Sean Nelson bursts through the door with a firm handshake, an introduction, an apology for being late, and a copy of Charlie Smith’s new novel, Men in Miami Hotels, uncracked. His little mop of piled-up salt-and-pepper curls have been described before, as have his clear-framed Ray-Ban-esque prescriptions specs, but the thing that struck me most about him was his really excellent shirt. It was the shirt of a man of some distinction; very thick, striped white and light blue. He wrapped it in a black blazer with nautical-looking bronze buttons at the cuff. 

It was the right outerwear for Tavern Law, the place where we agreed to meet, and the place where Nelson claims never to have had a bad meal. I had ordered a cheese plate to keep me company while I waited for him to show up. In about 5 minutes, three good-sized hunks of cheese arrived. Each hunk was served alongside its own nibbly companion and six very buttery little toasts. The sheep’s cheese was paired with mixed nuts (candied walnuts, almonds—an acorn?—and filberts), the blue cheese with Castelvetrano olives tossed in lemony oily righteousness, and a creamy fresh cheese with an orangey (apricoty?) marmalade. I tried to be democratic about everything, but the Castelvetrano olives proved too seductive for temperance. Ditto the nuts. The cheese was good all around, save for maybe the blue, which only got pecked at because really it was just there to make you want the olives.

Nelson settles his 6’5 frame onto the close-set barstools, nibbles at the cheese, and orders a Moscow Mule. I order an Old Pal and half-heartedly ask if Charlie Smith’s steamily-titled novel is a noir-thriller or something and then—bang—we’re off for an hour of (mostly one-sided) Grade-A riffing. Nelson has one of those plasma globe minds—touch one part and ten others will light up with associative fervor. Give him a noun and a raised eyebrow and he’ll be better than television for as long as you’ll allow him to be or until he wants to step out for a smoke.

For instance, he senses the slight criticism of genre fiction behind my faux-French pronunciation of “noir,” and in response he claims that Charlie Smith’s last book was one of the best he’s ever read, that it was not genre fiction and so he assumes Men in Miami Hotels won’t be either, and then—somehow intuiting my follow up question about how his feelings toward “Art” have changed over the years—he skips the generalist’s response about the silly distinction between highbrow and lowbrow stuff and jumps straight into the particular: “I wanted to plant my flag on the moon of culture.” He accompanies the phrase with a grandiose flag-planting gesture (one that would have skewered his Moscow Mule straight into the bar), one that lets me know he’s sort of joking but not really.

He tells me that, originally, he wanted to make a big crater in the right kind of art. The good art. High art. Part of what defined “good art” for young Nelson, the Nelson of Harvey Danger, was not “selling out.” He goes on to explain: “If you sell your song to McDonalds for a commercial or something, then the thinking is that your art has been corrupted. You’ve been influenced. You’ve given in to the corporations. But to have the capacity to think that way is to announce that you’re a very privileged person. And I’m not the first person to say this, but only someone who is particularly privileged can think that it’s somehow below them to sell something that they made. YOU made it! It’s YOUR thing to sell. And to say that the thing is no longer art—that it’s no longer rock and roll—because you made a good amount of money on it is just so wrong.”

Nelson’s lit. He’s not drunk; he’s just on. We hurriedly order some food. I get the pork belly (two hunky squares of pork on an attractive bright green puddle—it’s like a pig in a field, right?) and he gets the mac and cheese made with duck fat.

Over dinner we manage to cover the following:

1.) Anal sex and tentboy culture in ancient Greece. Nelson: “I believe Love was a transitive verb in ancient Greece….”

2.) The Self as the Great Subject of Our Time. Nelson: “…the Self really doesn’t start getting talked about in a real way until after WW2, after Freud, really. Some people might say talking about the Self is, you know, narcissistic, but I’d say there’s a spectrum, right? There’s a difference between a selfie, and, let’s say, Morrissey.”

3.) How right Leonard Cohen was when he said that the best line in rock and roll was “I found my thrills / on Blueberry Hill.” Nelson: “YES. That’s rock and roll. The line is perfect for the song. And maybe if someone other than Leonard Cohen said it then I wouldn’t believe it. But Leonard is, like, he’s in the Pantheon.”

I break in and say that I agree. Cohen’s up there. Malkmus. Bill Callahan. Then he breaks in: “Absolutely. Dylan. Malkmus. David Berman.” (He seemed weary of my including Bill Callahan, but I couldn’t be sure.) I quote Berman: “All my favorite singers couldn’t sing.” He asks, “What if life is just some hard equation on a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?” I tell him, “We’re off to the land of club soda unbridled.” “And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon,” he replies. (The last one’s a quote from Actual Air, Berman’s totally fucking amazing and, I think, important book of poems.)

I tell him that for about six months in college I thought all there was to life was getting a little stoned, lying in bed, and listening to Crooked Rain. “That’s it. That’s the bridge that joins our generations. Pavement. I did the same thing, except I was more than a little stoned,” he says.

I’m basically smitten at this point. I want to be his tentboy. Because he’s been talking so much, Nelson’s eaten maybe a total of 10 noodles, not even half his bowl. Instead of finishing it, he steps out for a cigarette (We few, we happy few…). Outside we pick up the conversation about the Self, following rabbit holes such as Michael Keaton’s (I think excellent) rom-com Multiplicity and the many fallacies that trouble Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. He gives me a 5-paragraph essay about the greatness of My Dinner with Andre and why I need to see it. I’m becoming convinced that there are no brows.

