#77, "The Killer," The Twilight Singers (2003)

150 Favorite Songs: #77, "The Killer," The Twilight Singers (2003)

I spent a lot of my early and mid-twenties on tour, performing poems that I had written to crowds that sometimes wanted to hear them, sometimes very much did not want to hear them, and sometimes did not think they wanted to hear them, but discovered they actually did while I was on stage performing them. (The latter is by far the most gratifying of the three experiences, though they all have their merits.) It was not an easy way to make a living, but for the most part, I was able to make just enough money doing it that I could afford to eat something and get to the next town, so long as I had sublet my apartment and never ever stopped or took a night off or came home.

During that time, I had what I came to think of as my signature piece, my own personal “Thunder Road” or “Margaritaville” even though no one who would happen to be in the room where I was performing knew that. It was called “The Killer,” and I would often introduce it by saying that it was a poem about Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee Lewis was nicknamed The Killer, just like Elvis was The King and Johnny Cash was The Man In Black, because all of those old Sun Records guys got iconic nicknames that made them seem like larger-than-life archetypes. It was not actually about Jerry Lee Lewis, although he was mentioned in it, and I had been in Tennessee when I wrote it. (It was really about a girl.)

Mostly I said that because I didn’t want to say “I took the name of this poem from a Twilight Singers song,” which is what I actually did. But—and I think this is probably true for other creative people, especially when they’re young and figuring out who they are creatively and what they want to say, but it was definitely true for me at that point—when you talk about the people whose work has really inspired you, who you identify with on a very personal level, who really influenced a lot about how you see the world because of art they created that helped you frame your understanding at a young age, it feels like you’re always on the verge of being found out as a fraud. It’s been easier for me to talk about, say, Danzig—whose music I do love, but who I never actually wanted to be—than talking about Henry Rollins or Greg Dulli, whom I really, really did.

Greg Dulli had been the frontman for the Afghan Whigs in the ‘90s, and then of a second band called the Twilight Singers for about fifteen years after that. Sometime a decade or so ago, he started using the Afghan Whigs as his band name again, because festivals pay more money to legacy bands than they do second acts from the same people, and it’s hard for a working-class musician who never really had many big hit songs to keep doing it. Regardless, the Twilight Singers and the Afghan Whigs are pretty much the same thing—they’re both Greg Dulli’s band. And I was always nervous that if someone looked at Dulli and then looked at me and squinted, they’d see that most of what I was trying to do was an imitation of this guy. (This despite the fact that we did not even work in the same medium, and he wrote a lot about heroin and sex addiction and I did not! Imposter syndrome is a powerful force.) All of that made it easier to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis.

So much of that time in my life was about learning tricks and obfuscation and realizing that you have the ability to create a lot of your world. Not all of it, of course, but more than you might have thought—you can bullshit yourself into believing something is true, and if it’s not actually hurting anyone, other people will often either believe you or be too polite to actively disbelieve you. And that’s what “The Killer,” the Twilight Singers song I am ostensibly writing about, is all about. “I caught a fever- a holy fire,” the chorus goes, with an explosion of guitar noise that sounds like the last gasp of what made the ’90s variation on the power ballad work so well. The whole song is like that, vague lines that don’t let themselves well to a specific, literal meaning or a concrete narrative, but that hold significance because they all sound so powerful. “I think we’re lost- don’t worry, I’ve been here before.” Whatever exactly that meant, it felt real to me.

My “The Killer” was more specific, but it was still based on that same creation myth. I had spent a few months hung up on someone when I wrote it, but after I finished it—and especially once I started performing it every night—I learned something really important about myself. I had thought that I needed to write that poem because I felt so strongly about the girl, but that wasn’t actually true. I felt so strongly about the girl because I needed to write that poem.

There are all of these things we misunderstand about ourselves, about art, about the way we see the world. We put meaning there, because we want things to have meaning. A song like “The Killer” by the Twilight Singers is huge and dramatic, epic-sounding and full of powerful lines that I don’t think actually add up to anything specific, it gave me the chance to feel things I wanted to feel at that point in my life, that I couldn’t figure out how to feel without it. We are all greater artists than we realize. as the saying goes, and “The Killer” helped me realize that listening is creation, too, and the way you refract that back into the world can make you feel powerful.