“I Don’t Want to Stay Here (with Me),” from Where Are the Cars (2008)
For about one week of the summer that I lived in my parents’ empty house—not coincidentally, a week when my father was home for meetings—I took to putting on a tie when I got dressed in the morning. I thought that if I “dressed” for “work,” I’d be more productive. I didn’t get more done, but during this time I did steal a container of hummus* from Bon Appetit at the Princeton Shopping Center. I think I was rebelling against my tie and although I wasn’t caught I apologize for the whole sorry situation. Eight years later, when my mom was sick and I was in charge of making Christmas dinner, I spent $300 in overpriced groceries there in hopes of making up for it.

On the latter end of one afternoon that week, I decided I’d tried hard enough for the day and that I’d walk to town and get a beer or two. It was happy hour, after all. Princeton has like three bars, and they’re all lousy. I headed for the one I knew to be lousiest, the too-sleek Triumph Brew Pub, and on my way there I stopped at the bank for some cash. There, sitting on the sidewalk in front of the cash machine, was a kid I went to high school with, Kenny Martinson. Remember that I, unemployed, living with my parents, a hummus thief about to go drink alone, was wearing a tie. Kenny was dirty and dazed and looked in a bad way.

We had been on the Elks together in Little League. He’d been a harmless wise guy who used to wear his helmet cocked back on his head, and one time he hit a double and was so excited that he was jumping around near second base and Coach Davis yelled at him. In high school he stopped going to class and was into the Dead and tie-dyes and LSD, and once in the hallway I saw him knock back an entire vial of what I later heard was liquid acid. It must have been like fifty hits, right in the middle of the school day. Now, in the summer of 2000 on the sidewalk of Nassau Street, I tried to say hi to him and he just stared into the middle distance.

“We used to go to school together,” I continued, now feeling awkward. “I’m Will. You’re Kenny Martinson, right?”

And on hearing his name, he finally looked at me and said, “I was.”

I hesitated. “Uh…so who are you now?”

“Onawa.”

That was all Onawa had to say to me. I got my cash and walked a few blocks farther to Triumph Brewpub, now with a new song in my head that went Onawa Xavier, Onawa Xavier. I don’t know where I got the “Xavier” part. I sat down at the low-lit bar and ordered a beer and in time, sure enough, I met an attractive blonde who had just finished her day at one of myriad financial-consulting concerns in that town. I told her I was a musician, recording two new albums in my home studio, which was not a lie, and maybe my tie helped a little but she gave me her business card. After a couple drinks she left, and I did too, humming Onawa Xavier all the way home, and when I reached my studio/parents’ house I was uplifted enough to bang out an e-mail to the Thunderegg mailing list—which, if you’re on the Thunderegg mailing list, you know is not a frequent affair. I included my new Triumph Brewpub ladyfriend’s address, hit send, and finally took off my tie with gusto—the way I remember my father doing when he came home from work at the bank when I was a little kid so happy to see him—to celebrate a day well spent.

The next morning I woke and put on the tie and when I got to my computer, there was already a message in my inbox waiting for me. It was from the blonde, curtly requesting that I remove her immediately from any and all future mailings. I immediately apologized, trying to explain that I hardly ever sent out Thunderegg news, and she didn’t respond. I would never hear from her again, but I would forever remain paranoid about adding people to my e-mail list. And I would never forget her name. I looked her up on Facebook just now and found her. She got married in 2004. She visited Los Angeles at some point, but in the headline of her photo set she couldn’t even spell it: “Los Angelas.” It is amazing the people we cannot forget.

Five years later, I recorded this song as a snippet, replacing “Onawa Xavier”—and consequently Kenny Martinson—with “I Don’t Want to Stay Here” as I stewed about how somebody had just smashed my car window on Carroll Street in Brooklyn for no good reason. Maybe that was the payback for the hummus. The next day was the first day of school in the Bronx, so I was already in a sorrowful mood. Summer was over. When I got up at six the next morning I would be putting on a tie.

*   Dad: “I have drawn freely from the imagination and adhered only loosely to the pattern of my past life. To this extent, and for this reason, I ask to be judged as a writer of fantasy.” —Frederick Exley, “A Note to the Reader,” A Fan’s Notes

“Keep It with You (demo),” from Powder to the People (1998)
I was in graduate school for fiction, writing short stories like I was supposed to. I hadn’t managed any songs in a few months, but I had a cute girlfriend I loved, and I told myself that was the reason why: Most of my songs had been about heartbreak. I didn’t know how to write about being happy. And surely I was so happy. I was so happy that I was panicking. It is as hard for me to explain fourteen years later as it would have been then.

