Paul Bass Photo
Brian Ember in the WNHH FM studio.
Brian Ember started singing a verse he wrote 22 years ago, to a song he’s just now figuring out how to complete.
The song is called “No Radio Inside.” He performed a version of it on WNHH FM’s “Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” tiniest-of-all-tiny desks unplugged live-performance program. Above minor chords insistently strummed on his white Gretsch Range Falcon acoustic guitar, he sang:
No radio inside
No radio inside
Nothing of value has been left
So don’t break in
No, don’t break in
No radio inside …
Ember — aka Brian Robinson — wrote that first verse while living in New York City, studying classic composition, hosting a Lower East Side poetry open mic. Car thefts were rampant then.
“People were putting hi-fis in their cars and getting them stolen all the time. Anti-theft devices were being invented, but they weren’t working,” Ember recalled.
“The car companies finally had this revelation — and really they should apply it to politics in general: ‘What if we made everybody’s radio good? Like even in a Toyota in a Hyundai, let’s make their radios awesome.’ There’s no temptation anymore to steal, because you already have a good radio in your car. It just completely obliterated radio thefts from cars.”
He put the song aside. He picked it back up three years ago, when he figured out where to take it next.
Just as he had figured out where to take his life next.
Ember has been working on a recording of it for an upcoming album called Get Ready To Hate Me. It will be the third of three recordings he plans to have released under his Brian Ember stage name. (He previously led “baroque pop” string-quartet rock band the Tet Offensive.)
The three recordings track years when he wrestled with a divorce, then rebuilt his life — and learned to open his heart back up.
Which prompted him to add the second “No Radio Inside” verse he sang in the WNHH studio:
My heart is open wide
Unbroken, though they’ve tried
To drown me in their grief
The sediment and leaves
The dust on record sleeves
My heart is open wide …
That verse put a final touch to the personal journey that formed the song’s metaphor: “When you’re guarded and protected emotionally, and you don’t want to have your heart stolen — your radio essentially — you put out that sign on your dashboard that there’s not even a radio here. Don’t even bother. Don’t try to get into me. Don’t try to figure out who I am. Don’t try to break in. There’s nothing here to take and, you know.
“That’s where age is helpful. After enough relationships, you start to understand how to function and how to be a more open and and complete person for your partners.”
Now he has to figure out the full instrumentation for the song. With his previous band, Ember may have had strings amplifying the emotion in the song, a la late-period Beatles. So far, as he puts together the track, he has added drums, bass, and trumpet instead. Figuring out how to get the song right, today.
Ember expects to release the full album later this year. He played two other selections from it in his unplugged “Acoustic Thursdays” appearance. Click on the above video watch the full episode. Click here and here to learn more about Brian Ember’s music.
Previous“Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” performances:
• Ceschi
• Wally
• Sketch Tha Cataclysm
• MJ Bones
• Johnathan Moore
• Charlie Widmer
• Sam Carlson
Brian Ember’s “Acoustic Thursday” set list:
• No Radio 0:09
• Peer Pressure 12:56
• The One 23:04