#dudewontdie

By Sam Segrist

"Someday" is the third track on Premier, the only album released by The Fashion Coasters, the band I played in during college. This song was ever recorded at the famed Nevada Recording Room by Jim Bogensberger (R.I.P.) in the spring of 2003. I recently had many thoughts while listening to it in preparation for the song's resurrection by Dude Won't Die, my newer band which features 4/5ths of the super-talented musicians who composed The Fashion Coasters.

I've been playing in bands for over twenty-five years, and this song is special to me and might seem catchy yet strange to someone hearing it for the first time.

If you're the type of music aficionado who likes to listen to a song with as little context as possible before learning more about the track, you can stream it here on our YouTube channel.

While you're listening, I'll wait.

…

"But I can't wait for someday, thinkin', thinkin' 'bout for you…"

Now that you're back, we can begin a guided tour through the many facets, layers, anecdotes, and quirks of this tune.

Let's start with the bassline and the key of D, played so steadily by Allen.

It's essentially "With or Without You" by U-Know-Who, except that the fourth note returns to the 'A' rather than going to the 'G'. We even placed it as the third track on the album, the same spot where Bono and the lads placed their mega-romantic-hit on The Joshua Tree. Sequencing is so important to the flow of album, donchaknow.

The palm-muted guitars on the verse are reminiscent of The Cars, another big influence in my life. ("Just What I Needed" was one of our most-covered songs back in the early 2000's.)

Enter Geoff's heartfelt and bittersweet vocals:

"If you're gonna send a shout-out to everyone you miss…"

I suppose this was a very indirect reference and response to the last line of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye:

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

But what happens if you're already in the state of missing everybody and decide you don't just want to tell them something, you want to shout it out loud?

"…I hope when the time comes, you'll remember this. When you're far away, perched with a lonely view, you can rest assured I'm thinking, thinking about you…"

That whole "perched with a lonely view" line is a blatant lifting of "Scar Tissue" by The Red Hot Chili Peppers. That single was on heavy rotation for four-plus years during my Xennial youth. What can I say? It just sounded right. The bittersweet (symphony) of irony is that the speaker of the lyric "Someday" is probably the one who is perched on some precipice like a lonely Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog mixed with Rodin's The Thinker, brooding and lonely, still thinking about the one who is no longer in their life. (The Cure's "Maybe Someday" was another thematic predecessor for this track…)

Now the pre-chorus hits:

"But I can't wait for someday, thinking, thinking 'bout you…"

In its initial incarnation, all four repetitions of this pre-chorus were played with an identical staccato rhythm of the drums and guitars playing in unison, while the bassline and the vocals percolated over the rhythmic hits. Fortunately, it was the suggestion of our ska-loving fill-in bassist Thomas who suggested doing the second half of each pre-chorus as upstrokes that gave variety and contrast to the choruses that were to follow.

(Where is Thomas today?)

Between this first verse and the pre-chorus lies something unsaid, a wish the speaker has for this absent person. The absent person can count on something and be rest assured that they're in the speaker's thoughts, but what is IT exactly?

Why can't they wait for some indeterminate future date?

"I will call you someday, I'll tell you I love you. Past this time of uneasiness, when you know my words are true."

Herein lies a contradiction in that the speaker has just declared (repeatedly) in the pre-chorus that they are incapable of waiting for someday whilst they spend quite a bit of time thinking/cogitating/daydreaming/fantasizing/romantically pining for the person they are addressing, yet they very emphatically, confidently, and declaratively uh…declare on the chorus that they shall someday contact this very person to express their love for them, but this will only happen after this present time of instability, stress, and uneasiness, because only then will the other person be able to clearly see the truth of the speaker's words, after the muddy waters of interpersonal conflict have become clear.

Following this first chorus is one seriously dainty interlude of a guitar lick. There's a tender, romantic, and schmaltzy quality to it which--with only the added hindsight of time--revealed itself to be a manifestation of my love for the exquisitely cheesy guitar solo of Savage Garden's "Truly Madly Deeply" and any of the Pure Moods tracks that featured guitar.

Verse Two begins:

"Sometime past spring or fall, we'll look back and remember it all, we'll remember all the good times, they're the times we left behind."

