Kill Your Heroes (But Dress Like Them)


I didn’t grow up in the Beatles era, the Beach Boys era, I didn’t grow up in that era of pop music auteurship that informs the sort of agreeable musical pretentiousness that is my stock in trade. For me punk was first, of the New York variety, then the London variety, then all that came after. Anyone who knows me well knows that I consider the year 1979 as the year it Pretty Much All Came Together. The progression went thus: punk revealed itself as moderately bankable and in New York and London and LA and around about the cities of England the Suits came Looking For Punk. Cut to a generation of ambitious young musicians of often remarkable vision and talent hacking off their hair and riddling their flares with safety pins and affecting reasonable snarls for the sake of that holiest of holies, The Record Deal. I did much, much worse in my day.

They signed in 1977 or 1978, The Pretenders, The Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Police, Elvis Costello, The Buzzcocks, Joe Jackson, The Talking Heads, XTC, Blondie, and they made good on their contracts by delivering debuts of sufficient punk cred to assure a Difficult Second Album. The Americans hewed a year or two earlier since (sorry) we invented Punk. As far as the Brits go, The Pretenders are the outliers here, their debut in 1979 was complete honed perfection and about as direct and powerful as the more jangly side of rebel music ever got. And get this, a CHICK was driving. Blondie had been printing commercial wax since 1976, 1979’s “Parallel Lines” was already a slick, assured affair that was less a collection of songs than a complete possible world, like “Sergeant Pepper” 12 scant years before, an ironically bright pink world of ice cream and Converse high tops.

In 1979 XTC, The Police, The Clash, PiL, The Stranglers and all the rest released albums that revealed their cheap flim flam games to the world. XTC was no Sex-Pistols-From-Swindon, they were Captain Beefheart sped up to 78 RPM and sprinkled with psychedelia! The horror! The Police were no waifs from the East End, keening about landlords and fascists, they were an international identikit boy band, Seat-wetters in the David Cassidy tradition, selling lasciviously westernized, masculinized reggae that the (much cooler) kids could try dope to. Imagine the relief in the corridors of A&M, Virgin, EMI. The Talking Heads aspired to funk and World Music in ways that would blossom in what seemed like minutes. The Clash rose up and out of whatever gutters they had contrived to doss in and snarl from and became a polyglot assemblage, part Exile-era Rolling Stones, part Who at their most Situationist, part Tom Waits’ callow little brothers.

It was astonishing, this thing that happened in 1979. And it worked because those of us who happened to be 14 didn’t know who the hell Capt. Beefheart were or who Iggy Pop was. To us he was this wasteoid that David Bowie had somehow pulled “The Passenger” out of. The humanity.

Something about “Coming Home” struck me as belonging to this tradition in a way, there was something early ‘80s-ish in how I heard the song, some of XTC’s, Peter Gabriel’s and U2’s drum extremes. We have a skeletal, basket-weaving ostinato motif that borders on obsessive surrounded by guitar atmospherics and supported from beneath by a granitic yet snappy, playful rhythm concept like a late Police record.

It amused me that with “Coming Home” I would be showing my slip, revealing my true influences, the ones I betrayed when they betrayed me. The punks and post punks taught me something I hadn’t know when I was 15. There was this thing called the ‘60s, and with few exceptions (like, when they stole from the ‘50s instead) punk cribbed everything from this era which was so supposedly disgusting to them. How shocked I was to learn the Chrissie Hynde hadn’t invented bangs and eyeliner. Sneak young Sting’s Dippity Do from his medicine cabinet and his barnets are vintage Lennon circa ’65. XTC we don’t even have to mention, they gave up whole hog and simply became a pretty slavish combination of Capt. Beefheart, The Beach Boys and The Strawberry Chocolate Vanilla whatever. Elvis Costello simply tired of sneering, the ROI was too low. And on and on and on.

Don’t get me wrong, I love all of this. This isn’t about inauthenticity or intellectual property theft. Its a thing that hip hop took a step further, a thing that's always a part of popular music. Stealing, stealing, stealing, in ever more actionable ways. Stealing enthusiastically, honoring the source, not honoring the source, mocking the source, revering the source It’s so legitimate, it’s almost too legitimate.

What makes it legitimate is the same thing that legitimizes certain aspects of human character: ownership. How lame would XTC be if they pretended for the rest of their career that they couldn’t be bothered with those ‘60s hacks The Kinks?



The Musicology of the Thing

The Constant Motif for “Coming Home” is musically expressed as vi-I. It’s hardly a chord change at all since the ii is simply a downward iteration of the tonic chord. We call it the “relative minor”. If it can be expressed as a metaphor, vi-I is a sound of coming home. There’s a little bit of a “triumphant” vibe to the cadence, a bit of adventure. Here it’s expressed as a D minor chord to an F major, and for the refrains we play briefly with the IV (Bb) and the V (C). It’s a very populist move, a very Led Zeppelin move, but it’s the money phrase of the song and we don’t want to bury the lead, now, do we?

