Joe Pernice's earliest ever memory is music related. "We were visiting my grandmother in East Boston on my birthday," recalls the singer-songwriter, Zooming RC from his adopted home in Toronto. "I must have been three years old. I had one of those Big Wheel tricycles as a present and I was riding up and down her hallway. Jimmy Webb's Galveston came on the radio, and it stopped me. Something from that song just fucking went into my head like a spike. I didn't even hear the words, it was purely sonic - the chord changes, the melodies, the instrumentation. It was very powerful to me."
In many ways, 56-year-old Pernice has spent his creative life in the slipstream of that moment, trying to evoke in others the same intensity of feeling that Jimmy Webb induced in his toddler self. He spent his teens listening to the likes of New Order, The Smiths and R.E.M., but the songwriters he looked up to - Webb, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, Brian Wilson - were all pop classicists at heart. Filtered through his own worldview, their influence has been brought to bear on various projects over the past 30-odd years, from the all-acoustic Scud Mountain Boys and the Pernice Brothers to solo outings and indie supergroup, The New Mendicants.
Themes of sorrow and loss, twinned to luminous melodies and arrangements, provide the through line of Pernice's body of work. Indeed, so acute is his gift for a melancholic tune that one early composition was voted The Most Exquisitely Sad Song In The Whole World.
"Have you seen the John le Carré documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel?" he asks by way of explanation. "He says how he writes from a bit of reality, but then goes somewhere else with it. And I feel like I've done that all along. Maybe it's a way of coping with things. Songwriting is a very important and necessary part of the machine that keeps me going. It helps me function in the world."
This story is from the July 2024 edition of Record Collector.
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This story is from the July 2024 edition of Record Collector.
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