Chump Change '25

It's an old Bejar song! Is it the New Pornographers? Who can say? Who could ever say?

Here I am continuing the same project I’ve been working on for awhile. Reworking old New Ps songs. This one even has some input from Dan Bejar himself. Well, he hasn’t done the vocals yet (he assures me he is doing them this weekend!) but I thought I should send out a version that is “where it is”. It’s in the spirit of this Substack, right? I’ll send you the version with Bejar when that happens. Soon? I know Dan’s into the new direction, but wait, you need some historical context here, don’t you? First off, Dan is this guy:

One of my favorite songwriters, good friend, etc…. You know this.

It was December, the end of the year 2000. Mass Romantic was out and none of the big press had happened yet. No NY Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, that was weeks, a month away, but some good reviews had rolled in. People seemed to like it. It had some underground buzz. For the first time I was in a band that seemed to be really HAPPENING. Popularity in our future. We had just played our first shows post-album (Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Seattle) and we were having a band meeting for some reason. During this meeting, Dan told us that he was moving to Spain and I thought “Of course….”

Of course….

Of course he’s going to Spain. Why would any of this be easy? It was the starting point of a dynamic that I have grown used to through the years. Bejar was going to follow his own path. No point in resentment or anger if that path does not intersect with mine. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. We toured without him from early 2001 all through the Electric Version tour. He would drop in here and there, if we were within a couple hundred miles of Vancouver. When he wanted to do the 2005 Twin Cinema tour, I was shocked. At the end of the tour I felt kind of wistful. Is this the last time we’ll play with Dan? It wasn’t. I think the reason our relationship works is that Dan has always been very honest about his intentions. Very matter of fact. He’s always been playing his own game. It’s stressful having a band that is a set group of people. I do not blame him for wanting the creative freedom of a lone wolf. A wolf’s gotta howl. That’s why I love the guy. He’s a howling wolf. Rasputin’s got nothing on him.

So he moved to Spain in late 2000. Occasionally I would see press that claimed Bejar left the band because he wasn’t comfortable with the success of the band, as if it was a whirlwind of sudden fame. It felt like fame to someone who’d been playing to near no one for a decade, but we were playing to a few hundred people a night. Indie fame. Fact is he just wanted to move to Spain. His family had an apartment there.

He came back after a year and a few months though, right around the time we were starting work on what would become Electric Version. He was, of course, up for the second album! Why? I don’t know. He just felt like it. I had already cherry picked “Testament To Youth In Verse”, having seen him do it at a solo Destroyer show. He gave me a cassette of demos that I sifted through and found “Ballad Of A Comeback Kid”. Then he gave me a new song called “Chump Change”.

I remember sitting in his apartment with him, he was showing me the song. He wanted it to sound like the song ‘Like Flies On Sherbet’ by Alex Chilton, which was kind of an impossible order. You have to be a drugged out genius to make music like that. Ask me to sound like ‘Hey Little Child’, that’s a more reasonable request. I loved the song but on the album it felt like the Dan song that did not quite find its way to greatness. That’s just me, me being hard on myself, not feeling like I did everything I could do. We never quite found the vibe live, rarely played it. So it was always in the back of my mind: do something else with Chump Change. It might not be better, but do something different.

A couple decades pass. I’ve left Vancouver. Married with a kid, living in America. That’s the short version.

Messed around with the song for a while, thinking that maybe it could have a Prefab Sprout vibe. The only vestige of that idea is a guitar through a fuzz and distortion, underneath the near a cappella bridge, around 1:50. After some trial and error, it felt “right” stripped down to one element and a drum machine. What is that element? Is it a guitar or is it a synth? Is it both? Added a little texture here and there. I sent it to Dan. He liked the vibe. So here we are.

I am enjoying the exploration, reworking a song. Getting inside of it, strolling around, getting lost, punching your way out. You sometimes end up with a new song. I could have sung new melody and lyrics over this and no one would have ever said “Hey, it’s Chump Change!”. I cut out a section that didn’t fit with the new vibe and Dan gave the edit a thumbs up. He’s embarrassed about the ‘…flew into a lesbian rage’ line. So 2002! It’s his big complaint re: singing it again. The reason it is currently me on lead vocals, but like I said, he claims he is getting it done! The ‘lesbian rage’ line stays. If you cut that out, what’s next? Cutting out the line in ‘Macarthur Park’ about the cake in the rain?

Looking forward to hearing it with his new vocals, but I’m liking it the way it is. This Substack has been very positive for me. I love that it makes me work, it makes me write, it makes me fix things that aren’t working. I love that it forces quick decisions. The never ending deadline. Somehow it is very good for my mental health. I listen back to songs I’ve posted and think “that needs improvement” and I don’t beat myself up about it. If it needs fixing, I’ll fix it. It’s the process. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. The thing I love about creativity, art, is that the possibilities are endless. You could travel infinitely inward or expand infinitely outward, you are never going to find all the ideas. That’s an amazing thing. Traveling hopefully.

Here is the song ‘Chump Change’, reworked because why the hell not?