first round
(5) edie brickell & new bohemians, “what i am”
took out
(12) rush, “new world man”
307-98
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/4/23.
Don’t Let Me Get Too Deep: Amy M. Miller on “what i am”
Kris sat across from me on the sofa telling me about this new band, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. I’m pretty sure she brought the album to my house, we played it on the big stereo in the downstairs den, I found a spare Maxwell cassette and recorded it after one spin of their single, “What I Am.”
In 1989, I was careening towards senior year with no idea what would come next. Kris, herself, had changed majors from architecture to fine art to philosophy and religion. It’s no wonder a song about philosophy and religion spoke to her! Who knew she’d end up a nurse practitioner in a matter of years? Did she know what she was or what? On the other hand, I was an English major without direction. Were my parents right that it’s great to have creative hobbies, but my acumen for uncovering themes in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass might not land me a job post-college? I choked down these worries, cut my long, curly Edie Brickell hair to my chin, and walked into the fog.
As far as 80’s videos go, this one is understated. No fog machines. No mirrors dramatically smashing. No gauzy curtains blowing through stage windows. No Russell Mulcahy symbolism that felt profound at the time only to end up cliché in retrospect. Maybe it’s because the video was an unbudgeted afterthought so they broke into an old fun house, set up bare bulb lamps, and played music surrounded by creepy mechanical dolls. Edie sways sideways, poses in an awkward air akimbo. She dusts her long wavy hair on the floor, then stares apple-cheeked into the camera. Look closely and you can almost see her wink.
My daughter heads out in a belly shirt she cut short herself, a long corduroy overshirt, and ripped jeans. She lowers the roof of her VW Bug and cranks the music. Her aquamarine hair blows back as she drives off to meet friends. She doesn’t care what you think of her, her music, her dressed down hipster look, her toadstool earrings. She’s 18. Not some sad Alice Cooper anthem. Something better: feminist, kooky, and full of eye rolls. How is she so confident? So cool and self-assured? This is what I wanted for her and yet I’m baffled by how she achieved it. She is what she is.
“What I Am” is a wink. The way that iconic guitar riff moves from a low B to high D parallels the interrogatory phrasing of Edie’s big questions: “What I am is what I am. You what you are, or what?” What am I? What are you? Go ahead, she seems to be saying, consult philosophy and religion to figure yourself out. I’ll be over here having a laugh. Online commenters at songmeaning.com dissect the lyrics like they’re highlighting the bible. They find “What I Am” dismissive, offensive, flippant. But guys, she’s not besmirching your belief system. Stop being so damn defensive! That’s not the way of Edie. She’s not aware of too many things, remember. She knows what she knows. You know what I mean?
D-do ya?
Her bags appear in the hallway in early August. We aren’t due East for a good month, but my daughter is a consummate planner, the only one in our family. She fills knock-off IKEA bags with blankets and clothes. Her best friends arrive, shut the bedroom door, listen to Phoebe Bridgers, and pack up her room. She returns the favor at each of their houses, keeping them company, taking pictures, playing music. It all led up to this moment, I think: preschool, ballet lessons, sleepovers, magnet schools, and art classes. In one of her first photos, I’m propping up one-week-old Fi in my lap. My expression reads, “I can’t handle how cute she is.” Fuzzy black hair sticks straight up, eyes wide and unfocused, she wears a onesie decorated with a paint palette. Above it reads “Future Artist.”
Senior year, three friends and I rented an apartment like grown-ups. I prepped for comprehensive exams. I dated a first-year student. I deejayed my first radio show at the campus station. Things were heady. Every moment was now, now, now. Twist the kaleidoscope one click and what seemed eternal shifted just enough for all the colored glass to fall. First, one friend moved out. Another, followed. And the two of us remaining did our best to keep moving forward, paying double the rent. The balance of my romantic relationship shifted, too. It felt light and airy at first, but soon I was grasping at my boyfriend like he was my lifeline to happiness. “You scared that poor boy to death,” my husband scolds me when I tell him these stories.
Parents do the best they know how. I’m convinced of that everytime I hear a friend explain why their kid will be attending the local or state university. If that’s what makes sense to their family, you don’t need to rationalize it to me. I’m not here to judge. Knowing the high cost of college, knowing several of her peers were taking gap years, we still insisted Fi apply to whatever schools made sense to her. I suggested she consider art schools when the big universities felt overwhelming. We toured the old brick libraries and sculpture gardens and I tried to read the expression on her face. Is this where she’ll find her people? One night last spring, my daughter asked, “Is it okay just to choose?” I had three months to find a full-time job before tuition was due.
