Princeton
Makings Of The Last Dance Of The Night
Mar 4, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Martina And Clive Krantz
Unreleased
This is a song I wrote about four or five months ago. I remember I had just bought this Ultravox drum machine and our then new roommate Paul was moving into the house. He actually cites this tune as the first Princeton song he remembers hearing, but Paul moved out recently so I am no longer legally allowed to refer to him as our roommate. But that's another story ... Anyhow, I didn't think we would arrange it in such an ambient and epic way, but around the time we were recording I was listening to a lot of Public Image Limited and New Order, and I think that shows. The premise of the song is pretty simple. Martina and Clive are a German couple who are having domestic problems. Clive is an egomaniac and Martina is sort-of a free spirit, who is alienated by this overbearing male presence in her life. She leaves him and spends a night camping out on the outskirts of their city. She becomes lonely and wishes Clive would join her for the bus ride home.
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Ms. Bentwich
original version appears on Bloomsbury
This song was written as part of a series of songs we did for our Bloomsbury EP. It is about a brief encounter economist John Maynard Keynes had with his secretary Naomi Bentwich. She fell in love with him, but at the time he was still very much confused about his own sexual identity, so things didn't work out very well. Keynes was more preoccupied with his other relationships, most notably that with painter Duncan Grant, the love of his life. Musically, I think Ben plays a really cool tack hammer piano on this instead of his usual harpsichord.
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The Waves
original version appears on Bloomsbury
This is the only track on Bloomsbury that I wrote specifically for the EP. The melody and rhythm came first, followed by lyrics painting a surreal portrait of a Virginia Woolf vacation. The point of the track was to use the title of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves as the basis for a fictional island vacation for Virginia. Although it is an absolute simplification of Virginia Woolf's complex mental struggles, I thought it would be nice to create a world where a vacation really would make all your problems and troubles go away.
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Sylvie
Unreleased
I wrote this track several years ago while I was in my senior year at UCSD. At the time I just was repeating the line "so then Sylvie" over and over again and thought it was something I could use in a song. Sylvie is the name of my great Aunt and a woman I knew very little about. Instead of trying to research her love life with my great Uncle Sol, I decided to create a romanticized portrait of their time together.
The half-meanings and the full stories of Princeton songs read sorta Ivy League-ish, giving them complexities that are peripheral and mostly hidden behind the curtains and the veneers. Jesse and Matt Kivel and Ben Usen aren't standard holders, willingly backed into the corners of writing about the same threadbare subjects and coughing up the kinds of lyrics that may mean the most to the greater numbers of people only because of their predictable likeability, their familiar stance. The guys from the California band Princeton have read books (no, serious books - ones that make you feel scholarly just by holding them lightly in your hands, without ever opening them a crack) and in doing so have developed a deeper bucket of ideas to dwell upon, to infuse into their indie pop songs. These songs are particularly interesting in that they feel as if they were based upon the modern lexicon of washy relationships and tepid regard. They are rich with the details that make a song something that can boast of its wingspan and of its diversified stripes and strings. There are odes to Virginia Woolf taking a vacation that was a real extent of the word, an escape, and interpretations of the sexual preferences and the motives to hide or shield them by economist John Keynes. There is a song devoted to a German couple fighting through domestic disputes and disturbances in the force, their force. There is an overall consistency to the tempo and the intentions of Princeton that goes beyond melody and texture. It's as if The National were ingrained in more of a citrus-growing vibe, as if they were still into chronicling the cyclical devastation of people and their loves, but also into filling a room with as much light as an explosion and a half. A line in "Sylvie" goes something like this, "In the 60s you kissed me," and the line comes in a tide of Wurlitzer, a plinking piece of electronic fiber and a dashing splash of timeless, melodramatic glassiness. It's got the makings of a last dance of the night, when the two stumbling partners - young and nervously sweaty and clingy - pull in closer and can smell their hair and their true body fragrances, all energy and fear and edgy awareness. It's an unabashed tribute to disarming purity, to nothing like the actual temperature, but to the temperature of what the skin actually feels at that given moment. It's a reference to temperature, it can be assured, but it holds a double-meaning that could make someone think that the kissing was actually done nearly five decades ago, back when mop-tops were the devil's haircut and moving your hips in a dance-like way was the first sign that promiscuity was going to be the next order of business. It carries with it no precursor, really, just a sweetness that overrules all else. It's the same thing that courses throughout the rest of the band's music, taking on the ideas and sensations of relatable misfortune and distress, while tempering them with a classy, sepia tone that's hard to ever wash off. It just feels as if it's going to linger through you for as long as you go on.
Princeton Official Site
