At the Distant Castle 9th Anniversary party in Worcester, Massachusetts, after round-robin noise sets, FISTinc.’s Westminster Dog Show–style sandwich showcasing, and the Lentils’ farewell set to the Heart of the Commonwealth, karaoke commenced. Luke Csehak, guitarist and lyricist of the Lentils and formerly Happy Jawbone Family Band, and I popped upstairs to chat about the song “The Bed Is the Killer,” from their new LP Brattleboro Is Flooding (available at BUFU Records), over cups of equal-parts homemade violet brandy and lilac bitters.

*Note: An incomplete annotation of the songs being sung by party guests accompanies the interview.
(From the blog WHYWHYWHY.)

Well, what do you do?

I’ve got tons of stupid ideas.

Do you feel like you approach music as if you’re pursuing a stupid idea? (edge of seventeen, stevie nicks)

Yeah, yeah, you can say that. It’s like . . . well no. No you can’t actually say that.

It seems like there’s humility to the songs you write, where it’s sincere but also has a cheeky “here’s some garbage that came to me” feel to it.

Yeah, that’s all part of the honesty process. That’s basically why I bother with these crazy things called songs. It’s a really great way to be honest with myself and honest with the people around me. At the surface level it seems kind of abstract but I think with the abstraction comes further honesty. I feel like I can’t be that honest being straight up confessional.

Sure, as in, with the ability to command a monologue and obfuscate, you’re free to be a little more vulnerable? (champagne supernova, oasis)

Well it’s funny that you bring up that. It’s interesting that it’s a dichotomy whether you should have control or whether you should be honest, which kind of implies if you were to be truly honest you would have no control.

Maybe you would’ve clicked with a different craft if you wanted to be completely candid?

It’s not like that. I’ve got these honest feelings and I want to make them relatable to people. It’s more honest to me if I sing a song about a bed rather than a song about a lover because it’s really about the bed.

So is the bed representative of a lover or having bed-oriented interactions or—

That’s really interesting and I feel like I should put a little bit on the table ’cause you got me all liquored up.

Yeah. I did.

Basically [Brattleboro Is Flooding] is like a breakup album, but that song was written a good deal before the breakup occurred. You could look at it as if it were prophetic in a way. There are a number of lines that turned out to be truer than I thought. I went through a lot of different lyrics. I had nine or ten verses.

Do you think those will ever come up elsewhere? (I will always love you, whitney houston)

Well, when I die someone will read my notebooks. It’s funny how a song works. There is that level of submission where you’re being so honest that you do lose willpower. It’s not even really about you at a point, it’s about the song. And because it’s you that’s putting it forward there are these bits that stick to it that relate to your life. It’s cool that you chose this song because it centers on the bed and cruelty. It goes back to this Peter Orlovsky line. He was Allen Ginsberg’s lover and a great poet in his own right. I sort of like him better, and in many ways he was a better writer than Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was a better hype man, a better socialist. I mean socializer, though he was a better socialist as well. But Orlovsky had this great line in a poem; I think it ended the poem. I read it in a really debaucherous state of my life, and the line is “The bed that takes the weight of the world,” and that really stuck with me. You hear these things and they’re a part of somebody else’s personal mythology and they become part of your mythology.

The bed.

There’s so much in a bed. I read this great fact about how after someone sleeps in a bed for a few years it becomes that 10% of the bed is their own skin cells. The bed holds so much. The best is this physical manifestation of memory, but it can’t just be resolved to that either because it’s also the physical representation of pleasure and relaxation. I just love how that one word, one syllable, three letters, is so loaded. That’s what really gets me juiced about lyrics. I want to investigate the bed. In linguistic studies people often talk about chairs. The chair is sort of like a negative definition of the human and its need to rest.

So there’s a lot of ambivalence around the bed, and with the line “The average bed in the course of its lifetime will never know regret or all the harm it’s caused in this world,” you pose it as a somewhat reckless or oblivious figure? (rhiannon, fleetwood mac)

That’s legit but that’s not quite what I was getting at. It’s a little more vague. The bed is the larger symbol of not just what actually happens in the bed and the memories of past partners and friendships but the bed as this force that supports your sleeping and your dreaming. It’s the grounds of something and that ground is sort of suspect.

Did you not “want to look [your] mattress in the eye” out of resentment or out of fear of unpacking everything it entails, or—

It’s sort of a meta line. I’m writing a song about a bed and at one point I was like “I don’t even want to write this song. I don’t want to be this honest.” And that’s an actual thought that I had. I didn’t want to look the mattress in the eye.

“Take the delay off my vocals”

That was about the recording process and how it’s so easy and common to obfuscate.

