Song Exploder - Semisonic - Closing Time

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

The song “Closing Time” by the American rock band Semisonic came out in March 1998. It hit #1 on the Alternative charts, and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Song. It gets played in stadiums, Weird Al covered it, and it’s the last song of the night in countless bars. Since then, Dan Wilson, the lead singer and songwriter of Semisonic, has become a powerhouse songwriter who has written or co-written for artists like John Legend and Taylor Swift. And he’s won Grammys for his songwriting with the Dixie Chicks and Adele. But over two decades ago, Dan and his bandmates John Munson and Jacob Slichter were in Minneapolis, getting ready to start work on their second album, Feeling Strangely Fine. In this episode of Song Exploder, Dan breaks down how that process led to "Closing Time." songexploder.net/semisonic

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. There are some songs that you've heard over and over and over again throughout your life. Closing Time by Semi-Sonic is one of those songs for me, and I think for a lot of people. And I always figured I knew what the song was about, Closing Time at a bar. But it turns out there's more to the story. And in this episode, Dan Wilson, the singer and songwriter of the band Semi-Sonic, tells the whole story. Closing Time came out in March 1998.

It hit number one on the alternative charts and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Song. It gets played in stadiums, weird al covered it, and it's the last song of the night in countless bars. In the years since the song came out, Dan has gone on to become a powerhouse songwriter, who's written or co-written for artists like John Legend and Taylor Swift, and he's won Grammys for his songwriting with The Dixie Chicks and Adele. But over two decades ago, Dan and his bandmates, John Munson and Jacob Slicker, were in Minneapolis getting ready to start work on their second album,

feeling strangely fine. I'm Dan Wilson. I first started writing closing time in a big batch of songs in late 96 or early 97. Semi-Sonic had gotten off tour after a long stretch, and John and Jacob and I were thinking about what to do for a next record. And I specifically remember among their requests to me in this batch of music was a new song

to end our shows with. Before, feeling strangely fine, I would write a song when I felt like it, but I was trying to write a song every day and eventually we had about 60 songs that I had written. And a lot of them were not great, but I think I wrote Closing Time

in the middle of that giant batch of songs. It was in John's basement that I first played closing time for John and Jacob. And the first demo is me, down in that basement, playing it for them. Almost all of Semi-Sonic's songs, I wrote on a Guild F-30, a little acoustic guitar.

And I thought of the title closing time literally because of the request from John and Jacob for a new closer for our sets. Semi-Sonic started in 92, and John and I had been in our previous podcast. for eight years before that and had toured most of that time. So I lived in bars, you know, a lot of my time.

I heard people yelling at us to get out a thousand times, and probably more. And I immediately thought of this thing that one of the bartenders at the 400 bar where we would always hang out would always yell, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. I've always loved those very metaphorical poets

like Elizabeth Bishop. where you, you know, you're like, this entire poem about an old decrepit gas station? Well, you know, she's got something, like, there's an idea, you know, with those poets. Like, it's, they're writing you a poem about the time their dad dangled them down the laundry chute in their house, you know? Like, that's not just about that.

That's about a lot of other things. So at the time I had this theory that every line in my songs had to be about two things. And I didn't mind if people would only understand the one, but to me it always had to be about two things. At that time, I thought that was my way of pushing myself to be more like Elizabeth Bishop. When I wrote Closing Time,

I was on the couch in the living room of my wife, Diane, and my house. At that time, we were expecting a baby. We had found out of several months before. And so closing time definitely took on a kind of, for me, a double meaning of being born, this kind of funny double meaning about being bounced from the womb and bounced from the bar. I was about halfway done and I realized

oh, it's got this other meaning and I was very delighted by that because then I could think of lines and they all didn't have to get generated by the work-a-day image of bar time and looking for someone to hook up with. It could be generated by other more mysterious images. It's funny because, you know, to be removed or kicked out at the uterus and, you know, enter a world of bright light.

It's like going out under the street lamps after being in a bar. Like, you're in this wonderful, like, dreamland, and then you get, like, kicked out, and now you have to figure out what to do with your life, you know. In utero, you're drinking the purest nourishment from your mother, and you don't want it to end, I think, you know, like, I don't know. Maybe babies are excited to be born, but I don't think so, you know. So I was just laughing to myself at the parallels. I just thought that was something sweet and beautiful about that.

