User Interview: Jayclay lyrics

Long ago and far away, in the dark, dank depths of a region called The Firehose, I was rescued into editorship by the effulgent-minded and great-hearted being called Jayclay. To this day, I thank my lucky stars to have been mentored by the best of the best, and I wanted to interview him because more people need be aware of his awesome. So here it is! Prepare for lots of lit, lots of love, & the shameless mingling of American and British spellings.

seaeffess: You're a legendary annotator. What Genius annotation are you most proud of and why?

jayclay: Most likely this one, which was the first one I ever pinned and I don't think it's ever been unpinned. I'd been reluctant to annotate Joanna Newsom because I was sure I couldn't do her justice, but I pretty much said to myself, 'OK, if I'm gonna have a go I'm gonna go all in'. And it took me a while, but it quickly got a couple of pyongs and more upvotes than usual (this was very early in my genius days). This gave me a sizeable hit of confidence, and I've since been dropping Joanna Newsom tates every now and then.

I am pretty proud of my Simpsons annotations, which make me feel that my dream of writing a book on the show might not be impossible after all.

seaeffess: If you were a fruit tree, which would you be?

jayclay: I don't really know my trees—which, according to an apocryphal Nabokov anecdote, means I'll never be a writer—and am more into vegetables than fruits. But perhaps I'd like to be a cherry tree, if only that a poet might think and call me 'loveliest':

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
seaeffess: Where did you grow up and what is it like?

jayclay: I grew up in Ipswich, a relatively large provincial town (a small city, really) in southeastern England. I don't much love it as a place, but I think it's a very decent place to grow up, mainly because it falls between categories: urban enough, but completely surrounded by countryside and rural villages; close to both London and the coast; enough to do, but boring enough to inspire you to look further afield; both a good place to leave and a perfectly good place to return to. There is some historical interest—there's a claim for its being the oldest continuously settled English town, for instance, and I'm told there used to be a good football team—and visitors have said to me that it's quite an attractive town (I can't really see it). The nightlife is poor, there's a disproportionately low number of good pubs, and I'm sure there are far more serious problems; but I've had by and large a positive relationship with Ipswich as shared with my friends. It's also home to nearly all my books.

seaeffess: How has place affected your intellectual life?

jayclay: This a definitely a question to which I wish I had a good answer. I've been very lucky in that I've visited all sorts of places, from big cities to tiny towns and villages (mostly by sailing to them) in Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, France, Holland. But I've only lived in a few places: Ipswich, Bristol (my university town), College Park MD, and Oxford (my university towns for a few months each).

Almost all writing I've done in any kind I've done at home: even as a student I only really went to libraries to borrow and return books; I rarely went there to work. Somebody I knew once told me that he needed his own private space to write, so that he could get out of his chair and move around and bash his head against the wall if he needed to. I suppose the same is true of me. I was never able to work at school if I was with my friends; I'm more productive in privacy.

I've also never quite been sure how far my intellectual life has been affected by where I am in the world. I've worked just as well or poorly back at my parents' house I have in my university town. I absolutely love Bristol, and I used to love reading in its parks and green spaces; but it's difficult to know the kind of impact it's actually had. I suspect these things will come clearer later, once I get further separated from these places as I once knew them and, even if I'm physically still there, they become sites of revisit and return, in body and mind. Spatial memory is pretty powerful and often painful. One of my favourite nuggets of etymology is Martin Amis's backdated definition of nostalgia as 'return-home pain'.

seaeffess: If you could wake up tomorrow being skilled at any art form, which would it be and why?

jayclay: This is a pretty great question. Lowkey I think I'd like to have the gift of mimicry, i.e., being able to put on any accent and do interesting things with my voice, partly because one of my best friends does it so well that it'd be nice to be able to keep up.

seaeffess: What's your strangest music memory?

jayclay: I crashed my first car listening to Lana Del Rey. 'National Anthem', I remember it was … In actual fact it was barely a crash, but my crappy car was damaged enough for it not to be worth fixing. And now whenever that song comes on…

