You Better Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood: "If I Let Him In" by Black Wing
Drumming Upstream 18
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I am learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 462 songs left to go!
This week I learned the song “If I Let Him In” by Black Wing. Black Wing is Dan Barrett, the singer and one half of Have A Nice Life. Readers might remember Have A Nice Life from a previous entry of Drumming Upstream about their song “Earthmover”. This makes Barrett the first musician to show up multiple times in the series. Neat! I’m going to treat Have A Nice Life’s origin story as common knowledge in this entry, so give that “Earthmover” entry a read if you’re not up to speed.
Now, onto “If I Let Him In”.
Side A
“If I Let Him In”
By Black Wing
…Is Doomed
Released on September 25th, 2015
Liked on October 15th, 2015
In my freshman year of music school I was in an ensemble that only played wedding standards. You know, songs that bands play in the background of private events. The musician-for-hire’s meat and potatoes. One of the first songs our teacher assigned us was “Knock on Wood” as played by Eddie Floyd. You know the song even if you think you don’t. Guy feels real lucky about the girl he’s dating and doesn’t want to take a chance on messing it up. So he knocks “ka-ka-ka-ka” on wood. That “ka-ka-ka-ka” was my job. Right after our singer sang “oh you better knock” the whole band would drop out and I’d hit my snare drum four times in a row. If I did nothing else well in the song I needed to nail those four hits. It wouldn’t just sound bad if I messed up. The sonic metaphor of a snare hit is the song’s whole identity. Without those snare hits “Knock on Wood” wouldn’t make sense.
A snare standing in for knocking on something is one of those metaphors you don’t need to explain to people. It’s intuitive. It’s also durable. You barely need to hint at it for the audience to pick up on it. The year after I played “Knock on Wood” I had to learn “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by The Rolling Stones for another ensemble. Once I heard Jagger sing the word “knocking” I couldn’t disentangle my left hand from his. In the wrong hands this musical symbolism is obvious, a little hokey even. No one wants to be reminded of the corporate events they’ve worked when they listen to music. So when a musician comes knocking with a metaphorical drum there’s only one rejoinder a seasoned listener can offer:
“Who’s there?”
For Dan Barrett, the answer isn’t one you look forward to hearing. On the closing track of his debut album under the name Black Wing, Barrett endures eight persistent minutes of knocking from life’s final visitor. The album cover tells the whole story. The words “Black Wing Is Doomed” in stark white against an isolated cabin billowing smoke. Basic familiarity with the transitive property fills in the blanks.
Barrett started Black Wing with a single rule: only use electronic instruments. With this limitation in place Barrett “decided to just go ahead and make a depressive chillwave record.” Unlike other bedroom producers using retro-sounding synths to make narcotized nostalgic pop, Barrett aimed for “music to listen to in the car with the windows down while feeling slightly melancholy and distracted.” That description fits most of …Is Doomed, but “If I Let Him In” grossly overshoots anhedonia. Instead, it shouts the quiet implication of chillwave’s death drive at the top of its lungs.
“If I Let Him In” begins and ends with the thud of a synthesized bass drum. “BM-BM-BM-BM”. No matter how much sound Barrett layers over it, and he lays on a LOT of sound, the “BM-BM-BM-BM” never goes away. You might not always hear it, but it is always there. Death is hovering at the doorstep, looming over Barrett like the billowing shaped black wing1 on the cover of his album. Faced with this unavoidable presence, Barrett writes from a state of exhaustion. "I give up my limbs to your caring grasp" he sings in a distorted voice, synth lines arcing past him in long, slow peels. Barrett’s exhaustion is not an affect. Though I’ve had trouble tracking down a primary source to back it up, multiple reviews of …Is Doomed claim that Barrett wrote the album while dealing with some pretty serious health issues2. I'm inclined to believe this reporting, given the album's lyrics. For the first six tracks Barrett's lyrics sound intermittently agitated and despairing. He rages against his incapacity. He struggles to connect to the people he loves. By "If I Let Him In" he's reached the closest thing to acceptance he'll find on ...Is Doomed. The full unromantic gravity of death is clear now (“hollow me out and fill me with spiders”) and Barrett reckons with the consequences of answering the “BM-BM-BM-BM” at the door.
That reckoning has a different shade compared to the death-consciousness of Have A Nice Life’s “Earthmover”. By 2015 Barrett was a father and a husband. How’s the old song go? I don’t want to lose this good thing that I’ve got. Because if I did I’d surely lose a lot. For the last four minutes of the song Barrett repeats the song’s title over and over, adding more and more voices until you can barely hear the words. The track around him roars with digital distortion, as if the cover’s cabin is caught in a torrential downpour. The “if” is never resolved. We never hear the door open.
Knocking on wood isn’t the only metaphor drums are good at. There’s one metaphor in particular that might be even more obvious than the one Eddie Floyd used. Consider the bass drum. “BM-BM BM-BM”.Death never stops knocking, but for now the heart keeps beating back.
