With Katie and Olivia
How Goon's song "Patsy's Twin" stopped me in my tracks
In early May, I wrote about coincidences and specifically about how in the span of a week, three different people brought up my daughter, Liv, who passed away suddenly 7 years ago. Just a few weeks after that post, I got a press release about a new album from the band Goon. I interviewed Goon’s Kenny Becker in 2022 after really enjoying Hour of Green Evening and was very anxious to hear new material. Included in the email was a link to a YouTube video for the first single of the album that was due out in July. The song is called “Patsy’s Twin.”
To be honest, I clicked the link while multi-tasking and wasn’t paying full attention until the second line of the song was delivered.
Cicadas in the yard
With Katie and Olivia
Wait. Did I hear the lyrics correctly? Did Kenny really sing “With Katie and Olivia”? My wife’s name is Kate. Of all the different names that Kenny could have used, he used my wife and daughter’s names. I played that song over and over, thinking my ears certainly had to be deceiving me. Not for nothing, the song itself is great. It starts with this very dreamy, indie-pop sound and then gets into this really messy, distorted guitars bordering on metal, part with all sorts of unpretty notes being played and Kenny (I assume) screaming like a death metal vocalist. The rest of the lyrics don’t really mean much to me in terms of looking for signs/coincidences as they relate to my family, but there is a cool reference to San Diego Padres legend Tony Gwynn (“Tony wore a big one nine”).
I don’t always bring up Liv when interviewing artists. I’m there to ask them questions, not for me to tell my story. But, when the conversation leads that way, I do talk about losing my daughter. So, when I had a chance to talk with Kenny again, we talked about the song and I told him how it caught me off guard.
We lost our 17-year-old daughter seven years ago to something that is like a brain aneurysm. I get a link to your record and start listening to “Patsy’s Twin.” My wife’s name is Kate, my daughter’s name is Olivia. You start the song singing, “Cicadas in the yard / With Katie and Olivia.”
KENNY: Holy shit.
When I heard you sing that, it sort of stopped me in my tracks. I don’t believe in higher powers, and you don’t know my wife or daughter or my story, but it was just a weird coincidence that was part of a series of coincidences with people talking about my daughter around the same time I heard the song.
KENNY: Dude, that’s insane. You know what’s crazy about that line in particular is that when I’m writing, I’ll get little bits of a lyric here and there. On this record, as the songs were coming together, I realized I was using a lot of my friends’ names. I wondered, is this a lyrical crutch? Should I find different words? I tried to be okay with it but also thought, maybe let’s audition some other words.
And that was the first one that came up. “Katie and Olivia.” I didn’t even have the “cicadas in the yard” part yet. I just had “with Katie and Olivia,” and nothing rolled off the tongue like that did. I’ve never even been in a yard with cicadas with my friends Kate and Olivia, but I had to keep it.
That was the first part of that song I had, and then I built the rest around it. In a way, it was the first mysteriously essential bit I couldn’t get away from. I tried a lot of other things, but it was so sick I just had to keep it.
Goon is playing at Rumba Cafe in Columbus on October 7 where I’ll have a chance to meet Kenny in person after having spoken to him via Zoom in the past.
If you want to read the entire conversation and learn more about Goon, here’s a link to the Big Takeover website: https://bigtakeover.com/interviews/catching-up-with-kenny-becker-of-goon