“What Was I Gonna Do?,” from A Very Fine Sample of What’s Available at the Mine (2005)
I am on the mini futon sofa in the control room in the Shed in Manchester, Connecticut, sometime between 2000, when we started recording our debut full-band breakthrough, A Very Fine Sample of What’s Available at the Mine, and 2005, when we finished. Many great bands take five years to record an album. Just look at the Stone Roses. The refrigerator switches on periodically and makes the power surge, the lights swooning briefly. Once in a while you’d hear that click on the recording, but it was a small cost for keeping the 30-pack of High Life cold. Natron and I are in repose, the day either done or not yet started; either way, he has just stepped back inside after enjoying a Black & Mild on the porch, and I have just gotten good and high to sharpen my creative faculties to a lethally incisive point. Jake will come around later. We listen to the playback as I flip through a Playboy and set the bottom of my foot flat against the wall in the tiny room, within the shoe-shaped outline that somebody already helpfully traced there with a Sharpie. We talk of the Egg’s next ventures, of the rise we see so clearly before us. We are young hitmakers. A label would surely want to get involved, and furthermore this song, I say, is ripe for a video. We’ll put it together at my parents’ house in Nantucket in the summer, everybody dressed in white like Nelly would do it. Couples dancing as the sun set, gin and tonics, croquet, happy good-looking people. My little cousin Matt? He would film it. He’d probably even do it for free. He was just a kid in art school and I was like a god to him. Who wouldn’t want to hang with his rock-star cousin?
New Thunderegg History Lesson every Monday and Thursday.