Sorry I’m just worried about who’s texting me right now. [sigh] Yeah, it’s a dramatic text. I don’t even know how to respond to that. This goes perfectly with the topic at hand.

Oh yeah?

Yeah maybe it’ll come up. [laughs]

Maybe it shouldn’t. Oh, so I really like this guy: “I don’t want to kill the killers anymore.” (standing still, jewel)

Well, I mean, the killers are people who kill things. But they’re also a band. I know nothing about the Killers except my sister really likes them and I tried to like them because I really wanted to relate to my sister.

How far apart are you in age?

I’m 31 and she’s 38. She has turned me onto some stuff I really like. But she was into this no-good guy who was into the Killers. The line’s not really about them, but it’s a cool double entendre. And it was cool how it was like that, just as I was saying it. This song especially I wrote lyrics where I recorded the chord progression and said random syllables to the melody.

I like how that line leads into the really pointed “Now I know that music itself is wrong.”

I was hoping you’d ask about that line. That’s a big line for me and it was a big release to just say it. It was sort of a point that had been coming for a while and that is that the common dialogue about music is that music is good for you.

When it hits you feel no pain.

Which is totally true, obviously. You can’t argue with that. And there’s this whole “Rock and roll saved my soul,” which is also very true, to a point. Maybe it’s just me, but that hasn’t entirely been my experience with music.

I mean, maybe it’s just you.

You feel that when you’re a teenager and you listen to Lou Reed and you feel like, “Fuck yeah, this is the shit and I feel more alive and I feel more meaning than I’ve ever felt in my entire life and I’m going to investigate this further.” Then you investigate it for 10 years and then you realize, “Oh shit, I fucking wasted my life.” And you’re hanging out with your other musician friends who have felt the same way and you’re a little ashamed to even admit that you’re questioning what Lou Reed said. I talked about this with this one punk girl that I love and she was like “Yeah, I sort of feel like rock and roll actually ruined my life,” and I think that that’s not entirely honest in itself either. In a lot of ways rock and roll has saved my life. But is it rock and roll or is it something you already have in you?

Is rock and roll just the loudest voice in your head? (total eclipse of the heart, bonnie tyler)

Which brings me back to the bed analogy. What is more of a bed than music?

When I hear you reference hard drives I think of the Happy Jawbone Christmas album (A Happy Jawbone X-mas Gift to You, 2011. Vol. 1: Operation Ho! Ho! Ho!) and the mythology around that, which exists in my mind as you lost your hard drive and did a lot of pacing. Is the hard drive somewhat analogous to the bed?

I don’t think I even made that connection. The hard drive, the bed, and the ocean foam are very similar in that they’re false spaces that don’t hold up in interesting ways. You put your faith in these hard drives and then they fail and then what happens? See these grey hairs in my beard? They appeared days after my hard drive failed. The Christmas album wasn’t so bad, the big stress was I thought I’d lost this other album I’d been working on forever, My Pillow Lava, which I’ve released one part of. I’m about to release the second part. It’s my magnum opus.

There’s another song on this album referencing hard drives.

Yeah, “Brattleboro is Flooding.” “You’re never gonna melt that hard drive.” It’s sort of funny that all of us technological brats actually have to care about this stupid little piece of metal. I brought my busted hard drive to my techno-geek friend was like “Can you please resuscitate these files?” and he was like “Dude, can’t you just, like, write some more songs?” and I had a moment where I thought “Yeah, I can just write some more songs.” I really like the symbol of the hard drive and I told myself I’m only allowed to use it once more.

Yeah, you can lose a whole lot without knowing how or why and sometimes there’s nothing you can do to fix any of it.

But it was some miracle that I was able to save My Pillow Lava and everything else was destroyed. And that’s actually the basis of the Lentils. I was planning on releasing that just solo, and then Happy Jawbone fell apart and I thought, “Okay, I guess this is the first Lentils album.”

So “ocean foam” comes up several times in this song. (love shack, the b-52′s)

Not even just this song. It’s all over that album and particularly the Happy Jawbone album before it, the self-titled one. Ocean foam is really important to me. I’m not done writing about ocean foam. It really relates to the bed too. It’s rhizomatic. Do you know this term?

No, tell me.

The rhizome, it was very big in my education at Naropa. It’s Deleuze and Guattari, these French critical theorists who wrote about how traditionally Europeans thought of the creative process as a tree where it starts in the roots and goes to the trunk and flourishes out and comes to a clean point at the end, and they posited that that’s sort of bullshit and that true creative process is like a rhizome, which is how fungus grow and how the root structure grows. It’s decentralized and interconnected.

