‘You know that guy spent six years working on that record.’
‘Well, it was time well spent. I’ve been thinking a bit about how I want to record something, but how I’m not sure I have anything yet that I want to record …’
‘You’ve written hundreds of songs though.’
‘Honestly, most of them are pretty bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad until I finished writing them.’
‘I think you’re being hard on yourself.’
‘It’s like the people who come into the shop every week to buy their lottery tickets. Once you start playing, you can’t really quit, because if you quit and your numbers come up you wouldn’t be able to bear it. Maybe one week, two of your numbers come up, or three come up, and for a second you can taste it, you know what it feels like when you think you’re going to win and your life is going to change. That’s what writing songs is like — you get these glimpses of how good it might be one day. You keep doing it because maybe the next time you sit down at your guitar you might write “Death or Glory”.’
She gets up to look at the wall more closely.
‘You should write something on there,’ I say.
‘It’s cool that you’re able to have a wall to do that.’
‘Yeah, Ned puts up with it. I guess one day when I move out it’ll get painted over, but for now it’s nice to have it there.’
We see ourselves in the mirror on the other side of the room and I can’t help but think we look like an unlikely couple.
‘I learnt to play guitar standing in front of that mirror,’ I say.
She laughs. ‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. For a while I was a lot better at posing and pulling moves than playing.’
I tell her about the party I can play at, explain how it’s some friend of a friend that Sebastian knows, and it’s on the Central Coast so it’s a bit of a hike to get up there, but they’ve promised to give me dinner and a place to stay the night, so I’m keen to do it.
‘Come with me?’ I say.
‘What if I don’t come?’
‘Then I’ll probably sulk, and write a song about it.’
‘I’d like to,’ she says, ‘but I’m not that into parties where I don’t know anyone.’
‘You know me.’
‘Well, anyone apart from you.’
‘That doesn’t matter, you’ll make new friends.’
‘That’s unlikely. People don’t usually like me that much.’
‘How could anybody not like you?’
‘I don’t know, most people seem to find a way.’
I don’t know how to respond to that so I kiss her on the cheek and she kisses me back.
‘You know I’m sorry about —’ I say.
‘I know. Shh,’ she says.
I pull the warmth of her body towards me. We might be an unlikely couple, but I’m starting to think that’s the best kind.
Mandy
Tim’s room is pretty bare, just a little wooden table with school books and papers on it, some beaten-up guitars, a couple of crates full of guitar strings and CDs, and a beautiful black-and-white poster of Jeff Buckley. The breeze blows in a light silver curtain, and the window looks out onto the uneven cobbling at the side of the house.
‘I’m not good at big emotional speeches,’ he says.
I’m not good at them either, I think. I’m not even good at knowing how to react to them.
‘But I do want to say I was so embarrassed by how I acted when we went away, and I just thought you should know that I’m not … I’m not always alright, you know. I’ve had some pretty questionable moments.’
‘But it’s not your fault that any of that horrible stuff happened,’ I say.
‘I guess I sometimes feel that it is kind of my fault, or I could have done something to stop it.’
‘Tim, don’t do that to yourself.’
‘I just want to be perfect for you. You didn’t sign up for any of this.’
‘You don’t have to be perfect … I like you how you are. I don’t want to change anything about you.’
I take his hand and we curl up on the scrunched-up blankets on the bed.
‘I know that when you get up on stage or you put stuff on the internet or whatever, you make yourself a target,’ he says. ‘If I want to have that chance of connecting with people through my songs, I have to take the risk that people will think it’s shit and hate me and what I’m doing. It’s just part of it. What happened with those guys yelling abuse at me, that’s happened to pretty much everyone who’s ever been in a band at some point. I just have to ignore it.’
‘I was so mad at those people. They would never have the guts to get up on stage. You were just trying to play your music and I hated that they ruined it for everyone.’
I hadn’t planned on saying that, but I know it’s how I feel. He sits thinking for a moment.
‘It’s not even about them, really. I just got scared.’
‘Scared of what?’
‘Scared you’d think it was all too hard and leave.’
‘Why on earth would I do that?’
‘Because that’s what everyone else did.’
Tim
I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing Vampire Weekend have never done a gig where they get there by following directions that have literally been written on the inside of a box of Cheezels and given to their ‘manager’ at a house party. We’re only an hour out of Sydney, but it feels like we’re in a completely different part of the world as we drive down a winding road bordered by tall trees and wild ferns and pass kombi vans with surfboards back from the beach.
Finally, as the sun goes down, we locate the place: an old weatherboard house on stilts with a few dozen kids spilling out across the lawn and music pumping. A tanned, snowy-haired boy in a skate singlet comes up and looks at us suspiciously.
‘Are you that musician guy from Sydney?’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ I say.
‘Do you reckon you’re better than us because you live in the big city?’
‘Um, not really.’
Thankfully another kid rushes up to us, introduces himself as the person whose party it is and tells us to ignore his mate ‘because he’s a bit of a tool’.