I had a small pile of microcassettes: recordings I’d been making on the fly since college, forgotten conversations with the blare of background barrooms, punctuated by little snippets of myself singing—usually as Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee—propulsive bass lines, muscular guitar hooks, piano arpeggios, entire choir parts, the grandest arrangements ever, sprinkled with fairy dust, all of it nearly impossible to decode in the hard light of morning, never mind the hard light of three, four, five years later. Nevertheless I had to try because I was so happy. I was so happy, if I didn’t record something I would be lost, and I would lose my cute girlfriend. I was so happy.

For two weeks that summer I sifted through the tapes and fleshed out thirty-five snippets that I thought someday I could turn into real songs when I had something to write about. These became Powder to the People, which despite its magnanimous title wasn’t supposed to be heard by other people. And several of its songs did become real: “Pardon Your French,” “In the Loft,” “Keep It with You.” Sad, hurt songs written about a year and a half later in the winter after, indeed, my cute girlfriend was gone.

Just a few weeks before I quit my job and moved out of the loft and back to my parents’ house, I came up with the words to this song. They were about trying to keep someone you love when she’s already out the door, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought I still had a shot. On the streets of South Norwalk, before the 1999 Fairfield Weekly holiday party, I sang it all into my little micro-recorder like I used to, along with ideas for a horn part and a guitar lead. A couple days later Jake came down from Hartford and we put a little three-piece together and we laid it down in a studio in the city. Now there is a band, I wanted to tell her. This is the best I can possibly do. I gave my girl the song for Christmas: I only want to keep it with you. It’s going to get better. See? I’m writing songs again. It’s going to get better.

“Conversation Hearts,” from Universal Nut (1995)
Every Valentine’s Day, my mother used to send me a card and a little box of Necco Conversation Hearts. My senior year of college, I spread out the chalky candies on the bedspread in my dorm room and strung them together to form this song. Would that there’d been a girl to share the moment with, a girl to please with my cute little word games, a girl to muss that bedspread with. In those days I was sure she was out in the world somewhere. Sometimes as I lay awake, heartbroken over one romantic fiasco or another, I would even call out to her. And wherever she was, telepathically she would say, “That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit the way they’re treating you. Just don’t worry about her, my love. Someday we will finally be together.”

The following summer, now graduated and subletting an apartment in New Haven, I recorded the song after returning from a Stereolab concert in Central Park. I sang la la la as I thought Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen might have, their effervescence and forthrightness in equal measure. I pictured the la’s floating up to the sky like a smoke signal, maybe straight to the heart of my hypothetical soul mate.

In time I would break college’s bad-luck streak and I would find women who loved me, and I would love them too, and consequently in the dead of night I would speak less and less to the girl I’d conjured when I was in college, the one who’d always stuck up for me. I couldn’t say whether we’d had a falling out or just drifted apart.

As I typed this today, seventeen Valentine’s Days later, from another sublet, still single, now in San Francisco, I looked down and realized I was wearing a Stereolab T-shirt. I found it at a used-clothing store in Austin last fall. When I brought it to the register, the pretty cashier, twenty-two at the most, held it up, then crinkled her face. “Stereolab,” she said. “I don’t get the reference.”

“It’s not really a reference so much as a band,” I said.

“That’s cool,” she said, ringing me up.

“They were really good,” I felt compelled to add.

“Would you like a bag?” she asked.

Maybe tonight I’ll try telling my hypothetical soul mate about it.

