AEM110 Hank and Pigeon

New York City, more than any other place I’ve ever lived or vis­ited, isn’t so much an objec­tive loca­tion as it is a flex­i­ble con­cept. My New York isn’t Your New York, and it’s def­i­nitely not His or Her New York, or god for­bid, That Guy’s New York. Most peo­ple carve a com­fort­able space for them­selves that’s sit­u­ated between the extremes of Gotham City’s crim­i­nal dystopia, Sex & The City’s 5th ave glitz, and GG Allin’s East Vil­lage nest of debauch­ery. Some­where in this mess of fic­tional bub­bles is an objec­tive por­trait of the city at large that accounts for the mil­lions of peo­ple strug­gling to rec­on­cile their fan­tas­tic pro­jec­tions of life in the big city with the real­ity that most of us wake up, go to work, do some shit, go home, eat some shit, and go to bed. We value good art as a cul­ture because it pulls us just a lit­tle bit out­side this real­ity and into the lim­i­nal space that sep­a­rates the daily grind from what we always thought life would be like “when we grew up.” That’s good art, but truly great art keeps us there long enough to grasp whole hand­fuls of fan­tasy. It’s a pre­cious thing. The dream isn’t to escape the metrop­o­lis but to feel like we’re liv­ing inside some highly styl­ized ver­sion of it that could only exist in someone’s head, and for but a moment at that. Film­mak­ers have it easy, they can lit­er­ally mold a world and present it to view­ers, and writ­ers have hun­dreds of pages to describe and expand upon their thoughts, but song­writ­ers have a mea­ger 2 to 5 min­utes to do the same, and so pop songs sel­dom grant lis­ten­ers this level of cre­ative free­dom. But when I hear Hank and Pigeon, I imag­ine two peo­ple, liv­ing in a New York that’s not mine and can never be mine; a New York in which pigeons become trapped inside apart­ment walls, in which peo­ple stand on oppo­site street cor­ners talk­ing on the phone, in which songs are writ­ten like let­ters to a friend, and in which all of this can be boiled down into a sim­ple melody.

Mor­gan Heringer and Alex Wern­quest hardly knew one another when they began the odd prac­tice of song­writ­ing as cor­re­spon­dence. Wern­quest had a back­ground in blues gui­tar; Heringer in jazz vocal music and com­po­si­tion. The story of Hank and Pigeon tows the line between truth and fic­tion in so much as the truth is so per­fect that it’s hardly belie­ve­able. When Bob Dylan first came to New York City he claimed to have been born from a Chero­kee mother who aban­doned him at birth with a trav­el­ing cir­cus com­ing through New Mex­ico, so com­pared to that it’s belie­ve­able, but it nev­er­the­less reads like the kind of urban fairy­tale that I’d expect to resur­face as the plot of a quirky Swedish art film or ani­mated short at Sun­dance. Heringer and Wern­quest had played together in a band, but not the kind of band that sleeps in a tour­ing van together–rather, the kind that hangs out every once in a while to record and play the occa­sional gig. They hap­pened to be on the phone dis­cussing one such gig when they met at oppo­site street cor­ners in Man­hat­tan. It would have been a sim­ple mat­ter to hang up and con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion in per­son, but the two stood there in plain sight, talk­ing. Add rain and replace Wern­quest with John Cusack and you’ve got your­self a PG-13 romanic com­edy. The inci­dent, how­ever cute in ret­ro­spect, went unno­ticed by Wern­quest until he showed up to an open-mic at the Side­walk Cafe. Heringer took the stage, and as Wern­quest sat lis­ten­ing he heard a line float by that went some­thing like, “The things you say to me on the other side of the street.” Heringer had taken their con­ver­sa­tion, or rather the sit­u­a­tion sur­round­ing it, and turned it into a song. But it wasn’t just a song. It was a song to him, a song for him, and an invi­ta­tion of sorts. Wern­quest did the only thing he could–he wrote a song back. And Heringer wrote a song back. And so they became Hank and Pigeon.