‘Did you find the place OK?’ he asks.
‘Well, we got here in the end.’
‘Cool. Hey, have you guys had some dinner?’
‘Nah, we could eat.’
‘Where’s Seb? I thought he was going to come.’
‘He would have, but he’s a dickhead.’
‘Ah. Well, we got stacks of food. I did some party pies, sausage rolls, got some of that cheesy crust pizza. And somebody brought a vodka watermelon.’
Sorted. Bet Vampire Weekend never got a vodka watermelon in their rider either.
Mandy
At the party, a girl I’ve never met before comes up to me and launches into a story. She keeps pausing for effect and I manage to fake-laugh in all the right places. Somehow she gets on to what seems to be her most prized anecdote: the time she jerked off some guy who works at the railway station in her car and he came on the passenger seat. Later, her mum noticed the stain but she brilliantly covered by saying it was some of a thickshake her friend had spilled there. It’s a lovely story.
‘I’m going to get some punch. I’ll be back later,’ she says.
I still have no idea who she is or whether she thinks I’m somebody she knows.
The only other people I talk to are a girl who looks at me strangely and asks if I’m OK before hurrying away, and a guy I start a conversation with based on his Bad Brains T-shirt. But then I mention that I’m going to a Josh Pyke show soon and he snorts at me angrily, like he’s been wasting his time with someone who likes mainstream music, and huffs off.
Everyone’s standing around in twos and threes and I feel like I’d be intruding on their conversations, so I end up hovering around the food table in some weird no-man’s-land, slipping through the cra
cks again, hoping nobody notices me. I feel like I’m in one of those time-lapse photos you see where everyone is racing around the subject, who just stands perfectly still.
Tim
I see her on the other side of the garden all by herself, one arm folded across her chest, drinking from a paper cup of champagne. People look right through her. I heard someone refer to her as a ‘little black cloud’ earlier and I didn’t care. She’s my little black cloud and I love her, yes, love her, more than ever. Everyone else doesn’t know what they’re missing.
Not for the first time, I feel some stupid urge to write songs about her, to make people see her as I do. As I walk towards her, I hear The Smiths’ ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ come on the stereo and I’m kind of drifting in and out of really paying attention to the music, but I drift in just as Morrissey sighs that line about a person that nobody sees any worth in, and how he does. I wonder about this, how a song can shine a light on a person in this way.
I stop by the punch table and watch her, with her tiny nose, fine-china cheekbones and hands scrunched up in the sleeves of a black cardigan. I know that for almost anything you could ever think or feel, someone (usually Morrissey) has been there before and expressed it beautifully. The trail of sadness is a well-beaten one and there’s something strangely comforting about that.
Mandy
Eventually the guy who lives in the house we’re at sets up a microphone and a small amp for Tim, and he sits on the wooden steps down to the backyard and starts playing. Sometimes when I hear him play I wonder why everyone doesn’t play like this. His voice is sweet but ragged, like a fallen choirboy, and his guitar playing is wild and passionate. There aren’t many tricks to what he does; it’s just honesty and heart.
His eyes are possessed when he sings. He plays like there’s a gun pointed at his head. You always know what his songs are about. It’s confronting, almost embarrassing, to see a person reveal themselves so much. I see two girls giggling at him as his voice becomes so scratched and high and raw that it’s almost like he’s crying. His eyes are shut tight so he can’t see them or anyone else.
I become less and less aware of everyone around and concentrate on the lyrics. It’s like I’m hearing them clearly for the first time and they seem more sad, more personal, than I’d realised. Even the funny songs have their down moments. Now I hear that the girl in ‘Accent’ who is so struck by his Australian accent isn’t just totally charmed by his voice but sees him as a bit of a novelty, a toy you can wind up and make talk in a funny accent:
Say what you want
Your voice sweet as it rings
It doesn’t matter what you say
You can tell me anything
When he finishes up, a few people cheer and yell out for more, but he smiles politely and waves them away and packs up his guitar. He mixes with people easily, looks everyone in the eye, slaps guys on the back when they make a joke, leans forward to hear the quiet girls speak.
A boy with a heart-shaped face wearing a buttoned-up shirt is asking him advice about playing guitar. He looks about twelve and I’m pretty sure he isn’t meant to be here.
‘Just practise for ten minutes a day,’ Tim says. ‘But make sure you play every single day or you’ll go backwards. And don’t be afraid to kill the skin on your fingertips. When the ends of your fingers start getting all calloused, you’ll know you’re starting to get good.’
The kid nods, wide-eyed, and you can almost see him physically committing the advice to memory.
Tim knows some secret to making friends. He is in with everyone here already. I can’t imagine anyone ever walking away from him in a bored huff like Mr Bad Brains did earlier to me.
I go over to him and put my arm around his neck and ask him something I’ve been meaning to ask for a long time. ‘Who are these people in your songs? Where do they come from?’
