Never Apologize, Never Explain.
Track 1: Wrong to Think.
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I . First, a Word from the Wise.
I worried a lot because of the point of view. We’re mostly in his point of view . . . I didn’t have a chance to tell you my political beliefs, you know, my beliefs about climate change. I could only signal over the character’s head to you . . . and I could feel that as an act of tension and a sign of my immaturity as a writer. Because I want you to know that I know he’s a bad guy. Well, I think a more mature writer would be somewhat more open about that, wouldn’t be quite so fearful that his political agenda and his shtick was being hidden.
That’s George Saunders on the Ezra Klein Show recently, talking his new novel Vigil.
II. Oh Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.
There are two kinds of people in this world. Let’s call them John and Paul.
One cares what you think of him, but only if he values your opinion. He may love you and want you to love him back. He may find you noble and honorable, and he seeks your respect in return. He may simply want something from you: a job, status, cash. If he holds you in disdain or scarcely knows you at all, then why would he care whether you like him or not? Why, indeed.
The other kind of person cares what you think of him no matter what. No matter who you are, how you are, what you are. You could be a war criminal and he’d covet your favor. Not all opinions carry equal weight, of course: his best friend’s opinion means more to him than his art school classmate’s mother’s. But they all still matter. If that woman doesn’t like him, he’s going to stew about it.
We all know these types. They are in our lives and—in radically simplified form—they are all over mass culture.
Person one is principled. Or is person one an asshole?
Person two is attentive and considerate. Or is person two a people-pleasing doormat?
Psychologists measure this trait on a spectrum of “agreeableness.” Most people clump in the middle, situationally dependent. It’s near the tails that you encounter your assholes and doormats. Those are the dark green areas below.
Let me lay my cards on the table here. I’m person two. I care what strangers think of me: more than I care to admit and certainly more than I prefer. Like most agreeable people, I wish I were more disagreeable. Not all the way down in Steve Jobs or Chairman Mao territory, but: you know. A few notches down the bell curve in their general direction.
It’s often wonderful to be agreeable. Don’t get me wrong. You’re not easily bent out of shape. You’re good at fostering community, good at making people feel welcome, good at making and keeping friends. Indeed, you are fundamentally here to make friends.
Agreeableness is not, despite what the word suggests, about being a pushover or a people-pleaser. Those people exist. We know them. But they are a minority of the agreeable population. No, agreeableness is about your tolerance for interpersonal friction. A highly agreeable person feels other people’s discomfort acutely. They can’t stand the thought that someone in the room is unhappy with them. Once that ugly thought arrives to the party, they find it hard to think of anything else. I need to make that person like me.
It’s even worse if you suspect the person is wrong about you. That’s like a five alarm fire in your head. Klaxon going nonstop, tiny emotional firemen sliding down the poles into your lizard brain where they run back and forth screaming.1
They think I’m bad thing but actually I’m good thing. They think I believe in bad idea but actually I subscribe to good idea. They think I’m serious but actually I’m joking. I must correct this dreadful misapprehension before it calcifies into a permanent opinion! Once that happens there is no recovery. They will not like me.
That urge, that irresistible itch to correct a misapprehension, is songwriting poison.
III. You Better Run For Your Life.
Remember John and Paul? You knew what I was getting at, didn’t you? So which one is John and which one is Paul?
“John couldn’t stand conflict or confrontation and his reaction was invariably to escape. It was in stark contradiction to his often aggressive manner, but in fact he was only confrontational when he had been drinking. He was often cutting and critical, but mostly he went out of his way to avoid direct conflict.”
Even a casual Beatles fan knows Yoko. Heck, you don’t need to be a fan. Yoko, long may she live, is part of the twentieth century cultural furniture.
Fewer know Cynthia, John’s first wife. She was not an international artist from a prominent industrialist family—that would be Yoko. But in Liverpool she qualified as posh. She caught John’s eye in art school, when he was still a “teddy boy,” looking to all the world like a smooth-faced Gene Vincent. They were together for ten years, married for six. I think that qualifies as “long-suffering.”
Cynthia published a memoir in 2005, rather self-effacingly called John. I was a college student then, and enjoyed partaking in free cultural events. Still do, when life permits. Book readings were always free, and you could find them calendared in the back of The Onion—which was also free. When John came out, I went to see Cynthia read it to a small crowd at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square.
We’re all for candor here, so I’ll admit it: I’m a Paul guy. But in 2005 I was a George guy.2
My overriding impression from hearing Cynthia, something that has stuck with me ever since, was that young John Lennon was an asshole. Physically and emotionally abusive, casually cruel and callous. I never read the book. But I’d heard enough just listening to Cynthia.
