Brother Joe Pernice Basks In The Joy of Pop

photo by Jayme Thornton

Joe Pernice was listening to the mixes of his new album, Discover a Lovelier You, at an L.A. studio last winter when he heard Blake Hazard, his female duet partner on the song “Subject Drop,” exclaim, “Do you realize you’ve made your first good album?”

LIKE ANY GOOD STORYTELLER
Pernice exaggerates for effect, but this tale highlights the paradox of Pernice’s music. Hazard, a Boston singer/songwriter, does have a point: After a career built on downbeat songs, Pernice has filled Discover a Lovelier You with spirit-lifting passages and musical moments of pure pleasure. Even if those elements are almost always countered by bitter assessments of how such hopes fare in the real world, optimism is as much a part of these songs as pessimism. Pernice knows this; that’s why he can poke fun at himself.

If this happily married Boston Red Sox fan were really the Gloomy Gus he’s made out to be in the press, if this busy songwriter and successful small-label owner were really as offended by feel-good music as he pretends to be in his own story, he wouldn’t be as interesting an artist as he is. It’s true that much of the traffic in his songs heads toward doubt and despair, but there has always been a trickle of cars headed in the opposite direction, and it’s the collision between these two lanes that brings his songs to life. On Discover a Lovelier You, there’s more traffic than ever headed in the feel-good direction, and this leads to bigger collisions and brighter sparks.

More often than not, the optimism resides in the music and the pessimism in the words. Pernice’s melodies, especially since he left behind the alt.country sound of the Scud Mountain Boys for the lush pop of the Pernice Brothers, are full of yearning, and this yearning is often rewarded with expansive harmonies in the style of such heroes as Brian Wilson and Jimmy Webb. But the lyrics are always skeptical of such happy endings; like his heroes Morrissey and Elvis Costello, Pernice is forever pointing out the ways romances crash and burn, the ways dreams crumble. The words breathe so much melancholy into the music that the harmonies become wistful rather than satisfying.

“When I’m writing,” he explains, “the melody is first. I love melodies, and I gravitate toward writing melodies that I might want to listen to. Lyrically, I might be a darker person, but musically, I like major chords and major sevenths. Sometimes I’ll step back and say, ‘Why aren’t you writing something cheerful to go with that melody?’ But it just doesn’t come; I’m not in that territory. Lyrically, it’s an entirely different ballgame. I tend to be a darker person when I start writing words. But the songs are never all-out sad, there’s always some hope, especially on this record.”

Discover a Lovelier You is the fifth album credited to the Pernice Brothers. Older brother Bob helped out in the studio as always, even though family and work prevent him from touring with Joe and the other band members. The album is reminiscent of early-’80s New Wave when small combos such as The Jam, The Smiths, The Cars, The Attractions and The Soft Boys used chiming guitars, circus keyboards and lean, brisk rhythm sections to confect shiny pleasure vehicles for their misanthropic observations.

Much of pop music devotes itself to making sense of the past, but these songs are trying to figure out the future. They resonate because we’re all trying to fathom a future that may be better or worse than we assume. What if I ask out that girl in history class and she laughs in my face? What if I don’t ask her out and find out later she liked me? Which is worse? Is it worse to campaign for your favorite candidate only to see him lose or to have him win and then betray his promises? Or to not work for your favorite candidate and watch him lose by a razor-thin margin? Pernice confronts the future more pointedly than almost any other artist.

“Saddest Quo,” for example, opens with a sunny guitar strum and a dizzying, descending guitar line that recalls The Beatles’ version of Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love.” The music’s optimism is echoed in Pernice’s first verse, “Trying to be a better person … my faith in life’s unbroken.” The desire to believe in a better self and a better world is sincere, but it is sorely tested in the catchy, harmony-cloaked chorus. The singer turns on the TV and sees a government full of “hypocrites … choking on their blind faith” and reporters exploiting scenes of a “train wreck picking up survivors from a plane crash.”

How, the song seems to ask, do you hold on to hope when so much of the evidence points the other way? The lyrics suggest a world designed to frustrate every shred of optimism, to leave us “waiting for the sky to fall.” The guitar arpeggios, so pretty at first, seem to get stuck in this paradox. Unable to move forward, their static repetition becomes part of the song’s frustration rather than its antidote.

“I was home a lot when I wrote that song,” Pernice remembers. “I was watching a lot of news and I was disgusted by the way TV was presenting the news, not just politics, but the whole presentation of reality. I wanted to make a tiny person’s comment on a big thing.

“A lot of songs that hint at politics do so heavy-handedly. A lot of subjects, maybe all subjects, have to be handled with kid gloves. Any time a songwriter wants to express anger at something, it’s easy to become so forceful that it makes people want to clap their ears. I never like being yelled at or preached at; that makes me feel like an idiot. I wanted to find a way to talk to the listener without making them feel like an idiot.”