And so the ocean foam. It’s back to me as a child reading Hans Christian Andersen stories. In the original Little Mermaid she doesn’t get the prince. And I was seriously fucked that she didn’t get the prince. She actually jumps off the ship to commit suicide and her body reverts to ocean foam, which is what mermaids come from. I just chewed on that for decades. It’s like the bed. It’s where you come from and where you go to and there’s so much suffering in between.

It’s your own little daily return to foam.

Yes, very much so. They both are gross and smell like genitals. The first time I went to the ocean my family was all excited, but I just barfed the whole time because I found the ocean foam to be so disgusting. I just barfed all over the beach. My family was so ashamed of me.

Does “I don’t want to show my professors where I live” deal with shame? (lovefool (say that you love me), the cardigans)

It’s funny that that line came at the end. It’s my favorite line in the whole song. Like “Oh great, I came to all these conclusions and half-conclusions but still I don’t want to show my professors where I live. This is a lonely, gross place.” That was an actual feeling that I had. I went to a school where professors would hang out with students, and I actually didn’t want them to come to my house because my house was gross.

So were you “all alone in the outfield with a jar of Vegenaise?”

I don’t know if I’ve ever come up with as visceral of a symbol of poor bohemians as a jar of Vegenaise in the outfield.

Who’s the “shortstop preserved on ice?”

I don’t think it’s an actual person. Just sort of grasping at something that’s innocent and isn’t lonely. The shortstop is the negative space of what the protagonist is in the song. I rely on a lot of baseball imagery on that whole album. Sports, especially to artsy types like you and me, are this thing that maybe we care about in this ironic sense, but it’s more of the nostalgia.

Sports mythology is often pretty poetic and nostalgia-inducing. (rosalie, thin lizzy)

It’s just a sense of innocence that you keep on ice, which is lame to say in a song. Maniac McGee really plays into my baseball imagery, the way sports are talked about. He was this homeless kid that was purer than everyone else and that stuck with me. It goes kind of hand in hand with the mermaid foam.

So the “pure perceiver?”

Let me piss and get right back to you

The fact that I call it pure is kind of damning in itself. It’s kind of a joke. I mean, it is my inner monologue, and it’s often very easily proved untrue. It’s the relationship I’ve developed with it. Your perceptions are the actual bed of your life, not your sensations. There’s a big difference.

You said this song was the basis of a lot of other songs on the album. Is what the bed represents largely thematic to the album, or is there an arc that developed over the course of writing it?

With having to start this new band from scratch, in a lot of ways, I felt more free to be more honest with myself. And it sucked in a lot of ways. The effort put into hyping the Happy Jawbone name to get people to pay attention to whatever I was working on just went to shit and I had this new band. But it was really great for my songwriting. It gave me a chance to not have to worry about being successful. Like, this album will not be successful. In any way. You know? It’s sort of strange that I didn’t keep the name, looking back on it. Any sane person probably would have.

I think the Lentils are pretty recognizable as a new iteration of Happy Jawbone Family Band. But content-wise it does show growth. Plus I’m sure there is a lot of history tied up in the Happy Jawbone name, like the bed. (always be my baby, mariah carey)

Yeah, that is why I did change the name. I didn’t have to worry about being this certain brand of DIY, “TM.”

Is the approach of writing more and paring down different from how you wrote songs in the past?

I wrote a lot and would think, “What did I really want to say?” and zeroed in on taking imagery from previous verses and going into it deeper. Very heavy editing. This song was originally going to be a Happy Jawbone song. A lot of earlier Happy Jawbone stuff was just, “This sounds good, I’m going with it.”

So is honesty a theme you were going for to represent this band from the get-go or is it just conducive to creating content you’re proud of?

That’s really what the whole album is about. The breakup sucked. A lot. But I had it together to see there’s a great opportunity here for my own personal growth.

It’s a hard reset.

It pushed me to be more honest with myself and with the listener. I’m really interested in the relationship the songwriter has with this perceived listener, this romanticized “other” that comes up when you’re writing. Who’s going to listen to this, how are they going to interpret it? You don’t want to be too specific, or write something that only your ex-girlfriend will appreciate.

Because she never will. (heart of glass, blondie)

At a point the song wasn’t actually about me anymore. There aren’t really personal details in the song. There’s no shortstop that I was in love with.

Was there a jar of Vegenaise tangled up with you and a lover?

Nope.

I guess I’m projecting.

But so many people are going to think that way, and that’s the beautiful part of that imagery.

It’s the honesty people pick up on and can lay the transparency of their own life over. Even something like the saxophone in this song made me do that thing where you just look up and sigh.

Yeah, totally. That’s beautiful.

(Photo by Yuya Peco Takeda)

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