I still loved the music (vide supra), but as a Beatles obsessive from the age of 9, I felt a bit disillusioned. When you’re a kid, you assume your heroes are of sterling character. Nine years later, I’d learned the ugly truth.
Maybe I should have read the book.
First, watch John being heartbreakingly vulnerable. Forced by Brian Epstein and Tony Barrow to make a public apology, you might interpret his squirminess as simple discomfort with hypocrisy. But I see someone who yearns to be understood. I’m not going to pretend the guy minded giving offense. He loved offending, and clearly found it hilarious. But interpersonally, the agreeable John Lennon made himself known. He might enjoy upsetting the public, but he wasn’t particularly comfortable upsetting people.
I read a new book last year, Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story. It changed my perspective. Thanks in part to Cynthia at Barnes & Noble, I’d come to think of John as a hard man. Mean-spirited and angry. Thin-skinned and tough to be around. A genius, yes. And maybe still, underneath it all, a good man. But not a man who fussed over the good graces of others.
Disagreeable.
This book taught me a thing or two. John was soft, easily wounded, desperate for approval and affection. He could be very nasty, yes, especially after a few rum and cokes. But he was mean because he cared, not because he didn’t. You all know the story of his mother, the car accident, his Aunt Mimi, the primal scream therapy. If you don’t, the Wikipedia page on the “Bigger Than Jesus” controversy alone is longer than my unfinished memoirs, so I’m sure you can work it out. It’s worth doing, actually. Start with the Ian Leslie.
Because that book, above all, taught me about John’s relationship with Paul. How close they were, even in the dark times. The jealousy. You can feel yourself viscerally irritated by John’s spiteful and childish sniping at “Yesterday.” But you get it. And above all, you see how it was Paul, not John, who didn’t much care what others thought.
You look at the songs: “Hey Jude,” “Michelle,” “For No One,” “Let it Be.” “Yesterday,” of course. And it seems Paul, the “sensitive one,” wants you to like him. Forget the songs, just look at that mug! But that’s not right. He doesn’t want you to like him. His songs want you to like them. His songs are open, inviting, emotionally vulnerable. Paul has made some strange music in his life, no doubt. He’s artistically adventurous, open to all sounds. But any sound you filter through the mind of Paul McCartney comes out the other side at least a little sweet, a little winsome. “Temporary Secretary” wants you along for the silly ride. “Kreen-Akrore” ends on a major chord.
Could it be that a sensitive person does not necessarily write sensitive songs?
You listened to “Run For Your Life?” Good. John picked up the foundational line from an Elvis song: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.”3 But he dialed it up several more notches, writing a 2½ minute true threat in the first person. Is it a joke? I don’t hear a joke. A Paul song would wink at you. “Run For Your Life” stares you down.
It’s very telling that Lennon later disavowed the song, claiming he “never liked” it because he just “knocked it off.” I’m sure that’s part of it. But you can’t know what we know about John—his jealousy and the way he treated women, but also his deep vulnerability, his desire to be known…all that stuff—and not suspect he had an ulterior motive. Namely, the song was too revealing. He didn’t like what it said about him.
Beatle John wasn’t an overtly confessional songwriter. He became that, later on, after screaming his way towards catharsis. But in the ‘60s, he was still veiled and cryptic, deep into his Dylan phase. “Help,” which he later characterized as, well, a cry for help, was received as a love song in 1965, just like every other piece of music the Beatles had released to that point. Later, but only later, from a safe distance, John was relaxed enough to reveal that the song was about his own depression.
“Run For Your Life” was not veiled, not cryptic. It was ugly and mean. And, most damningly, it was just a little too close to John’s own perspective. Surely, on some level, he knew that. And just as surely he was scared everyone else knew it, too.
But you know what? It’s a damn good song. And its ugliness, and indeed its projection straight from the dark heart of the songwriter, are essential to its power. John wasn’t a disagreeable person. He was “Person Two.” But he was a disagreeable songwriter. There’s really no other way to do it.4
IV. Was I Wrong to Think You Would?
Comparing ourselves to the Beatles, are we?
Listen, it’s a rhetorical technique. I recognize I’m loading your mental hi-fi with a pile of the greatest songs of all time, then asking you to listen to one of mine. It’s a risky move. But if you read this far, it was worth it.