Semi-Sonic had a friend named John Cooker. He had golden ears for what sounded right in a guitar or a compressor or keyboard, anything. He was a genius. And then John told us that he was going to start a studio. And he called it CD Underbelly, and he built it in downtown Minneapolis. but the studio is not quite finished at this point. So we're working in the storefront next door, getting the songs together and waiting for John Cooker

to finish the studio and let us start recording the record. So this recording, this demo, is us in that storefront rehearsal space with an upright piano that we're using to, like, show each other ideas. And that's where John Munson thought of that piano part of Closing Time. The producer of Closing Time is Nick Launay. We sent him the storefront recordings, and they were way more formative than we expected them to be, because they became Nick's vision of what the songs were supposed to sound like,

but actually they were literally just the way we played them on that day. Like, if we had recorded Closing Time the day before, it wouldn't have had the same piano part. If we had recorded Closing Time the day before that, it would have no piano at all. You know, it was all basically like wherever it was, we just froze it and send it to Nick. Then a month after the Starfront demos,

Nick came to Minneapolis, and we started recording in early April. And then our daughter Coco was born many, many weeks early and very tiny. She arrived after six months. And she stayed in the hospital for a year after she was born. We were very afraid for her survival the whole time. Nick and I had a heart to heart on the phone, a long conversation about what to do.

And my daughter's doctors, I discussed with them what to do, and they said you need to just keep doing your job because if this goes well, it's still going to be a long process, and you can't live at the hospital. You need to do your life. So then I had a conversation with John and Jacob from a band,

and I told them we're going to do this music, but I would not be present for a bunch of it. I'm going to do everything I can to like, I'll do all the singing and I'll play, you know, all the guitars I think of and we'll do all the takes of the songs. But then I'm going to spend as much time as I can at the hospital with Coco. So my life was very difficult at that time. But the recording wasn't that difficult. And we didn't fight really. Nick Launay had a hard job, but he was an easy person to work with.

One of the things we really liked about Nick was that the recordings he had made were all really heavy. He was just something about the way he recorded things that gave everything this gravitas and heft. And it relates a little bit to John Cooker, whose studio we worked in, he would say, oh, I don't like that guitar because it doesn't sound mungy enough. And I would never know what he meant by that word mungy, but getting to know him more, it was like everything had to be dark. And so all the amps were like really loud, but they weren't shrill and bright. They were dark and kind of dead sounding.

And then Nick's secret was, I think, to have me play the parts a lot of time, so it was all a little bit out of tune, and then just add them all together in this huge, low, mid-range kind of mass. Closing time, it's very simple, like a folk song, very repetitive, very innocent in its melody. And then, almost in a funny way, it's really loud. It's like this melancholy, street corner, busker song played super loud. Band is a trio, so there was no extra person to strum the guitar. So if I was to play a melody on the guitar, we would be sacrificing the chords, which is just the way we understood it.

And so, you know, during the chorus, I'm playing those chunky chords. Then during the solo, forget the chorus, I'm playing the melody. Zvex Effects is based in Minneapolis, and they had this new invention called a Fuzz Factory, which is this crazy sounding distortion box that makes guitars sound like it's a music. Guitar sounds like it's a giant zipper being zipped. Very strange sounding. And Zach at Zvex FX

Fx brought that Fuzz Factory to a party at my house, and it was labeled number five. So it was like the fifth one that they built. And I used it on everything. It was that buzzy sound just struck me as so insane. I just loved it. And that's the sound of the solo in closing time. That was really strange, like a hive of bees,

singing a melody or something. The song is so sing-songy and so much like a nursery rhyme. So I wanted the bridge to just sound like a whole different world from the rest of the song. I wanted it to sound sentimental and cinematic and dreamy and kind of sad and emotional. So I just made this arbitrary change of key. But I also felt like a change of key would even make it sound more like an old children's movie or some kind of LP of children's. stories or something that would have an interlude with sort of string sections.

