Joe Pernice builds his boat
Notes on craft, songwriting, generational change. Plus: Polls, policy, Phoebe, Tony, Blood
I’ve always associated Joe Pernice with an ideal of craftsmanship. Maybe it’s the way his gentle tenor seems to outline his syllables and melodies, as if putting a light but firm frame around a painting. Perhaps the understated classicism of his instrumental arrangements. Maybe it’s the New England in him, that land of well-made Robert Frost poems and fences. (Pernice grew up on Massachusetts’ South Shore; several moves later, he settled, for love, in Toronto early in the 2000s.)
Whatever the cause, I think of him as if he were a bicycle builder, rather than just an avid rider. A luthier, instead of a “hack” guitar player as he called himself at his concert here the other night. A carpenter, maybe, like the late Texan musician Guy Clark, who made it a metaphor for his own approach to songwriting: “I’m gonna build me a boat, with these two hands/ It’ll be a fair curve, from a noble plan.” Contrast that with Clark’s best friend and rival Townes Van Zandt, for whom writing seemed more like banging himself with the hammer, or doing worse with the drill. Pernice has that side too: He titled his 2007 novel It Feels So Good When I Stop.1
With his gifts for lyric and melody, surely he could have made his fortune as a mostly behind-the-scenes songwriter, like his hero Jimmy Webb (“Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”), who guests on a song on Pernice’s latest album, Sunny, I Was Wrong. But for a certain segment of us, in the older half of artsy, white, middle-class Gen X—the Ally Sheedy division of the breakfast club, if you will—that’s the kind of trick we didn’t quite know how to do. The cliché was that we had a horror of selling out, but often we just didn’t know how. Our tribe had a hard time conceiving of a more remunerative use of our talents without squelching our at once under-and-over-developed senses of self. Some went for the money anyway. A few figured out how to square creativity and employability, in relatively peaceable roles in, say, Nashville or Hollywood. Many had trouble even seeing those angles. Easier to get a day job, to do the double life.
(Like all generational talk, this is caricature, but also maybe my ears do stick out kinda funny now that you mention it.)
For every case like the late Adam Schlesinger or Linda Perry, successful as writers-for-hire while continuing their own work, I can think of many like Pernice, Stephin Merritt, Aimee Mann who have all the makings, have gestured in that direction (soundtracks, etc.), but never really got into the swing. Pernice’s MFA program classmate David Berman (Silver Jews) actually moved to Nashville in the 2000s with the idea—as he pledged in “Tennessee,” a song that doubled as a marriage proposal—that “I’ll make a career/ Out of writing sad songs/ And gettin’ paid by the tear.” It came off as a joke; in real life he was trying to mean it. I wonder if he even got himself to take one meeting on Music Row.
Many of us were infected early with the belief that for a song to be yours, or to be a real song at all, it had to be defiantly, fatally yours, at least flash its fangs. (For “song” see also “drawing,” “joke,” “book,” “article,” “customized burger” … )
As he approaches the end of his fifties, though, Sunny, I Was Wrong highlights Pernice’s craft side more than ever. He began writing scads of songs in the past few years, after his son came of age and no longer required baseball coaching. He culled dozens down to 11 tracks with the help of an old pal, the musician and writer Warren Zanes. Sunny is also officially Pernice’s first album ever of new material under his plain old given name, rather than as Pernice Brothers—which began as a genuine group with his brother Bob, but became a kind of catch-all—or Big Tobacco or Chappaquidick Skyline, his bandonyms from the early 2000s. I see that as a sign of shedding certain past attitudes.
These songs are likewise both musically and lyrically more direct, less tricky, surreal, or venomous than earlier, though still a far shout from chipper and breezy. Each song expediently installs the emergency tape, identifies the bodies, then returns soberly to base.
No previous Pernice record has spotlighted guest musicians as much as this one. Aimee Mann, Rodney Crowell, and Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake2 each show up for a track, and finally there is Webb’s piano on the kisser-punching closer, “It Got Away from Me.” That song refers to Webb’s classic “Macarthur Park” in a verse pinpoint-aimed at all the bewilderedly middle-aged:
I blew half my life on things I can’t explain.
Left so many cakes out in the rain.
Of all the holes that mark
The road where I came from,
The hole I dug’s the deepest one.
Pernice was eager to tell tales of those cameos during his concert Saturday night at Longboat (NB Guy Clark) Hall in Toronto, when he wasn’t getting distracted by what he thought might be clipped toenails on the stage floor and other wayward thoughts. “It’s gonna be one of those, I can tell,” he warned as he found himself rambling. “There’s no stopping it.” (I can say the same about this post.) He was joined by his pipeline to Webb, guitarist Pete Manicini, as an acoustic duo for the first five songs. And then for a dozen more with a full band of locals: Mike Evin on keyboard, longtime collaborator Mike Belitsky (the Sadies) on drums, dapper virtuoso Nichol Robertson on electric guitar, and Vivienne Wilder on bass and vocals. (The latter three are all part of the group Country Flash, who play Mondays at The Bell and the Beacon in Parkdale, and who Pernice said “restored my faith in live music.”)
