Happy Birthday King James Version

King James Version, the difficult second Harvey Danger album—not the Bible translation, silly!—was released seven years ago yesterday, on September 12, 2000. Writing sessions began in December, 1998, recording started in March or April of 1999 in Bearsville, NY, and continued in fits and starts throughout the next year. By the time it was finished, the major label that bankrolled it no longer existed, and the entire music business had entered an upheaval that, frankly, has yet to end, and isn't likely to.

Though the initial trajectory of the album was away from pop (away from melody, away from fun, away from humor, away from anything the band was identified with or, indeed, was good at), time had a way of guiding us back toward our strengths, and the resulting push and pull made an album that not only reflected the tumltuous life of success, self-doubt, internal wrangling, yearning to prove ourselves to a largely indifferent audience/totally indifferent label, and unavoidable immersion in the depths of narcissism we'd been living, but turned to the elements of that tumultuous life for thematic and even musical inspiration. What I hear when I listen to the album is not the sound of my life in 1998-2001, but the sound of our little band striving (sometimes together, but often against one another) to make it sound more like we thought it should sound. More than anything else, I think, we wanted to make an album that no one expected from us. An album no one else could make. An album that made no concessions to any idea (ours/theirs/yours) of a popular audience. An album you had to seek out. An album you had to work to love. KJV is unarguably that, right down to Tae Won Yu's beautiful/terrible/perfect cover art, which expressed our band's fractured mental and psychic state, or relationship to ourselves, our city, our project, and each other brilliantly. It's also a mess (possibly because we micromanaged him into the ground). There are sounds I hate on the album, but far more that I love. More to the point, having never before or since put so much of myself into anything with so little to show for it afterwards, there are sounds I never got over the fact that more people didn't hear. Almost never. Having met a lot of people who did hear the album and to whom it meant something, I think I am now. Which is better than never, but goddamn...

Sometimes I think we put far too much energy toward all the wrong things. Sometimes I think we were utterly delusional. Sometimes I wish we had done every single thing differently. But sometimes I think KJV is a legitimate cult gem that will one day join the ranks of Oddessey and Oracle and The Village Green Preservation Society or at least fucking Pinkerton or whatever. Not likely, I know, but I still have a dim wish.

Mostly, though, I'm glad to find myself thinking about it less. I do wish it a happy birthday, however, and many happy returns. (Thanks to iTunes).

I See Me 10 Years Ago Today

Well, yesterday, technically.

That was the tenth anniversary (please don't say "10-year anniversary"; it's like saying "three a.m. in the morning") of the original release of Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?, the debut album by my band, Harvey Danger.

The covers were all hand-screened onto cardboard (at the legendary Fort Thunder in Providence, R.I.). Aaron, Evan, Jeff, and I all sat in our revolting living room in South Wedgewood, giddily folding and stuffing them full of booklets and CDs so we could send them back to Brooklyn, where the label (Arena Rock Recording Company, which had released only one other full-length at the time) could then get them out to the handful of indie distributors that had agreed to handle the record. The original pressing was 1,200 copies. Eight months later, a re-mastered version of the same record (in a jewel box) would be released on Slash-London Records.

In the time between, Merrymakers charted somewhere low on CMJ, got great reviews in The Rocket, Magnet, Option, Puncture, Milk, and The Big Takeover and made a respectable showing in The Rocket's Northwest Top 20 charts. We played our first show in NYC, at Coney Island High, with Elf Power and a bunch of other Arena Rock bands on a SMJ showcase.

As a result of all this, we started getting better shows in town and felt a bit more legitimate about being in a rock band despite our rapidly advancing ages (I was 24, after all). We still had never made a single dollar from playing a live show (or any other musical activity), but we all felt like MISSION GODDAMN ACCOMPLISHED.

A few short months later, everything got completely douchetarded.

Hooray!