There is much said online about Edie’s take on philosophy and religion. Her lyrics are indiscernible on first listen. In summary,
Philosophy is . . . talk on a cereal box, a walk on the slippery rocks.
Religion is . . . a smile on a dog, a light in the fog.
Some call these lyrics Zen puzzles. An October 1988 Cash Box hot take called “What I Am” one of the “catchiest, anti-philosophical, tongue-in-cheek ditties since Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’” Catchy? Yes, very percussive and quirky. Tongue-in-cheek? 100%! But the song’s cheekiness isn’t challenging philosophy or religion—yours, mine, or anyone else’s—because Edie isn’t searching for meaning. And she definitely doesn’t have answers. Put simply, “What I Am” is more, “Hey, let’s take it down a notch,” than “I’m speaking in riddles to ridicule you.” This is a message I celebrate. I see my daughter in this message. Cut the drama, mama. Chill out. Just be real.
Fi and her friends love BeReal, the photo-sharing app that randomly alerts you when it’s time to, well, be real. Users get a two-minute notification to take an unfiltered selfie with their camera’s front camera whether they’re ready or not while the app simultaneously uses the back camera to shoot whatever the user is looking at. Then bingo! It shares both images with your friends for their reactions. It’s less about collecting likes for perfectly curated duck lips, peace sign photos, and more, “Hey friends, look how dorky I am.” My daughter shows me her friends’ BeReals and they’re charmingly narrative: shopping for dorm rooms at Target, packing for college, eating family dinner. When she last visited I didn’t expect her to ask, “You wanna be in a BeReal with me?” but she did. I leaned in, smiling ear-to-ear, side-by-side in selfie mode. Her brother grinned on the forward end of the camera. And there we were, all of us with our messy hair—happy.
My parents gifted me my first car as a graduation present. They bought my brother Craig’s Subaru station wagon, which he drove to campus. After the ceremony and dinner out with my siblings and parents, I received one lesson on how to drive stick before they all turned around and drove home. I stayed with a friend who was house-sitting that night, packed the cargo area to the ceiling, and set my boombox in the seat beside me. The next morning, I turned the ignition and grinded the gears for a good ten minutes. A neighbor I hadn’t noticed on the porch across the street must have tired of the noise. He yelled, “Push in the clutch!” Thank you, irritated citizen! I headed towards the interstate blaring Joni Mitchell, weeping uncontrollably. “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling. Looking for something. What can it be?” I needed to figure out my shit, but at least I was in the driver’s seat, the unairconditioned driver’s seat in a car I was learning to operate as I drove it four hours home.
Edie told us right up front that she wasn’t aware of much. Maybe her humility and self-deprecating humor grew from sudden life changes. When Edie met the band, she dropped out of art school. I had wanted to study art, but my parents didn't support that choice. And music? Edie didn’t plan a rock and roll fantasy career. She wanted to sing, but put that dream aside to pursue art. Legend has it, she saw a band, stayed after the show, downed a shot of whiskey, and asked if she could sing with them while they jammed. And that’s how it began. Liquid courage and luck. It’s possible Edie and the band never thought they’d strike gold with their first single. (Spoiler alert: It was a Top 10 hit and the album went double platinum!) She was as surprised as anyone to land guest artist on Saturday Night Live. Edie wasn’t proselytizing humanism and speaking snarky about your beliefs, your personal philosophy. On the contrary, Internet, she humbly admitted she didn’t know shit. Maybe, you don’t either.
≈
A week before my daughter leaves for college she and my son greet me as I walk through the door. I’m tired. Full-time work is no joke after so many years of working part-time, raising kids. I am bone tired. “The National has a new song out and I can’t stop listening to it. Wanna hear it?” Her favorite band. Matt Berninger is basically the same age as me and my husband. This comforts me. She also loves Radiohead and The Decemberists. We did good, Pa.
Of course I want to hear the song, exhaustion be damned. I only have days remaining with my girl. She could ask me to do a back handspring and I would give it the ol’ college try. She streams Spotify from her phone to the tv, finds the lyric video, presses play. It’s a driving song. A song about “weird goodbyes.” It’s about distances and heartbreak and leaving. The emotion in Berninger and Bon Iver’s harmonies set my tired bones in motion. I’m dancing. We’re all dancing. Three bodies floating, arms waving, heads rolling, eyes closed. We dance together until the song ends, pausing long enough to say how beautiful it is. She presses play again and we slide into the bench seat beside Berninger. We glide.
