Digging Deep #9: Romanticizing Poets
... and other circuitous ruminations on death, fame, and art
The Preamble
There seems to be a kind of societal preoccupation with not growing up. Hold onto your childish whimsy, your steadfast sense of wonder, your wildest dreams! I would call it a Disney-ification of childhood, but that would limit its scope. There is a vast subculture (perhaps subculture is the wrong word, but whatever) of infantilism on The Internet – parts of it dark and pedophilic, other parts simply cringe – and whether it’s someone cosplaying a favorite animated character of their youth or another heinous TikTok song using an interpolation of a nursery rhyme, it makes me think that we’ve taken this whole Neverland thing too far.
But maybe I’m being too harsh. “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it,” to quote the original Peter & Wendy by J.M. Barrie. Perhaps it is better to keep on believing you can fly. That’s not what rubs me the wrong way, though – it’s this commercialization of childhood, sold to adults, that feels icky. An insidious form of escapism, to be verbose; a bombardment of nostalgia-based marketing techniques. Don’t you remember when things were better? it seems to ask, while you’re mid-binge of a television show you’ve seen dozens of times under a weighted blanket just to feel less anxious.
This is a roundabout way for me to start talking about “Romanticizing Poets,” which exists within the context of all in which it lives and what came before it. I see RP as the logical progression of songs in my catalog like “Older Now” and “Half as Cool.” In both of those songs I basically just whine about getting older, how I still feel like a kid, yadda yadda. I wrote “Older Now” when I was 22 and “Half as Cool” when I was 23, so I think that checks out. Post-college blues, unsure of myself as a musician, lost in my own existential contemplations of the universe. I am not immune to the retrospective! “Romanticizing Poets,” written right before turning 27, takes a different approach (we will get there, I promise).
Birthdays are perfect catalysts for these feelings to resurface; in this, I am sure I’m not alone. In your early twenties, there’s a fixation on being young and staying young, and the dreaded 25th feels like death (“Now every birthday feels like dying” - see What if it all works out in the end?). The only salve at 25 is knowing you can rent a car.
However, when I turned 26 (that devilish, dirty double baker’s dozen of an age), I found myself finally, unexpectedly, feeling comfortable in my own skin. There are perhaps many reasons for this, but at risk of this post becoming a psychological self-assessment rather than an analysis of my music, I’ll move on. Of course, the idea of turning 30 is still horrifying, but not so much as it used to be.
Writing Romanticizing Poets (The Music)
Grace and I took a trip to France in late August/early September of 2023, and that’s where the song is set. I’m obviously a big fan of real, concrete imagery in songs (see my Digging Deep: Flight to JFK post for some more context on that), so I decided to pack this song full of some of the most distinct moments from our trip. Raining at the Sacre Coeur, rolling our own cigarettes, playing rummy at the same cafe every day we were in Aix-en-Provence, willow trees on the bank of the Seine, etc.
But before I put pen to paper, I first put finger to string! The verse melody and guitar part of this song came through my classic mumbling technique:
10/16/23 verse ideation
I clearly didn’t have the ending of the verse nailed down yet, but in my notes app I had the song idea written: romanticizing poets. You can hear it come together a bit more in this next one:
10/16/23 verse locking in
In my stumbling and mumbling, I attempted to figure out a chorus. Indeed, often in my nebulous grasping for a song, I fall back on my tried and true techniques. I’ll show you what I came up with at first, but be warned: this song did not end up having a chorus! More on that next.
10/16/23 fumbling for a chorus that never quite emerged
This song, with the refrain “oh I’m romanticizing poets again” already in place, was starting to feel like a classic kind of song. Why tarnish that with a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus template? Why not instead exercise my vast songwriting knowledge and pick a different template! Enter the verse/refrain/verse/refrain/bridge/verse/refrain, seen often in jazz standards. In my own interpretation of these kind of songs, the verses explore an idea and cap it off with the grand refrain. Then the bridge expands on that idea, maybe tosses in a tentative explanation. Okay Theo, let’s run with that.
10/16/23 bridge idea interesting!