There’s another political allusion on “Say Goodnight to the Lady,” which laments living in Homeland Security’s “color-coded era.” It’s a song about leaving New York in 2004 after four years of living in Brooklyn, but it’s also about Pernice’s perennial struggle between optimism and pessimism. As the music rises in hopeful, Beatlesque chords, he allows that he “prayed for hope to spring eternal even if the trickle’s slow,” but he worries about deluding himself. What if every expectation is doomed to be dashed in the end, what “if the snicker was the future looking back at me?”

He evokes his current home of Toronto on “My So-Called Celibate Life.” The verse’s description of life’s frustrations are underlined by a nervous R&B guitar rhythm and an agitated vocal. But then a dreamy guitar figure and whispery harmonies usher in the chorus with fatalistic resignation: “The breakdowns litter the highway out of town. In Ontario there’s a light snow falling down. It’s a short slide down.”

A companion song is “Snow,” a garage rocker with an especially ominous, distorted lead guitar. The lyrics describe a car rounding the bend on an icy road; time slows down as the car starts to skid. Pernice doesn’t give us the end of the story; he simply lifts the melody into a succession of delirious “ooh ooh oohs.”

“In my own listening experience,” he says, “when something is hinted at in an image that’s not so obvious, I tend to give myself to it more readily rather than if it were something more clumsy. It’s that Hitchcock business where you never see the knife, where the person watching is invited to leave their fingerprints on the scene. If you, the listener, has to complete the story, it becomes more of a personal experience.”

There’s a lot of cinematic technique in Pernice’s songwriting—in the fast cuts from image to image, in the alternating use of long shots and close-ups, in the way the background music can contradict the surface meaning of the dialogue. But never has his debt to the movies been as obvious as on his new song, “Red Desert.” The title comes from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film about an Italian woman trying to recover from a nervous breakdown.

Pernice alludes to the movie’s shipyard setting, to the woman’s attempts to reconnect with her son, to the sensuousness of Antonioni’s name, to other favorite films (Don’t Look Back, Five Easy Pieces) and to the fact that “MacArthur Park” singer Richard Harris plays the woman’s lover (“out in the rain like a wet cake”).

“Movies are really big to me,” Pernice admits, “really influential to my music. Movies always inspire me to write songs; as forms they’re really close. Listening to music or watching a movie, you can just sit down and let it enter your head. With reading, by contrast, you have to concentrate; you have to do something. A book won’t grab you without you making it grab you. But how many times have you walked past a television and said, ‘Oh, shit, I don’t want to get pulled into this,’ but you do anyway?”

If Pernice’s combination of shimmering music and bummer lyrics recalls The Smiths, that’s no accident. Morrissey and Johnny Marr’s band was the great musical love of Pernice’s adolescence. When he was invited to write a short book about a particular album for Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series, he chose The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder.

But he didn’t write a history of the making of the album or a critical essay about its meaning. Instead Pernice wrote a novella about a mid-’80s teenager at a Catholic high school on the Boston South Shore who clung to a cheap cassette copy of Meat Is Murder as his lifeboat in a sea of sexual frustration and social alienation. The book, Pernice admits, is “semi-autobiographical.”

“I grew up on the South Shore,” he concedes, “in suburbia. My family was great and I had lots of friends, but culturally it was a wasteland. I went to Catholic schools all my life, and there was no music, no art. It was all about a strict discipline and curriculum. Today I picture it all as kind of gray; it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t very inspiring either. Because of that, like a million other people, I retreated into music, just because there wasn’t a heck of a lot else to do.

“I definitely credit my brother for getting me interested in music. Bob’s five years older than me, but he was very patient, even though I broke a lot of strings on his guitar. As I started playing music and excelling at it, we became friends, and that’s always a big breakthrough, when your older brother becomes your pal. He’s a much better player than I’ll ever be. If you ask him, ‘Bob, what’s that song from 1966 that goes such and such?’ he’ll pick up his guitar and play it. He never pursued it the way I have, but he’s a very talented guy.

“I played in bands but there were no gigs. You played covers at a dance once a year and it was the highlight of your life. Certainly The Smiths were huge for me, as were bands like The Jam, The Clash and early R.E.M. You’d hear The Smiths playing ‘Well I Wonder’ or The Jam playing ‘Dig the New Breed,’ and you’d think, ‘I could play those changes; that’s not too hard.’ It was inviting. And it had that angst that appeals to a teenager.”

That brain-blocking angst made Pernice, by his own account, a mediocre student and confused outcast until he was a junior at the University of Massachusetts. That year he happened to take a poetry-writing class, and when he tackled his first assignment something clicked. Here was an area he could pursue with enthusiasm rather than merely a sense of obligation. He soon switched his major from engineering to English.