“I Felt Wonderful,” from This Week (2007)
Elliott Smith is said to have frequented O’Connor’s when he lived in Brooklyn, but Farrell’s, in Windsor Terrace, is the only bar where you can actually write a song. There is no jukebox competing with what you’re hearing in your head, and the televisions are on mute. If you get there early enough, the only sound is rustling newspapers. A Bud—the sole beer on tap—being placed on the bar doesn’t even go thunk, or clink: It is set before you silently because the bartender doesn’t say much and because it came in a shock-absorbing 32-ounce Styrofoam cup that they call a container. It’s like your beer is wearing socks. Early on, it is quiet enough to hear the head fizzing. It is quiet enough to write the chorus. As the night progresses the room fills with locals, many of them firemen and cops who really don’t give a damn what you do, and it gets louder and louder but for me there’s always this blissful moment when I realize it isn’t music and it isn’t Tim McCarver: It’s just people talking. Or yelling. A crescendo of collective conversation, of simultaneous stories and jokes and bullshit from the altar of the bar and the tables scattered around it, tables with little doorbells mounted beside them because in the old days the ladies weren’t supposed to come to the bar when they wanted a refill; they had to be served. I never made it to last call at Farrell’s. For all I know, it never closes. I would just get a lid for my container and walk out the door and down the hill and eventually home, and I felt wonderful.

“Retarty” (explicit), from Platinum (2009)
And so after writing an enormous number of songs—sometimes I claim 350, 400, but it’s probably more like 200 if you don’t count the snippets and re-recordings, the experiments and the foolishness—Thunderegg finally hit the road in November 2011. In a van, as I’d always dreamed. Driving from town to town, bringing all those tunes to the people. Well, not all the tunes: That would be impossible! Actually not too many tunes at all, because the tour was for my cousin Fletcher’s band. Thunderegg joined at the last minute, and Fletcher was kind enough to insert us at the front of his already short set. So really there was only time for three or two or, really, one song. One song, we’d play, although “we” might be a little misleading because I was touring solo, no Jake, no Ken. That one song, though, it was going to be a good one, the best one I ever wrote. I was going to pick one with sophisticated lyrics, an intricate chord progression, subtle modulations. I was going to make all these strangers in far-off cities, some of them twenty years younger than me—a new generation of Egg fans there for the taking—run to their computers that night to find out who Thunderegg was, where had they been? What had they missed? How do they download ALL OF IT?

The song I chose was going to make me look smart, cool, and totally pro.

I did “Retarty.” Every night I would play “Retarty,” “Retarty” from Chapel Hill to Atlanta to New Orleans to Houston to Nashville, until at tour’s end, after we all awakened in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the boys dropped me off at my father’s house in New Jersey just after dark. For a few minutes we all stood awkwardly in the brightly lit kitchen, my father holding a piece of cheese that I knew he wanted to set out for them. But they were eager to get home, so he settled for giving them some fruit for the road, and then I watched the Econoline’s tail lights disappear in the distance of the quiet street. I came inside and a little later sat down to dinner with my father. He was wearing his pink golf shirt and I explained as best as I could how my life had changed.

“This Is Just Like California!,” from In Yanistin (2000)
That February, my gamble at adulthood—living with my girlfriend in Westchester County—proved to be not very well thought out, and I finally caved and slunk home to my parents’ house to record snippets (complete songs were not possible in my state) on my four-track in the attic. By the summertime I was still there, although my parents were not, and some days in the empty house were better than others. This was one of the iffy ones. I thought maybe if I tried to wag the dog, make a happy party picnic jam—smiles beget smiles!—then maybe I’d feel better. Yipp-i-doo! At 0:41 there’s this one double “Yahoo!” that sounds so starved for joy that it’s practically choking on itself. The poor little feller, he tries so hard: I daresay the entire effort is heroic. But in its barely articulated desperation, it still might be the saddest song I’ve ever recorded, which is no small statement. Here’s a transcript.

This is the sunshine song. (Yippee!) Pretend you’re at a park. Pretend you’re at a park! Just pretend you’re at a park! Ohh . . . (Whoop-i-doo! Yay!) what a nice day it is! (Skip-i-dee-boo!) I’ve got the picnic basket (Who brought the Frisbee?), I’ve got the Frisbee and the transistor radio . . . (Catch! Catch!) Whoo-hoo. (Yippee-doo! Yippeeee! Whoo-hoo! Yahoo! Yippee-doo!) Yahoo, yahoo! La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la (I feel like taking my shirt off!) (Go for it, man!) (Whoo-hoo.) Yahoo! Hey, throw me the football! (Okay, here I go! Catch! [Whee-hee!] Nice catch!) (Whoo-hoo.) La la la la la la la. Hey, man, this is just like California! Yee-hee! (Skee-be-dub-i-dee-dub-i-dee-doo!) (Rrrrrrrrrrr-row-de-dow-dow-dow-dow!) (Here, boy! Here, boy!) (Arf! Arf arf arf!) (Yipp-i-dee-dipp-i-dee-dap-i-dee-bap-i-dee-bow!)

