CW93

I wrote “Cymbal” in 1993, when I was 17. It was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, and my friend Ben had just graduated. He’d be off to college in the fall.

We were both on the field crew at Tuttle’s Red Barn—“the oldest family farm in America” (1632-2013)—in Dover, New Hampshire. We’d carpool to work together, with our friend Owain, over from nearby Durham.

We worked forty-five hours a week: five ten-hour days with an unpaid hour in the middle for lunch. $4.75 an hour, all outdoors. The crew did lots of things, but the overarching story of the summer was in two halves: strawberries and peas, and then beans* and corn.

*After hours of picking green beans, carrying half-bushel after half-bushel to the truck and loading them into the bigger baskets, a switch to yellow beans was very psychedelic. The shock of their preternatural bright yellow, down in the leafy shadows of the plant, remains burned into my brain.

The crew was pretty big—maybe fifteen people?—and a bunch of our friends were part of it that summer. It was hard. You had to bend over or crouch or wear knee pads (the worst option). Sitting would get you fired. And you were definitely expected to maintain technique and speed. Picking stuff that wasn’t ready, past its prime, or going slow would get you spoken to. (Our immediate foremen, Peter and Bob, were firm but good, but old Hugh Tuttle, who perpetually patrolled the fields in his long, beige truck, lit cigarette permanently hanging from his lip, was outright terrifying.)

It was a great job. The farm was expansive and the different fields—which the crew traveled to clustered along the bed walls and tailgates of two old red pickup trucks—were like different planets. We were all barefoot and there were no fluorescent lights, was no store music. Sometimes you’d be, say, weeding and thinning all afternoon in the Oven Field (yes, because it was hot—big as it was, the trees would box in the air there), and you could, as long as you were both working fast enough, entrain your speed to the person working the next row. You could literally have a four-and-a-half-hour conversation with someone.

After work, Ben and I would work on I Am The Cornship. It was the last high-school Clov album, and we knew it. Since starting Clov in the spring of 1991, we’d been prolifically making 4-track albums together, but this one was going to be special. Our music teacher, the one who still loaned us his Tascam to make our albums, let us clean out his garage, also in Dover, to make a studio in there. After days of setting it up all amazing, we did something we hadn’t before: a bunch of arrangement work on the songs before we started recording, perched on tall stools. We worked nights and days off through the summer, Tuttle’s somehow energizing us through that particular fatigue. When the album was finished, we dubbed maybe twenty copies for friends, and then it was fall and my best friend moved away.

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“Cymbal” was my song, but aside from arranging and recording it together, Ben plays an extraordinary guitar solo in the middle. It’s the centerpiece of the song. Even the feedback is making melodies. In my memory, Ben worked out maybe the opening couple notes and the last phrase. The rest is improvised in one take. We weren’t into U2, but through Ben’s older brother, Josh, also a musician, we were into the guitar solos on Achtung Baby, minimal solos tipping from signal to noise. I believe you can hear that influence on Ben’s solo.

“Cymbal” can be found on Two Makes One: Best Of Clov (1991-1993) on my Bandcamp. Tracks 28-42 are all from I Am The Cornship. About half of the album made my 2021 cut. Juvenilia? Like I say in the liner notes, yes it is. But it still sends me, it still made me. 💕

“Cymbal”

I noticed
The cymbal on your shoulder
And I noticed
The wind is in your hair
I’m crazy
I guess that I am crazy
To think
That I could take you there

I’m sorry
I don’t know how to travel
I’m sorry
The radio is in the other room

But I know 
That I need someone
But I drive a truck
On rainy days
And the cymbal’s the same
And the feeling remains
That I lost someone
On the way

The blue bell
That’s crying through the window
The girl
That never learnt to fly
I’m sorry
I don’t like Punch and Judy
Especially
When Judy has to cry

I’m sorry
I made it rain today
But heaven
Is just another day away

And I know
That I need someone
But I drive a truck
On rainy days
And the cymbal’s the same
And the feeling remains
That I lost someone
On the way

The ocean 
Really isn’t green
And your love
Is nothing like a boat
It won’t sail away 
But I know you will
(That’s)
That’s all she wrote

I’m sorry
This sunset had to happen
I’m sorry
That superheroes really aren’t for real

But I know
That I need someone
But I drive a truck
On rainy days
And the cymbal’s the same
And the feeling remains
That I lost someone
On the way

A question about this song I have no memory of ever asking: What is it about?

It seems to me it’s like a Beatles song. It’s ostensibly about a female love interest, but feelings about my artistic partner are making their way in there. I did have an unrequited crush on someone who had also just graduated, but—I’m pretty certain—my feelings for her had largely faded by then. I had seen other people my junior year, but I know I was single that summer—maybe I was thinking of her.

I seem to be saying: I know I have my flaws—e.g., “I don’t know how to travel,” “I’m sorry / That superheroes really aren’t for real”—but I need someone, and I lost someone.

I feel like the broader question of the song’s meaning has been eclipsed for me (for 32 years!) by the unbidden lines and images that just seemed to poke through from some deeper level. “I’m sorry / The radio is in the other room.” What? Wow, I love that. I felt lucky. I don’t know if I “earned it” by writing so many songs starting in middle school, but by 93 it definitely felt like I was really doing it, like I was a real songwriter. I was getting beyond craft and ideas. I was an antenna. Me and Ben both were.