Along with the new album, they ranged across Pernice’s catalogue as far back as “Penthouse in the Woods” from the 1996 Scud Mountain Boys’ album Massachusetts, which was when I discovered his work. It’s a song about some boys who find a water-damaged porn mag stashed by a log in a garbage bag. Which, as Pernice said, is one way kids saw naked pictures before the internet. But he chose the word Penthouse instead of Playboy, to sow some metaphorical misdirection—leading to his mother telling him, “I like that one about finding an apartment.”
Another surprise came in the duo portion when Pernice announced they were going to cover an MJ Lenderman song. He was returning the favour of Lenderman and Waxahatchee covering Pernice’s “Lift Me Up” (also from Massachusetts) at a Boston show in April, as he relates on his own Substack here. His selection was “Under Control” from Lenderman’s 2022 album Boat Songs (boats again!). It fit him so well that I would have just assumed it was another Pernice song if he hadn’t pointed it out. Much has been made of Lenderman and his former band Wednesday being influenced by David Berman, but we need to add another Amherst alumnus to that narrative.
That smoothness of transition in performance, from his own work to a cover, from new songs to ones three decades old, was another distinguishing mark of the night, another signal of craft. Pernice might be endearingly rambly, fidgety, and self-deprecating like a cranky old Xer in his banter between numbers. But when the music starts, the anxiety dissipates and the only reality is that of the song, the only tensions the ones in its story and in its suspended chords.
Negotiations with the outside world may still be fraught at best—Pernice ended the main set with an unreleased (I think) anticipatory kiss-off to the Trump administration, with the key line, “Someday this shit show must end.” And he concluded the encore (after “The Loving Kind,” a 2010 tune I think stands up to the best of Jimmy Webb himself) with his soft-spoken anti-war song, “How Will We Sleep?” from the latest Pernice Bros. album, 2024’s Who Will You Believe. (It begins, “I’m no man’s idol, and no man’s my king,” as if written specifically for the No Kings protests that hadn’t happened yet.) But in his internal landscape, he seems to have reached a truce in his peace talks with himself, or at least so the music would have us imagine. If it’s an illusion, it’s one so artfully constructed that it begs no second-guessing. That sturdy craft can carry you through turbulent waters, and lay you down in green pastures . . . where, for your troubles, you might just stumble on some damp creased old nudie shots, a reminder that to appreciate tranquility when it comes, you must remember all the frazzle and agita that came before.
Songwriter sweepstakes: brief return
In the weeks after I first wrote about the New York Times “greatest living American songwriters” project, it became the object of predictably overblown and self-righteous controversy online, somewhat less predictably fixated on the specific absence of Billy Joel. I’m not going to relitigate the whole case but the discussion did leave me depressed about the cynical way much of the public apparently regards arts critics.
Last week the Times finally published the readers’ poll version of the songwriters’ list, based on the responses of 25,000 people. To me it’s a pretty good vindication of the original. Nearly half of the readers’ top 30 is the same as the critics’. But look at who they added and who got dropped. It’s not (mostly) that they are bad choices. I agree with several, including getting Pernice’s beloved Jimmy Webb into the mix. But the patterns make a larger point.
Here are the readers’ picks that didn’t make the Times’ cut: Billy Joel, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Tom Waits, Randy Newman, David Byrne, Stevie Nicks, Jason Isbell, Jeff Tweedy, Brandi Carlile, Donald Fagen, Neil Diamond, John Fogerty, REM, Patti Smith, Don Henley, and Jimmy Webb.
Here are the Times picks that readers didn’t include: Nile Rodgers, Valerie Simpson, Diane Warren, Stephin Merritt, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, Babyface, Mariah Carey, Outkast, The-Dream, Romeo Santos, Fiona Apple, Josh Osborne/Brandy Clark/Shane McAnally, Lana Del Rey, Young Thug, Bad Bunny.
Notice anything? All of the readers’ substitutions are white people. There are also more men, many more people over 65, and not nearly as many behind-the-scenes songwriter/producer types acknowledged for their roles. If kneerjerk assertions of “common sense” overrule the results of careful critical deliberation, the same old biases tend to prevail.
(You could argue that many of those omissions get balanced out in the rest of the readers’ Top 100. But if the Times critics had 100 spots, they would have made room for many of those names too. Yes, even Billy Joel.)
