I genuinely listened to this with my face scrunched in a grimace the entire time. I don’t know exactly why, but this particular strand of lyric writing in my earliest songs - the fake angry judgmental teenage rebel character, bursts straight through my ear drums and nestles deep in my intestines, where I keep all my greatest shame. In a way I am jealous of my younger self. He did not care. He was so much less self-aware, even as his lyrics tried to position himself as someone stood apart from the ‘boring inauthenticity’ of others.
And whilst I know that when I was younger I was only pretending to be the character in ‘Nothing In Particular’, listening to this song teaches me something about expression in music, and its perception by others. When I listen now, I don’t feel like I’m the same as the person I hear singing, and the song hits me much more like it would a stranger. I realise that whether the lyrics of the song are a joke or not, they are still interpreted as a genuine expression of the personality of the writer. So when they fail, as they undeniably do here, it comes across as a genuine failure, not a joke failure.
On a musical level, a few things stand out. This song was clearly written straight after learning how to play a major bar chord (there are no minor chords in the song), and I’m basically just moving that chord shape up and down the guitar with very little thought. I’m also clearly having a lot of fun on the drums. I can picture myself perfectly, arms whirring as fast as I can possibly make them, with extremely mixed success. Leaping off the stool at the end of the take, rushing to the computer, heart beating, arms aching from the strain, thinking I can’t keep this up, let’s just use this one. And it does seem I am getting a bit better at the drums compared to the earliest songs, despite my overreaching performance here.
The vocals destroy me though. Especially from 2:26, where I start uttering one of the worst collections of lines I’ve ever sung:
‘Why am I even speaking to you,
You have no life you have no friends,
At least not here.
Go ahead and call for backup
I’m sure they will come running
Or instead why don’t you shut up
And back away into the corner?’
It made me feel sick even writing them down today. And the instrumentation collapses and falls out of time around those final lines, as if my future self was reaching back through time to try and thwart the completion of the song.
No such luck. But I like thinking about how excited I probably was writing and recording this song. It’s fun to thrash about, to write the song very quickly and sing about being cooler than other people. It’s fun to not care about what other people think apart from your relentlessly supportive parents, and to listen furtively to your own music on buses, dreaming about how talented you are. I really did have the best time making music at this age.