A picnic, some people tossing the Frisbee, a hippie guitar circle, a little dog barking as he tries to track the flying disc: From my lonely perch in my parents’ house in the summer of 2000, is this all I wanted? Last Friday afternoon I found myself in Golden Gate Park as the shadows lengthened and the action all around me unfolded, I swear, 100 percent exactly as scripted. “This is just like ‘This Is Just Like California,’” I said aloud as I walked through the heart of Sharon Meadow. I was by myself so nobody heard me, but at least I thought it was pretty funny.

1. Larry (1994) – “You String Me”
2. Universal Nut (1995) – “Conversation Hearts”
3. New England Music (1996) – “Dog Leg”
4. Personnel Envelo-file (1997) – “Double Reverse”
5. Thunderegg (1997) – TK
6. Powder to the People (1998) – “Keep It with You (demo)”
7. In Yanistin (2000) – “This Is Just Like California!”
8. The Envelope Pushes Back (2000) - “The Drapes Come Open . . .”
9. Sweetest One (2004) – “Deliverance from Crack Rock”
10. A Very Fine Sample etc. (2005) - “What Was I Gonna Do?”
11. This Week (2007) – “I Felt Wonderful”
12. Where Are the Cars (2008) – “I Don’t Want to Stay Here (with Me)”
13. Platinum (2009) – “Retarty”
14. Line Line (2011) – TK

“Deliverance from Crack Rock,” from Sweetest One (2004)
In your Thunderegg course packets, please flip to the lead story of the Tony Alamo Ministries newsletter, November 2000, which you found under your windshield wiper:

DELIVERANCE FROM CRACK ROCK!  During the Christmas season, 1996, I was a homeless man struggling to survive the mean streets of Newark, New Jersey. I was an alcoholic and strung out on the crack rock. My life had spiraled down to nothing . . . I came upon literature from the Holy Alamo Christian Church that I was going to use to start a fire that fateful December evening. Something made me read the words so eloquently written, and it changed my life. From that day forward I stopped smoking the crack rock and only 10 months later weaned myself off the Wild Turkey. Today I am a proud and changed man thanks to the Holy Alamo Christian Church.

Would that all the world, especially in the post-grunge era of which our proselytizer speaks, have kicked the crack rock as well. But in the early nineties we got hooked on those gigantic guitars and loud-soft-loud-soft song structures, and there we built our cage. Like rebellious radioactive goo or Starburst Flavor Morph, crack rock has evolved into its own species, Nervermindus interruptus; it represents the toxic post-grunge deluge ever since Nirvana, which I maintain did a lot more harm than good in the long run. I liked Nirvana. But late on a Friday night last September I was driving around Brooklyn looking for an open gas station (the local BP was closed because the abandoned building next door was burning), listening to a reverential story on NPR about the twentieth anniversary of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I lost count of how many times callers and commentators alike called it “important.” Driving down Fourth Avenue I was clucking to myself, “What about Stone Temple Pilots? What about Bush? What about Nickelback? ALL NIRVANA’S FAULT!” Then I played a midnight solo gig at Freddy’s for a crowd of three: Ivan, Tex, and this guy, also named Will, who’d been kind enough to get drunk with me at the bar beforehand, although eventually he had to go because he had to get up early for his job renting out bicycles in Grand Army Plaza.

If Thunderegg has had one discernible purpose since its inception, it has been to deliver the masses from crack rock. It’s okay to admit it: You were about to use your digital-only copy of Sweetest One to start a fire in your crack(rock)house, weren’t you? But something made you stop. The Egg can change your life, and we won’t even make you quit the Wild Turkey.

“You String Me,” from Larry (1994)
I had arrived at college as one kind of stock character, the former student council president still in love, long-distance, with his high school sweetheart, and in less than three months I’d morphed into another: the lost freshman boy who slept all the time, a pale arm sometimes extending, cautiously, from under the comforter to write on the wall.

Wedged in the slime, they say: “We had been sullen
in the sweet air that’s gladdened by the sun;
we bore the mist of sluggishness in us:
now we are bitter in the blackened mud.”

