Chase Burke
Look Out, Dinosaur! was the name of my band's only record, which we self-released a long time ago. "Release" is generous: we dumped the files in a forum and told the rockist kids to go to town. They did, in the way these internet kids do, and next thing we knew a song called "Tissue Paper"—which I'd written in a half-drunk fugue about the heart condition that ended my baby brother's life when he was seven—took off on the blogs, and then we were a viral thing, and I found myself sitting next to the hyper late-night guy on a slippery leather couch under stage lights while he asked me to assign shelter cats to audience members for an aww and a laugh. I don't know if they got to keep their cats. I didn't.
Later at a party—this was about a year later, in Los Angeles, well after the band was famous—a young man asked me to sign his chest. I Sharpied Hot Soundz, the first thing that appeared in my head, between his nipples, forming a pectoral bridge. He looked down and said, "Fire," before asking someone to take a picture. He was still holding his shirt up when the camera flashed. Maybe he wanted me in the photo, but I had headed for the bar.
After that night, I started signing Hot Soundz when people would ask for autographs. Everyone interested knew my name, but I wanted distance from who I was. Before long people started calling me Hot Soundz. "Have you seen Hot Soundz live?" and that kind of thing. It became my name in the way a repeated action or a particular feature can define a person. I'd written Hot Soundz on that kid to amuse myself, but people, as they do, made the decision for me. I leaned into it. And anyway, the music I made—and I was making the music, I'm always going to insist on that, even if others got scraps of credit in the liner notes—did have a sound like heat, in a metaphorical, or associative, sense.
Good and bad times followed, and of course the band broke up. I haven't talked to them since the split. Sometimes I'm mailed requests from lawyers, but I ignore the chatter, tell my people to talk to their people and never to me. I have a restraining order against being bothered. Going it alone—going solo—is complicated only when contracts are involved. Most of the time I live in Nebraska because there's nothing around, but occasionally I winter in Florida. And there's always Los Angeles, siren-calling as it does, its voice enough to put you over, either an edge or a makeshift make-believe.
At a sold-out solo show in Columbus a few years ago, and many years after the band split—I'm getting old, now—I wrapped it up, said thanks, and remained on the stage. This was the part where the dramatic encore break was supposed to be. Tradition, or expectation, dictated that I leave the stage and let the crowd work itself into an obligatory frenzy. But I didn't feel like walking away. Instead, I told the crowd I was retiring from music and this would be the last time anyone, ever, would see me perform. I was going to move to Galicia, I said. "That's in Spain," I sang to the tune of "Tissue Paper." They went nuts when the notes came out of my mouth, because this was a song I had, for many years, refused to perform or even acknowledge. I hadn't wanted to be weighed down by the past. That's what the lawyers were for. That's what the liner notes were for. But it turns out I was not as immune to the roar of a crowd, even after all those years in the spotlight, as I thought I was. I'm easily convinced.
So I didn't retire. I made the improvisation a regular encore replacement, a have/eat cake situation: I would make up lines to "Tissue Paper" and sing them spontaneously when I should have been in the back drinking water or pissing or leaning against the wall with my eyes closed, while the crowd had their moment of release, shouting encore encore encore and clapping quarter beats off from each other, devolving into noise. Instead, I made something new, turned the noise—the chanting, the clapping, the devolution, the song—into an acapella demonstration of… something. I'm still figuring that out. But they love it. And maybe this gambit has helped me perform a song I thought I hated, one that reminds me even now, two decades since writing it, of things I don't want to think about. I prefer to avoid reminders of certain things I know. The skewed performance, the improvised wordplay—it all makes the song new to me. And the consumers in the crowd get "Tissue Paper" in so many words—the melody, the cadence—and everyone goes home happy, entertained by the friction, or the heat, of transformation.
At home I prefer to sleep by myself. I like the house to be quiet. In Florida in the winter there's the sound of waves on the beach, and in Nebraska there's air moving over air. Los Angeles gives me nightmares, but they are, in their way, necessary. Despite my long career, I've never made it to Spain. One day I hope to carry an old song there and learn a new language and mold it—the song—into something different. I have read that new language changes the functions of the brain, what and how it remembers. What it thinks it knows. But the melody would be the same, and even if the words were different, I would know what they meant.