Brightest Young Things

Michael Zapruder and Tim Williams are wrappign up their tour this Sunday @ The Red and the Black. All signs point to it being an interesting night.
We asked them to write up some of their songs for your sonic aquaintance.

Michael Zapruder

Ads for Feelings-
Some people have guessed that this song is about advertising, but it was actually inspired, to use the term loosely, by "Since You've Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson. I thought I sort of liked that song, but on one particular evening I listened to it and there was something so astonishingly desperate and spiritually bleak not only about the emotions she was expressing, but also in the overall texture of the song. I just overdosed on pain. I started writing in order to escape the tyrannical, oppressive experience of the song. That's where "My ears were ringing from your victory screech / they were echoing your deafening credo / like a terrorist's victim in europe / I staggered out in a horrible speedo" came from. It's hopefully funny and yet seems relevant. That's what I was going for. The music was inspired by Robyn Hitchcock in the verses and Caetano Veloso in the flute and violin riffs. And, for the record, I often enjoy sugar-pop guilty pleasures, but they can be like junk food: impossibly delicious unless you have that one extra bite that changes everything.

Happy New Year
I don't really remember writing this song, but I do remember where the ideas came from. I live near Oakland's Chinatown, where there is a Korean church and various other religious pavilions. They are pretty close to the freeway, which runs alongside the whole area and lends it a certain pathos. It's a part of town that expresses a kind of ongoing anticlimax, but I love it, that melancholy feeling of being in a somehow mediocre place. This song lets me speak in a certain voice I can relate to. Here's a person with a complaint, a person whose perspective is deeply unreliable, and a person whose internal monologue is so loud that it's hard for him to connect to the outside world sometimes. He's standing in the rain, very confused about the present and the past, and just reacting to events around him. This is my favorite genre - the hypnotic scenario. A world you can step into like a little film.

Harbor Saints
I started writing this for my sister, I think maybe when she got married or had her first baby, but it quickly changed to be about something else. I love this song because it asks permission to be imperfect. It's asking for peace on human terms, not in some way that none of us can accomplish. I wrote it fast and it has that simple, immediate quality. On the surface you might think it's just a simple folky song, but the lyrics are dark. It's what you might say if you had to ask an angel for permission to really be yourself - imagine how difficult it would be to stand up in front of a real angel and know that it could see all of who you are. What would you say? I think this is what I would say.

Tim Williams --

Lessons -
I don't remember the process of writing many songs but I remember this one. I was in Brighton, England on a cold November day down by the sea. There weren't too many people around except for one couple walking along the rocky shore. I don't think I was stalking them but certainly was channeling my past into their present. Wishing that it was me and a lost love giving it another shot. Learning from past mistakes in order to live happily ever after. Maybe that was the case with those two, maybe they were just drunk. Either way I found something inspiring about the scene.

Tape Your Head -
December 23, 2008, 2AM was the last time I was asked about. I was seeing this girl and we were going to her childhood home. Apparently her mother had googled me and this song worried her. She wanted to know what it was about and I only had a few minutes to spit it out before we arrived. I was still trying to sober up from a night out on the town and was not in the best place to explain anything. Every word that came out of my mouth seemed to fall right to the ground below the cold leather seats of her SUV. The only thing I remember was that it is a song about injecting hope into the hopeless. And this is the best I have every described this song.

Out There -
This song came together as I was serving a year sentence at my first ever office job. Like many things in my life, I had built this new experience up so much that I convinced myself I was incapable of doing it prior to even setting foot in the place. After a few weeks though I realized I had nothing to fear as most of my coworkers were serving life sentences and I was about to get my parole.

hop.to.it