So said “the souls of those whom anger has defeated” in Canto VII of the Inferno. I know it’s the passage I wrote on my wall because I underlined it in my Signet paperback, including a note in the margin that diligently says, “I wrote this on my wall,” as if it would be on the midterm. I had two roommates, just one wall to myself in that entire room, and I vandalized it. There had to be somewhere else to write away anger and defeat.

Turn it outward, blast it at a bunch of people with cups in their hands. If it’s loud enough and you mean it enough, and if in the process of being loud and meaning it you suddenly find you’re enjoying yourself, they will buy it. Maybe not buy buy, like with money, but they’ve all been strung along and they’ve all been drunk and they all like Nirvana too, which is fortunate since here—two years later now—we’re playing a cross between “Heart-Shaped Box” and “Rape Me.” Of course it’s only a complete coincidence that this song was written the same month that In Utero came out: It’s not a rip-off, it was the zeitgeist! The singer is stinkin’ dee-runk. The entire band is a little off, a little uncool, and so all the more credibly unhinged: Justin goes atomic on his solo. Jamie’s running his 1987 keyboard through a flanger pedal to make it sound like a jet plane. And there are conga drums. Allies. They let it build into the second part, secretly known, to me alone, as “Part II: The Temples of Kajahbada,” an extended instrumental jam wherein I imagined my Peavey Predator shooting laser beams. Straight through the wall.

This was Larry. In time, at the end of our shows, they would chant Larry, Larry, Larry.

“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.

“Double Reverse,” from Personnel Envelo-file (1997)
Another number from the putt-putt series, recorded in the spring of 1996. I would take the Peter Pan bus to Hartford to visit Jake, to see the action transpire at Scarlett O’Hara’s in its unlikely location downtown, unlikely because there was not too much left of downtown Hartford. In the 1950s its heart was ripped out to make room for parking garages for the insurance companies. Somebody should have filed a claim for that. 

Nonetheless on the ride up Friday night I would start to get that feeling of eager anticipation, of knowing I was going to see a friend and drink beer and carry on: I loved looking forward to going out. At the bar I would watch loud girls talk and listen to the Dead cover band sound a lot like the Dead while an old local named Yogi played air clarinet on his necktie. On the way up, in my eager anticipation, I would talk to whoever was next to me on the bus. Or I would eavesdrop and be fascinated that not everybody lived my Hartford rock ’n’ roll dream.

6/9/96: The people in front of me on the bus are engaged in a discussion about religion. The clean-cut man looks to be from Utah but he’s from the greater Simsbury, CT, metropolitan region. He became a Jehovah’s Witness 7 years ago when he was “young,” 14. Now he talks about creationism in an aw-shucks tone of voice and ruffs his hair every once in a while.

Psh! What a mollycoddle! Then again he was talking to a girl and I’m sure he got her number in the end. Me? This might have been the same trip that, running to the bus and hungry, I found a tube of Ritz crackers on the floor of the Port Authority bus terminal. I was, of course, aware of Port Authority’s reputation, but the wax paper was crisply sealed and not a single cracker felt crumbled. I ate all thirty-eight of them as I rode north. Chicks dig shit like that.

I wrote this song on the way back, and if the words describe defeat, it feels like I don’t mind that much, which I considered to be the ultimate victory. Maybe spacing out to the Beach Boys all the time wasn’t entirely in vain. Maybe the next cassette would be better than New England Music. Back in Brooklyn I would record it and then wait impatiently for my next opportunity to ride a bus and be excited for who and what I’d see when it stopped.

Today we celebrate the digital release of Thunderegg’s 2004 album Sweetest One, which features early versions of such favorites as “The Scheduled Show,” “Long Way from Home,” and “If You Knew Me So Well” alongside lesser-known gems like “Deliverance from Crack Rock,” “I’m a Fool Again,” and “When the Cables Break.”

This is the Egg’s most low-fi venture, which makes it easy not to notice that it’s also a strong set of songs. I used only three of the Portastudio’s four available tracks when I was recording it, with the intention of overdubbing drums on the remaining track in the end. So everything’s really squished, the bass and the guitars and the vocals all stacked on top of each other. And then, unfortunately for my big vision, so it had to remain, because it turned out it’s really hard to record drums last. That’s why nobody ever does it that way.

Still, if you can get into the spirit of it, there are rewards to be reaped.

