The Pernice Brothers – The audience is listening
Pernice began recording Live A Little in January 2006, spreading the sessions over four months around tours and his wife’s pregnancy. The album was tracked to analog tape in a converted bakery in Enfield, Connecticut, that is now Deming’s Studio 45.
“He’s a bit of a mad scientist,” Pernice says of Deming. “He’s invented his own microphones, which we used all over the album. We had the luxury of setting things up just the way we wanted. And I did a fair amount of pre-production work. Usually I’ll just do a sketchy demo; my guitar player Peyton [Pinkerton] might not even have heard the songs before. But this time I demoed the songs quite a bit. I knew I wanted to have strings on this record, so I kinda left a space in the arrangements. I’d even demo some leads, but Peyton would take my ideas and do his own thing. I’m not a spectacular musician.”
The lyrics and melodies on Live A Little — from the Village Green-era pop of opener “Automaton” to the sweet Association-esque folk-soul of “High As A Kite” — flow mainly from the solitary practice of just playing his guitar. “If I don’t play guitar a lot, I’ll just start humming,” Pernice says. “For the most part, tunes that I write just come from playing guitar and stumbling on changes that suggest a melody. It’s not that common for me to have a tune I can sing before I play.
“And I don’t write a lot of things down,” he continues. “I just keep playing something over and over. Almost always something will pop into my head, and it grows from there. Very rarely will I get hit with a complete theme or story. Usually when you play something over and over you get a hook, then you start kicking it around and you go from there. Things don’t fall on me completely; it starts with a spark.”
One spark was the story of British experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, who killed himself in 1973. “You were dead by 42/There’d be no rigid form for you/Jammed into a plot where you would never fit,” Pernice sings on the track “B.S. Johnson”. Another cut deals with the 2002 death of the Clash’s Joe Strummer.
On his website, Pernice has joked that Live A Little is largely about the fear of death. But it might not be a joke after all. The transience of days, all the fading moments of beauty or insight in life, is a motif as persistent, sad and sweet as the layered violins and cellos.
“Well, they’re not exclusively about fear of death,” he says. “But I am conscious of the clock ticking every day. It’s not something that handicaps me; I find it liberating. I have a hyper consciousness of my own mortality. That probably sounds lofty or whatever. But I think about living and dying every day. How could that not be present in my music? There are recurring themes of how things are ephemeral, metaphors of missed opportunities, or opportunities that went their course. Are those analogies for a finite time on earth? Do I feel like dying? No. One song is about unbridled casual sex. Is that about fear of death? Many would say yes.
“Another part of me says I’ll be dead, so what do I care?” he adds. But he can’t quite buy into that mindset: “Let’s face it, there’s a lot of good things going on. I don’t feel like leaving.”
Such lyrical concerns might suggest Live A Little is Pernice’s full-length homage to the Smiths — but of course it’s not. On “Somerville”, he celebrates the charm and genuineness of his native New England turf, imagining that he’ll take a lover, “Show her round the neighborhood/Re-case the streets and settle down.” On “PCH 1”, he looks toward California and writes his first song of the open road.
“There I had an idea,” he says. “I really wanted to write a song about a place. I haven’t written too many songs that are about the American Dream. I just wanted to write a song like that, an American tune, the myth of it all. Even in this political climate, you can still have a dream that things might work out. People don’t have that everywhere.”
The album ends with a revision of the Scud Mountain Boys’ song “Grudge F***”, which originally appeared on their 1996 swan song Massachusetts. The dynamics of the song roll and dip and soar, from solo piano and a solitary bass line, to strings and guitars expanding the melody like a million thoughts at once.
“When that song was originally recorded,” he says, “I did it on a four track cassette in my living room. I didn’t know if we were doing demos or what. But it was suggesting a direction I wanted to go musically. We tried playing that song one time live. It was a train wreck of train wrecks. It was nearly comical, like we were all wearing catchers mitts and trying to play. That song went away, and then the Pernice Brothers pulled it out and started playing it live, so the song really belongs to the band. I really like that song, people respond to it, and I thought, nobody is gonna hear it the way I’d like it to get heard. I thought it deserved a good try.”
“I would give anything to make it with you just one more time,” Pernice sings on that tune, but it no longer sounds like a desperate come-on. It simply sounds like an exhilarating pop moment — as if he’d been listening for it for a long time, and he only needed to trust what he was hearing all along.
“If a song begins with an idea,” he says, “then you still have to chase it down, and it opens up other vistas that in the beginning you might not have seen. But by walking down that road, it shows you all these places you can go. You just have to trust that you’re going to see things once you begin.”
ND contributing editor Roy Kasten thanks Joe Pernice and the city of Boston for, at the very least, not making the 2004 Cardinals wear dresses, sing show tunes and dance around the infield.