Phoebe Bridgers in the wild blue Yondr
Neither the Times’ nor the readers’ top 30 living U.S. songwriters included Phoebe Bridgers. Mine did. I’ve been very excited by the series of surprise shows that culminated last week at Madison Square Garden, and not just because they signal the coming of her first new album since 2020’s Punisher, one of my favourite records of the decade. It’s also the ways they were staged, not only kinda guerrilla-style, but with attendees getting their phones locked in Yondr bags till after the show; in that her more conventional tour this fall, including Toronto dates, will follow suit. It’s an attempt to get the audience to bring their whole minds and bodies to the room in real time, though on this leg also to prevent leaks of the new material. (Forbidding pen and paper too was rather much, though, especially for critics—Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone got busted over it, according to The New Yorker.)
Most importantly, though, it’s felt like Bridgers finding a more balanced relationship to her own fame. I’m wary of my own impulses here, which when it comes to Bridgers tend to be those old Gen-X underground reflexes, given that her style is so indebted to the likes of Elliott Smith. I’ve wanted her to safeguard the sensitive craftsperson in her rather than pursuing her celebrity ambitions. It wasn’t her fault, but I was uncomfortable with how much of her press centered on her dating other famous people, a la Taylor Swift (Bridgers opened on a few Eras Tour shows). I didn’t really like seeing her at the Met Gala. When her new songs seemed to be the weaker ones on the Boygenius album, I wondered if the star-making machinery was distracting from her previously steady artistic growth.
It sounds like it took her father’s death, and some fans’ insensitive behaviour at that time, for her to reconsider what was going on. She went into retreat for a couple of years. Now 31, she seems to be returning in a different mode. I’m relieved to hear from friends who attended that the new songs are strong. I’m also aware that anti-publicity is itself another form of publicity, one that I am prone to fall for. Artists have to play those games one way or another, unless they drop out, which comes at its own costs. A bit of glamour is by no means inherently corrupt, and I don’t want to set false standards that would end up leading back to the readers’ version of the Times poll.
But I’ll admit I want the songs to be the highest priority. And to a bias towards survival, which under Bridgers’ circumstances is frankly never guaranteed. If a little revived counterculturalism helps with that, I’m going to let myself enjoy it.
Carney’s cultural carn job
Canadians, please read Globe TV critic J. Kelly Nestruck’s column about Ottawa abandoning all efforts to make streamers work with the culture sector here (as they do in Europe). It’s what the Liberals are also doing for AI companies. Apparently Mark Carney (abetted by my old college frenemy Evan Solomon) honestly believes that to resist the current U.S. government, we have to outperform them at being captured by and subservient to U.S. corporations.
No, no, not Giles
Anthony Steward Head wasn’t young—this is not like his Buffy castmate Michelle Trachtenberg dying at 39 last year—but he was still only 72. He’d recently lost his wife, sadly a high risk factor, particularly for men, but some women too: RIP as well to the great Marjane Satrapi.
In any case, I’m gutted to think of ASH gone. He was great in everything, but above all as the mystic librarian. Many have said how much Head’s portrayal of Giles—paternal but not patriarchal, discerning but not judging, anti-macho yet protective—meant to Buffy’s characters and fans alike, especially queer ones. But I was already a (youngish) adult during the original run, and it’s equally vital to me that he introduced grownup ambiguity and wry skepticism to the show’s mood and morality. (At least when he wasn’t concussed.) Not to mention his love of his books.
We could talk about the post-high-school plots seldom doing Giles justice. Nothing about Joss Whedon and the series will ever be without issues and contradictions. But you know who can help you with those? Giles. Or if you prefer, he can lie to you. (Tonight, for the first time, that scene also reminds me of Bridgers’ own song about lies and a father figure. Both now gone.)
Songwriter Jenny Owen Youngs of the Buffering the Vampire Slayer podcast/cult created a Giles jingle years back that sums up all the above—plus Giles’ obvious hotness—faster and more eloquently. I can only echo: Thank you, Giles.
If you want to rewatch some top Giles episodes, here’s a good partial list.
Fair sailing, Captain
Rest in power, too, to James Blood Ulmer, one of Ornette Coleman’s most creative acolytes. So glad I got to see him a few times at his peak. “Are You Glad to Be in America?” was always a highlight. And it’s still an excellent question.
Another emigré to Ontario, Blake has performed and recorded with Pernice before, as the duo The New Mendicants.
Excited to see you write about Joe Pernice! Best-ever concert I attended was a solo show by Joe in a living room in Hamburg, NY, two years ago. What an artist. And woulda been a good poet too, if he'd kept writing poems. That's where the big bucks are.
I had listened to "Penthouse in the Woods" hundreds of times without ever grasping that it referred to a magazine rather than a treehouse. What a gorgeous song.