Introduction to Broom People, March 29, 2011, Bowery Ballroom
“This is a song - I’m always telling people what this song is about, but I always feel like I fail to actually, correctly, accurately detail without seeming crass just how great it is if you are 14 years old and you have just entered high school and you’re staring down what looks like an extraordinarily long and dark tunnel because everywhere you go, they are calling you a faggot, right? And then you are the sort of insufferable intellectual already at 14 who wants to go, ‘Well, you call me that like it was a bad thing - I am straight, but…’ - and you, like, get your ass kicked, kicked, kicked, kicked, kicked, kicked, kicked. And you persist in this illusion that you can talk sense into them. You cannot. Although, turns out later that many of them actually were sort of nursing their own sort of things, and if you hang around long enough…
“But yeah, so, I’m 14, and I’m at Claremont High School. <cheering> I don’t know why you would cheer for Claremont High School. I mean, there’s wonderful teachers there, but… So I’m in Claremont High School, and I’m thinking, ‘Junior High sucked, but maybe high school will be great because people might be into books.’ But as it turns out, there’s 900 people, and 850 of them think it would be fun to just kick a guy’s ass when he walks past. And you think, ‘I don’t think I can stand 4 years of this,’ you know? I was thinking, ‘I look too young and innocent to score the kind of drugs I would need to get through it.’
“But then you sign up for stage makeup class. <laughter> Man, I’m gonna personally beat the tar out of all of you who laughed at that - stage makeup is awesome! So, you sign up for stage makeup class, and you meet somebody who wants to sleep with you. And the next time you walk past the jocks and they smack you in the head, you think, ‘None of you are having sex, and I am.’ This song is for my first serious girlfriend, it’s called Broom People.”
(via gunthershabadu)