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“I noticed / The cymbal on your shoulder”:

I was picturing a cymbal on its side floating over someone’s shoulder. I think it was inspired by an image I’d seen in Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey Also. In the final panel of “The Blue Aspic,” Jasper is pictured—I’m not going to spoil the story for you, but it’s dark—with one of his beloved records floating over his head. This image is the first in the story that isn’t “real”; we have obviously leapt into the realm of the symbolic. It also follows a page turn and is the first panel unaccompanied by text, to only roar with silence.

The record—I think this interpretation would be uncontroversial to other readers—symbolizes Jasper’s insane, tragic obsession with opera, with the singer Ortenzia Caviglia in particular. I think that symbol inspired the cymbal “I noticed” in my song. “Cymbal” doesn’t specify the floating, but I’ve always known. The meaning remains obscure to me, but the image has always struck me as correct.

“I’m sorry / I don’t know how to travel”:

Though my anxiety troubles improved in my teens (they came back hard in the spring of 95), when we went on sabbatical to Madison, Wisconsin, and Bristol, England, in 86/87—when I was 10 and 11—I had a really hard time. I’ve always associated “I don’t know how to travel” with that sabbatical. Travel remains a trigger, one I periodically confront and then retreat from again.

“But I drive a truck / On rainy days”:

Sometimes trusted people on the field crew at Tuttle’s were, eventually, allowed to drive one of the red trucks. Sometimes the crew was split up, and driving to another field was a means of communication. Or other reasons. (Driving the trucks with other people in the back required another level of earned trust.) I had driven a truck (without the people), and it could be argued I included the line with a comic sense of pride or importance. It had another feel to me though.

Ben and Owain and I were discussing “Cymbal” in the corn at some point before Ben and I recorded it—I must’ve played it to Owain—and Ben admitted he didn’t like the line. There had already been a truck in one of my better songs from the year before, and the repetition felt like a flaw to Ben. (Ben, it must be said, was always extraordinarily kind and careful with his words. (I, alternatively, was a hyperactive motormouth!) It pained him to voice this criticism.) Owain, though, thought it was the best line and who cares about that other song. I liked it too and kept it. I don’t remember if Ben just let it go or actively changed his mind later. In any case, I tell this story with deep love for both of my 18-year-old friends in the corn that day. They both cared! 💕

“The blue bell / That’s crying through the window”:

I think one my of my best gifts as a songwriter is going wide on the verse that follows the first chorus. The music is a repetition, a return, but the lyric there is an opportunity to splash new color into the song, to jump cut to another setting, to introduce new characters (e.g., the centuries-old terrifying puppets that come out of nowhere in this verse). It’s one of the places in the process where a wild fearlessness seems to lift me forward like a gale. Something like: If it’s in the song, then it is the song. Just recombining the elements that have already appeared, or trying not to mess up the vibe, or trying to consolidate meaning—these seem like a missed opportunity. This is a wonderful place in the form for a song to leap.

Like a bell ringing and the sound is blue? (There are a lot of bells in my lyrics.) It’s worth noting a cymbal has a bell too. Not that I think I’ve ever noticed that. In fact, I forgot this line completely. I was pleased, looking it up, to see that a “bluebell” is also a flower. A flower associated with fairies. 💕

“Especially / When Judy has to cry”:

Once we’d given out the I Am The Cornship tapes, I feel like more than one friend noted that I pronounced “especially” like “expecially.” I hadn’t noticed.

I like this repetition of “cry” at the end of the verse. It’s not a callback to the blue bell “crying through the window.” It’s more like a mistake. It’s like the two “truck”s. Unconscious repetitions can feel like the writer is not properly in control. Maybe that’s why I like them.

“I’m sorry / I made it rain today”:

And it happens again right after. This “rain” doesn’t seem to refer to driving the truck “On rainy days.” It’s more like a melodramatic teenager who keeps making up another line about rain and not realizing they’re doing it too much. Except he doesn’t care. When he notices, it interests him.

“But heaven / Is just another day away”:

My friend Josh—not to be confused with Ben’s older brother—who also briefly worked at Tuttle’s that year or the next (I was there three summers and even returned at age 29, on top of teaching music, when I was badly in need of money), didn’t like this line because it reminded him of hair metal. Specifically a song by Warrant I didn’t know. I don’t know how I remembered that, but I looked it up while writing this post and found the song: “Heaven” (1989). The Clov tape was already “out” when Josh told me this, but it was okay. (Again, that a friend was actually listening to this music deeply enough to comment on a particular lyric (on side 2 no less)—I did not take that for granted. 💕) Hair metal wasn’t cool again yet—it had just been destroyed!—but I didn’t mind the comparison. Yes, it’s an overbright, cliché line, especially in contrast with some of the weirder lyrics. But it’s an emotional song and it kind of just… fits.

“I’m sorry / That superheroes really aren’t for real”:

This line, though, bothered me as I got older. Too grand, big, whiny. Like, He thinks his “vulnerability” is attractive. Yuck.

But now I don’t care. Like I wrote in the liners to Best Of Clov four years ago, “the more extremely young these kids become with time, the more easily I love them.” 💕