Like 1960s John Lennon, I am not a confessional songwriter.5 I love using a song as a way of inhabiting a character, which puts me closer to Paul’s approach. That presents a problem, because I enjoy taking the perspective, specifically, of bad people. Or, to be specific and precise, people who think and do bad things. But I don’t want listeners to believe I think and do bad things. Then they might not like me, and that’s an unbearable thought. Recall the tiny firemen.
I wrote “Wrong to Think” on the ukulele. That tells you a couple things. First, it won’t have many chords in it. When it comes to string instruments, even those functionally for children, I’m a hack. Second, it will be breezy. Even sad songs are breezy on the uke.
Am I lading this breezy six-chord pop/rock tune with more emotional cargo than it can carry? Let’s find out.
It started with the chords. It’s 2021, I’m standing at the kitchen counter, rocking the four-month-old on the baby bouncer, and I’m thinking I should really write songs again. But, I says to myself: don’t overcomplicate it. You’re stalled out. You haven’t finished a song in ten years. Don’t get fancy or this is over before it begins. I started hacking away at three basic chords on the ukulele my grandmother bought me when I was 18. Serious intonation problems but I never got around to restringing it. It’s always served me well.
“It’s not that hard to be afraid.”
Hey, a line! What’s that mean, though?
That’s how I usually get started. A single line or two that catches my mind’s ear, that seems like it wants to go somewhere. You pull the thread until something else pops loose. Sometimes the next thing is bad, or doesn’t really follow. Throw it out and keep tugging. Eventually the next line came.
“Know every step will be betrayed.”
What are we talking about here? Surveillance state? Spy thriller? Had I been finishing up the last season of The Americans?
Two lines set the mood. Prickly, paranoid. But it doesn’t make a song. You need three lines for that. Back to the well.
“I was wrong to take you home.”
Uh oh. This sounds…whaddyacallit…non-consensual.
But that was it. That was the line, and that was the song. I could go back and rewrite it, but that would be a different song, on a different path. And I wanted to see where this path went.
V. I’ve Let Down My Fans.
I do not remember how or when I wrote the rest of the song. That’s not uncommon. But I finished it quickly and left it as a one track ukulele and vocal demo in GarageBand. Didn’t give it much thought for another year or two. You read the part about the four-month-old in the baby bouncer. I had other things going on.
At some point in 2022—probably before my birthday—I was 35. Not unrelatedly, I began assigning myself arbitrary goals. Go on twelve hikes. Learn to garden. Clean the shed. (Reader, I did none of these). But I wanted to work on my music, so in addition to practicing the piano once a week for the first time since high school, I added a new goal: write an album in 2023.
I decided the album would be thirteen songs. Why? To make up for lost time, I guess. And it’s my favorite number and Big Star song.
As a very rusty musician with thirteen songs to bang out, I opted not to reinvent the wheel, a phrase I use altogether too often as my alter ego, “Lawyer.” If I had complete or near-complete songs, I aimed to use them. “Wrong to Think” was already written. Slot it in.
Twelve songs to go.
Much later—we’re going to skip over a lot so I have some biographical material left to cover on the other twelve tracks—much later, as I was saying, I recorded a more “produced” demo of the song to bring to the band. We started talking over the arrangement. Introducing your song to new people, even just one new person, completely changes your own perspective. You start hearing it through their ears. It’s a very dangerous time. Your eyes begin darting about. You get a little shifty, a little defensive, very possessive.
Will they think it’s weird? Will they like it?
Nobody was going to think “Wrong to Think” was weird. It’s straight up the middle. It’s got a ukulele, it’s got a handful of chords. In fact, my fears about this particular tune are better framed as “will they think it’s weird enough?” But another thought occurred to me.
What if people think I’m singing about myself?
Very early on, maybe a couple weeks into the whole project, when the song was still just my demo, our guitarist, Chris, sent us all a video. Chris is a superb guitarist, you’ve gotta understand. I was incredibly lucky to fall in with some guy in high school who would later learn to play like Django Reinhardt. You can’t orchestrate this stuff. You just need to be lucky. But that’s all to say that whenever Chris sent over an idea or a track, it was an occasion. It’s like opening a new album from your favorite band, except they were covering your own material.
Chris sends over this video, and it’s about fifteen seconds long. It’s him recording his own laptop screen. If you’re my age, it’s the way your mom shares a funny reel on Facebook. His screen, though, showed the song, and it played me a brand new guitar solo. A scratch track, he later told us. He just wanted to see if he was nailing the style I was hearing. But I was transfixed. Because that’s when the song took its first step out of my hands, out into the world.
