In 2005, I was living with Arturo Vega in the Ramones Loft. I was Senior Art Director for a magazine called Direct and I moonlighted at ESPN the Magazine. I was still in contact with my family. My two best pals were Sean Gould and Lisa Brennan (occasionally in reverse order). And I had a blog, Honesty v. Politics, in which I serialized the story of The Hanslick Rebellion.

The Rebellion was my band from 1995 until 1997. That was two years in calendar time only; there was like a decade’s worth of shit crammed in there. In 2003, a writer friend of mine named J. Eric Smith began putting together a Please Kill Me-style oral history of three turn-of-the-century New York music scenes using bands I’d been in as the through-line. That project fell apart when my then-manager lost a batch of interview tapes and Eric decided that writing a biography of a local businessman might involve less chaos. But memories had been stirred and the old adventures were fresh in my mind. I decided to write about them myself.

So I blogged the Hanslick Rebellion story, which mainly involved a bunch of artsy weirdos being shitty to one another. I gotta say, it’s a fun read.

Names were named; punches not pulled. Some folks got pretty cranky with me. Others reconnected in a friendly way. One of those people was our estranged guitarist, Alex Dubovoy, and halfway through my chronicling of the Rebellion tale, the band got back together.

We rehearsed in secret. It was a rainbowy lovefest of rock n’ roll camaraderie! All our old issues were in the past, and we sounded great. We started planning a reunion gig.

Meanwhile, on the history blog, I was just getting to that juicy part of the story where our bassist, Mike Keaney, and I REALLY started hating on each other.

I realized that to continue dredging up old sourness would almost certainly sink the Rebellion reunion. So I called it and went back to writing about whatever other crap was going on in my life (which wasn’t exactly scintillating—I killed the Honesty v. Politics blog a few months later). On September 22, 2005, The Hanslick Rebellion celebrated the tenth anniversary of our debut gig with a reunion show at CBGB. We all still happily make music together to this day.

It was tough writing songs in the Ramones Loft. Our upstairs neighbors were this loony couple whose parents must have been brutally murdered by a gang of marauding pianos, because if I played so much as the intro to “Lean on Me” they would start doing violent calisthenics on the ceiling while screaming for me to SHUT IT UP. Sometimes the wife would then go out to the stairwell and pitch a shrieky, moany Exorcist fit until her Xanax kicked in.

John Derian’s shop was right downstairs, so during business hours we also had to be mindful of the FANCY DECOUPAGE BROWSERS. Our building was simultaneously a Bowery gentrification test case and metaphor.

I worked a lot, and odd hours, so in order to remember what loud music sounded like, I would rent Zipcars in the middle of the night and drive out to Long Island with Lisa Brennan and a case of mix CDs. The Wendy’s in Farmingdale, next to Adventureland, was open until 2am so you could Eat Great, Even Late. It was just long enough of a drive to get through two discs, one there, one back.

I could only work on my own music during the day, with headphones. Not even the headphones could save me after dark—just the CLICKING of otherwise-silent keyboard keys would trigger conniptions upstairs. And singing? Forget it. My output was way down, and anything I did write was stuck in sketch phase. But the Rebellion reunion was going so well that we’d started jonesing for new material to play. I was able to present the band with a handful of rough demos, the least-finished of which was something called “Like A Radio Loves A Song”.

I only had one line of lyric ready, so that became the title by default. Alex liked the demo and we decided to try arranging it as a group. That crapped out pretty quickly—our drummer, Kearns, was having trouble feeling the downbeat with the tonic on the third note of the piano phrase. Kearns rarely gets frustrated, but when he does sticks go flying and it’s best to move on to another song. So we did, and “Like A Radio” slipped down into the dark, not to be heard from for ten years—when, like an Indiana Mole Woman, it resurfaced into a radically different world.

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Every single thing about my life has changed since I made that demo.

Even the gear and techniques I use to arrange music are new. I’d been using workstations—a Korg O1-W and then a Korg Trinity—since the early ’90s. But I got my first home version of Pro Tools in 2003, and slowly weaned myself off hardware sequencers. By the end of 2005, I was doing all of my programming and song construction right in Pro Tools. “Like A Radio Loves A Song” was the very last track I programmed on a workstation synth.

The lyric is still only nine words long—even now, all those “la”s and “da”s are yet to be replaced. Which is fine; I’ve known what I wanted the song to say since I first laid it down in my bedroom, three feet from the scorch mark where Dee Dee Ramone once set the loft on fire. I can’t think of a better way to start work on an album about all the crazy shit that’s happened to me over the ensuing decade. In fact, I’m just gonna go ahead and name the record right now: Like A Radio Loves A Song.