A pop song from my long-gone past. I re-recorded it in April 2009 with some friends who were around for the original.
I am the Nail (2:52 / 4mb) (mp3) (1987 / 2009)Howard Rappaport - Lead vocals
Dave Foster - Lead guitar and background vocals
Bill Foster - Bass and background vocals
Adam Kendall - Rhythm guitar.
In my 20's I should have been fully immersed in the tape loops, electronics, and formal composition I worked on in high school and college. Instead I wrote songs, strummed guitar, and sang with a less than amazing voice.
When I started on the singer/songwriter path, my friend Dan Dorogusker told me about a carpentry gig he once had. He wasn't doing a great job, and his boss came up to him and demanded, "Don't just hit the nail! Be the nail!"
I thought that was a pretty cool approach to things so wrote "I am the Nail", an ironically naive song of determination and love. (This was the late 80's, so Talking Heads and They Might Be Giants already made ironic-naivete hip).
Years after that song I found my epiphany, accepted I shouldn't sing in public, and tried to get back to the more esoteric things from my past.
Dave Foster, my pal from those singer/songwriter days, had a roommate named Erica Pearl. She got in touch with me in the winter of 2008/2009. Apparently the message of "I am the Nail" affected her enough to use it in a short story she wrote many years ago, and now she has a teen-novel coming out in which she incorporates the short story, thus the song.
It's time for me to come clean and let this song back in my life.
Here's a link to Erica Perl. The book, Vintage Veronica, isn't on her site yet:
http://www.ericaperl.com