No Such Thing

In the case of "No Such Thing," as soon as I wrote that song I knew it was going to be my first single if I ever had the opportunity.

CM: How old is that song now? How long have you been doing it?

JM: I think that song is from the summer of '98. Yeah.

CM: That is a great little pop song.

JM: Thank you. Thank you. I like it exactly because it's a pop song but it doesn't use pop tricks.

CM: Yeah, and you've got the dense, introspective lyrics that hopefully take it to another level.

JM: Hopefully, I mean. I just like watching the thing kind of go.

I made a friend at Berklee, Clay Cook, who was from Atlanta, and we started writing songs together. We both decided to withdraw from the college at the same time. Our withdrawal slips probably have consecutive numbers. We cowrote “No Such Thing,” he came up with the bridge chords. I never would have thought to put those in there.

As you get older you don't write twelve verses and pick the best four. Young people: [sings made-up wordy lyrics], and I go, this is gonna kill me. I can't. When I was younger: [singing quickly] "welcome to the real world she said to me, condescendingly, take a seat, take your life, plot it out in black and white"—we're halfway through. And at this point as I get older I go, I don't know that I could ever summon that much energy to go da-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba [...].

DD: It’s almost like joke-writing. 

JM: Oh, is that true?

DD: When you’re first writing jokes—

JM: That's setup city. 

DD: It’s dense dense dense. Later on you realize it’s “bop, bop, boom”. 

JM: That's right, that's right! “Bop, bop, boom”. 

DD: That's right and that's also a great song formula.