Judgment Call

I spend a lot of time fantasizing about my career as a covers singer. I do it pretty much all day long and it provides a kind of escapism so thoroughly satisfying that damn near anything becomes bearable. I used to tap this resource when I had to clean 150 pounds of squid at a time, during my kitchen job in 2004. Or I would go on two-hour-long walks when my mom was sick and sing out loud, imagining even wiping the sweat off my forehead because of the heat of the spotlight. Or when I had to wait in the cold for the bus to get home to Red Hook, my imagination here was my salvation. If you ever see me walking down the street and I’m glazed over and murmuring things and snapping every once in a while, I am probably feeling myself onstage with Cassandra Wilson singing an edgy rendition of “Cheek to Cheek.”

It’s different from just having songs you like stuck in your head. And I don't fantasize about being only a covers singer—my foundation would be a critically acclaimed body of original work, maybe just two albums or so, enough to prove my chops. No, I would want to be thought of as having really, really clever taste when it comes to choosing and “reinventing” other people’s songs. I wouldn’t record many of them. They would happen as opening numbers at shows and, most thrillingly, as encores. Oh man, people would be cheering so hard, and then I’d come out and blow their minds with a cover of a song by Bonnie Raitt or Rickie Lee Jones or New Order or Pink Floyd or Taylor Dayne or, like, something from Porgy and Bess. It may be hard for you to picture it with the examples I’ve given, but trust me: the unexpectedness is its selling feature. Sometimes I give myself the chills.

(One of my best ideas is a reinvention of Rickie Lee Jones’s “Ghostyhead,” the whole album, start to finish. Do you even know about Ghostyhead? No, of course not, because Geffen pulled it from the shelves because they thought it was too weird and wanted a cash cow from Guns & Roses or something. But strange as it may be for an artist like RLJ, it is a beautiful album, full of nuance, and RLJ herself claims it to be one of her favorites. In my dreams I could bring it to the next level and get it the credit it deserves, and at some show RLJ would come gushing from backstage to sing “Myriad Harbor” with me as an encore.)

The biggest obstacle is my complete ineptitude when it comes to singing and writing songs. The idea of writing song lyrics is so incomprehensible I find it stifling. As far as singing goes, I’ll just admit that I’m not good; I hold my own in karaoke, but I don’t take my eyes of the screen, and I get really uncomfortable during the instrumental breaks. I also don’t play any instruments except for the piano, which despite all my drink-inspired best efforts I cannot do while singing or even talking at the same time, and the flute, which is a pointless instrument. I also have a very apologetic stage presence.

But when I am in the zone, I am in the zone, and I end up staying there for a while, thinking that maybe one day a neighbor will hear me singing Al Green’s “Call Me” in a fresh way while cleaning my apartment and give me a record deal, or I’ll finally learn a karaoke song really well and blow everybody’s mind, or I’ll get this gig at Joe’s Pub called “Gay Songs” which will be about reinventing all these cool old songs that are awesome when you make them gay (serious, it’s an idea that I get fired up about at least twice a week; opening number would be “Death Letter”). But then I’ll be doing research on Youtube and find something like this, which is when the gauntlet comes crashing down and I start feeling terrible about myself. I mean, the poor guy, he got my idea but he was spared the memo, the memo for me being kind of like when you’re out one night and you meet a bunch of new people who seem to think you are fabulous and you laugh a lot and make jokes and, I don’t know, dance, and you go to bed patting yourself on the back for how fun and social you have been lately, how you’re really adapting to the single thing, only to wake up at 5 AM realizing that you were slurring all your words and repeating your jokes five too many times and that, sigh, you weren’t funny at all, they were sympathy chuckles, and you spend the entire next day hating yourself. Or when you are writing something that you think is hilarious and insightful and in the spirit of another blog you admire, but when you click on the other commenters’ blogs on said admired blog you realize that yours is just a drop in the bucket and mostly mimicry anyway (save PoopGroup, which in my darkest moments I still think is genius), and it results in you getting to that point of the night when you decide to “preemptively” lay off the vodka and instead fill up your Nalgene with some cold water and figure on going to bed. Remember to brush your teeth.

Judging is a fraught enterprise. I feel like over the past several years—and maybe this just coincides with my age—it’s been really fun to judge people and to get good at reducing them to their signifiers. I guess that’s fine, if mean spirited. But we must agree that it is a debilitating thing for everyone, to feel that every word and every action can be sussed out to indicate something greedy and terrible and unoriginal about one’s true nature. On the one hand, we can’t have everyone in the world thinking they are the bee’s knees (I’d argue that no one should think one’s self to be the bee’s knees); on the other, if we all live in fear of judgment, we’ll settle for mediocrity and only let the guards down while drunk or high and that probably will result in rape and stuff. Not sure what the answer is, except that there must be a fine line where people can be self-aware and comfortable in their own skin at the same time. And nice to each other. And only moderately reliant on their (heretofore) secret fantasies.