‘I don’t know. They’re not really based on real people a lot of the time, they’re more like people I’d like to know. People who are maybe out there listening and might get something out of them. That’s who I’m writing the songs about, and who I’m writing them for. People who kind of see the world the same as me, but who are maybe just a little bit better than I know how to be.’
‘Wow, I didn’t know you …’ I struggle for words.
‘Weren’t dumb?’
‘Ha ha, no, not at all. I guess I just thought you wrote the songs on instinct. I didn’t know you thought about them so much, or that you had these people in mind who you wrote songs about.’
‘Well, I’ve got hidden depths, I suppose.’
‘Clearly.’
‘Often I hear a song and think, wow, she sounds amazing. I wish I knew Wendy from “Born to Run”, you know. Or Hannah Hunt from that Vampire Weekend song, or the girl who lived on Heaven Hill. Is that really sad?’
‘I don’t think it’s sad.’
‘I’m glad I got to tell someone that without them laughing at me, I really am.’ He holds me for a second. ‘Now come on, I heard there’s a yard glass out the front.’
Tim
We never get to the yard glass. When we get out the front, a police car has just pulled up and two policemen are sweeping their torches through the front yard. We see a couple of kids, including one guy with his shirt off, jump over the fence and bolt off down the street.
‘We’ve had noise complaints and reports of underage drinking here,’ one of the policemen says, sounding like this isn’t the first party he’s broken up this evening.
The guy who organised the party comes out the front looking bewildered. He runs his hands through his hair out of stress, then sees me and pats me on the back.
‘Thanks for playing, bud, but it looks like this is over. You better jet.’
I gather up my stuff, and Mandy and I get into her car while the police are still talking to people. Things are a bit chaotic and I can see somebody passing something in through the toilet window at the side of the house.
I feel drained as we leave, but in a good way, like I’ve left some part of myself in this house at the bottom of a winding road in a Central Coast rainforest. I played as hard as I could, until my fingers were sore and my voice was shot, and I don’t think anyone besides Mandy totally got it, but I can live with that. If it’s a defeat, at least it’s an honourable one.
We’re pretty tired as I drive us back to Sydney, relying on The Hold Steady turned up loud and the cold, crisp evening wind shooting in through the windows to keep us awake. I tell Mandy she’ll have to do most of the talking because I’m pretty sure my throat is about to bleed.
Mandy
Heather’s messed up the living room and we find Dad watching TV in the middle of the mess, with cushions strewn around the floor and newspapers draped over the couches like something out of a Dali painting. A bong made out of a Coke bottle and part of a garden hose sits boldly on the coffee table.
‘Why don’t you do something about all this?’ I ask him.
‘I’ve given up, Mandy. If she wants to be like this, there’s nothing I can do.’ Dad nods at Tim, who’s standing behind the couch in his old velvet jacket with his guitar case strapped to his back. ‘How are you doing, son?’
‘Real good, sir.’
‘Well, it’s good to see you round here again. You’re always welcome.’
‘Thanks.’
Dad nods, satisfied, and not just because someone has called him ‘sir’, which he loves. I think this is their version of an emotional conversation.
Tim is so weary now I have to half-carry him up the stairs and guide him into bed. He kicks off his shoes, then collapses into a mess of sheets on my floor.
He looks at me sleepy-eyed. ‘I have this weird thing after I play, like I’m full of energy and can’t possibly sleep, then all of a sudden I have to sleep, like, right now for eight hours.’
‘I could go to sleep right now as well.’
‘Thanks for looking after me,’ he says.
‘Pleasure.’
/>
‘Hey, can I ask you something?’
‘Just one thing. You need to sleep.’
‘How come you came to the hotel that night?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What made you come to the band competition at the Old Canterbury that first night?’
‘Well, Alice’s friends said we should go to see some mate of theirs who was playing. But they brushed us when we got there, and the guy we were meant to be watching was a bit of a douchebag.’
‘It’s funny, Ned and I were sitting at home watching TV that night and the TV just died suddenly. Ned started looking in the local paper for things to do and we found this band night. I’d never heard of it before.’
‘Well, I’m grateful for that broken TV.’
‘It’s fixed now. But, yeah, I’m grateful for that douchebag. We might never have met otherwise. It was just luck, I suppose.’
‘I prefer to call it fate,’ I say.
‘It’s a great thing, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘Being in the right place at the right time.’
I go to say something else, but I realise his eyes are closed.
Tim
I get home to find Ned flitting around the living room dusting the shelves. He has never previously dusted anything in his life, so I know something is up.
‘Ah, Tim, I talked to your mother this afternoon …’
‘Right.’
‘And, ah, she’s moving back to Sydney. She wants to see your graduation.’
‘OK, good, it’ll be good to have her there for it.’
‘And after that, she’s going to be here to stay.’
‘What, with us?’
‘Not here specifically. But she’s coming back. She’s going to live with some friends at first and look for a new place. Her old work are going to give her some shifts.’
‘Hmm, that’s good.’ I don’t know what else to say.
You’re the Kind of Girl I Write Songs About Page 18