A Song For You

It's true. It's a Joe Pernice Christmas song, circa 1986

I wrote this song when I was 18 years old.

Those weren’t particularly happy times. But I had managed a 3.14 grade point average in my first semester at UMass, Amherst. Doing so took everything I had.

Hours after my last final, I sat in my basement dorm room with a couple hours to kill before I’d catch a ride home for break. Most everyone had left. I wrote this song on glossy black plywood Yamaha acoustic a neighbor let me borrow.

The next day I was in the Central Square, Cambridge apartment of my late cousin Joe Harvard. I don’t believe he’d started Fort Apache Studios yet, but his eight track recorder had been moved from his apartment (previously called So So Studios), so maybe the Fort was in the works.

Joe recorded me to a Fostex four-track recorder. I played one of his Telecasters & my Tokai APB 64 bass (which I gifted my good friend Liam Jaeger). I also sang. Joe added an acoustic track. I left his apartment in the snow with one of two cassette mixes. Joe kept one.

I played the song for my family as a Christmas gift. I put the tape back in my school backpack. Before Christmas break ended, I “lost” the backpack in an underage drunken bummer of a party at Stonehill College. I pretty much forgot about the song. I had bigger worries on my horizon.

In 2019 my cousin Joe died. I knew it was coming, but his death still gouged a channel from me. Among other things, he left me a box of cassettes of demos and mixes from his years of owning Fort Apache. One tape was marked “XMas Master.” Well, sonuvabitch. There it was.

I played it only once for fear of the tape might break or be consumed by my antique off-brand Walkman. But it all came back. Sometimes it takes a year for Wednesday to become Thursday, but 40 years can feel like a blink.

Anyway, I just made this demo cover of an 18-year-old’s holiday snapshot.

- Joe Pernice, November 29, 2024

News from corporate HQ

Joe is doing a living room concert in Boston on December 27, and tickets are available here.

You asked, and we are responding. Charlie Ashmont t-shirts are back in print. We are doing them with one of those on-demand printers, so they are a bit pricier than we’d like, but so many of you have asked about it that we figured we would try. It’s still a picture of a dog wearing old-school earpods, so everyone will think it’s vintage turn-of-the-century.

Thanks for being here.