Really, though, I don't think I can do justice to this question, much as I'd like to live up to its very juicy adjective. I have no real musical chops, can't sing, have never really been involved with anything musical—I'm not even much of a gig-goer, and do most of my listening in peace and privacy. The best things I could dig up are all more personally striking than they are strange, and music is only an associative part of those memories. When I was seventeen I once stumbled upon a group of Russian folk-singers in a wing or outbuilding of the Winter Palace (I think) in St Petersburg, and the acoustics in that space were all but incredible. During that same vacation, I remember standing with my dad on the deck of a ferry crossing the Baltic between Sweden and Helsinki, each of us with a miniature duty-free cigar, he explaining to me some of the distant ship-and-shore lights we could see, I listening to him but also to his iPod which I'd borrowed because in Sweden I'd managed to submerge my own in water twice on two successive days. Specifically, I listened to an album by The Chieftans, and to a couple of bands that my half-brother was part of. A few months ago, this same half-brother—who's a professional musician, and operates a recording studio in South London, and plays a handful of instruments but is usually learning one or two more—sat me down and played me a short piece on his cello. (It might've been Saint-Saëns, I'm not sure.) He hasn't mastered the cello, so it was slightly hesitant, but all the more moving for that. In a way my brother's musical talents make me glad that I'm not musical: there's more magic, perhaps, in not knowing exactly what he's doing to bring the music forth, and as I grow older I look forward to learning bits and bobs directly from him. We're closer now than we used to be, in part because we're both now adults (he is, by the way, 18 years older), and this'll be one of the good things about getting older.

My dad used to play Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the 5 hour drives to his parents' house near Liverpool, where we used to stay for a few weeks every summer, but I never really asked him about it and so didn't even know I'd been listening to the Beatles. We stopped going when I was 12 or so, but I'd heard the album so many times that there was an eerie series of recognitions when I started listening to the Beatles independently at about 15. This is a pretty common experience, I imagine, but it's probably the closest I can come to strange: the strange familiarity of the uncanny, of meeting what you think is new and coming to find that it isn't.

seaeffess: What word would you remove from the English language if you could?
jayclay: I love each and every word. This is hard. It's tempting to go for a derogatory term, or a word than denotes something disgusting or objectionable, but if I can only get rid of one it'd be impossible to choose (and there'd always be another to take its place). I don't really have a problem with new coinages, acronyms, backronyms, auto-antonyms, even the words pulchritude and belfie and brexit (just about). I love language, I'm a usage nut, punctuation is my passion, I think refinement and precision are important—but only in certain contexts. I've no general interest in trying to tell other people how to use language, or in whinging about apostrophes on public signs. A tutor once told me to 'excise the word springboard from my critical lexicon'. I acquiesced, but cutting a word loose from the whole language is something I couldn't do.

I might have gone with pretentious, which is a word I see people throw out unthinkingly as a way of trying to de-legitimise somebody's relationship to something. But as a word and a charge it's important and interesting, and Dan Fox's recent decent book Pretentiousness: Why It Matters argues, more or less compellingly, that pretentiousness itself is not only all around us but actually gets sh*t done. I haven't answered the question. The best I can do is probably either amongst or whilst: they're useless, faux-sophisticated variants of perfectly good words. But they're not doing any harm.

seaeffess: What's your ideal Sunday night?

jayclay: I've been a student for basically 5 years, with few obligations and very little structure, so I've not really been able to compartmentalise the week in the way that most people do. But still: I like to spend a long time cooking something to eat with friends or family, and then head to a quiet pub for a few slow and pensive drinks and some relaxed but rangy conversation.

seaeffess: What's your favorite food to eat?

jayclay: Most likely Indian food. I don't have a particular favourite dish, and I tend to mix it up a fair bit, but the whole process of a meal in a British Indian restaurant—the poppadoms to the starters to the main dishes to the sides—always comes together into a comprehensive if often over-indulgent pleasure.

seaeffess: What's your favorite food to cook?

jayclay: Again, Indian, and again no particular dish. For years I've been trying my hand at a range of different curries and sundries to the extent that it's almost a joke among my friends—that on any given evening I'll be cooking a curry, that when I offer to cook for anybody it'll always be a curry. I've had great pleasure in mastering the preliminary stages to cooking a good curry: I asked for a chef's knife last Christmas primarily to make dicing onions that more precise and satisfying, and for a grinder so I can make my own garam masala. But there's also so much space for variety and experimentation; you can work at perfecting a particular dish with all sorts of subtle changes and additions, but you can also branch out far and wide. You can cook a tasty curry in 15 minutes, or you can slave over one for hours.

seaeffess: How does music actually interact with your everyday life? Where do you listen to what you listen to, and what do you use music for?

jayclay: It's only really been in the past couple of years or so that I've really made music part of my daily food, and now I listen to it pretty much constantly: when I'm walking somewhere, when I'm lying in bed, even when I'm reading. As such it's not easy to say what I use music for, since it's almost always there; but it certainly helps me when I'm writing or contemplating the scenery rush by my train window. It helps me concentrate, or pass the time, and occasionally nudges me into a state of heightened emotion. It's also not as if I use a particular kind of music for working, say, and another for working out, and another for winding down—it depends more on my mood than my activity, I'd say.

