PicoBlog

This is Medium Rotation, a newsletter about the bands we used to play on my college radio station, 88.3 WSBU-FM, St. Bonaventure. Today, we’re looking back at Seattle-via-New York indie-rock band Say Hi, who are still making music.

Sometimes a song defines a movie or TV scene for everyone who watches it, like the extended “Layla” coda in Goodfellas. But sometimes a song only defines that scene for you. I like those moments because they feel like secrets that make sense entirely in my own head. Midway through the 2011 movie Crazy, Stupid, Love, Lio Tipton’s character, teenage Jessica, takes a naked Polaroid of herself as part of a plan to get Steve Carell’s character, Cal, whom she babysits for, to fall in love with her. She’s smitten with him, and despite the overt creepiness of the power dynamic and age gap, the whole thing is written and acted as totally normal (even healthy, if illogical) teen horniness — and thankfully Cal is not interested. But Jessica wants to change that, hence the analog nude.

The scene’s forward momentum comes partially from its comic editing and the actors’ performances and partially thanks the song that plays in the background throughout the whole zany enterprise: the very hard to Google “Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh” by a band called Say Hi. (It also made its way onto both the original and the revival versions of Gossip Girl.) I am in love with this song, but unlike Jessica, there is no inappropriate photo necessary. I have a newsletter.

I first heard “Oh x8,” as I will refer to it throughout, sometime in either late 2008 or early 2009. Say Hi’s sixth album, Oohs & Aahs, was due out, and the CD had arrived at WSBU for radio airplay consideration. How it worked back then was that the two music directors would listen to all the new albums, suggest known bands that the unknown bands sounded like (RIYLs, for those in the biz), and then dole out the CDs in weekly meetings. If, say, a band called Get Help came through, one of the directors would say, “Sounds like R.E.M.,” and I, having an iTunes populated with R.E.M.’s greatest hits, would say, “I’ll take it.” This happened until all the CDs were claimed; then we’d all write a few paragraphs about whether the albums were good or not. In the case of Say Hi, I genuinely don’t remember their RIYL specifics, but I remember liking the cover a lot (see above). When I actually listened, I noticed the similarities between vocalist/songwriter Eric Elbogen’s voice and Conor Oberst’s, which excited me further.

Of course, Elbogen wasn’t just the songwriter and singer. He played every instrument in Say Hi, which began in earnest in New York City in the early 2000s as Say Hi To Your Mom. If you’d like to know why he later shortened the name to simply Say Hi, so would many others. Elbogen doesn’t have a direct answer, but he has offered an explanation, kind of: “Why did you buy those pants that you’re wearing right now? Why do you like action films and not romantic comedies? Does spicy food taste good to you?”

Something essential to point out here is that Elbogen is a prolific recording artist. There were five Say Hi releases before Oohs & Aahs, all strikingly designed with similarly minimal, pastel artwork. A lot of it sounds lo-fi and rainy, despite some of the records being conceptually about vampires. Even the more upbeat-seeming song titles like “Pop Music Of The Future” and “Let’s Talk About Spaceships” reveal groaning guitar-led compositions that are nevertheless orchestrated beautifully. His cover of The Beatles’ “I’m So Tired” on 2004’s Numbers & Mumbles makes complete sense. The early music of Say Hi can feel like pulling an all-nighter—occasional bursts of energy punctuating a largely sedate drift into drowsy oblivion. When the New Wave keyboards enter on certain songs (“Back Before We Were Brittle,” “Blah Blah Blah”), Elbogen hits a sweet spot that elevates his yawning pop into a higher realm. To be clear, I mean these words like “drowsy” and “yawning” as complementary, the way Broken Social Scene’s production can often feel sleepy, even as the song electrifies you.

A quick note of transparency: I haven’t spent all that much time listening to these delightfully named early Say Hi albums in full. I bet that after a week of immersing myself in 2002’s Discosadness, 2005’s Ferocious Mopes, 2006’s Impeccable Blahs, and 2008’s The Wishes And The Glitch, I’d have many nuanced things to say, especially keeping in mind how Elbogen recorded the vast majority of his output—including six subsequent releases since 2009—in his home studio. (“More often than not, this ‘studio’ has been a laptop on a small desk in a bedroom,” he writes on his website.) The commitment to creating no-frills pop-rock music in a no-frills way is extremely endearing and endlessly inspiring. Especially when one of the songs created that way remains one I’m quite smitten with.