“I f---ed myself economically,” he acknowledges, “but I felt a lot better. Though I liked engineering and math, I didn’t like where it was leading me, to the kind of job I’d have to take. I had been a ball of nerves for years; I hadn’t felt engaged with my courses, but when I became an English major, a light went off. I studied with the poet James Tate, and he was inspiring to me as a young kid. He stressed the artistic vocation, that it was a worthy, noble thing to dedicate your hours to.

“Even today, when people ask me about my influences as a lyricist, I don’t think of Bob Dylan or Joe Strummer. For me, the biggest influence is the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer or American poets such as James Wright, Charles Simic and James Tate. When I started to really bury myself in songwriting, which wasn’t until I was in graduate school, I had already been writing poetry for several years. When I wrote lyrics, I wasn’t trying to write poems, because I feel they’re two different things. But I definitely borrowed conventions from poetry to use in my songwriting, especially from Transtromer.”

Poetry and song lyrics are both forms of verse, but that’s like saying novels and magazine stories are both forms of prose; it’s true but it glosses over fundamental differences. Lyrics don’t have to carry the emotional weight all by themselves; they have music to share the load. Poetry just sits on the page alone; it has to move us without any help. On the other hand, poetry doesn’t have to compromise; it can choose any word or sequence it wants, and it can force the reader to slow down to glean the meaning. By contrast, lyrics always have to compromise to fit the music and have to grab the listener’s attention on the run as the music flows by. Both have their challenges.

“You could argue that Dylan’s best stuff is poetry,” Pernice says, “but I don’t think of The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘A Day in the Life’ that way. I think ‘A Day in the Life’ is the best pop song ever, but I don’t want to open a book and read the lyrics. I think people demand different things from a song than they do from a poem. They expect a poem to keep up the diction of poetry, but if a song doesn’t keep up a high level of language, the music can take over for a spell.

“And yet I was able to take things I learned from writing poetry and apply them to songwriting. I started editing my songs the same way I would a poem. Does every word count? Is there any fat cluttering up the song? Are the images saying what I want or anything at all? I knew songs were a lot more forgiving, because you have melody and all kinds of bells and whistles, but I got used to being very tough and ruthless. I learned to get the scalpel out and it still serves me well.”

Part of that ruthlessness was cutting out any lines that smacked of wishful thinking or self-deluding romanticism. This habit gave him a reputation as a dour pessimist, but his career can be described as a quest to find hopeful music to balance his skeptical lyrics.

By the time he’d entered the creative-writing graduate program at UMass, he’d co-founded an alt-rock band called The Scuds. But the more he got into writing lyrics, the more he started listening to Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, The Louvin Brothers and Gram Parsons. After all, these were songwriters who put a lot of weight on their lyrics. Soon he was writing his own country-flavored songs and playing them with The Scuds when they finished their regular gigs and went back to the apartment to sit around, drink and pick.

“When we played electrically,” Pernice remembers, “it was just loud with no nuance. We had very few dynamics; it was loud and louder. If you played in small clubs, the PAs are terrible; because we couldn’t really hear, we couldn’t pull off the harmonies we wanted. It wasn’t fun. But when we played quietly, we could hear the harmonies; you could hear the lyrics or the way an acoustic guitar played against the swell of an electric guitar.

“That’s when I started writing a lot, sometimes two songs a day. I felt more inspired to be expressive because the lyrics could finally be heard. And because the melodies and harmonies could be heard, I paid more attention to them, too.”

The Scuds launched an alt.country side project called The Scud Mountain Boys to play their after-hours music for paying customers. Turns out it was more fun for the customers and the musicians and soon became the main concern. The early ’90s were a fertile time for music in Western Massachusetts; David Berman of the Silver Jews (which also included Stephen Malkmus) was also in the creative writing program at UMass, and Sebadoh was still based in the area. The Scud Mountain Boys released two low-budget albums for tiny label Chunk in 1995, and those discs attracted enough attention that Sub Pop financed the third album, 1996’s Massachusetts. Massachusetts was a sensation in the fledgling alt.country world at the time. Pernice’s songs were more literate and melodic than most of the genre, and The Scud Mountain Boys were poised to become big fish in this small pond. But there was a problem: Pernice’s new songs weren’t country.

“A lot of country music is I-IV-V progressions,” he points out, “and there’s only so many times I can listen to that before my ear grows tired. I had left the corral. I didn’t want to make another record like Massachusetts. I really liked that record, but I had done that. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to use different instruments, to make them supportive of the song.”

