What’s going ahn with Wayne Everett

PHOTO by JENNIE WARREN

There came a time when Wayne Everett finally drove out to the Joshua Tree Inn to lock in with a guitar and a lonely sense of purpose. It’s kind of like going to Disneyland, he says, because you hear about it so much and finally you’ve gotta do it. And there was even another guy a room away who may have been doing the same thing—another lone musician laboring into his own Gram Parsons hour of darkness. But Wayne’s not really sure because he was getting a lot done in his own private room, writing a song that starts out, “Twenty-nine times I said I loved you so”—a soft song with sparkling U2 guitar (Unforgettable Fire was a derailer record for 15-year-old Wayne) and a bassline that makes a gentle motor and one sunset final chorus that lets Wayne’s Wilsonian falsetto raise one quiet line before it all dips away and finishes. So far, it’s one of only two semi-released songs from what might one day be the most difficult album Wayne Everett ever writes.

“Scarier and scarier territory with each leap,” he smiles now. He started as a drummer in Prayer Chain, and then tip-toed forward to sing for the Lassie Foundation, who, he says, tend to return with a new record every time they decide they’re absolutely broken-up. During Lassie’s last hiatus, he set out his 2003 solo album Kingsqueens, built on a bedrock reverence for the Velvet Underground and the Beach Boys rearranged in Wayne’s own sweet and almost wounded way—songs like “I Can See Jail,” with the shaky foundations of Smiley Smile and with Wayne singing about the sea in the falsetto he originally adopted as a joke. (“I thought if I got more sissy and did my best indie-rock impersonation of Curtis Mayfield or Barry White, maybe girls would like me,” he says.)

And now he has about a year put into maybe (in the future) an album of new solo songs, written about his own life in Long Beach like Bruce Springsteen wrote about life in Nebraska—careful and deep and stark and nervous and alive because of that strange energy that comes when particularly vicious catharsis has to force fit into a beautiful little pop song. Funny that his least-favorite Big Star record is the last one, where Alex Chilton took his own worst downers and set them to piano and guitar. Maybe it’s too close for Wayne, who says he had to start life over after a divorce (“Really brutal—I don’t recommend it!” he says with another quick smile) and who says he can’t wait to get the record that grew out of that finished. “It sort of chronicles the tough stuff,” he says. “I wanna get that done and close the door and end that chapter—whatever metaphor you wanna use!”

He’s a private person, he says—he’s a normal guy. He appreciates good grammar even though he curses like a sailor, he says. But since he was 15 and heard Unforgettable Fire, he says he’s always written songs for the same reasons: “to make a statement or purge some demon or express something you can’t express with just a phone call,” he says; and to find and define feelings away from cliché and toward something a little universal—the hardest thing, he says, for him to do. Which he did out in the desert, and which he is trying to do now. “I wanna make sure the music I leave is gonna tell the story,” he says. “I wanna give that person who hears that a photograph of who I was.”

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