On
the cover of I'd
Rather Die Than Live Forever,
Brendan Kelly wears a t-shirt that alludes to a truth that some of
his fans might find uncomfortable: He loves Lady Gaga.
“I
am a legitimate fan of what she does,” he says, his sentences brisk
and bated. “I went and saw her show and was pretty blown away.
She's doing some shit, man. People write her off as a shitty,
second-rate Madonna, but she's cooler than Madonna ever was. And she
also writes her shit, produces her shit, she's like a virtuoso
pianist. I think she's awesome.”
Of
course, those familiar Kelly's course as a musician and blogger might
sense more than an ounce of irony in his adoration; he hasn't been
above making extreme statements for a laugh in the past. Still, he
insists his love for Mother Monster is sincere. “I make no
apologies for the fact that I'm a snide wise-ass and this could very
easily be another fucking stupid thing that I say,” he explains.
“When I first came across Lady Gaga, I wasn't necessarily all that
impressed. I thought it was like it was bullshit Euro dance-pop. But,
upon repeated listenings, I started paying attention to her
song-craft and the way that she toys with simple tropes and makes
them very, very weird. And she does it all in this arena of
super-hyper-accessibility, and it's like, fuck...”
This
may not be such a surprise to those who have heard I'd
Rather Die Than Live Forever,
his first solo effort released in the spring of 2012 by Red Scare
Industries. Kelly, like Gaga, has a penchant for writing memorable,
melodic pop songs that seem simultaneously witty and twisted, poetic
and perverse. In fact, he frequently refers to the songs he recorded
with the Wandering Birds as “weird”—the same word he uses to
express what he appreciates about Gaga's songwriting.
Kelly
traces these songs to his last round of songwriting with the Lawrence
Arms, the Chicago punk-rock band with which he's performed most
regularly and which is, perhaps, best known. “The songs were kind
of a palette cleanser after I had written my part of [2006's] Oh!
Calcutta
and [2009's] Buttsweat
and Tears,”
he explains. ”I was like, 'Okay, I didn't think I have too many
more songs like this left in me that are going to be any good right
now.' I didn't think I could sing too many more frustrated,
me-verses-the-world kind of punk-rock songs, so I just started
writing these songs that were weird and different and kind of dark. I
started thinking, 'Man, I could put a record together that sounds
really, really weird if I just keep writing songs like this.'”
The
result resembles the Lawrence Arms very little, but the record is
unmistakably Kelly's. Even he admits that, though he endeavored to
avoid its pitfalls, punk-rock is part of his musical make-up and
will, in some sense, always be present in his songwriting. From his
crispy vocal chords to the playful, bouncy beat present on half of
its tracks, I'd
Rather Die Than Live Forever captures
what is essential about Kelly's music. Of the other half's tracks,
some swagger treacherously and suspiciously; still others sway like
the trees still standing after a tornado. “If you boil the Lawrence
Arms off and you're left with me,” he says, “this is the kind of
stuff that excites me—like, weird, sleazy rock and roll that seems
vaguely dangerous that's about meeting people in weird alleyways to
do creepy things. That's exciting to me. I've always had a lot of
prurient and dark interests like that.”
The album's darker moments, Kelly
recalls, were sparked by the the construction of a single line. “I
remember when I came up with that first line on the record—it's
like 'What's a pretty little thing like you doing in this dingy old
back room'—I was like...ugh! That's awesome. Let's see where this
can potentially go,” he says snickering. “It's so cringe-inducing
that it's got to get interesting. Whether it's good or bad, that's a
totally subjective thing that I can't really control. But I can make
it fascinating—whether it's as morbidly fascinating as a complete
fucking train wreck or whether it's genuinely fascinating as an
interesting exploration of something.”
That first track, “Suffer the
Children, Come Unto Me” shuffles with a catchy discomfort. While
Kelly's acoustic struts with a syncopated stutter, handclaps maintain
a chipper, cheerful beat; in the second verse, these instruments are
replaced with a throbbing electric piano and the gentle jitter of
sleigh bells. With such innocent foundational instruments, it's easy
to miss Kelly's lyrics: “And the last sound that you'll ever know /
is my bone-saw grinding / Woah woah woah woah / Woah woah-no / Soon
they'll be chippin' at your bones / We'll be chippin' at your bones.”
Instrumentally, song concludes with snarling guitars and a precise,
driving drum part, but, melodically, “Suffer the Children” never
becomes quite as insidious as its lyrics.
So, where is this dark—deranged,
really—lyrical content coming from? Kelly says, in some sense, it
comes from having kids. Being a full-time father of two, he struggles
to squeeze in time to write music. When he does write, he challenges
himself to write content that truly fascinates him. “My life has
become a lot more tame, so I'm concerned about losing my juju, just
being shitty old dad,” he says, laughing a little at himself. “So,
one of the main objectives in writing this record was keeping myself
nervous and on edge and pushing my own boundaries of what was
tasteful and acceptable to do.”
