News+Notes

Garrett Caples' thoughts on Jeff Mellin's lyric collection Skin & Bones

Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2006
JEFF MELLIN WAS THE FIRST AND QUITE POSSIBLY only genuine pop song writer I’ve ever met, despite the fact, years after our initial encounter at Livingston College (Rutgers), I’ve unexpectedly become an occasional, half-willing, professional music journalist. What I mean is that Jeff was the first person I met who approached both the art and the craft of the pop song from a perspective close to my own as a listener. He had an enthusiastic yet by no means uncritical appreciation of the classics (the Beatles, say, or Dylan) but too could savor those genuine, if ephemeral or even vapid pleasures, of Brill Building hackery, Tom Waitsian Cole Porterism, Jim Croce's AM tongue in cheek, Donovan's "I Love My Shirt." The joy of pop songs is often quite simply their utter ridiculousness, for which Jeff retains a keen, though unironic relish. Some of my favorite memories of college are just sitting around his dormroom, paging through the massive hardbound Beatles studio session logbook, seeing who added what little part when, wanting to know how it was done in the studio, though, as a songwriter armed solely with an acoustic guitar and Johnny Cash's pickless style of strumming, Jeff had already arrived. He wrote crazy good songs like "Geologic Time,' a genre-piece of the you-don't-like-me-so-I’m-leaving-not-that-you-give-a-shit-anyway school, which climaxed with the embittered long view of: you think you are so pretty, think you look so fine, but girl your life won’t mean a thing in Geologic Time, a conceit which allowed him to work in words like 'trilobites,' which is what seems to me the true goal of pop lyricism. Later after college, when he began making music in studios, his writing changed, with perhaps slightly less emphasis on the obvious lyrical cleverness necessary to the naked acoustic strummer, just as Dylan's going electric afforded him a whole new set of writing possibilities. Yet still Jeff would endlessly turn out gorgeous lines like she reads my face like a novel, but she skips to the end of the book, or brilliant changes in scope, like a frog on the back of a whale, both from "Typical Male," a song he recorded with his mid-'90s pop garage band, the Eddies. And of course his art continues to evolve in unanticipated directions, like the golly-Buddy-Holly simplicity of "Blue Corduroy," from his 2001 solo album Good for a Gander (Stereorrific, 2001).

Still, while it's often difficult to gauge the worth of pop lyrics printed on the page without musical accompaniment, it’s remarkable how well his forthcoming book of lyrics, Skin and Bones, reads, as lyrics in the poetic sense. Slightly archaic, perhaps, with their unfussy rhymes, though entirely free of neoconservative Wilburism in the handling of line and meter, Jeff's lyrics considered as poetry at their best evoke the only-just stylistically-belated (late 1940s), yet entirely individual and intense poems of Weldon Kees; even at their least effective, they have the readable lightness of Edward Arlington Robinson, and everyone knows Paul Simon made "Richard Corey" a better song than it ever was a poem, which illustrates my point nicely.

Being a close friend and collaborator, my feelings on Jeff's abilities are perhaps biased. All I care to add is the fact that Jeff once took a poem I wrote, "Light Sleeper (Elegy for George Harrison)," and turned it into the lyrics of a beautiful tribute to one of the most profound men ever to have the mantle of "pop star" thrust upon him. (Coincidentally, I'd copped the title "Light Sleeper" itself from a song, by Oakland rapper Saafir, the Saucy Nomad.) Clearly Jeff and I were both feeling Harrison's loss in a similar way, though I was astonished he wanted to use my poem instead of his own lyrics, which are so goddamn good. It may be the highest complement my poetry has ever received. •

This article originally appeared in Rock Heals!: A Narrow House Weekly