You write a song as an agreeable person. Refine it, arrange it, record it. Maybe you’re out there performing it throughout the process. At all those points, but especially the earliest phases, before you send it out into the world as a “finished product,” there’s a devil on your shoulder. The devil is your need to be liked. Agreeableness is a nervous little demon, chewing his nails down to nubs. His fears are legion: will they like it? Is it too difficult? Is it not “engaging” enough? Will they connect with it? Empathize? Will they get it? Is it too subtle? Too obvious? And at root: what will they think of me for writing and singing it?
His concerns are not your concerns. They must not be your concerns. But the lines will blur. Agreeableness, that little devil, doesn’t care if the song is good or not, as long as other people think it’s good and will think you’re good for making it. He will start offering little suggestions:
Why don’t we make that implication a little more obvious?
Wouldn’t people like that riff better if you repeated it a few more times?
Let’s scratch that one line. It’s creepy and it’s not that good. It’s not worth the headache.
Remember, friends, that the devil speaks your language. He would never be so gauche as to suggest you make things more “accessible” or “popular,” and he would never suggest that you take the easy way out. No, he tells you, it’s just—you know how things are now. The short attention spans, the cancelations. Let’s meet the culture where it’s at it. Who do you think you are, anyway? This isn’t Beethoven.
No, “Wrong to Think” isn’t Beethoven. But it’s got a helluva guitar solo: the exact track Chris recorded two years ago. The track that took it out of my hands and out of the devil’s easy reach. And yes, the song title is a play on an alt-right meme based on Orwell. And yes, you can imagine a really obtuse listener with murky motivations interpreting the song as an admission of guilt.
But—I’m addressing the devil himself, now—do you know how many people have even listened to my lyrics closely enough to figure out what the song is about? I’ll let you guess. Even my own band doesn’t listen to my lyrics (we’re cool, guys). Today, with the song out there treading water in the vast seething, streaming ocean like a solitary man tossed overboard, today, I say, I would welcome a single outraged human listener as a compliment of the highest order. Because they really listened. And to reach a single nut, you’ve got to reach thousands of wonderful, open-minded fans first. Sitting here today, I’d take that deal in a heartbeat.
So shut up and let me write my dumb songs.
VI. They Walk Around Tellin’ Great Big Lies.
Randy Newman must be the king of not giving a shit whether people “get” his satire. You can’t write and release an album like Good Old Boys if you’re worried about being misunderstood. Right?
Good Old Boys barely charted. He probably expected about the same reaction to 1977’s “Short People.”
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
To liveThey got little hands
And little eyes
And they walk around
Tellin’ great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feetWell, I don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
Don’t want no short people
‘Round here
Instead, the single went gold and peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was all over the radio for weeks. That’s plenty of time for a mass audience to hear the lyrics. The general public, being general and all, contains multitudes: the crazy, crazed, predator, prey, offensive and offended. The tall and short. In 1977 as today, it included some people who were short, crazy, and offended.
“You never forget your first death threat!” he declares in an accent part inherited from his Louisiana-born mother. “It was in Memphis. My manager at the time had been tour-managing The Carpenters and he said they got death threats all the time. I said, ‘All the time? Really?’ He said that if they refused to come on every time they had a death threat, there would never be a show. So I just went on and did it. Later, I learned the truth. The Carpenters had never had a death threat. But there it was. I survived.”
Now, “Short People” may be a strange example, because Randy Newman now hates the song—or at least resents that a near-novelty number was to define his career for mass audiences. I get that. But I think he should be proud he didn’t have to broaden his satire to hit it big. Easy for me to say, but if you don’t get at least a few death threats for proclaiming an entire class of people “got no reason to live,” then your satire is surely toothless.
Funny thing about Randy Newman, though. You’d think he’s the most disagreeable man in the world. But look a little closer. He’s got the devil on his shoulder.
It makes me nervous all the time. A lot of my stuff makes me a little nervous because I don’t like controversy, but I can’t help the way that I write.
I can’t help the way that I write.
John Lennon didn’t like “Run For Your Life.” Randy Newman doesn’t like “Short People.” It’s not strictly true, of course, that they couldn’t help the way they write. They could have self-censored. They could have forced themselves to write in a different style. They could have quit and gone into sales. But we all know the resulting songs would’ve been no good. Can you imagine a “friendly” John Lennon ditty? A deadly serious Randall S. Newman dirge? And no one’s buying a car from Winnie Lennon from down the way. He’s so negative.
These are two fundamentally agreeable guys with fundamentally disagreeable songs. Their devils tried to “help” them, I’m sure, and they turned those infernal fellas down flat. We’re talking about agreeableness here, but I hope I’m being clear: everyone’s got a devil. It’s not just we non-controversialists. For McCartney, maybe it’s the opposite problem. “Dirty this song up,” the little bugger says. “Say something mean. Drop a sudden blast of noise.”
