My Secret Career 5: Always Leaving Providence, or Brendan Goes Into A Recording Studio For The First Time

1993.

I somehow live in Providence. I am somehow in a band. I have somehow willed myself into being a semi-decent guitar player. But there is one song of mine that The Mahoneys just CANNOT get a handle on.

“Always Leaving Providence” would ultimately elude us as a band. It would also ultimately be the spur that led me to make the leap and move to New York City. I wrote it after one too many local artist had claimed that they planned to make that leap. But they’d lived in Providence forever, when did they think they were getting out?

The song gnawed at me. Every time I played it I felt implicated. The people in the song claim they have big plans but never go after them. Was this going to be me? Talking a big game but backing zero up?

The song gnawed at the band as well. Every week we tried to get the thing on its feet. Every week we failed. Or, more aptly put, I failed. I could never explain the structure of the song in any fundamental way. I could only play it to my own internal rhythm.

By this time, we already had recorded versions of every song we were able to play. But “Always Leaving Providence” could not be captured. I was also itching to play acoustically in the city. So I decided to go into the studio.

1993. Or early ‘94, not sure. Looked through the classifieds in the Phoenix, the arts circular that dirtied my fingers every week the entire time I lived in Providence. Found an ad for “Danger Studios”. Called. Booked a day.

I lugged my amp and guitar down there in the snow. I spent the day wrestling three songs. One was an instrumental that I think is the first piece of music I ever wrote on guitar called “Horizon Mother”. It became an intro to “Cyrano”, one of the first songs I wrote in my Providence apartment. The third was “Always Leaving Providence”.

Both “Horizon Mother” and “Always Leaving Providence” were solo acoustic recordings. But I wanted to layer another guitar track into “Cyrano”. I played my acoustic through my amp, putting a phase effect onto it, which causes a kind of cascade.

I distinctly remember the engineer guy rolling his eyes and saying something snide to another employee when asked about his day. It was difficult to get the two guitar tracks synced and my lack of experience meant that I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted. The dude gave off serious Guitar Center vibes. 

I had the last laugh, though, because “Cyrano” came out great. I walked out of there with a master of what I considered my first solo single: A-side “Always Leaving Providence”, B-side “Horizon Mother/Cyrano”.

As is the case with all of my musical projects, it remained hypothetical. The Mahoneys continued to attempt “Always Leaving Providence”, but mostly the song began to envelop me a little bit more each time I sang it. Those desperate dreamers trapped within, trapped in Providence, pointed accusatory fingers at me, saying, “You’re no better than us. You’ll never leave. You’re trapped, too.”

By the fall I was living in Harlem, the cassette of  “Always Leaving Providence” tucked into my backpack as I tried to prove myself wrong before it was too late.

Here is “Always Leaving Providence”.  And here is the overlong B-Side “Horizon Mother/Cyrano”.

Years later I would have the ultimate revenge on that engineer, as this version of “Providence” was chosen to appear in the Showtime series “Brotherhood”. He got paid by the hour to help me out and I still get royalty checks on that motherfucker.