The Suckiest Singer-Songwriters Helped Me Through My Suckiest Times

The other day I overheard my audio engineer buddy offering our mutual friend a job he couldn't do. Audio engineer dude was like "blah blah near Times Square blah not something you'd be interested in musically… money's good. But yeah blah something Broadway yeah singer-songwriter." The entire time our friend had been nodding his head in that I'm Definitely Paying Attention Dude way but when he heard “singer-songwriter” he stopped and winced a little. "Really? Well… I mean I guess it could be fine. I really need the money." I felt for him. As a former Dave Matthews Band fan, suicidal emo teen, and overweight thespian I knew that recording session was gonna be painful.

“Singer-songwriter” is a singularly annoying genre primarily because the musicians who front their respective bands basically write everything from the get go and then expect their bands to just, you know, fill in the blanks. Then sometimes they name the bands they're in with their own names and just add the word “Band” at the end as an afterthought. But the genre is annoying for a lot of other reasons. The most awful of which being the culture surrounding its stars. And since I'm chill with having no shame it's cool for me to lead you on a journey through the absolute worst parts of my life and the singer songwriters who got me through.

DAVE MATTHEWS BAND

Ninth grade was pretty difficult for me. I accidentally got a really weird Hansel and Gretel looking haircut in the summer and started taking a two hour train from my small upstate New York town to a weird part of Westchester to continue my private, Catholic school education. I made a lot of mistakes the first week of school: I was fat, I was a closeted lesbian, and I was wearing my stepdad's CK Be cologne. The rest of the year was a snarl of being called Lesbian Seagull and getting pushed into lockers while the slightly less unpopular kids stole my textbooks. After that maelstrom I demanded to go to the local public school in my tiny town but before I started made a plan: I had to be popular. Fortunately this girl Jessica Who Lives Up The Street that my mom had been trying to get me to hang out with since we'd moved to that neighborhood had become popular somehow in the years since I'd seen her shaking in the cold at the bus stop. I asked her to hang out and took mental notes: Shell top Adidas and American Eagle everything else. Easy. But what was she listening to? Sublime, DMX, Steve Miller Band, and 311 but her favorite thing was DAVE. She had crumby, pixelated computer printouts of DAVE and posters of DAVE and mall-bought colored pencil sketches of DAVE. That's when I learned the key to popularity and fitting in was DAVE MATTHEWS BAND! I immediately went home, ripped out one of those "10 CD's for a Dollar" things that used to be in every Seventeen Magazine and filled out all the CD's I'd seen on her bedstand. When they arrived I learned the lyrics by heart while wearing khaki Mudd flares, started binge drinking, and comfortably sailed into my new role of Funny Fat Girl in the Popular Crowd.

CONOR OBERST

After I'd been popular for a while I felt alienated because I was actually a weirdo that couldn't relate to straight people who wore uncomfortable clothes to attract one another. When my friends started getting into ecstasy and coke in the summer before junior year I decided to "do my own thing" and renounce them, thus becoming chained to the off-brand desktop computer my mom's weird friend sold us. In July I'd gone to field hockey camp and met this super hot Asian girl and was into IMing her and obsessively checking her info box. One day she had a hilarious quote from someone with the screenname sTuPidJeRkFaCe and I thought it sounded cool so I messaged her. She seemed like a badass girl living in New Jersey doing badass things, mainly because she was. We ended up having a secret internet romance that lasted from the end of July until Thanksgiving when I convinced my family it was okay to visit her during the holidays. We made out IRL (my first kiss) and I was horrified. I, like, MADE OUT WITH A GIRL, and I freaked out and never saw her again. Anyway the important thing to know here is that Maria (that was her name) exposed me to Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst and Jade Tree and Deep Elm and zine culture all this emo shit so I had this whole soundtrack to feel different to and be the perfect sad, lonely freak. But it was sexy too. And sad. One time she sang Bright Eyes' "Pull My Hair" to me on the phone at four in the morning all sexy like. And there was the time I tried to kill myself listening to "Something Vague." Teenagers and razor blades, am I right?

THESPIAN SINGERS WITH REALLY GOOD DICTION WHO PLAY ONE INSTRUMENT MECHANICALLY WELL

During my emo non-popular girl exploration time I became public friends with my formerly secret friend at school. She HAD to be my secret friend previously because she wasn't well liked. Anyway, when we went public with our friendship she exposed me to a lot of stuff that I didn't know about like musicals and people who did musicals and people who like that kind of music who decide they're going to make music like that too. Of course I knew about, like, Jesus Christ Superstar from VH1 and Annie from my childhood but I hadn't previously been exposed to the type of people who sing all the words really clearly and play open mics confidently with their friends who got to performing arts high schools that are really nice where everyone respects their creativity. Tiffany (my public best friend) was hated in our small town high school for taking an interest in theatre and I guess I subconsciously knew I could trust theatre kids with my burgeoning sexuality. Or something.

As you can see from my examples singer-songwriter music is rife with memories and decisions that make my stomach churn and it's those memories and my past that dictate how I feel about people's creative endeavors and just how mercilessly I'll criticize them.