Kelly
claims that having children hasn't really
inspired his songwriting. “There's nothing less rock 'n' roll than
being a dad,” he says. But he does concede that the particularly
repulsive aspects of parenting has played some role. “I will say
that 'Suffer the Children, Come Unto Me' was totally inspired by my
kids because they were watching Dora or some shit, and the music is
so fucking bad—so repetitive and catchy that it gets stuck in your
head all day, all week. And I was like, 'I'm going to write a song
like this, but it's going to be the most depraved fucking song ever.'
So in that way, yeah, I never would have written that song if it
hadn't been for my kids.”
“Covered
in Flies”, a song comprised of grimy smudges of guitars and
patinated organ chords, was inspired by a similar mindset. “That
song was about going back to an old storage unit full of dead
hookers, looking in there and being like, 'Well, you know what, we
should really start doing this again. This was really great,'” he
says. “I never would have pushed myself to get to a place that
depraved if it hadn't been for my kids and feeling like I was in
danger of kind of becoming a pussy.
“I
don't want to make it sound I obsessed over keeping my cool,” he
continues, “but, when I sit down to write a song, I want to make
sure I'm always pushing myself. These kids made it hard for me to
push myself in sort of a dark way, but I was like, 'We'll that's
exactly the direction I need to push.'”
But
not every song on I'd
Rather Die Than Live Forever
is deprived. On “The Thud and the Echo”, the record's intriguing
conclusion, Kelly's sparse, dense acoustic chords seem to adorn his
lyrics, dangle from his lines like strands of crumpled tinsel on a
Christmas tree. Something seems different about these lyrics,
though—they're somber, bothered, and, though still fascinated with
death, reflective. “But this time I wanna tell myself this time I'm
gonna change,” Kelly softly sings as he strums, “and then I turn
around this time and do every goddamn thing the same / and as the sun
goes setting on this one of my last days / I'll just piss it away /
and laugh about my fate / and dance on my own grave.”
“That
song has got the most emotional resonance to me,” Kelly admits.
“It's about a friend of mine who's not really a friend, almost kind
of my enemy, who killed himself, and about my own struggle to deal
with how I feel about that. Because we were in this lifetime of
competition and he was winning. He was a doctor that traveled to
Africa who gave heart transplants for free and I was getting drunk in
Baltimore with a bunch of gross dudes.” He then pauses, snickers
sadly, and clears his throat before continuing. “He killed himself
and the circumstances were pretty horrific. It was a real
stock-taking point in my life, and I feel like I owe my wife and my
kids so much that I'm not able to do, and that song is sort of the
culminating of all this genuine emotion.
“A
lot of songs on this record exist in at least somewhat of a
fantastical place,” he continues, his speech no longer brisk and
bated, but slow, almost stumbling, “but that one's really from the
soul. I know that its not the most interesting song, and I wouldn't
have even put it on the record, except I think it's the most
important song on the record.”
Maybe, here, Kelly connects once again
to Lady Gaga, this time in her ability to move from the absurd to the
serious and sentimental—and to make it fit perfectly of the
spectacle that makes up the rest of the record.
And,
maybe, even more so than anything the Lawrence Arms ever released—or
the Falcon, or the Broadways and Slapstick, the other bands for which
he wrote music—Kelly's work with the Wandering Birds is a sincere
expression of his own essence. I'd
Rather Die Than Live Forever,
like its writer, is sweaty and slimy and subtly punk. It's creepy and
discomforting and endlessly interested in exploring the disturbing.
Stripped down, it's simple, but complex in some surprising places. At
times, it's difficult to tell what's serious and what's satire,
what's ironic and what's just wrong. By the end, though, it reveals
itself as honest and sentimental and impressively poetic.
But, mostly, it's weird.
Kelly recorded these songs on April Fool’s Day from his home in Chicago through a new landline phone he purchased just for the Switchboard Sessions. He just put his two children down for a nap and tried to sing quiet enough not to wake them up.
“Your Mother" appears on Brendan Kelly and the Wandering Birds' 2012 record titled I’d Rather Die Than Live Forever. “Hair" is a Lady Gaga cover; the song originally appeared on the 2011 album Born This Way.
Visit the band's Facebook page for more music, and Kelly's blog for hilarious commentary on life in general.
Sorry, but these songs were taken down due to space constraints. Please download The Switchboard Sessions, Volume Three for a track from this and other sessions recorded in 2012. If you're desperate for a copy of these tracks, please see the "About the Switchboard Sessions" page for info on how to contact the author.
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