≈
A friend of Edie’s recalled driving with her as a teenager in the March, 1989 issue of Spin Magazine. The friend, Amy Kuhn, painted a familiar scene. She and Edie were high school friends. They both drove VW Bugs, their first cars, and took turns driving one another. They blasted XTC, The Psychedelic Furs, and David Bowie while singing, but “every once in a while Edie would ask me, ‘Do you think I have a good voice?’”
≈
Sixteen-year-old me couldn’t wait to drive. My dad took me driving on the weekends. I still tease him about hitting the “brakes” on the passenger side while his voice inclined from a B to a D, not as a question, but an exclamation, “Brake it. Brake it hard!” On more than one occasion I would borrow Mom or Dad’s car and head to the park to get lost. I’d turn into Seneca Park, down the long parkway that lined the hilly golf course, make a left and another left to reach Cherokee Park. From there, I found as many hidden roads and backways as I could. Windows down. Stereo up. I blared Tears For Fears and Bruce Springsteen’s The River, feeling like a character in those songs: shy, lonely, trapped. Getting lost in the park gave me agency. Whether the roads dead-ended or circled in loops, I always found my way back to familiar landmarks.
≈
Despite my daughter’s superior planning skills, I’m in charge of the trip to Rhode Island. I request time off, write a note to my son’s school, remind my husband to reschedule clients, hire a pet-sitter for Charlie. I take my Subaru (a newer model, not the graduation present) to the dealership so it will be travel-ready, order a storage bag to strap to its roof. If I focus on the details—I definitely never said to myself—I won’t need to acknowledge the purpose of this trip. Hey Everybody! I Googled a cute bakery where we can eat downtown!
≈
Thinking back, I wonder if I scheduled one too many days for the college move. Each day as we walked to our car through the hotel courtyard full of smokers, I heard a voice inside me counting down the minutes, quiet-screaming, This is my daughter two days before she starts college . . . This is my daughter one day before she starts college . . . This is my daughter three hours before we leave her at college. I scheduled plenty of time to arrive, wander the campus, and explore town. I accounted for the amount of rest my husband and I would need between two days travel there and two days back. But I was also buying time. We’d have two whole days without her friends distracting her, two days before all of the chaos of first year orientation began. Two days to wander into H. P. Lovecraft-inspired bookstores. Two days to hold onto my whole family.
≈
Breezing through the ‘89 Spin Magazine, I discover Edie laying it all out for listeners, despite the pages and pages of online debate at songmeanings.com:
I’d rather die than be thrown into some heavy conversation. I don’t like heavy conversations where everybody’s so deep all the time. Spirituality, beliefs, the whole big picture—I don’t think you can make anybody see things the way you see them. It’s just so weird. That’s what “What I Am” is about.
She was 22 when she said that. In 1989, I turned 21. Like Edie, I was introverted and preferred deep thoughts as an appetizer on the conversation menu with plenty of self-deprecating humor to give the meal flavor. Sure, I had my doubts about philosophy and religion—still do, and so do my kids—but like Edie says, I know I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, so be who you are and let the rest go, man.
≈
How did I keep it together all of those months leading up to this moment? I snap a photo of my kids, arms around each other for the last time until Thanksgiving. It happened so fast. Senior photos, college essays, senior art show, a haircut and green dye, prom, first love, college acceptances and scholarships, dorm shopping, and then, the sixteen-hour drive to Rhode Island, the quick unloading at the dorms, the suffocating heat inside the colonial Baptist church where the college president gave parents instructions: enjoy the buffet on the lawn, then say goodbye to your child and hit the road.
How did I keep it together on the long drive home? Through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with The National playing in my head on repeat:
It finally hits me, a mile's drive
The sky is leaking, the windshield's crying
I'm feeling sacred, my soul is stripped
Radio's painful, the words are clippedThe grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes
My car is creeping, I think it's dying
I'm pulling over until it heals
I'm on a shoulder of lemon fields
The grief it got me. A nine hundred, forty-six mile drive. My soul was stripped. Spotify’s painful. And if the windshield cried, I don’t remember. On the way up, I caught Rick shaking next to me, silently mourning when he thought no one noticed. On the way back, he was calm and I was running on fumes. Halfway home she sent a smiling selfie, seated on the bed we put together with new sheets, blankets, and pillows only hours ago. Behind her, the posters of David Bowie, Dodie, Phoebe Bridgers, and The National collaged and overlapped photos of her friends and her love. She was going to be fine. Was I?