We head back in, order another couple drinks, and pick up our thread about music and taste, which carries us for the rest of the evening. Earlier, we were discussing the peril of too strongly identifying with characters in songs, books, and movies; how one can lose oneself in them, become a part of them: “It’s super dialectical. There’s no better feeling than naked thralldome to somebody’s work, to think: ‘I was born to receive this song. I was born to appreciate it. I was born to appreciate it more than anybody possibly could.’ I don’t feel weary of that feeling, because in the moment it’s quite a thing to feel born to do something. It’s when suddenly you are watching My Dinner with Andre or something and you have the exact same sensation: ‘This is me.’ Well, yeah, they can both you, because we are a lot of things, but I think as you get older and maybe more aware of your patterns you are more capable of realizing that you’re just willy-nilly pouring yourself into molds—participating in a sort of promiscuous identification—and you start feeling like, ‘So, which one of them am I? And why do I want to be someone else?'”

I squint at him a little, and he takes that as a sign to give me a specific example: “I remember it happening on tour, when I would play a song for people, and they would be like, ‘Aw man, this sucks. I don’t get it. I don’t like it.’ I would take it really personally—”

“What is it?”

“Any number of things! A film, or a book, or something that I was talking about. I remember one time I played this Robyn Hitchcock song for the guys in the van, and then they literally started shouting, ‘Turn it off! It’s horrible. It’s awful! And I found that I was nowhere near being able to say, ‘Oh I guess we just really disagree about things—where are we going to stop for lunch?’ It was more like. ‘I can’t believe you are rejecting me. What you’re really saying is that you don’t like me, and you’re saying it intentionally to try and hurt me.’ And that’s almost psychotic, but what it is for sure is a form of neediness. The neediness for approval of something I DIDN’T DO. It’s sort of ridiculous to feel affronted by people not having the same experience as I do. And it happened enough times that I really had to examine where I was coming from. And more than once I got into arguments about that subject.”

I tell him that I feel affronted when people start spouting out a bunch of opinions that don’t take into consideration the piece of art as a whole. My chief love, for instance, is music, and my chief love within music is the lyrics. When I hear a song my ear goes straight to the words, and so I sort of freak out when people say that they don’t really notice the lyrics. Nelson shakes his head: “I’m amazed that people don’t listen to lyrics. It’s like when people say they don’t like the Beatles.”

At this point, Nelson looks like he’s about to go on a Beatles tangent, but then he interrupts himself. “The thing that I hate—hate—is when songwriters refer to their songs as poetry. It’s a fundamentally different form. It’s not the difference between theatre and film…it’s like the difference between…I know there’s an analogy…”

I try helping out, saying that we don’t get drums in poetry, nor do we get guitars. Then he collects himself: “The thing about a poem is that the music is contained within the words. It is music that suggests itself. And song lyrics have a relationship with an existing bit of music, and sometimes they precede the music, and sometimes they follow it, and sometimes they ride the rhythm of it, and sometimes they violate it, and sometimes they’re integral to it, and sometimes they’re discrete. I care about poems—they’re one of the things that show you the infinite—so I have real reverence for them, but, I just have more access to song lyrics. With the Beatles, for instance, the lyrics are not good or bad—they’re perfect. They couldn’t be any other way. And it’s because they’re a component of the larger organism of the song. They serve the other parts of the song. The elements are interdependent. Poems are their own islands, their own universe. Song lyrics can have themes and be about something, but really what they’re about is that they’re a solution to the puzzle that is the song.”

I ask if he always starts with the same puzzle pieces. Does he, for instance, always start with the sky, or the melody, or the rhythm? “It has been all of those. In the case of some of the songs on Make Good Choices (Ready Records), I was teaching myself how to play piano so that I could start writing songs for myself, and I discovered that a certain “piano figure” arose; the melodic line suggested itself but also the words suggested themselves—and I never had the experience of finding all that for myself, and I really liked it. My limitations as an instrumentalist circumscribed my ability to explore that as much as I’d like to have, but I keep working on it.”

I ask him about the relationship between the instrument and the kind of song that emerges from the instrument—if he played a harp, for instance, would he be writing a different kind of melody, a different kind of lyric? “There’s only so much I can do playing piano. I have limited skills, and so the idea of a chord progression that’s a little more rhythmically intricate would absolutely inspire or engender a different lyric approach. My piano playing is pretty rudimentary, so it gives me room to be more verbose, really. It’s not just that the singing and the words are prominent in my songs, it’s that there’s a lot of space, and I tend to fill it. As I’ve demonstrated tonight, I’ll just talk and talk and talk. It might be that I’m nervous about silence. I just feel like I spend a lot of time in isolation.”

Solitude or isolation?

“Isolation. Self-imposed. Even when I’m around a lot people I feel isolated. I don’t have a hard time being gregarious, obviously, and I think I’m really good at listening to people, but I do feel that conversation is fun. It’s the best. It’s like when you see a horse running—like an actual wild horse—or a dog! I have a dog, and I throw a tennis ball into the lake and she is…just—fucking activated. She’s a pure organism. There’s this great phrase from Marlene Dietrich. She had a visit from Orson Welles or something, and afterwards she said she felt like a watered plant. I get a little backed up in isolation, and so I’ve been accused of showing off or spinning my wheels when I re-enter society, but I just know that when I get in a good conversation with someone who’s smart and who appreciates both what I’m saying and the collaboration of the conversation, then I feel like a plant that’s just been watered. It’s why I like making music with people. It’s exactly the same thing.”

The clock strikes 9:00. I say shit I’m late for a date. He says shit he’s got to run watch his friends in Cumulus play at Neumo’s. We step outside, shake hands, and part ways. Watered.