The vi-I framework suggests simple, nursery rhyme melodies because of how neatly it supports the I’s “Ionian” mode. Modes are similar to keys but are far more implicative, much less neutral. The melody of “Coming Home” reflects the ultra-simple, monosyllabic, nursery rhyme nature of the lyric with a total of six notes. Three notes up, same three notes down, same pattern a major third down; this is 90 percent of the melodic content of the song, up to and including the hook phrase.

The second and third iterations of the chorus contain repetitions that substitute the IV, or Bb major, with its relative minor (ii) G minor to add richness and pathos to the deeper dive of the lyric.

A variation of the Ionian mode leans on the flat fifth scale degree, B natural in the key of F, but this bit of cod-Eastern-ness I saved for the last note of the guitar solo phrases so they could possess their own deeply Robert Fripp-influenced identity.

The most fun, satisfying and sort of ridiculous part of “Coming Home” for me is the final verse after the solo. Here we drop the Terry Chambers obsessive tom tom groove for a skipping, ‘80s percolation in which I give my youthful Police obsession full rein. The guitars drop into a punchy, rockist 16th-note percolation that borders on satire; the part is soaked in a very particular ‘80’s rooster-haired machismo that should invite an indulgent smile. We’re not even in Police territory here anymore, we’ve ventured into the realms of their MTV imitators, The Outfield, Men At Work, some really reprehensible stuff. I do not question; I go where I am told. The lyric tempo changes entirely and compresses to deliver the central emotion of the song, a world-weary, sighing acceptance of basic human shittiness. Here and only here we add a four bar phrase that modulates but, critically, keeps the six-note melody unmodulated.

The ii-V framework is compelling enough to return to for the fadeout, climactically heralded by an upward extension of the melody that sets up a new level of intensity to see the song off.


The Production of the Thing

“Coming Home” is drum-driven in the Peter Gabriel/U2/XTC mold. I used my very nicely purpose-built room to an extent I hadn’t before with gated room mics. Everything that would create power and depth was on the table. The floor tom that features so prominently was recorded three times so that every aspect would be audible. There are two complete kit recordings, one largely just time-keeping on the kick drum and hi hat so the “rolling thunder” floor tom sections maintain sharpness. The “80’s-ness” of the drum production was brought right up to “In The Air Tonight” intensity and then backed off to keep the song from ending up as a tribute to ‘80’s drum production.

The central vi-I piano motif is variously doubled with electric guitars, marimba and synth to fortify it and keep it central. At a couple of points it is also expressed in the vocal harmonies which bring an energized, almost African vibe to the proceedings. The fretless bass is played high with an electronically triggered lower octave so as to convey a reggae low rumble vibe but with the notes clearly expressed. The bass guitar part on “Coming Home” was a pleasant surprise that came about during overdubs; punchy, syncopated, simple and all-around a favorite part of the thing for me. It glues the drums to the piano and guitars just the way it should.

The harmony vocals arrive in two- three- and the occasional four-part deployment, doubled and spread. There are places where great care was taken to convey darkness and disquiet with dissonance (…well, they sent me there…”) in a way I hadn’t toyed with since “For What It Is” from the “Good Expectations” album. The only “normal” harmonies occur on the money phrase of the chorus (“…people don’t you worry…”) for maximum pop impact.


The Song

“Coming Home” is essentially a spiritual. It is a classic death song in the mold of “Like Dying” or “We All Come Back As Birds” from the “Good Expectations” album. “Birds” is quoted in the second verse and the sounds sourced to aurally convey “a desert world of a trillion birds” are very intentionally pulled from the original “We All Come Back As Birds” multitrack. Birds are quite indisputably my favorites of death’s many, many symbols and I am sure I will return to the device until I eventually make like the song.

I tried to say what I wanted to say in “Coming Home” with as few words as possible. There are only one- and two-syllable words and damned few of them. Sometimes a song wishes to say only one very simple thing and the job is to point with every other word to this one simple thing. What I did with “Coming Home” was to communicate absurdity to the listener (“…on a desert world/Of a trillion birds/Well, they sent me there/Because I talk to birds…”) to lightly elbow them towards the hook phrase. The sub-communication is; “everything else here is portentous nonsense”.

Between the “compelling arrival/resolution/homecoming” of the vi-I cadence, the cod-gospel of the lyric, and the skeletal nature of the central accompanying motif, I tried to make every aspect of the piece say one simple thing:

One day you won’t have to deal with all of this shit any more.

"Coming Home" doesn't exist without:

"Travels In Nihilon" and "All Of A Sudden (It's Too Late)" by XTC

The "American" String Quartet by Dvorak

"Swing Low Sweet Chariot" by Wallace Willis

"Secret Journey" by The Police

"A Sort Of Homecoming" by U2

"Intruder" by Peter Gabriel

"Industry" by King Crimson