Music does weird stuff to me. I can watch a movie, say, “Prisoners”, where Hugh Jackman's kid gets kidnapped and I can feel his pain. Like I get it. I understand that I am supposed to feel his pain because he's a good actor. He's doing a good job. I can't relate, per se, but I feel it. I can read a Batman comic and feel similarities with Bruce Wayne, but I've never thwarted a mastermind or punched a criminal in the mush. But when I listen to a song like “Clear the Air” by Off With Their Heads, I think to myself, 'Wow! Ryan Young (singer of OWTH, naturally) sure gets me! It's like this is out of my diary!'. Same thing happens all the time. I presume it happens to you too. You just know that song is about you! I'm not sure why that is. I know why I project, I just don't know why I project onto music way more. The first time I heard Arcade Fire's “Wake Up!”, I cried like a baby. The second time (I acknowledge how weird it is that it was the second time) I heard Bane's “Calling Hours” I cried at work, in front of 40 people. If the horns in “Disconnect the Dots” by Smash Mouth ever stop making me smile, I better be in my coffin. If I hear “Linoleum” by NOFX, I'm probably going to take off running.

 

Something about certain songs just grab me and always have. Most of the time, I make them personal. I suppose it's why I like music as much as I do.

 

I was never a “musician”, I was a drummer. I can't count or read music or keep time, I just thrash quickly. I never wrote lyrics and I sure as hell couldn't if I tried, but when I wrote some beats, I wrote them for myself. I never once thought about how anyone would appreciate it, I never thought about it's reception at all. I barely even cared what my bandmates thought about my parts. I wanted to play drums as fast as I could and way too loud. That was my deal, so that's what I did. John Hart wrote songs for the bands I was in (so did a bunch of wonderful dudes before him and with him) and I sat down and tried to not be the weak link. I would assume a lot of musicians can relate. You write songs for you, whatever feelings people get are what they feel, not necessarily what you feel. I'm pretty positive i can say that John never sat down and thought, 'I sure hope someone projects themselves into this song'.

 

“Teeth City” was written at least a year before anyone ever heard it. John and I were hanging out in his brother's now defunct motor cycle shop which his brother was cool enough to let us jam in. Let's get this out of the way: John had riffs. You might not know that. Maybe you liked Five Star Fracture, but didn't like Takes Manhattan, maybe you thought he was just a singer, maybe you're someone who doesn't know John at all. Kid had riffs. So we jammed and that song was born. For the longest time, it was just he and I and no P.A. system. We probably played it 50 times without words. Eventually, John wrote the lyrics and, as usual, the dude killed it. He had riffs and he could write lyrics like a mother fucker.

 

So we played it and he sang it and I thought it worked out pretty well. We never collaborated on lyrics, that was his strength, but he'd ask what I thought and I thought it was great. I asked to read the lyrics:

 

I hope you found some happiness in your absence.

Or is your only friend resentment

in this endless battle against self acceptance?

It's not hard to place the blame on everyone else, never yourself.

The person you think you need to be, is someone I want no part of.

You didn't grow up any faster than the rest of us.

You only understood the risks of trying to resist when the world sinks it's teeth into you

and you let them win.

It's not hard to place the blame on everyone else, never yourself.

The person you think you need to be is someone I want no part of.

You didn't grow up any faster than the rest of us.

You only understood the risks of trying to resist

when the world sinks it's fucking teeth into you.

 

It seemed rather personal, so I asked him who it was about. He told me, but he said it in a noncommittal way. Months later he mentioned it was about someone else, which was weird at the time, but I didn't put much stock in it. I asked him what it was called and he said “Teeth City”.

 

“Teeth City” requires some explanation. I have a friend, I'm going to call him Eddie. Eddie had a fling with a girl a long time ago. They were doing their thing and that thing led to another thing and that thing was oral sex. Sorry. I was trying to soften that up a bit, but I am not that good of a writer. So, Eddie comes up to us a few days later and and he goes, 'so I hooked up with that girl, she started [doing that thing to] me and all I can say is... teeth fucking city!' Hopefully that's clear enough for you without me elaborating. Needless to say, we laughed and laughed and 5 years later, it became a Takes Manhattan song title. One night, we played it live with Eddie in attendance and Eddie did not appreciate John telling that story in front of a bunch of people who knew him. But this song is not about Eddie in anyway. He's a dude who just happened to have a bitchin' story and he told it to a guy who needed a bad ass song title.

 

Most of you know me and probably knew John, but if you don't know us personally, John died not long after Takes Manhattan was finally a real thing, not some back room of a retail store pipe dream. It was sudden and horrible. Not that a dude ever dying at 24 isn't horrible, but it was so brutal, it took me a while to even listen to the songs again. We recorded them not long before he died and I had probably listened to the CD twice while he was around. I remember going back to Bismarck a while after he died and realizing that my step father hadn't heard the CD yet. I'm not sure why, but I decided to put it on for him. I spent the next 20 minutes in a different room crying my eyes out. I put the songs on my computer and avoided them like the plague.

 

I finally got around to listening to them when I burned a copy for a friend. I want to say it was one of the beautiful dudes who helped us do the “gang vocal” stuff on the record, but who can be sure. I sat down and started at the beginning. I smiled a lot. Probably cried a little bit. Noticed every god damn mistake that I'd never have a shot at fixing and felt unbelievably guilty for focusing more on my parts than John's. It was an odd time, for sure. I hit “Teeth City”. It was one of the first riffs John ever showed me and I loved it right away. Kid had fucking riffs. As soon as the lyrics started, it hit me. I've never said this to anyone, but I felt it:

 

Holy shit. This song is about me.

 

I hope you found some happiness in your absence.

Or is your only friend resentment

in this endless battle against self acceptance?

It's not hard to place the blame on everyone else, never yourself.

The person you think you need to be, is someone I want no part of.

You didn't grow up any faster than the rest of us.

You only understood the risks of trying to resist when the world sinks it's teeth into you

and you let them win.

It's not hard to place the blame on everyone else, never yourself.

The person you think you need to be is someone I want no part of.

You didn't grow up any faster than the rest of us.

You only understood the risks of trying to resist

when the world sinks it's fucking teeth into you.

 

I spent a lot of time with John, but not enough. We lived together, but I loved being alone. Most of the time it was just me trying to have a moment for myself or watching a game or whatever, but sometimes it was out of spite. Maybe I was mad at him, them (you folks know who you are and I'm more sorry than I could ever hope to express), whomever, but most of the time, I just loved being alone. I still do. That first line, “I hope you found some happiness in your absence” hit me hard. I already felt guilty about not being with him for every second possible and now he's taunting me from beyond the grave? That's a brutal feeling for a kid finally revisiting the jams he worked so hard on. The rest of it reads like every damn thing he ever wanted to say to me, but was way too nice to actually say.

 

I hated it. I have probably skipped that song on my iPod 800 times. Maybe more. Can't stand it.

 

And this was story was going to just be about how much I hated that song now and how much projecting yourself into songs changes them, but something really cool happened while I was writing this. I couldn't find the lyrics, I swore he put them on our Myspace (this was a while ago!), but the design of that site is now atrocious and I can't find my head from my ass on there anymore. So I had to listen to the song a few times and I love it. I love it like I used to. Maybe it's about me, maybe it's not, but the kid had fucking riffs and we did alright. Maybe he did write a song about me, but so what if he did? I deserved to be told all of that right to my face at one point or another, that's for sure. Maybe he did write it about me. Maybe it's about one of the other people he said it was about.

 

Maybe I'm just projecting. I've been known to do that.