Happy Sounding Sad Songs is a record I released in 2007 under the name Johnny Citizen, a non de guerre I’d first ascribed to a fictional character in 2001. I’ve been meaning to put it on the web for free download for a while, and it just worked out that today is that day. Later this month I’m releasing a re-worked and re-arranged re-issue of my Americana EP as well.
I’ve long wanted to explain some of the material on HSSS. I didn’t go into a lot of detail, but here is what I wrote about each track as well as my best guess about the year the song was written:
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Don’t Tell Me (2001): A break up song for someone you can’t break up with–an emotionally unavailable God. The extended ending has lyrics from the song that inspired this one, Dig by Adam Again.
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Painful Tired (2001): An ode to sleep deprivation.
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High Tonight (2003): Sometimes when a relationship is about to crash and burn, you just want to have one night where you forget about the giant piles of resentment and hurt and just enjoy each other’s company one last time before you go your separate ways. Incidentally, using “get high” as a metaphor is probably the best way for a metaphor to be mistakenly literally interpreted. The ending was originally an interpolation of Over the Rhine’s Long Lost Brother.
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Humanity’s Playbill (2003): The first verse speaks to various things in “our world”: A lover who can’t keep her promises but also can’t admit to not keeping them. “At the local megaplex by fools and drones” is a segue and is specifically about “The Passion of the Christ”, a movie that was receiving a lot of attention at the time. The next verse continues airing grievances against both modern faith and modern ideals: “We are like the birds” is a sideways reference to the “consider the ravens” parable. The streets of heaven as “fool’s gold” is mostly an inditement of those motivated not by love but by reward. The rest of the song is sung specifically at Jesus, with the “shouting over the din” unintentionally pairing with the line “I can’t hear unless you shout above the noise” from Don’t Tell Me.
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I Don’t Know What to do About That (2007): One of my favorite songs musically, and the newest song on the record, but the lyrics are strictly historical. Made by another to feel really poorly about myself, this was the song that came out. I like that the title line, at the time sung in desperation, is now a shoulder-shrug.
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I Radio Heaven: I cover a lot of Over the Rhine songs, but this was my favorite. We had fun with it.
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Sucker for Love (2003): This was the first song we recorded for the record. “Someone…to shove” is, of course, a reference to the classic Soul Asylum song.
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Beautiful and Tragic (2003): A song I wrote about Bosnia before I’d even moved there. The spoken word track is actually Polish. We didn’t know any Bosnians to call at the time. The lyrics reference U2’s The Best of 1990-2000, a record where the Passengers track Miss Sarajevo comes just before Stay. “My wheels are spinning but I’m upside down” is a lyric off the latter.
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American Dream Town (2002): A re-recording of a previously-released tune. A song about secret societies, plastic surgery and other interesting aspects of the American dream. Jason Roberts of The Happy Bullets wrote the ending, which I have always been chuffed about.