So, 2009. Oohs & Aahs. In my Dell laptop’s internal CD drive. Some synthetic horn sounds made with a keyboard give way to an acoustic garage-rock riff, then a snaky electric line. It’s “Oh x8,” and the processed echo effect on Elbogen’s voice acts like a second hook. They turn the little pop-rock ditty into a proper stomper, energy he exploits to tremendous success live at a KEXP show in Seattle, where he’d moved in 2006. He plays the fake horn line on the guitar and swaps in big open strums for the acoustic parts. The live drums set the tune ablaze.

Years later, I found a completely different version of “Oh x8” that Elbogen performed in 2010 in front of the Space Needle. It relies on a drum machine and a handheld synth pad pretty much exclusively and is, to use an unfortunately correct phrase, way nerdier. It does not, as they say, rock. But it absolutely rules. Elbogen hits a hi-hat with a shaker as he sings. The whole enterprise hews much closer to DIY bedroom recording and musical experimentation than the Caffe Vita romp. It’s fun to be older and realize that both versions succeed in their different aims. And yet then and now, I wouldn’t have played the nerdier version on my radio show. Something about propulsive live drums is magnetizing.

The way it worked at WSBU was you’d have the CDs you volunteered to review for a week, then you’d explain at the next Sunday meeting which ones deserved airplay. If the music directors agreed, the songs could get into rotation. Until then, if someone wanted to play one of them on their radio show, you’d have to loan them the CD. They’d bring it to the booth and load into the Denon to play manually over the air. (Digital DJing? Not there in 2009.)

I explain all this to say that when a very cool kid with a taste-making radio show asked to borrow Say Hi’s Oohs & Aahs to play a song on the air, I knew I had something good on my hands. It was still early in my college radio career. I knew Bright Eyes, sure, and Death Cab (who didn’t), but I certainly didn’t know “Randy Described Eternity,” which gets shouted out by name in “Oh x8.” The co-sign from a trendy kid with good taste made me listen to the album at least semi-seriously, taking in the fact that “Oh x8” is playful about being horny (“She's got lips like a sofa/And she's strawing down a soda”) and that a song like “November Was White, December Was Grey” could become a nice little soundtrack to seasonal depression. I liked “Maurine” for seeming like a Killers song dragged into the desert and drained of every ounce of Las Vegas light.

And then I didn’t think about any of this for over a decade until I heard “Oh x8” in a Steve Carell rom-com one night. But I cared about it enough back then, in 2009, that my brain deposited those fake horn blasts somewhere, not too far down, accessible enough by a movie scene that caused me to say aloud, “Whoa, I know this song. What is this?” until I recalled it. It was a secret between me and me—and Eric Elbogen, though he doesn’t know it.

These days, he keeps busy writing and recording, including 2020’s Diamonds & Donuts, inspired by “thirteen exciting psychological studies.” One of them, “And Then Some Miniature Golfing,” sounds like a Killers song that crawled back to Vegas and used the electricity from neon signs to revive itself. I’m quite fond of the gentle “Windsor Knots And Ruffles” and the way it blends yearning vocals with the right amount of synthesizers. Elbogen’s voice is more forthright now, lending certain songs an authoritative plaintiveness that comes with age. He’s got a Patreon where you can support him; on the Say Hi website, he’s extensively noted the chronological history of his songwriting career, including the retail stores that have since taken over the spots where he recorded his first few albums in Brooklyn (an Urban Outfitters and a J.Crew, naturally). He also made a largely electronic album as Werewolf Diskdrive in 2017.

It is very hard to write a song. It is even more difficult to compose a piece a music that actually elicits any kind of positive resonance with another person. (I have tried.) Elbogen has written dozens, so he was clearly playing a numbers game. The odds were on his side that one would hook me. “Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh” was the one that did. That alone is a tiny miracle. If people watching Crazy, Stupid, Love got into Say Hi because of a silly scene involving cascading teen horniness, that’s another miracle. It’s hard to resist.

On the song’s chorus, Elbogen keeps just keeps repeating, “I’ve got something I think I really wanna tell ya.” After a while, you simply need to know what it is.

ABOVE VIDEO: Say Hi perform “Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh” live at Caffe Vita in Seattle in 2009, uploaded to YouTube by KEXP on April 25, 2009.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

UNTIL NEXT TIME: Watch the ambitious collage-style music video for “Hamburgers & Hotdogs,” a song from Stay Hi’s other project, Werewolf Diskdrive, that “captures exactly how [Elbogen’s] own music has always sounded to him.” Synesthesia, man. What a trip.

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