dailyeatings

My next-door neighbor Tim has started a band.

Until recently, his musical pursuits had so far been limited to grooveless, jerky drumming—the kind of dyskinetic mishmash one might expect from a percussionist with advanced Parkinson’s disease—and loud, thrashy powerchords pumped through his Wal-mart guitar amp. He hadn’t ever played any real songs per se; most of the time, he would simply play a three or four chord hook from a popular song, say, Green Day’s “Basket Case”, over and over again, with subtle variations each time. Starting out slowly and sloppily, he’d play it faster and faster, each time as messy as the first, until the notes and sounds were so mashed together it was difficult to tell what was a mistake and what was intentional, which I suppose must sound to him like progress or improvement.

What he definitely never did until now, however, is sing.

He and his equally talented backing band started rehearsing in our shared attic space last weekend almost as soon as I was getting settled to take a nap. Instead of restful quiet, my Sunday afternoon was instead three solid hours of the most wretched cover song ever, Bowling for Soup’s “1985″. I don’t know what it is that motivates poor singers with already limited vocal skills to pick songs far, far outside their singing range. Tim clearly cannot or is unwilling to sing the melodic line as written, opting instead to half-rap, half-wail the lyrics at random pitch intervals between a fourth to an entire octave below the original. The bassist and guitarist share in this apparent interest in atonal improvisation, as they can’t consistently play the correct notes in a song which has only 5 chords in total. When combined with Tim’s virtuosic singing, it all comes together to create an artistic statement of such staggering profundity that all I can do is plug my ears and sing the right notes to myself, hopefully drowning out the dying cats wailing above me.

And I don’t even want to talk about what happened after the third hour, when they started playing “Hey Ya.”