I'm always trying to discover new music, but I do so unsystematically, following my nose down any pathway until I find something I like. But this also means I have a pretty cluttered listening life: essentially I update and edit one big playlist that I cycle through day-to-day. I will stick with single albums or artists as well, but most of the time I'm just jumping about.

seaeffess: What personal achievement are you proudest of?

jayclay: I wrote somewhere recently, with reference to two of my favourite people, that the fact 'we three have been strong friends for two decades […] remains my greatest achievement, and one not likely to be matched'. That's to a degree rhetoricized (it was added at 5am to the acknowledgements page to my master's thesis, after all), but I do believe it. I have plenty of regrets, too, mostly surrounding friendships which never quite flowered or which faded out after a promising start, but my high school group is as strong as ever. It's a strange achievement, because I haven't exactly made any conscious effort towards it, but that's something nice in itself. I'm a rabid sentimentalist, and it's no surprise that I cry at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, but what's inscribed in the book given to George always tugs hard at my heart: 'Remember no man is a failure who has friends!'
It's all too easy to feel that I haven't actually achieved anything, and it's certainly true that I don't have a very impressive CV. But I did also clean up as an undergraduate. To be precise: I studied English at the University of Bristol, and the department has a number of prizes for the top students in particular classes. The degree programme is fairly rigid—half compulsory period classes, half special subjects—and it's therefore easy to identify the highest performing student in specific areas. There were 10 prizes on offer across the three years, and I won 5 of them (along with a few other commendations), 4 in the final year: best in any special subject, best in Literature 3 (roughly, iirc, 1700-1850), best dissertation, best overall. Apparently nobody else has ever won so many. Not as big a deal as getting the highest GPA at a big US university, but still nice to have under my belt. I once got 106% on a midterm when I was studying in the US.

seaeffess: How does your mind work differently in interpreting lyrics than literature?

jayclay: Speaking only for myself, I'm not sure that it does. I tend to treat lyrics as I would any other poetry, and I see no particular reason to separate the two, certainly not into any hierarchy. There are differences to be pointed out though. Delivery, for instance: in poetry the written text comes first, and any modulations in cadence and intonation are added by the reader; with lyrics the recording comes first, and there is a certain authority to the particular delivery. I remember Christopher Ricks saying somewhere, as part of a discussion of his own critical writing on Bob Dylan, that with a song you have three fundamental elements—the words, the voice, and the music—whereas poetry gets by on words alone. These things can all be toyed with and shuffled around—there are covers, remixes, poetry recordings, variant texts, live performances, and so on—but the fact of always having to deal with extra-literary elements makes things a little dicier.

I don't want to get too wrapped up in questions of authorial intention, or how meaning is created, or what the point of annotation and criticism might be. Nor do I want to get too far into Derridean ideas of presence and absence (mainly because I wouldn't know what I was talking about), but I think most musical artists are more tangible, more physical, in their relation to their own songs. There also seems to be an assumption that, for the most part, the 'I' of a song is closer to the artist than the 'I' of most literary works is to the writer. I think I'm less interested than most Genius users in what an artist has to say about the meaning of their own lyrics—or at least it's not my first port of call—but this is to do with my own interests in language and literature, and isn't a conscious decision to pay less attention to artists outside their lyrics.

seaeffess: If you could go back in time and introduce your younger self to an artist or genre, what would it be?

jayclay: I am entirely constituted of regrets, but I'm not sure there really is a particular artist or genre I'm aware of now that I wish I'd been aware of earlier. I'm mostly past the first fine careless rapture of adolescence but I'm still pretty young. My professor once told me that he put off reading Proust until his 40th birthday, and I think that age and aging definitely affects our relationship with art. There are big books and big-book writers I perhaps would like to have read more of when I was younger and had more stamina: Henry James, George Eliot, USA, The Making of Americans, The Apes of God, War and Peace, The Recognitions. But I've read enough big books in my time.

My dad has a decent collection of classical music and jazz on CDs and sometimes I wish I'd spent time as a teenager listening through all of them. And there are artists I wish I'd spent more time getting to know, such as Leonard Cohen, and all sorts of things I wish I knew more about. But I'm largely at peace with how art has figured in my life so far.

seaeffess: Do you think babies are cute?

jayclay: Yes. Of course.

I don't have any young cousins (or any at all really), and am not soon to be an uncle. So I don't spend much time with babies. But if I can see one's face when I'm at like a restaurant---distracted for the duration of the meal.