it! So yeah, well, no, I erased that, it's gone. And you go jsfhkasjhdfk, you go through this, if the record has 12 songs on it, you go through it 12 times. So you go through all this, in the old major label system, the guys upstairs who haven't been involved in the process prior to this point, except to sign your check can say to you, y'know, we're not really feeling this record, we're not gonna put it out.
Audience: FUCK THEM!!
JD: Well, it sucked, I assume. I haven't ever worked for a label like that. But a lot of people have, and when it happened, the record is said to have been shelved. (2017-06-01 The Fillmore)
- "This song is also off the new record [Goths]. And it's about - I was doing research. By the middle of the set you start going "wow, I got a Sisters of Mercy Song", and I've got one that's cryptically about representing Nick Cave and Peter Murphy, then you start digging deeper and you discover that some bands started putting on more eye makeup when it started looking like their own scene wasn't gonna work but the goth scene might be the ticket to another three album contract. And I find that very interesting, because I see their point, it's a good job making music, but at the same time, it's very weird to me to imagine a band going, 'sure, we'll make a goth record, why not?' So this is a song about a band who does, and regrets it. What happens is when you make an album, if you're working for a big label, you have to present it to them. Your manager calls a meeting and you play a couple tracks and you try to frame them. 'This next one is about such and such' and then the guys who have all the money, they don't care about what you're saying at all. They tell you whether or not they like the album and will release it. If they don't release it, you spend a year or two or three, working on something that will never see the light of day. And they take your little album, and they put it on the shelf." (2017-11-12 Brooklyn Steel)
Live Performances
Footnotes