Here, I applied the song-arrangement principal of "Don't bore us; get to the chorus!" and the second verse was half the length of the first verse.

After the second chorus, there are two guitar solos and a key change.

The first solo is by me and is just the melody of "Lean on Me" by the late, great Bill Withers.

This blatant homage of a well-known gospel song was a direct influence from me reading Noel Gallagher's interview in Guitar World's May 1996 issue:

GW: You have a reputation for "borrowing" a hook or two. Do you stick other bands' riffs in a song so people will accuse you of nicking them from somewhere?

Gallagher: Yeah, of course! That's half the game. I want people to know where the inspiration for the song comes from. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. That really winds up other bands in England, though. They'll go, "Don't you feel guilty about having so much success by blatantly pinching riffs?" I'll go, "No, I don't feel guilty. But you feel pissed off because you didn't do it first." We have a saying: Why write your own songs when you can use someone else's? [laughs]

I chose to interpolate "Lean on Me" into this song to evoke the ache, the pain, the sorrow that we all feel sometimes in our lives, but to serve as a hopeful and time-based reminder that there's always (a someday) tomorrow. This epiphany is emphasized by an ecstatic change in key from D to A and a soulfully upbeat solo by Toddka Vonic, a solo which always reminds me of the celebratory vibes of The Allman Brothers' best jams.

But no matter how triumphant the epiphany may be, there's eventually a return to a state of contemplation, a dwelling on the past.

The third verse of this song features an unusual distancing move regarding the arrangement: following the guitar solo, the track breaks down to just bass and drums, played so crisply by Woody, our jazz-trained rock drummer. Emotionally, the speaker is back where they started, but the song's arrangement decompresses somewhat and allows for more thoughtful introspection by delaying the re-entry of the vocals one more time through the drum & bass progression.

"Sometime past spring or fall, we'll look back and remember it all, we'll remember all the good times, they're the times we left behind."

Unlike in Verse Two where the band hits it hard on the pre-chorus, this verse's lyrics are followed by a wistful, melancholic, and semi-triumphant ascending guitar line that is complicated by the harmony guitar line that descends wistfully before The Dudes return to the final pre-chorus and chorus.

"I can't wait for someday, thinking, thinking 'bout you" + "I will call you someday."

Just as Bono couldn't live with or without you, Our Dude singing his heart out can't wait for someday without calling you.

To tell you the truth.

And here's a truth I've never told anyone:

In the spring of 2001, I was a freshman at the University of Wyoming. There was another local songwriter and music critic for The Branding Iron, the college newspaper, named Anthony Bayles. We bonded over writing, music, and writing about music.

Sometime after the spring semester ended, he drove to my parents' house in Scottsbluff, Nebraska so I could record some of his songs for him in their basement. Whether these recordings were intended for an album, EP, or demo tape, I really can't remember the end goal of the sessions. All I remember is he played this super cool sequence of double-hit chords that went D D, A A, Bm Bm, GG -> AA with a repeated phrase of "Can't wait for someday, thinking, thinking 'bout you."

The recording session ended abruptly over a disagreement about money. He thought I was going to record him for free, but I was expecting some compensation at the time. (I regret that I--at the naive and insecure age of 20--was not as clear in establishing and communicating financial arrangements.) He left and nothing became of the recordings. While I probably scrubbed them from my 250 MB Zip Disks to make room for other recording projects, I never forgot his sequence of chords or that repeated line "I can't wait for someday, thinking, thinking about you."

A few years after that one-off recording session, I placed those words and those chords into the rest of the song that would eventually become "Someday."

I've read enough about the origins of creativity and the history of songwriting to know this kind of thing happens all the time. Little bits of life/art we experience get extracted, remixed, and inserted into larger mixtures, but this particular "lifting" has always given me a certain pain in my heart, that I was a thief somehow by taking four chords and a few words from another musician and based an entire song around it.

The guys in my own band don't even know this aspect of the story, but perhaps it doesn't matter. We've taken those four chords and few words and made them our own. It's been over twenty years since Premier was released. Just what is the statute of limitations on minor artistic borrowing(/theft?)?