MAGNET Exclusive: Joe Pernice Goes Track By Track On “Chappaquiddick Skyline” Reissue

Working its way nicely through Joe Pernice’s back catalog, New West now delivers the 25th-anniversary reissue of Chappaquiddick Skyline for the first time on vinyl. Released two years after Overcome By Happiness, the Pernice Brothers’ 1998 debut, Chappaquiddick Skyline has more intimate, stripped-down nuance than its predecessor’s precisely rendered chamber pop. It’s almost as if Pernice simply picked up where he left off on “Ferris Wheel,” Happiness’ subdued last gasp.

Recording at home on a Tascam TSR-8, Pernice brought back Happiness producer Thom Monahan and guitarist Peyton “Pink” Pinkerton. Chappaquiddick Skyline also features contributions from drummer Mike Belitsky (Sadies, Neko Case), guitarist John Crooke, Laura Stein (Pernice’s wife and formerly of Jale) and Fort Apache Studios cofounder Joe Harvard. For the new vinyl edition, the tracks were remastered by post-punk producer/engineer extraordinaire Bob Weston.

Battling through a bad cold, Pernice took one for the team, offering a clear-headed song-by-song assessment of Chappaquiddick Skyline for MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland.

1) “Everyone Else Is Evolving”
“It’s the song that gave birth to the ‘I Hate My Life’ T-shirt. The shirt became more popular than the song itself after a Canadian Customs agent wouldn’t allow me to bring them into Canada because I was a single shirt over the limit—25—and would need an importer’s license. I think he was fucking with me. Anyway, I had to go back, where a U.S. Customs agent offered to donate the shirts to a homeless shelter. At the time, it seemed like a good idea … free shirts. But ‘I Hate My Life’ was probably not appropriate. Always felt a little bad about that.”

2) “Solitary Swedish Houses”
“An homage to the late, great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. His poem of the same name is a killer. I can’t say how influential and inspiring his writing has been to me.”

3) “Courage Up”
“This was originally on the list of tunes that would become Overcome By Happiness. I scrapped it from the list while in the studio because the song itself was the least finished of the bunch. Money was tight, and studio time was expensive. There was no time to fuck around.”

4) “The Two Of You Sleep”
“I wrote this and ‘Kidney Shaped Pool’ on the same day: July 4, 1998. I remember it vividly. My band had just finished a tour. I was staying at Mike Belitsky’s apartment on the Lower East Side. He was out for the day, and I was alone with his acoustic guitar and four-track recorder. The recording on Chappaquiddick Skyline is from the demo I made in his apartment. We added a few things later. I didn’t own a cellphone yet, and later that evening, my parents finally tracked me down to let me know my grandmother had died that afternoon.”

5) “Breakneck Speed”
“This one was written while I was still in the Scud Mountain Boys, so my guess is sometime in 1997. It’s possible I’d forgotten I wrote it when we went to make Overcome By Happiness. More likely I didn’t think it was good enough. As Thom Monahan used to say, ‘Not every kid makes the team.’”

6) “Theme To An Endless Bummer”
“I wrote this song so I could shoehorn ‘salient’ into a pop song … But seriously, it’s a quick and contained little number. I always dug how John Crooke used our takeout lunch chopsticks to tap out his guitar part. A theme of the record was small-dollar special effects.”

7) “Up In Michigan”
“I also wrote this one while in the Scud Mountain Boys. Bruce Tull and I played it at the Middle East as a duo in early 1997. I nicked the title from the Hemingway story.”

8) “Hundred Dollar Pocket”
“During a self-prescribed extended period of bed rest, I watched a lot of TV. I got hooked on The Price Is Right. Bob Barker kept a C-note in his suit coat’s “hundred-dollar pocket.” I jotted that down for a later date. This recording is a favorite of mine. John’s vocals throughout are quite beautiful. Pink’s outro guitar licks get me every time. Monahan pulled a clarinet sample from somewhere and fucked with it.”

9) “Nobody’s Watching”
“I wrote this song after driving home to Northampton from Boston. Somewhere around Sturbridge, I could pick up an oldies station in Hartford. I heard Herman’s Hermits’ ‘Two Silhouettes (On The Shade)’ and it got me thinking. As a fun experiment, I tried mapping the thoughts from the Hermits’ song to mine. What drives home my recording is the vocals of Laura Stein and Jennifer Pierce. So freaking good.”

10) “Knights Of The Night Vol. 1”
“When I started writing this song, it was about my father. After messing around with it, I found it worked better as a romantic love song.”

11) “Leave Me Alone”
“To a person in the 1998 version of the Pernice Brothers, we were all massive New Order fans. I think us covering this song was Pink’s idea. He certainly made the guitar parts his own. I always loved playing this one live.”

12) “Kidney Shaped Pool”
“See number four above and swap ‘Kidney Shaped Pool’ for ‘The Two Of You Sleep.’”