We pull in front of our house late afternoon the next day. Charlie greets our weary faces. I let her lick me as Rick and Toby bring in the luggage. I’m not hungry, but I walk into the kitchen, and open the refrigerator. On the top shelf I spy Fi’s unfinished chocolate milkshake from last weekend, straw still sticking out from the lid. I clutch the cold container like it’s her, my girl who brilliantly bloomed into her best self. Rick finds me sobbing a minute later and curls me into his chest.
≈
After the New Bohemians’s second album, Ghost of a Dog, released, Edie stepped away from recording and touring. Her focus shifted after she married Paul Simon. She wanted to be home to raise their three kids, but she remained friends with her bandmates and they left a door open for her to return. In 2018, when Edie’s kids were grown, she recommitted to the New Bohemians. Two critically acclaimed albums later, Edie and the boys have finally built the practice studio of their dreams, a barn back home in central Texas. While this wasn’t necessarily Edie’s plan, I discovered a wistful Edie looking towards the future in a 2011 Texas Monthly interview:
I’m hoping that if I make really good records or records that I love, one day, when my kids are in college and I’m suffering desperately from empty-nest syndrome, I can slip back into a creative life and occupy my time with a healthy career. So I’m trying to figure out a way to move gracefully into the next phase of my life.
≈
I dry my eyes, wipe my nose on my t-shirt, and take my bags upstairs, passing Fi’s closed bedroom door on the way. I flop on the bed and dig through stacks of books on the floor to find a notebook. Knowing I have this essay to write, I jot down who I think I am at this moment. Adjectives anchor the noun “mother” so it doesn’t dematerialize.
What I am: mother, heartbroken, shattered, hopeful, proud, gutted, excited, nostalgic, wistful.
I put the list away and walk back to my daughter’s room. I turn the handle and enter, noticing what she left behind: books, awards, the electric guitar we bought her last year, photos above her ink-stained desk. I pull a pillow off her bed and breathe it in. The door stays open, I tell my husband.
Months later our family falls into a pattern of weekly FaceTimes. My girl is happy! She’s reading good books and essays, watching films, dancing, sewing and felting projects, laughing with names that are new to me. She also returns home several times. As I write this, I’m anticipating the pizza nights and dance parties of her upcoming visit. I’ll send a YouTube video from my phone to the tv. In it, a young woman with waist-long, wavy, brown hair leans to the side in awkward akimbo. Her glossy lips shine in the close-ups. The guitar slides from B to D in parallel to the singer’s question. My kids and I will drag my husband to the family room dance floor. Our arms will undulate in time with the quirky percussion. When the song ends, my girl will pick up her tote bag and key ring—the one with the Ruth Bader Ginsberg amigurumi—and head to her VW Bug. I’ll glimpse her blue-green hair from the living room window as she cranks up the music and speeds away.
≈
After graduation, after that grueling four-hour drive with the windows down and my boom box at top volume, after almost sliding backwards on an incline into the car behind me, I made it home. Returning home had never been my post-college plan, but I needed somewhere to sleep. And despite coming home never being my plan, and despite never having a solid plan in the first place, I lived. “What’s your five-year plan?” my brother Craig asked me soon after I got back. More like what’s my plan for later today! I did hope and dream. I did find a job and a job and a job. I did earn two master degrees along the way. I never expected my mother to die before I turned 30 or for my dad to keep on keeping on at age 93. I never planned to get married and have babies, but I’m so glad I did. And now, midway through my road trip, as my kids blossom into adults before my eyes, I’m letting myself wander again. (I’m drawing almost daily!). All those years ago when I drove through Cherokee Park trying to get lost, I always navigated my way back home. Maybe not having a plan is one way of putting it. Maybe another way is saying, let’s take it down a notch and wander for a while, gracefully—like Edie—into the next phase of our lives.
You know what I mean?
Amy M. Miller’s essays have appeared in Brevity, Salon, Hippocampus Magazine, [PANK], The Louisville Review, Under the Gum Tree, and more. She received the 2017 Harpur Palate Creative Nonfiction Prize and contributed to Air: A Radio Anthology, published by Books by Hippocampus. Formerly the Executive Director of Louisville Literary Arts, she now teaches literacy skills to children with dyslexia. Amy lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her husband and two children, their dog Charlie, and her scraped-up Subaru wagon. She still loves Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians and remembers her daughter looking happier in this photo.
dave singleton on “new world man”
It can be hard to work on projects where there is a looming deadline. The stress can sometimes be overwhelming. However, there are also cases where being on deadline leads to the best work you can possibly do.
