TALKY TINA, the best mod-revival rock band in San Jose named after a Twilight Zone episode, has been through some big changes recently, with half the band splitting off and vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Dave Miller reconfiguring it as a three-piece.
Somehow, Miller managed to salvage songs from the record the band had been working on, which is how Talky Tina’s Blank Club show this week came to be a release party for their new EP, Don’t Go. So I asked Miller (ever-so-conveniently located downstairs in the Metro office) to deconstruct the songs:
1. ‘Don’t Go’ “I don’t write love songs. This is the closest I’ll get. The first verse is about how we’re animals in certain ways. The second verse is, like, ‘I’ll be here for you, so don’t go,’ so basically I’m trying to keep the relationship together. The last verse doesn’t have too much to do with the rest of the song, if you ask me.
“We were coming into the studio, and I’d read an article about DNA. It had nothing to with the song at the time, I was just telling Randy [Burk, of Stout Recording] about it. Later on in the day, we were like, ‘We should write about that.’
“As far as vocals go, it was a step in a direction I never went before. It felt great. Randy and [drummer Dave] Conrad were rolling on the floor when I was singing it in the studio, because I was going for it, and I’m sure it looked hella funny. It’s like the closest I could come to Joe Cocker or something. I felt like I was channeling that.”
2. ‘Hand Delivered’ “I remember sitting on the porch and the riff came to me, and I started humming out the melody, and that first line—’Hey there, sir, would you like a magazine?’—just came to me. I didn’t know what it was going to be about yet, I just liked the way it sounded. And then I thought it’d be kind of funny if I wrote it about the Jehovah’s Witness guys.
“That song in particular was taken more from stoner rock & roll, but I tried to put my spin on it. But when it gets to the chorus it’s not really like that anymore, it’s more like the Damned or something.”
3. ‘Wanna Be’ “It’s just saying, ‘I’ll vote for you, you vote for me, and we’ll be free to be what we wanna be.’ But what I’m saying at the end is we’re just wannabes. So there’s two meanings to it.
“[The political influences] probably came from Billy Bragg, and the Clash, the Jam and even Dave Baisa [Miller’s bandmate in the Odd Numbers]. He kind of got me pointed in the right direction, too. When I was playing with them, I was 16 years old, I was barely learning how to play bass. He’d be singing about when the Wall came down, and different things that were going on in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and I picked up on that.”
4. ‘Lost Away’ “It was one of the earlier songs. I have no problem dumping songs, but it’s only happened twice in two years. What’s funny about ‘Lost Away’ is that it’s always been on the tip of leaving, but it’s stuck in there somehow. It definitely evolved over time, with the backups and stuff like that.
“But I had that one together pretty quick, as far as the arrangement. There’s a little steal from the Jam, the pre-chorus thing that says, ‘It’s the modern world, but you’ve seen nothing yet. Step up away and get your grand prize.’ I don’t even know what that means. But it seemed to make sense at the time.”
Talky Tina
Friday, 9pm
The Blank Club, San Jose
$7
