We’ve finally arrived at the first real edition of The King Teen Newsletter! I’ll be dividing these into a few sections:

Throat clearing — little housekeeping items

Come on out — where I tell you about where I’ll be playing so you can come on out. 

Song of the newsletter — where I’ll go into some detail about one song. I’m thinking it’ll be a song of mine but I reserve the right to talk about some other song if I want to. I mean, there might come a time when I have something to say about Afternoon Delight.

Other stuff — I think you can figure this one out. An occasional section for now. 

Throat clearing

If you like anything I do, you can help me out by forwarding this email to one person who you think would also like it. Thank you! 

If you want to read this in a browser, go here. If someone's forwarded this to you and you want to get the newsletter — it's free — go here.

To keep me out of your spam folder, see the instructions at the very bottom.

Come on out

Carolina Ale House, Brier Creek

Thursday, February 1, 7:45 p.m. sharp. Free

At the moment, it’s a lot of open mics, but I’m trying to work my way into the local gigging scene too.

I play a monthly set on the first Thursday at the Brier Creek Carolina Ale House open mic in Raleigh. Unlike most open mics, where musicians show up early and sign up for a slot to play two or three songs, this one schedules longer sets in advance. Usually 15-20 minutes.

I play different songs every month. OK full disclosure: There’s a little overlap, but not much. So come on out! And if you came out last month, come on out again! The Ale House has good food and beer too. 

You can always see where I’m going to play by following me on Instagram or looking at my ReverbNation page.

Song of the newsletter:

Dead Mall

This is the first — and so far only — song I have streaming on Spotify. And Apple Music if that’s your thing. And I think a bunch of other places, but International The King Teen Enterprises™ hasn’t hired an analytics person yet and I’m strictly on the content side. 

Dead Mall is the first song I made up after moving to Durham, North Carolina. The wife and I were driving around with our cousins Rob and Debbie when Rob pointed out our local mall and said “There’s the dead mall.” After a couple seconds he said “That should be a song.” I didn’t say anything but I thought “Yeah, that should be a song,” which is a thought that often fails to lead to a song being made up, but in this case, I had the angle immediately: It should be like a torch song, only instead of singing about some lost love, the singer’s talking about the mall. 

The way I make up songs is to start singing to myself. That’s why I say I make them up, I don’t say I write them. I have other reasons to but they're pretentious and you wouldn't like them. 

I’ll sing lines over and over as I think of them, memorizing as I repeat them to myself. If I’m pressed for time I’ll sing it into a voice memo on my phone. That’s an improvement on the old days, when I’d want to write it down, but I’d never have a pen or paper, so I’d just obsessively repeat it to myself so I’d remember it … which is how I developed the method. And also why I might not have been paying attention as you were talking to me even though I was looking at you and nodding my head.

You’d think as a writer I’d always have a pen and paper handy, but you’re thinking of artists.

Once I’ve got it down, I’ll pick up the guitar and work out the song just like I would if I were learning a cover. Sometimes I’ll surprise myself. “Oh, that’s a minor 6th. Nice song making-upping, King!” 

Anyway, I conceived of Dead Mall as a throwaway, just a silly comedy song. I call it baggy pants comedy — dumb jokes on the level of vaudeville or kids TV. You can see the lyrics in the description on the song’s YouTube page. 

It starts as a torch song, the singer sounding like he’s lamenting the end of a relationship, and then the punchline is “It hurts to say goodbye … dead mall.” 

I call that pulling the rug out. Comedy 101. Setup: Invite the audience to stand on the rug. Punchline: Yank the rug out from under them and they all fall down but in a funny way, not an ouch that hurts I'm gonna sue you way. I think actual comedians call it misdirection. 

There’s a little torch-song reference in there. “A million things running through my mind, I got nothing to say” is meant to echo a line in George Jones' classic song A Good Year for the Roses: “While a million thoughts go racing through my mind / I find I haven't spoke a word.”

The second verse is a lot of name-checking of mall things — Hot Topic, camping out for Jordans, the food court and so on. I didn’t really realize it at first but I was accidentally adding a little pathos here. I didn’t realize it because of two things:

1. I’m not a nostalgic guy. I don’t even like nostalgia. I think it’s toxic. 
2. I don’t like malls. In fact, I hate malls. I think they’d have to add about a Marvin Gaye per square foot to get up to “soulless.” This is not an autobiographical song. No one is happier than I am about the decline of the American indoor shopping mall, though the wife loves them and I feel bad for her about it. 

So I wasn’t really thinking about how for a lot of people, the mall was meaningful. It’s where they spent a lot of time, especially as preteens and teenagers, and they have a lot of good memories. All my mall memories are about me wondering when the hell I can get out of the mall, not to mention where’s the stupid exit I came in through, but some people have nice memories about the mall! It takes all kinds.

For the bridge, it’s back to the baggy pants and the rug pulling. The whole section exists so the listener will think I’m going to rhyme 50-plex with sex. When I say something other than sex: Rug pulled, everyone standing on it falls down. Ha ha! 

I don’t always make up songs in order — first the first verse, then the second etc. — but in this case I pretty much did, and so by the time I got to the last verse, I knew about the accidental real feelings in the second verse. I really had just taught one of my kids to drive in the empty parking lot of a dead mall, though not the one in Durham, so I knew what I was doing as I connected that sad scene, the deserted parking lot, with the memories of the once-vibrant scene inside.

I’m proud of that last verse. I got to something real in spite of myself. The first time I played Dead Mall in public, it was at the mostly comedy open mic at Zog’s Art Bar in Chapel Hill. The comedian who followed me commented on it. He said “Damn, that was … it was … poignant?” 

So that’s how Rob Granick got his first songwriting credit. I put him down as a co-writer when I registered Dead Mall with BMI*. I didn’t give Rob 50% credit let’s not get excited, but if the song ever makes me money, I’ll have to give him some of it. 

Spotify cuts a check when a song earns $1,000. As of this writing, the song’s streams have earned 6 cents. 

Keep your day job, Rob. I will too. If I get one. 

* If you’re not familiar, BMI and its counterparts, ASCAP and SESAC, are performing rights organizations — they keep track of music use and collect and distribute royalties. There’s a whole fascinating story about how BMI came about as a rival to ASCAP in the’40s, and it involves race in America and the surprising ways changing technology can affect history, but this newsletter’s pretty long already and also I don’t know the story that well.

Thanks for reading. 

Your friend,

The King Teen

Instagram | Spotify | Bandcamp | Facebook | YouTube

Keep me out of your junk folder

For Gmail, that means moving this email to your Primary Tab (desktop: drag and drop; mobile, hit the 3-dot thing) and adding king@kingteenmusic.com to your contacts. For Apple Mail it means tapping the email address at the top of this message and selecting "Add to VIPs." Here's more help.