Travels With Brindle was kind enough to write about her songwriting journey and comparing it to Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.
Reaching a songwriting destination
By Chelsea Spear of Travels With Brindle
The Idiot by Elif Batuman depicts some unfortunate rites of passage for creatively minded young adult women with an epigrammatic style that wrapped itself around a vulnerable point of view. Reading it 20 years after I ended a few abusive friendships with older men who had more power in the local arts scene, I giggled at protagonist Selin Karadag’s sparkling wit, and gasped at the casual cruelty of her crush, Ivan Varga.
The book made such an impact on me that it started weaving its way through my songwriting. First there was “Ivan,” which came from the heartfelt emails Selin and Ivan exchange when she confesses her love to him; then I wrote “Rudolph’s Ranch,” a paean to a learn-to-read-Russian text Selin reads, for a songwriting challenge. “Something’s Wrong” was a response to a Songfight prompt, and I recast Selin’s sleepless nights in her dorm’s computer lab into a girl-group single complete with arpeggiated ukulele and call-and-response vocals. Each of those songs, including a new single titled “Switching Tracks,” out this Friday, will be featured on my debut album, Notes From Undergrad, set for release on June 2.
To steal some words from Batuman’s novel, the shape of a potential album was spread out in front of me like some fantastic salad. A passage at the end of the book, in which Ivan tells Selin that he’s unable to reciprocate her feelings for him, seemed like a natural next song to write. Since I had been traveling by train to visit my in-laws in New Jersey, the sensations of train travel — the rhythm of the train on the track, the squelch tags from the stop announcements, the greenish fluorescent lighting in the cafe car — was fresh in my mind, and I changed Selin and Ivan’s transatlantic flight to a train ride down the East Coast.
I always start my songs with the title, and I took to Ask Metafilter for a song title that would serve as a breakup metaphor or a bit of train lingo. Tomorrowful’s suggestion of “Switching Tracks” stuck in my head. Inspired by music historian Chris O’Leary’s deep dive on the Boston vocal group The Jamies, I stole a chord progression from “Summertime, Summertime” and started writing lyrics to sing over it.
I ended up with a barf draft of dense, amelodic lyrics that has thankfully been lost to time. When I wrote it I felt the rush of having created something, but once that feeling of accomplishment slid off my brain like a five-dollar bill between couch cushions. When the pandemic started a few months later, I went through my drafts and began editing it. I set a limit of four bars for each verse and cut all the details that didn’t work, singing a melody of half- and whole notes at the lower end of my head voice.
In the book, Selin responds with resignation to Ivan’s observations, and while I understood why she might have a more subdued response, I wished I could have jumped through the pages and fed her some bons mot. This staircase wit was a reflection of all the pent-up things I’d have to say to the men who treated me as cruelly as Ivan did Selin, and I took all the things I wished I could have said to the men I knew and put them to music. It worked better, and I began playing the song at pandemic open mics.
Over the summer of 2020, I began a mentorship with Massachusetts-area singer/songwriter Erin McKeown. “Switching Tracks” was one of the first songs we revised, and it felt unique because it didn’t need as heavy a lift as some of the others. (Ask me about the ill-advised key change in “Something’s Wrong”!) Erin advised me to stay with the characters in the first verse and don’t cut too quickly to the chorus, and I took their advice and stacked the two verses and pre-choruses one after the other. Once I finalized that, I began playing the new version of “Switching Tracks” at open mics, and people continued to respond favorably to it. One of the old codgers at an open mic told me it reminded him of “Can’t Hardly Wait”, and since I spent my teen years listening to everything from 1984 out of Minneapolis, a Paul Westerburg comparison struck me to my core.
I carried that influence into the recording of the song. When I recorded “Switching Tracks”, I played it at the same BPM as the Replacements played their song, and I wrote a horn part for two trumpets and a trombone to play us off that train. Once I sourced a trio of brass players off of Reddit, I sent the stems to Christian DeKnatel to mix. Christian has a brighter, more electronically driven sensibility than did Jim Dickinson, and his iteration of the song sounded more like something you’d hear on The Adventures of Pete & Pete, one of my favorite TV shows from when I was Selin’s age. This was where hopelessly nostalgic middle-aged me needed to be, and the sweetness of Christian’s mix made some of the angrier lines in the song sting a little harder.
So here it is, almost four years since I wrote “Switching Tracks,” getting ready to share this song with you. I hope it soundtracks your own misadventures on public transit, even if it’s a less epic bus ride across town.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7v7VVzgfAFaIT3Ga2oa4Km?si=3fwSU0DfQbGJJpyUHOGxew
Bandcamp: https://travelswithbrindle.bandcamp.com/
Homepage: https://travelswithbrindle.com/
