If Scott McMicken’s name, voice, or preoccupation with long-distance transportation seem familiar, you probably recognize one or all of these things from his time in Dr. Dog.
His new project, Scott McMicken and THE EVER EXPANDING, release their debut album, Shabang, this March 31st. Out ahead of its release is the first song off the thirteen-track record: “What About Now.”
The jam-centered composition process of Shabang results in songs shaped by the improvisational imaginations of each of the musicians. On “What About Now,” the multi-person percussion endeavor has the playful swagger of a circus elephant, broken free and sauntering across summer fields. The bass, in its mood-driving unobtrusiveness, billows like the shadow of a cloud. The guitars, when they comment, are opinionated and to the point.
If you tried to map the rhyme scheme of this song, you’d come up with a diagram of braids within braids. At first it seems like McMicken isn’t bothering to rhyme the last lines of his verses, then you realize he’s rhyming them with each other: “overflow,” “glow,” “go,” and “snow.” Other rhymes he hides inside a single line, straight or slantwise, as in “the lights are flickering on the strip and on the tripwire.” These internal rhymes unite the strange images, so the weird world they describe sounds plausible.
In the world of this song, intangible things have physical effects: “I threw a wish, it didn’t fit inside a fountain / I made it overflow.” Big wish, to make such a splash. The images are so vivid you can see the impossible happening: the words are special effects for the mind’s eye. “I put the center of my soul in a centrifuge / I wanna fall like snow.”
Picture that.
McMicken uses this song’s surreal physics to talk about time in terms of space. On the chorus, the band asks in harmony, “What about now?” and McMicken, solo, answers, “I wanna stay right here.” It might seem like he’s avoiding the question, but the journey of this song is a journey through time, disguised as a side-street schlep. “It never seems like I’m ever gonna get there / after everywhere I’ve been,” McMicken begins. By my reading, “there” is the future, and “everywhere” is the past. Or maybe he’s asking about the even trickier trick: how to get to where we already are, here and now, when there are so many distractions to catapult us elsewhere?
McMicken doesn’t answer the question directly. That’s one of the things I love about his writing: he knows you can learn more from a question than from an answer. The title question of this song repeats at the beginning and the end, and weaves through the chorus. By refusing to answer it directly, McMicken gifts it to the reader.
But in a way, the song itself is an answer to the question. We can lose time, or get lost in time, but in music, we keep time. Time is what a song is made of. What about now? Now we’re making music.