“Dog Leg,” from New England Music (1996)
There is a batch of Thunderegg songs with titles drawn directly from the scorecard of a putt-putt course that used to be on the Boston Post Road in Westbrook, Connecticut, a beautiful postwar throwback with leisurely miniature fairways, the long holes sprawling over vast acreage ultimately far too valuable for the meager returns of $5 a putter. During the spring of my senior year of college I played there, soundly defeating my best friend and my girlfriend both—just recalling this in passing—on assignment for the New Haven Advocate. That’s right: “girlfriend.” “On assignment.” Look at this guy and how much he’d arrived. This was really the only kind of assignment I tended to draw. One time I was supposed to cover a press conference involving the mayor of Stamford and I was too scared to get out of my car.

On the scorecard the holes were neatly divided into a front nine and a back nine, looking every bit like a mix tape with two sides, nine songs each. I accepted the challenge and got cracking with “Dog Leg,” then later “Billiard,” “Lighthouse,” “Double Reverse,” “Windmill,” “Flower Hole,” “Treehouse.” But some of them (man, “Mole Hill”) were bad and I lost interest and never even got around to writing “Sea Gull,” “Double Trouble,” “Covered Bridge,” “School House,” “Looptie Loop,” “Seal,” “Under Hurdle,” “Sea World,” or “Red Barn.”

I was proud of “Dog Leg” at the time. It was one of the last songs I recorded in New Haven before abandoning the haunted house and moving to the city. I thought it had a good bridge. Also, I’d read somewhere that somebody famous used to record vocals in the bathroom, you know, for the reverb, and so that’s what I did, burgeoning pro that I was. I’d just been fired from the coffee shop for being an all-around bad employee: frequently late, sarcastic, and also not very good at making coffee-based beverages. The incident that galvanized my dismissal was getting caught selling a very old, fizzy-tasting mozzarella-and-tomato salad to a friend for less than I should have. On my way out the door, my boss, whom I decided to call Dog Leg here, told me I seemed like somebody she’d like to hang out with, just not have as an employee. I was like, Yeah, right, like I’ll hang out with you now.

“The Drapes Come Open, Revealing the Grand Ballroom,” from The Envelope Pushes Back (2000)
There was a little man walking around the wedding wearing a huge tape recorder on his back. It was 1971 so the machine was not compact; he looked more like the plastic army man carrying the radio set, but substitute brown lace-ups and Dacron suit for combat boots and flak helmet. The straps from the tape recorder backpack make the brown jacket bunch up at the shoulders. The cuffs of his cream-colored dress shirt protrude two inches, three inches, four.

Although a stranger, the man was hired to be the wedding’s roving reporter, to interview all the principals, to document with his microphone every step of the reception from cocktails to cake. The recordings would be pressed to vinyl and the LPs presented as a six-record box set to the newlyweds. On their shelf, next to the soft-rock jams they would acquire over the rest of the decade, his work would look like an opera. The interviews went better and better as the night progressed. Proud parents and old grannies and next-door neighbors and one little kid he suspected may have been a little off. The happy, breathless bride and groom at the very end in the interest of dramatic timing. But it was in the opportunities to describe the scene, standing there alone and talking to himself, that he knew he really excelled:

And now something’s happening. The whole wall of red drapes across from the reception area has just started to come open from the bottom. An ever-increasing arc, rising, getting higher and wider, the opening revealing the wide expanses of a dining room: Didn’t even know it was there. A huge dining room, filled with tables with tiny, flickering candles among the flowers. Looking across, it looks almost like a castle ballroom. Way at the far end, we see Donna and Tom, embracing…

At least this is how I pictured it. This is from Seth’s parents’ wedding forty years ago; for their thirtieth anniversary, Seth asked if I would burn the old records to a CD for him. The technology was still new. It was 2000 so the machine was not compact. I listened to the entire thing as the snow swirled outside my Harlem sublet. I had just moved back to the city after a year in the margins of Westchester and New Jersey. In the former, ill-conceived attempts at cohabitation and a bracing lesson in what love was and wasn’t. In the latter, a self-imposed exile to my parents’ nest where eventually I healed well enough.

By the end of the recording I knew all the guests as well as anybody. I felt like family. Family surrounds us always. Didn’t even know it was there.

The Reigning Sound, “If Christmas Can’t Bring You Home,” from Home for Orphans (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 2005)