The latter was the case for Rush, the prog rock power trio from Canada, as such a situation led to the creation of their only U.S. Billboard Top 40 hit. The song, “New World Man,” clocked in at number 21 on the main chart and at number 1 on the Top Tracks (now Mainstream Rock) chart.
In an excerpt from his diary published by Sounds UK Magazine in 1982, lyricist and drummer for Rush Neil Peart explains how “New World Man” wound up on Signals:
At this point the basic tracks for the other seven songs were finished, and we have enough for an album, but we have always wanted to write another song for this one. We want more! There are moral reasons why an album shouldn't be too short, but there are technological reasons why it shouldn't be too long. What shall we do?
We decided to write another song, and if it turns out to be too long, we won't put it on, but if we come up with something short enough, we will have an eighth song.
So, thus was born "Project 3:57"!
See? Working under the gun, or in this case, under literal time limitations, can produce something that winds up being recognized and appreciated on a high level.
But there is also a lingering question that needs to be resolved. What, exactly, is a New World Man?
The overarching theme of Signals seems to be the changes that are happening in our world and how it impacts different people or groups. “New World Man” fits into this theme by looking at an individual, this New World Man, as he adapts to the progress taking place.
The New World Man desires to be an important member of society, helping to “run the big machine”. Even though he is restless and a rebel or an outsider, he seeks to do…something.
There is a touch of individualistic selfishness in the New World Man. A bit of strongman, even. He strives for purity and strength, but he is also sensitive enough to acknowledge his failings and the problems and demons he has. He is complex and contains multitudes, including an understanding of the fact that change in society is ever present and ever occurring, and that staying hidebound to tradition does not allow for the progress needed to improve the human condition.
At the same time, he is not fully mature, and there is a chance that he might fail. After all, lots of new inventions, new creations, do not succeed. A new world man is no different. That failure may be driven, in part, by his own unwillingness to be on the side of right—even when the decision is clear.
It is quite a bit of philosophical consideration to pack into three minutes and forty-five seconds (clearly, they met the stated goal of sub-3:57), and is not the typical lyrical foundation for a song that winds up being your only United States number one hit. However, from the moment that Peart joined Rush in 1975 and became the primary lyricist, he brought different philosophical and literature-based considerations to rock music.
While there were science fiction and fantasy lyrics in much of the band’s earlier work, by the time Signals came out, lyrically Peart had started to become a bit more direct and even a bit more humanistic when compared to the work in the 1970s. That evolution would continue through the rest of the band’s career save for their final album, the concept piece Clockwork Angels.
I discovered Rush when I was 13 years old. It was the summer between 8th and 9th grade, and I found myself enrolled in a summer program at a boarding school in western Massachusetts. My neighbor was a big, burly white guy from Texas whose name I cannot remember at this point. I do remember, though, that he was the one who introduced me to this band that I, a Black kid from New York City, had never heard of. (I was four when Signals came out.) He let me borrow two of their albums: Moving Pictures and Roll the Bones.
From the first few seconds of the song “Dreamline” from Roll the Bones, I was hooked. At the first chance I got, I bought my own copies of these albums and then went searching for more. And while the music was appealing, as a budding lyricist myself, it was Neil’s words that had me hooked. The ability to convey so much information in so few words spoke to my soul and allowed me to tighten up my own lyrics specifically, and my other writing generally.
When I am struggling to find the words for a project, whether at work, in school, or for my own creative endeavors, I choose a Rush album to listen to as I try to gather and sort my thoughts. Neil Peart was, and is, a source of inspiration for me as a writer—even though I don’t write lyrics that much anymore.
To paraphrase one of his own lyrics to refer to him, from the song “Afterimage” from Grace Under Pressure:
Suddenly, [he] was gone/from all the lives [he] left his mark upon.
Cancer sucks. Rest in peace, Neil.
This is Dave Singleton's second time writing for March Xness. Born in the late 70s, raised in the 80s, but musically a 90s aficionado, Dave Singleton has been writing about sports and other stuff online for nearly two decades. Originally from New York City, Dave went to college and graduate school in the Midwest and has called Las Vegas home since 2006. He has won and lost on Jeopardy! and on the Game Show Network. You can follow him on Twitter @dfsingleton.