Hank and Pigeon is two voices, very much sep­a­rate but inter­minably attune to one another. Each song is iden­ti­fi­ably a Hank or Pigeon com­po­si­tion, usu­ally accord­ing to the prin­ci­ple vocal­ist. There’s a con­sis­tency to their songs, even though each writes with a wholly dif­fer­ent back­ground and approach. Heringer’s songs are often modal, with chords expres­sive of her back­ground in jazz. She writes on the ukulele, which as a rel­a­tively new instru­ment in her reper­toire, affords her the oppor­tu­nity to exper­i­ment with chords and har­monies that wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily occur to her oth­er­wise. Wernquest’s back­ground in blues draws him towards more basic har­monic struc­tures with an empha­sis on the inter­ac­tion between vocals and accom­pa­ni­ment. The vari­ety of sen­ti­ments and moods that the two are capa­ble of cre­at­ing is extra­or­di­nary, and since each lends his or her fin­ish­ing grace to the other’s com­po­si­tions, the album reads like let­ters writ­ten by one and edited by the other such that both voices are always present but in vary­ing roles. While sit­ting together dur­ing an open mic, the two began jot­ting down ideas and phrases, just lit­tle men­tal snip­pits. Unplanned, each went home and wrote a song based on their col­lec­tive brain drop­pings that evening. Heringer wrote “Feath­ers and Fur,” the B-side of this dig­i­tal 7-inch, and Wern­quest wrote “When Will We Become,” the clos­ing track on their phe­nom­e­nal donation-optional album avail­able on Band­camp. One lis­ten will tell you that theirs is a spe­cial kind of col­lab­o­ra­tion, dif­fer­ent from the great song­writ­ing pairs that come to mind, but some­how also bet­ter. Recur­ring themes run through their songs, most of them shared sto­ries between Heringer and Wern­quest that through the course of the album implant them­selves upon lis­ten­ers. As these lit­tle quirks reveal them­selves to us, we get closer and closer to Hank and Pigeon, until we become a part of the dis­cus­sion, watch­ing their con­ver­sa­tion unfold while tak­ing part in it ourselves.

A-side “In the Ridge” intro­duces us to the pigeon char­ac­ter. Heringer and Wern­quest sing, “I’m a pigeon and I’m liv­ing in the ridge between the walls.” It’s born of a true story, in which Wern­quest con­sis­tently woke to strange sounds within the walls of his apart­ment, and imag­ined that such caco­phany could only be caused by a pigeon fly­ing around inside. From an aca­d­e­mic per­spec­tive, this whole sce­nario sit­u­ates Wern­quest on the edge of a fic­tional Kafka-esque New York in which pigeons actu­ally do nest in apart­ment walls. It’s a crazy alter­nate real­ity that I so des­per­ately want to be true, and “In the Ridge” makes it so for a beau­ti­ful two and a half min­utes. The song opens with a 5 (and a half) year old’s ren­di­tion of the song, which he ren­ders as “whoopee cush­ion, whoopee cush­ion, tooshie tooshie, tooshie tooshie, whoopee cush­ion, whoopee cush­ion, whoopee cush­ion, whoopee cush­ion, whoopee cush­ion, whoopee cush­ion.” The lyrics pick up con­sid­er­ably in scope and depth after that, but I really like some­thing about start­ing a song with a child’s voice. When most artists cull vocal sam­ples they look for snip­pits that can be con­strued as sin­is­ter, like The Books sam­pling a dead­beat dad ignor­ing his child, or Neu­tral Milk Hotel sam­pling a kid putting down punk music, but here the sam­ple reminds me that sound is sound. A beau­ti­ful song is essen­tially the same thing as a whoopie cush­ion, and it’s use­ful to be reminded of that. It’s also nice to hear it from a 5 year old and not John Cage. “In the Ridge” is a Wern­quest com­po­si­tion, and alter­nates between two main chords for the entire song. Yet some­how, the vocals are lay­ered over this sparse accom­pa­ni­ment to give the impres­sion of full­ness, com­plete­ness, and near-perfection. Wernquest’s restraint on the gui­tar is com­mend­able, and his style of play­ing is just casual enough to be truly endear­ing. The record­ing itself is part of the magic, done live on a TEAC 1/4″ reel to reel in a sin­gle 12 hour marathon ses­sion that went well into the morn­ing hours, dur­ing which Heringer and Wern­quest recorded all 9 of the songs that appear on their album. Wern­quest explained to me that this was the first time he’s ever made music with some­one and had no idea what it was sup­posed to sound like. There was no for­mula for Hank and Pigeon, no musi­cal tem­plate. In fact, they never really had any inten­tions of form­ing a proper band. It just hap­pened, and the result is some­thing so nat­ural that it’s almost impos­si­ble to hear with­out feel­ing some deep and abid­ing attach­ment to the music. As a lyri­cist, Wern­quest is among the best we’ve fea­tured on Ampeater. His words read like a pas­tiche of mod­ern lit­er­ary greats, mixed with the sur­real expe­ri­ence of liv­ing with 8.5 mil­lion other New York­ers. Take a look:

Woke up this morn­ing
Sky was falling
Walls were crack­ing
Tum­bling down
Was star­tled by the sound

Crack in the win­dow
Hit my pil­low
While red rain was
Pourin down
My brain spilled on the ground

I heard a moon man
Brush­ing his hand
On the glass and
Plas­ter cracked
Was flat on my back

Now I’m a pigeon
And I’m liv­ing
In the ridge
Between the walls
Hop­ing the plas­ter falls.

In so much as the main fig­ure in the song actu­ally trans­forms into a pigeon, it’s hard not to recall The Meta­mor­phoses, and the gen­eral expres­sion of Kafka’s utterly dis­ori­ent­ing and yet some­how com­fort­ing prose style. It’s mag­i­cal real­ism at its finest, and it recalls the afore­men­tioned lim­i­nal space (in this case, lit­er­ally as well as fig­u­ra­tively, given that the pigeon is trapped inside the wall) between an objec­tive real­ity and the one that exists in the songs of Hank and Pigeon.

B-side “Feath­ers and Fur” is a show­case for Heringer’s extra­or­di­nary voice. There’s some­thing about it that imme­di­ately dis­pells any thoughts of “girl with a ukulele” syn­drome, an oft lamented part of any open mic per­for­mance. Heringer is above all else highly trained, and her empha­sis on pre­ci­sion sep­a­rates her from the masses of song­writ­ers that have also cho­sen this par­tic­u­lar instru­men­tal com­bi­na­tion. I’m most struck by her con­trol of each vocal phrase, as she ever so slightly tapers the clos­ing note with­out sac­ri­fic­ing sound qual­ity or pitch. If there’s any effort required to pro­duce such a nat­ural tone, it’s almost impos­si­ble to hear it in Heringer’s per­for­mance. The tune opens with a ukulele, cycling through a chord pro­gres­sion that’s so far off the beaten path it needs snow­shoes. And yet, it ben­e­fits from the same sim­plic­ity that makes “In the Ridge” truly mem­o­rable. As a lis­tener I’m swept along by the incon­stant motion of the song, like an old music box play­ing some long lost waltz sub­ject to oddly timed vari­a­tions in tempo as its rusty cogs strug­gle to keep pace. It’s a song that belongs to the night–both writ­ten and recorded after mid­night, and it has a patience and calm­ness that reminds me why it’s worth stay­ing up until the day’s fran­tic move­ments have faded away. The rel­a­tive quiet of the early morn­ing hours really does work wonders.

It’s dif­fi­cult to deter­mine at times whether Pigeon is being used as a pseu­do­nym for Wern­quest or per­haps refers to an actual bird. The won­der­fully play­ful line “Don’t break your clav­i­cle crush­ing acorns in the park.” sug­gests the lat­ter, while “Pigeon if you’ll be my muse then I will be the best friend a boy could ever hope to never see” (a ter­rific line, by the way) provides equally com­pelling evi­dence for the for­mer. More­over, Heringer directly ref­er­ences “In the Ridge” in the song’s last line: “And the walls are slowly cav­ing in.” The pigeon is ulti­mately untouch­able, a dream pigeon that exists only in the mythol­ogy of Hank and Pigeon, and any ref­er­ence to it duly func­tions as a place­holder for Wern­quest as a per­son. There aren’t many bands that have suc­cess­fully devel­oped such a com­plex set of allu­sions on their first album, and I doubt there are any bands that have done so with­out con­sci­en­tiously set­ting out to do so. But Hank and Pigeon evolved as the nat­ural out­growth of two cre­ative spir­its inter­act­ing through their art. It’s not at all con­trived; this is about as real as it gets. Even on my most jaded days, when the monot­ony of existing’s worn a hole in the fab­ric of my imag­i­na­tion, Hank and Pigeon some­how remind me that I can still day­dream, that I can still imag­ine a world in which pigeons burst through walls, or in which every cell phone con­ver­sa­tion takes place on oppo­site street cor­ners. So put on Hank and Pigeon, and if it strikes you just right, head down­stairs, out to the cor­ner, and give some­one a call. Maybe they’re closer than you think.

Ben Heller

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