VII. Will They Say I Was a Bad Man?
George Saunders says a more mature artist would just write the damn character, let the audience think what it wants. I say a more disagreeable personality would just write the character. No number of years or experience is going to change the agreeable person. Your devil may shrivel with age but you will too. You’ll weaken together, one never gaining the permanent advantage over the other. That’s your battle to fight. Fight it to the last.
We like to talk about “authenticity.” Being authentic to yourself, or to the truth, or to beauty. We may all conceptualize our North Star differently, but in a secular, materialist world, your personality and the dreadful fact of your own body are inseparable from your authentic self. You can’t cleave off the things you don’t like about yourself and still be true to that same self. Instead you’d be “true,” if that’s the word, to the way you want other people to see you, and what kind of cheap authenticity is that? It’s muddled up with all the usual implicit motivations: love, lust, status.
You see the contradiction, I’m sure. We are love, lust, and status monsters. That’s our software, the burning coals in the furnace. The farther you run from it, the farther you are from your own true self.
Some of you may believe in a higher power. I don’t.
When I’m writing a song, though, I believe in something. I believe, to put it concretely, in the good angel on my other shoulder. I believe in her even though I can’t see her. After many years of practice and attempts at self-knowledge, I see the devil. I can’t always resist him, but I see him. The angel, she’s invisible. I don’t know what the angel looks like, and I don’t actually know what the angel wants. I’ve never heard her speak. I don’t know how to make her appear. I just take a leap of faith and try to write the music she loves.
After all, the ancients had no idea what the North Star was. It just was. The handle of a great Babylonian wagon in the sky? Sure. The tail of a bear? Absolutely. A pinpoint hole in a great tarp thrown over all of this? Now you’re riffin’, baby. Point is, you can orient yourself by the heavens without knowing the first thing about them. You just need to know which way is up.
Your songs are not you. They’re not even for you. That’s something you’ve got to remind your devil every once in a while. Your songs are a message from you to your angel. Like a long and heartfelt letter, they’ve got everything in there. The personality you have, the personality you want and the way you want to be perceived. Your desires, your fears, your cold intellect and hot blood, your loves and hates. All of that. All of that inside stuff meets the outside world, sometimes violently, sometimes gently, and it makes a song.
If the angel were your only audience, what would you write?
VIII. Some end notes.
Paid subscribers (and there are still a few gift subscriptions available, so get in there!) will get a solo piano/vocal performance of “Wrong to Think” in their inbox later this week. Oh, hey, it’s later in the week already. Here it is.
Yes, I know John Lennon was literally assassinated for saying something a crazy person disagreed with. That’s according to the crazy person. Not sure he’s totally reliable.
What do you think of that George Saunders quote? I’m actually not sure what he’s saying, and it’s not clearer in the original (IMO). Is he saying a more mature writer wouldn’t care that his own opinions on climate change were hidden behind the main character’s? Or is he saying that a more mature writer would be more open about it? I’d prefer the former, obviously.
I checked my Netflix viewing history and I was not watching The Americans in 2021. I was watching a lot of Star Trek: DS9. Great show. Completely unrelated to this essay.
This isn’t a psychology essay and I am no psychologist. I hope that’s obvious but not too obvious.
Did you know Polaris wasn’t the “north star” until about 500 AD? I guess I knew in the abstract that the polestar had changed, but I didn’t realize it was so recent. I decided to spare you guys and not start writing about that too.
It’s not like they can get out. Blood-brain barrier, look it up.
You know what they say. He who isn’t a Paul guy at 10 has no imagination, he who isn’t a John guy at 20 has no heart, he who isn’t a George guy at 30 has no wisdom, he who isn’t a Paul guy again at 40 has no brain, and he who isn’t a Ringo guy at 85 needs to take more anti-aging supplements.
Let’s give the original artist his due. For my money Arthur Gunter’s drowsy delivery is definitive. Don’t you think Sam Phillips used a little too much slapback on the Elvis cut? We’re all friends here, right?
What about Paul, you say; I thought you were a Paul guy. I’ve been thinking about that. I hear no compromise in Paul’s writing. I maintain that his songs are inviting, eager for your enjoyment. But that’s who Paul is as a songwriter. There is rarely any self-censoring. If anything, it’s on the rare occasion when he actively tries to make his songs disagreeable that he runs aground. That’s when you can tell that the criticism—perhaps John’s especially—got to him.
He did it again!