From The Desk Of Bird Of Youth’s Beth Wawerna: My Brother And Why I Love Music

Bird Of Youth has no business being this good. Really. If writing and recording a really beautiful album was as easy as Beth Wawerna and her crew made it look, wouldn’t everyone do it? That’s sort of the story here. For most of her decade in New York, Wawerna was, in the words of her pal Timothy Bracy, “the consummate green-room insider.” Her background in journalism and her unerring taste had led to a number of indie-rock acquaintances who eventually became friends. It sounds like a pretty good time, hanging out in Brooklyn with the Mendoza Line’s Bracy and Pete Hoffman, Will Sheff of Okkervil River, Carl Newman, Charles Bissell of the Wrens, Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws and others. But it turned out Wawerna had a secret stash of her own songs, which she’d worked on and demo’d and never, ever let anyone hear. Eventually, she decided it was time to set those songs free. Her pals not only liked them, they helped her form a crack band—guitarist par excellence Clint Newman, drummer Ray Ketchem, bassist Johnny North, keyboardist Eli Thomas and accordion player Elizabeth Bracy Nelson—and recorded them. Sheff and Phil Palazzolo (New Pornographers, Ted Leo) produced. Bissell contributed a terrific guitar lead on one song. Caws sang. Members of Okkervil River and the National played. The finished album, Defender, was released in May, just in time to give your summer a worthy soundtrack. Wawerna and Clint Newman will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week, and once a day, Wawerna is having one of her famous friends guest blog. Read our brand new Q&A with her.

Wawerna: The photo above is of my brother (left), me (center) and my brother’s friend (right) getting photobombed by a Planet Of The Apes trash can. My brother is 14 years older than me. When I was born, he begged my parents to name me Beth but refused to explain why. He pushed and pushed, until finally they reached a compromise: They would name me Elizabeth, but my brother was permitted to call me Beth if he wanted to—and he most certainly did. Everyone did, in fact. Elizabeth never really stuck, and I never thought much of it—until I was about 12 and brother decided it was time to tell me the truth. He explained that the name Beth was his idea and asked if I’d ever heard of the band KISS. His pride swelled visibly before my eyes.

So, yes. I am named after a KISS power ballad. And I love my brother deeply for it.

And so it began at birth—his constant and lasting influence on my musical proclivities. As a teenager in high school, I remember climbing up into my mom’s dusty attic and rifling through a box of old LPs that my brother was storing there temporarily—pulling out the ones I thought looked interesting. It was through this process that I first heard Murmur and Reckoning by R.E.M., Doolittle by the Pixies and X’s Los Angeles. It is because of this that the covers of NRBQ’s Tiddlywinks and Squeeze’s Singles: 45’s And Under are still permanently etched in my mind. Then, of course, came the real game-changers: My Aim Is True by Elvis Costello and Let It Be by the Replacements. Costello and Paul Westerberg are my brother’s musical heroes, and over time, they became mine too.

Now, in no way am I trying to imply that I was one of those musically precocious children with fabulous and sophisticated tastes way beyond my 13 years. No. I did love these records that I found in the attic, and I do think they were immensely influential on who I have become as a songwriter. But let’s not forget I was still a kid in high school in the ’90s, and as such, I was most certainly not immune to the more unsavory trends of that era. I’m pretty sure I went to a 311 concert, but that’s as far as we need to go with that.

The point is, in the midst of the more mainstream music I was into at that age (Jane’s Addiction, Smashing Pumpkins, U2), there was also my brother’s guiding hand, creating a more discerning and varied musical sidebar to the story that was playing out every day at high-school parties and with my friends. Proof: I heard Exile In Guyville for the first time at his behest, and I can still picture the yellow spine of the CD and exactly where it sat on his record shelf. He taught me about the Young Fresh Fellows, the dBs, Big Star, Hüsker Dü, Nick Lowe and on and on and on. My brother was also a musician, and when I was in college, he and his wife played in a band together and covered “Sweet Is The Melody” by Iris Dement. I’d never heard of that song—or Iris Dement, for that matter—but it completely blew my young mind, and I still count that song as a favorite to this day.

At a certain point, our ages and lives aligned in such a way that we started to discover and experience music together as adults. After college, I moved from Austin to New York and got a job at a music website, where I was paid to run around the city all day interviewing bands, filming live acoustic performances, etc.—basically a 22-year-old’s wet dream. During this time, I had the privilege of meeting and hanging out with many of the artists that my brother had introduced me to as a kid. Like John Doe, who came in for an interview and graciously drafted a handwritten birthday card to my brother at my request. (I believe it is now laminated.) And when Paul Westerberg played at Warsaw in Brooklyn in 2002, I waited around after the show for hours—drinking copiously in the hopes that I might meet him. When I finally did, the only words I could muster were, “Sign this dollar? My brother loves you,” as I a handed him a soggy, flaccid bill. A couple years ago, after nervously introducing myself to Nick Lowe at a festival in San Francisco, the first person I texted was my brother. Ditto this past SXSW, after approaching Scott McCaughey and Pete Buck with all the grace of a boar and clumsily forcing my record into their hands. In these little moments, I like to think I’m honoring my brother. Perhaps he finds it irritating to receive an ecstatic text message from me at midnight letting him know that I’m standing three feet from Glenn Tilbrook at that moment—but if so, he never lets on.

The kind of songwriter and musician that I strive to be has everything to do with the albums and artists my brother exposed me to growing up. And I’m sure that when he handed the 15-year-old me a copy of R.E.M.’s Life’s Rich Pageant, he could not have foreseen that I would one day be handing Pete Buck a copy of my own record.* I hope that is not lost on him. And I hope it makes him proud.

* We both know that Pete Buck likely never listened to my record, but that’s really not the point.