If these Digging Deep posts have been interesting to you at all, then I think you’ll have appreciated the meandering nature of that last voice note. Some of the pieces are there, but it’s wilder, untamed. Just needed a little pruning. I really had written the music of this song before the words – not unheard of for me, but definitely different.
Now let’s discuss the lyrics.
Writing Romanticizing Poets (The Lyrics)
As I mentioned above, I wanted this song to be chock full of poignant moments from our France trip. But that’s more or less a guise under which I was hoping to develop the idea of “romanticizing poets.” Please allow me to ramble for a second.
You are probably familiar with the “27 Club,” a so-called list of musicians, writers, and artists who all died at the age of 27, in the prime of their lives and careers. Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse are some of the big names on the list. The “white lighter curse” goes hand in hand with the 27 Club idea – allegedly a number of these artists had a white BIC lighter in their pockets when they died (a theory debunked by historical fact). The whole thing has been sensationalized, mythologized to the point of legend. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself. What I think is damaging is the celebration of the destructive habits that many of these people engaged in. We have created a fiction around these godlike creative figures. See “too bright, how they burned.”
Too many people (myself included) have exalted these stories as legends while forgetting the very real people with very real issues behind them. I’ve always wondered if my music would be better if I was more tortured, more troubled, more mystical. (Shoutout Vincent Van Gogh, shoutout Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.) I use so much of my own life in my songs that I often feel like I’m fictionalizing it, and I don’t want to lose the humanity of it all in my journey for success. See “tragedy to fiction to a trite mythology.”
It goes beyond the 27 Club, though. Elvis is a good example of the sanitization of a musical hero, and of course that kind of list goes on and on. We often whitewash the more unsavory parts of a person’s life to keep them on a pedestal that we’ve posthumously constructed, and that does as much damage as forgetting them in the first place. See “an inconvenient contradiction, a neat mythology.”
So yeah. I think that all came together pretty well in the song. The writing process for this one took precisely one week, from October 16th to October 23rd, 2023.
10/23/23 first full, rough recording I took of the song
Recording Romanticizing Poets
It’s always a daunting process to try to record a song that I wrote so cleanly and clearly with just an acoustic guitar. How do you translate the dynamics of a live performance? How do you retain the emotionality of the song while making it sound better than the voice recording?
Jack Kleinick (album producer) and I struggled with this at first. I wanted to do a simple live recording, no click, just me and a guitar. Jack allowed it, and the very last day of recording at Grand Street in Brooklyn, at the buzzer, I did a take that I thought was absolute money. Turns out I was too drunk on the High Lifes and Jack Daniels to realize I was playing it incredibly slowly. I am literally laughing out loud listening to the plodding tempo. Here it is, in all its glory:
11/20/23, the drunk and languorous take
Okay, back to the drawing board. I had enjoyed borrowing the studio’s Gibson J-45 – it had a nice deep and woody quality, and as the song requires the guitar to be tuned down a whole step, it really resonated. Most of the guitars I own are smaller, concert sized, so they project well but often lack the low end that a dreadnought can provide. Once we got back to LA, I called up my friend Sam and asked if I could borrow his Gibson Hummingbird (previously mentioned in Digging Deep #8: Nothing New). At Jack’s home studio (a recurring theme of the album recording process), I recorded it again in one take, no click. Et voila! C’était parfait.
Parfait for the moment, I should say, but not quite fini. The song needed a bit more jeuje, a je ne sais quoi. And then it hit me. Strings! It is called “Romanticizing Poets,” after all. I hit up my friend Shaan Ramaprasad, the best strings guy I know, and told him I wanted “something spooky.” Just kidding. I told him I wanted something grand and romantic, and that is just what he did. It’s a simple recording for a simple song.
Reading Comprehension Questions
Do you think that T. Kandel actually believes in the stance he takes in The Preamble, or was he just feeling particularly bitter the day he wrote this?
What’s your favorite line in “Romanticizing Poets”?
Were you able to discern T. Kandel’s lyric scribbles in his notebook? Should he work on his handwriting?