I have maybe too much to say about this song, since it’s kind of a trifle, and it doesn’t even have words. But ephemera: that’s what blogs are for, yes?
First, the music: “Wallace’s Dogs” represents the longest gestation period I’ve ever had between coming up with a riff and finally actually recording a song based on it. When I was in high school — senior or junior year — I had a brief period of musical proliferation. And as sometimes happens when you find songs coming out of your ears, I thought I’d write a concept album, or at least a song-cycle. It would be about…a slightly depressed teenage boy whom no-one understood. Seriously, that’s all I had. So thankfully, it never saw the light of day.
The first song was called “Morning Prayer,” and while the lyrics aged poorly almost immediately, I always liked the guitar part, this three-string, two-chord circling thing. Every couple years I’d remember the riff and take it out for a spin. Then about a year ago, my friend Scott (who records as Mitre, check it out), out of nowhere, just GAVE me a classical guitar. Said he had “too many.” Now, even an anti-gear-headed dude such as myself could tell this wasn’t the greatest guitar in the world, but it was a classical, something I haven’t really been able to mess around with since my older brother Brian had one around the house during breaks from college.
It was as if this riff had been waiting for the right instrument, because the first time I played what’s become “Wallace’s Dogs” on that guitar, I knew I’d have to record it that way. The extra bend in the strings, the particular resonance of the lowest three strings on there. Hard to explain. Without hearing it, naturally.
As for the title. Thing is, I’ve written songs about suicide, and the suicide of certain cultural icons in particular. But last year, when David Foster Wallace ended his own life, I was speechless. And then I went and read David Lipsky’s remembrance in Rolling Stone, and it made me sadder. Wallace was an avid dog lover, basically, and…you should read the article, if you’re curious.
At any rate, it seemed appropriate that I should eulogize the guy with an instrumental. Wallace’s writing is so brilliant, I’d feel sheepish using words at all. Also, for me, songwriting (as distinct from prose writing) has always been a form of expression that’s (mostly/comparatively) free of the self-consciousness that so dogged David Foster Wallace. Music’s just music, and I’ve always used it as a sort of creative loophole, a self-consciousness workaround, if you will. It’s maybe dumb to offer a small piece of it now as a balm, well after the fact. But there it is.
For more on my favorite writer, check out this fantastic audio archive of interviews and more. Also, as a summation of Wallace’s overall positivity in the FACE of our weird, reflexive age, a web archive thankfully exists of his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, which is cynically (IMHO) being sold as a standalone book… (In other words, the link might not be long for this world, so you better click it.)