His obsession with the songs Jimmy Webb had written for country-pop star Glen Campbell had led Pernice into pure pop, the world of Webb, Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, Harry Nilsson, Carole King and the Left Banke, a realm even more unhip than country. He started writing songs that were meant for strings and piano, not pedal steel and mandolin. He knew these songs were striking a better balance between yearning music and bleak words. He also knew The Scud Mountain Boys couldn’t do them justice. He wanted to record them with the Pernice Brothers, the side-project band he’d started with Bob. The more he stewed, the more he realized the Pernice Brothers should be his main focus, and he’d have to leave The Scud Mountain Boys.

“I don’t think you can do two bands at once,” he explains. “Writing and recording a record is the easy part; the hard part is going out and touring behind it for eight or ten months. It wouldn’t have gone over too well to make a Scud Mountain Boys record and then say, ‘By the way, instead of touring I’m going to do this other thing.’ My decision didn’t go over too well with the rest of the band, so I didn’t leave on the best of terms. I was vilified for breaking up the band; I moved away and I haven’t kept in touch with them. But I never f---ed anyone over; I was always up front and told people to their face what I was doing.”

Thom Monahan, who had produced the second and third Scud Mountain Boys albums, had become Pernice’s most trusted musical partner since his brother. The three of them joined keyboardist Michael Deming, guitarist Peyton Pinkerton, drummer Aaron Sperske and local union string and horn players in a Hartford studio in 1997 to pursue Joe Pernice’s new songs and new chamber-pop vision.

“There I was,” he remembers. “I had broken up this band that had gotten a fair amount of hype. I had taken a pretty big chunk of money from Sub Pop, and I was going into the studio with people I barely knew. I started to panic. I said to myself, ‘Am I turning ‘Crestfallen’ into a ridiculous string orgy or is what’s happening supportive of the song?’ Finally I decided I needed to let my connection to the work be the main thing. That’s where the payoff is; you can’t jeopardize that. ‘F--- it,’ I told myself, ‘this is what I want to do. If I get paralyzed, I’ll never do what I want.’

“When I heard the orchestra playing along with the track with a woman beating on a harp, I said, ‘This is amazing.’ It just blew my mind and at that moment, I knew I was doing the right thing. I was having a blast. The music was almost cinematic.”

That album, released in 1998, was Overcome by Happiness. It set the template for all the Pernice Brothers albums to come: 2001’s The World Won’t End, 2003’s Yours, Mine & Ours, 2004’s live CD/DVD set, Nobody’s Watching, and this year’s Discover a Lovelier You.

But before he could pursue this chamber-rock sound, Pernice had two older batches of songs to deal with. One was a bundle of country-flavored songs intended for the fourth Scud Mountain Boys album; he released them as a Joe Pernice solo album, 2000’s Big Tobacco. The second was a cluster of songs so bleak and spare they didn’t fit the lush Pernice Brothers sound; they were released as 1999’s Chappaquiddick Skyline, credited to the one-off band of the same name.

Pernice’s once enthusiastic relationship with Sub Pop soured during the Chappaquiddick Skyline experience, and he left the label to form Ashmont Records with his business partner Joyce Linehan. The label has released not only the last four Pernice Brothers albums but also a volume of Pernice’s poetry, 2001’s Two Blind Pigeons.

“I just wanted total control of my music,” he says. “If I’m going to bust my ass playing music, I should be the one who makes a living from it. I don’t mean to pick on Sub Pop, because they’re no different from any other label, and I’ve heard that ‘the bigger the label, the bigger the crap.’ No matter if you’re the biggest genius in the world, if you don’t meet the numbers, you’re going to be dropped and be looking for another record deal. I saw the handwriting on the wall. It’s not personal; it’s business.

“It didn’t make sense to go to another label, because I don’t fit that business model. I’m not nor will I ever be a mainstream artist. There are people who want to be stars; in my younger, more naïve days, I might have been one of them. Luckily, I got past that. Owning my own label, I don’t have to sell even 50,000 records to live comfortably and have creative control. It’s the best of both worlds. I have a good head for numbers and a really good memory, and I have a partner who’s really good too. You need an ally, that’s for sure.”

After the string-drenched arrangements of The World Won’t End, Pernice decided to strip down the arrangements for Yours, Mine & Ours. On the road he learned that the Pernice Brothers sound’s buoyant romanticism had less to do with instrumentation than it did with melody. If he wrote enough catchy parts for a song, it didn’t matter if those parts were played by four violins or a single electric guitar; the feeling came through. That new openness in the arrangements allowed the vocals to cut through more sharply than ever. By reducing the variables, he was able to increase the tension between the music’s reverie and the lyrics’ cold splash of water.

“I was really into the lyrics I had written for this new record,” he explains, “and I didn’t want them to get squashed by the other instrumentation. I wanted to bring the arrangements back even further. And I discovered that when you create more space, you can really jack up what’s left. The bass and drums are really loud on this record, and the melodic elements, the pleasure factors, are given more weight. On the other hand, the vocals—and the lyrics are as dark as ever—are showcased more than ever, too. So the tension is still there.”