Like, Winnie the Pooh would, they'd be like walking through the forest and then you'd hear like flute melodies and strings, and there'd be this beautiful, like, very musical little interlude that would change keys, and then you'd come back to the main story. I just wanted the bridge of closing time to have that quality of like, it's a whole cinematic change of scenery. And Jacob had been learning more and more about arranging and orchestrating. And so he wrote the string arrangement. of that melody that I just kind of sketched out on the demo.

In the bridge, we wanted to have the drums change radically, and John and Jake created a loop of Jacob playing the drums, but with a super different sound. So then we played the bridge to Jacob and John's loop. Then he turns the sample off and starts drumming for real again. Nick had the musical lore of how to get guitars to sound great, but also how to make singers comfortable, how to push someone to a point of not quite exhaustion

and get a great performance just right when they were the most tired. He definitely pushed me a lot. Closing time, one last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or beer. He got very attached to the way my voice would break on the chorus of closing time. And he'd be like, can we get you to do that break again on the chorus? And I'd be like, no, it just happened. I can't just do that

because I'm not a very trained singer. And he would say, oh, well, just try. So we would try it a whole bunch of times and I would just get madder and matter. And then my voice would break at that point in the way that he liked and then he would keep that

when I was completely worn out. It can actually make the song feel so much more emotional because it's a struggle for the singer. It's not just like them being awesome. It's them trying to survive that moment, you know. I know who I want. want to take me home. I know who wants to take me home. I know who I want to take me home.

Take me home. That whole period of time of recording the album was a crazy blur for me because our daughter was in the hospital the whole time and would be for the many, many, you know, almost the whole year. She's still with us. She's a light of my life and I'm very happy about that. outcome. But the process was crazy. And I was very happy to have a meaningful activity to go to. I was very happy that I was doing it with people that I trusted in love. John and Jacob and Nick and the whole team around me were so supportive and so kind because I was hanging by a thread a lot of the time. Coco just took it out of us. You know, we were just limping from how, to hospital to studio to hospital to bed.

It was intense. The thing we tried to provide, like I would go a couple times a day and just rock her. As soon as we got permission to take her out of the isolate, we would just rock her for hours. And then, you know, we'd have a friend or my parents would come and do the same.

Just to give that person in a little box human contact with family was a huge project. There's a very sad Robert Frost poem. that it's about a family that loses a child and the wife can't forgive the husband for still doing chores around the house. And she hates him for like mending fences on their farm and kind of whistling while he works in a weird way. And, you know, I look back on it and it is, I can identify with the characters in the Robert Frost poem. During that time when Coke was in the hospital, I felt like any kind of constructive activity that I could have would be a, kind of a lifeline to staying sane.

And so I grabbed onto it and made the record with my guys. And also tried to stay super engaged with my family. The connection between impending fatherhood, impending new life, and closing time just continued in the craziest way. It never stopped being connected. The day she was scheduled by the hospital to come home, the day they scheduled the ambulance to take her home and set her up in our house

was by chance the same day that MCA scheduled closing time to come out as a single. And there's no possible way these two giant impersonal organizations coordinated. When we got the gurney with Coco on it into the ambulance, and the nurse sat back there with her, and I sat up in the front with the ambulance driver,

turned in the seat so I could watch Coco and the nurse. We left the hospital and the ambulance driver turned to me and said, I'm really sorry to ask this. I'm not supposed to ask this. Are you Dan Wilson? And I was like, yeah, I am. And he goes, you're in Semi-Sonic. And I go, yeah.

And he goes, I love your band. Oh, thanks. He goes, craziest thing, I just heard your new song on the radio, the one that goes, take me home. I know who I want to take me home, take me home. Is your new single? I just heard it before you got in here with your daughter. And I was like, okay, this is never.

gonna unconnect you know there's no like untangling it and now here's closing time by semisonic in its entirety doors and let you out into the closing time turn all of the lights on over closing time one last call for alcohol so finish your whiskey or beer closing time closing time You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. I know, I know the places you will. This room won't wear a sister to jacket. More about Semi-Sonic, visit songexploader.net slash semisonic. You'll also find the music video for closing time, and a link to buy or stream the song.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full-length. and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine,

Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Winerobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage.

And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is made by me and producer Christian Coons, with production assistants from Olivia Wood and illustrations by Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a collective of independent, creative podcasts. Learn more about all of our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Song Exploder. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.