Dated Wednesday September 12, 2007 3pm
Greenwich Village, NY

Fuck. Remind me never to put out two albums at the same time ever again. Aside from drowning in essays and photos and touring and artwork and covers and every other fucking thing under the sun, I just realized I made an outrageously bad mistake and, to make matters worse, it's way too late to correct it.

I accidentally took credit for writing someone else's song. I'm a religious nut about giving credit to my band members for writing contributions and then I went out and took credit myself for someone else's song. I'm so freaking pissed.

When Dave and I were looking for demo tracks to include on the end of disc 1, he found all this crap that I hadn't heard in years, some of which I didn't even really remember recording. I vaguely remembered doing "This Land Is Your Land" but I didn't remember "Mean Jumper Blues" at all when I first heard it. I just heard it and thought, "Whoa, this is really cool. It's so simple. It doesn't sound at all like one of my songs and it's totally me copping a blues formula but it really captures me as a beginning songwriter trying on someone else's clothes, so to speak. And unlike "Lightning", which really apes Peter Gabriel to me, it's some really old clothes so it's not as dated sounding. Anyway, it just seemed cool so I put it on the record.

Then the other night I'm reading through the Main Room Forum and I come upon the "Deluxe Track Listing" thread and the second post reads:

"Mean Jumper Blues, for the record, is a Blind Lemon Jefferson song."

Which, of course, it is.

Fuck.

And now, of course, I remember completely how I got the song. I had a book of old Americana song lyrics. It had stuff by people like Stephen Foster, Lightning Hopkins, and Woody Guthrie, among others, and it had a song by Blind Lemon Jefferson called "Mean Jumper Blues". It was such a cool lyric that I decided to put some really simple music to it and then Dave and I started playing it at our open mike sets. I guess eventually we recorded it because, well, there it is.

Unfortunately, "there it is" on our damn record with "Words and Music by Adam F. (stands, by the way for "fucking idiot") Duritz printed right next to it, or underneath it, or on top of it, or wherever the hell it's written. And, of course, it's way too late to do anything about it, at least until the second printing (like there's going to be a second printing of a 2 disc "Deluxe Special Edition" re-issue of a 14 year old record). The only thing we can do is contact the estate and tell them and at least make sure the publishing money is paid correctly.

The funny (or not-so-funny) thing about it is that it's the quintessential experience for a black musician of Jefferson's time. It's not like every one of them didn't have his songwriting credit or his publishing money basically stolen from him either by half the white musicians recording his material or the white record company owners putting it out. Now here comes this Jewish moron with fake dreads doing it 70 years later.

Fuck.

I am so pissed.