Side B
“If I Let Him In”
Programmed by Dan Barrett
70 Bpm
Sometimes I wonder if freshmen drummers still have to learn songs like “Knock on Wood” and “Mustang Sally”. Those songs became meat and potatoes because of who they’re popular with. As generations keep cycling over I wonder which songs will replace them as entry level must knows. How long until kids are learning “Mr. Brightside” and “Since U Been Gone” instead? One song that I’m sure won’t make the drum curriculum at any level is “If I Let Him In”. Assigning this song to a student could only be read as an act of punishment. Other songs in this series have challenged my skills and my memory. “If I Let Him In” does something far more grueling. “If I Let Him In” is the first song that my body has flat out rejects if I try to play it too many times in one day. Every time I’ve left the studio after practicing “If I Let Him In” my right shin was sore for the rest of the day. I cannot recommend that you learn how to play “If I Let Him In”. Doing so might be legally inadvisable. Doing so would definitely be sadistic.
Dan Barrett is not to blame for my suffering. The drum part on “If I Let Him In” was not written to be performed by a human being. It is the work of machines and it should have stayed that way. It was my brilliant idea to try and bring it into the world of flesh and blood. More than I bargained for indeed.
Eight minutes straight of 16th notes at 70 beats per minute. Four on the kick, then four on a wooden block. Back and forth and back and forth. Thankfully 70 bpm is not a fast tempo. “If I Let Him In”’s kick and snare part is a marathon not a sprint. That would be a pain enough, but this isn’t the only drum part in the song. After the first verse, Barrett adds layers of cymbals on top of the central pattern. Because there’s no human required to play all of these layers at once, they often overlap in a way that only a South Asian deity could comfortably perform. Since I’m just some guy, I had to let a few of those cymbal hits go unplayed. I had enough on my hands already. With the entire right side of my body accounted for, I had to stomp out 16th-note off beats with my left foot like I was playing a double time swing for J.K. Simmons
After the second verse Barrett adds even more cymbals, marking off the whole 16th note pulse on a hi-hat like a souped up version of the dance beat I learned for “Delorean Dynamite”. This actually makes the song easier to play. By far the hardest part of the song was coordinating my two feet. Even after I got comfortable with the pattern, if I played the song too many times in one day my legs would start jamming up. The human body was not meant to play this many “BM-BM-BM-BM”s. I knew if I made it to the end of the second verse that I’d be in the clear for the rest of the song. When it was finally time to start filming I only got through two full takes before my legs went on the fritz. Here’s the better of the two:
You might have noticed me singing along during the song’s lengthy breakdown. I started doing this because it helped me play the song correctly. Singing along with Barrett’s repetition of the title forced me to breath in time with song. Like with any strenuous physical activity, having oxygen in your system is a boon. Singing also helped me keep the tempo together, even as the beat got obscured by distorted bass. Finally, the lyric worked like a mantra, a reminder to not let the song defeat me. I didn’t have to contemplate my mortality during the song, I’m not that dramatic about playing uncomfortable drum parts, but I did have to contend with self-doubt. It was me against me for eight minutes. I chose to not let him win. You also probably noticed me massaging my right forearm at the start of the breakdown. Bro, hitting the rim of the snare that many times in a row hurts. There was a moment where I seriously considered looking up symptoms of carpel tunnel. Like I said before, legally inadvisable for me to tell you to play this song on drums.3
But can I advise you to listen to the song? Find out on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
“If I Let Him In” is in a narrow sense a model of what I hope to accomplish with Drumming Upstream. I want to strengthen my relationship with music that I’ve experienced as atomized items on a list. In the years since adding “If I Let Him In” to my Liked list, I steadily grew bored with it. I found it too repetitive and too similar to better songs of Barrett’s. I expected to plop it at the very bottom of the Leaderboard after I learned it. But as it turns out, learning the song gave it new life. Until I started researching the song I was unaware of the medical context, and learning where Barrett was coming from revitalized the song for me. It may not be “Earthmover” but it is definitely the work of an older and more mature songwriter.
Still, it is mighty repetitive. So while it won’t bring up the rear on the leaderboard, it will sit on the lower end. For now it rests at number 16, below Marissa Nadler’s “Was It A Dream” and above Joyce Manor’s “Constant Headache”.
Thank you for reading, and special thanks to Josh Stanely for cooking up that silly Whiplash meme. I’ll be honest, after the last three songs I’m a bit burnt out on learning long, slow songs about death and depression, so for the next entry of Drumming Upstream I’m going to learn something short, simple, and fun! See you then, have a nice week.
I’m filing Barrett under “possibly” in my “Have they actually read Infinite Jest” dossier. You know who’s firmly in the “definitely” section? Jordan Peele. I’ll have more to say about that in December.
Genius cite an interview with Barrett in the zine Mithra Temple. The zine’s website is sadly defunct.
I can hear some drummers screaming “JUST PLAY IT ON A SPD!”. Yes, if I were to play this song at an actual gig I would just load up the kick and snare samples into a SPD and play them both with my hands. Much easier, much more practical, but that’s not in the spirit of this project.