Annotations - Vermont

Hi friends. Sorry for the week off. If you followed along on our tour you noticed that we had some silly routing on the back half, and all of my responsibilities outside of driving and playing music bore the brunt of the poor planning. I’ll do an entire post about what goes into booking and routing a tour some day. For now I’ll just say that I wish more agents played in bands at any point in their career.

I’ll also do a full tour recap in the coming weeks with some thoughts on it. But I’m still not actually home and decompressed yet, so that feels a bit premature. Instead, let’s do an annotation on a song we played once on this tour. It’s the first song I wrote for this band. People still like it. I really don’t.

Let’s talk Vermont.

I’ll get it out of the way immediately. It irritates me to no end when people think that this song is full of references to other songs (including the annotations on Genius). I get why people do, I shouldn’t care, and I probably should’ve changed the lyrics. But here we are.

I’ll give you some context for what’s happening in this song, since like everything on Giant, it’s almost entirely biographical. First, here’s me at roughly this time:

I’m 23/24. I’m pretty freshly divorced. I’m sleeping on my best friend’s couch in Hollywood and interning for free while living off $400/mo unemployment. I still believe all of my dreams are going to work out. I’m about to start film school. With this backdrop I start a crazy intense spring romance with one of the members of my cohort who also lives in LA. And this is all before we start classes in the fall.

Pretty much everything in the story of the song is true. This soon-to-be classmate said most of this to me over the course of 2/3 months as we each sorted out some crazy feelings and realized neither of us should’ve been dating anyone. Thankfully we stayed friendly through our two year program. She even served as a cinematographer on a short I directed.

I had one other thing going on at the time. I was playing in a band with some guys I met on Craigslist. Our lead singer typically wrote everything, but for whatever reason I felt like writing a song again. I scribbled most of this on a yellow legal pad in my parent’s apartment in San Diego. I recorded the demo in their bathroom. The band learned it. We even played it live a few times and I sang it.

Then that band broke up, but Ruben, Gabe and I wanted to keep playing songs together. I kept writing songs. These became the backbone of Giant, which is an album about failing my way through my early/mid 20s and ruining relationships. It’s a pretty cynical album.

But not Vermont. It has the DNA of our band, but it’s in this song that I originally wrote for a much more romantic band to fit the vibes. It’s the not-quite formed version of us. A nostalgic version of us. It’s why, with some distance from Giant I’ve come to not enjoy the song. And it’s certainly why I ran away from anything resembling a love song for a few records.

But I’m not here to yuck your yum. Just explain why my own yum is yucked.

-D

1. This entire first verse is a real scene (except the summer part). An unhoused woman lived in her alley with a cart. Her neighbors legitimately played Norteño music until the early morning (Mariachi felt like more people would understand it). And she actually said happiness is just a moment. I cringe thinking about these two dramatic kids (both of us wanted to be writers) saying shit like this.

2. At various points in our dating she referred to herself as a black hole and mentioned that nothing is permanent. Again, we loved the drama.

3. n.b. note 3

4. This verse is entirely my invention, inspired by a professor who called producing the “art of putting out fires”. The morphine line is lifted from a nurse who scolded my for wanting more morphine when I had my head injury at 22 (more on that when I annotate “I’m gonna miss everything”.

5. I wrote this after my divorce when trying to start another band with some high school friends. It never really progressed past jamming in a garage, but it was a much heavier, Modest Mouse inspired band.

6. As a baseball player, I’ve had an endless run of nicknames: D-man, D-money, D-train, Big D, Big Dog, Slowsky, Big slow, Dyl-dog, Big man, El Grande, etc.

7. I never entirely took to smoking, but would smoke half a cigarette like 5x a year at this point.

8. The Vermont in the song’s title refers to the street we both lived off of at different points, which is confusing because “Concrete” mentions taking a drive down Vermont. I believe the original title I had for this in my notebook was “Mt. Vernon”, a neighborhood in San Bernardino, CA, which makes me think I revised these lyrics at some point on the weekend of my brother’s wedding in San Bernardino (the same weekend I wrote the song “Mexico” — what a little shit I was). There was a much different original version of this song that would’ve started in early 2012, and then I revised it over the course of the year, and then revised it again when SLS half started in 2013.

Watching the World Cup and Listening to Blank Check & In The Dark, my two big tour podcasts.