i know you like when i admit that i was wrong and you were right
"told you so" by paramore & the rca studio b tour
Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only person still referencing Baseketball in the year of our lord 2024, but this newsletter has me feeling like —
“This is Alicia Thompson you’re talking about here! Hell, she could write three newsletters about Paramore if she wanted to, huh, Alicia?”
And you know what? I CAN and I WILL! I’ve been thinking a lot about Paramore recently — like more, than my normal amount, which is already a medical marvel — for some Reasons I’ll get into here and some I won’t (MYSTERIOUS!) . But I’ve been haunted by this question ever since I got back from Nashville, which is:
Was After Laughter (2017) really recorded in Historic RCA Studio B?
You might remember me mentioning a while back that I prepared a proposal to write about After Laughter for the 33 1/3 series, and, well . . . they announced the list of books they’ll be publishing and mine wasn’t on it lol. This is my second rejection from this book series (I wrote up a proposal about Tegan and Sara’s The Con many years ago) and the most frustrating part is that you never know why you were rejected — were you doomed from the start by choosing an album they don’t want a book about? Do they want a book about your album, just not by you? Was there something about your approach to the album that didn’t click? Do they doubt your ability to deliver a solid final product? And on and on.
BUT I have also been on the “selection committee” side of things, and I understand that there’s a lot that goes into those decisions. Some of which you can’t explain in a satisfying way to the people on the receiving end of bad news, some of which wouldn’t be helpful to them even if you could. All of this to say that I’m not particularly bummed or surprised by this rejection, any more than the normal amount, but I do now have lots of After Laughter-related thoughts and nowhere to put them.
Which brings me to RCA Studio B.
EVERYWHERE you go on the internet, it’ll tell you that Paramore recorded After Laughter in Historic RCA Studio B. If you google it, you get this sentence over and over: “After Laughter was recorded at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio B — Paramore’s first time recording in their beloved hometown.” It’s obvious that sentence came from SOMEWHERE, maybe even from the record label itself when they fed out the album information to all retailers?
So, obviously, when I recently took my trip to Nashville and signed up to do the tour of RCA Studio B, I was HELLA excited because this! was the room where it all happened!!!
There’s a reason they do tours of this particular studio — it has a long and storied history, and please don’t think I’m immune to any of it just because I keep using Paramore-first language. Roy Orbison recorded “In Dreams” and “Only the Lonely” here! Charley Pride recorded “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’”! Dolly Parton recorded “Jolene” AND “I Will Always Love You” AND infamously ran her car into the studio wall because she was so excited to get there! THREE hits, baby!!!
I have only recently become low-key obsessed with Elvis, something else I’ve been thinking about a lot for Reasons, and so I ate up any stories about him in particular. For example, the Colonel wanted Elvis to record “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (one of the Colonel’s wife’s favorite songs), but Elvis wasn’t into it. So finally, at 4am, he agreed to sing it if they turned all the lights off and he could do it in one take. The tour guide mimicked this experience by turning all the lights off and playing the song for us in the complete darkness of the room, and it was honestly kind of a . . . spiritual experience for me? Like it was one of those things where at first you’re like haha, this is so silly, and then you’re like, this is a little weird I hope this doesn’t turn into a locked room mystery situation, and then eventually something about the darkness and the song all works on you and by the time the lights come back up you’re like . . . whoa. It’s like Robin Williams repeating “it’s not your fault” over and over, where you’re like ahhh this movie is so cheesy but then all of a sudden you’re crying.
Anyway.
Then the lights came back on and I was thinking about Paramore again.
It is extremely obvious to me by now that, while it *might* be possible that PARTS of After Laughter were recorded in this room, it was definitely mostly recorded in the adjacent RCA Studio A. For one thing, I knew right away that the floor wasn’t right — I remembered the band posting a clip while they were recording that showed the pedalboards and equipment all on the ground, which looked to be parquet wood with some rugs thrown over it.
For another, as my husband pointed out — the fact that this studio is open during the day for these tours and then only open for recording at night does not suggest it would be ideal for a band recording an entire album. Normally you set up and camp out for a while in a studio when you do that, so what a nightmare if you had to pack everything up so that another group of tourists could sit in the dark and have spiritual experiences about Elvis songs the next day.
There was one more piece of evidence I had used prior to going to the studio in person that made me think, okay, it must’ve been Studio B, right, because otherwise why . . .? When I was searching for various Paramore-related sites to see around Nashville (don’t judge me!), I found a blog post where a fan had recreated all these photos of the band over the years — like they’re standing in the middle of the Brand New Eyes road (Old Charlotte Pike) just like the band did for photos of promo materials for that album, that kind of thing.
And one of them was a recreation of a photo of Taylor York and his brother Justin sitting outside the studio during the recording of After Laughter, which the fan had listed under “RCA Studio B” with the correct street address for that studio. Okay, I thought, this is from a person who actually went there in person! They saw it! So I guess it’s confirmed.
Ah ha, but Studio A is adjacent to Studio B — it has a completely different street address only because of the way the buildings are facing, but you could literally drive to either of them and then walk 20 feet, take your picture, and then just put down the wrong address.
All of this would’ve been FINE except you know I was walking around Nashville with that chip on my shoulder about why they weren’t shouting about one of their most precious natural resources as much as I thought they should, so of course I was muttering about the Paramore erasure on this Studio B tour and my son decided to ask the tour guide if Paramore had ever recorded there. “Nope!” the tour guide answered confidently. “Would be cool, though.”
Well, of course I had to set him right! They HAVE recorded there, Wikipedia says so! I said this with my full chest even though I already had my Lack of Parquet Floor and Why Would They Record in a Studio That Runs Daily Weekday Tours misgivings.
But then of course I did all my investigation when I got home and yeah, it’s pretty clear that most of the recording was done in RCA Studio A, not B, and I don’t know why Wikipedia would say otherwise when even the Billboard article it references after the very sentence about RCA Studio B says clear as day that it was Studio A if you read the article itself. (I know, I know — the dangers of Wikipedia as a source!)
I had half a mind to edit the Wikipedia myself, just to clear up any confusion, but it turns out MY IP ADDRESS HAS BEEN BANNED FROM EDITING WIKIPEDIA!!! hahahaha giving rise to ANOTHER mystery, because I don’t think I’ve ever tried to edit a Wikipedia page before, not even when I was so mad that someone took the word “eschews” out of the description of Joey Wendle not using batting gloves on his page. (Although, given that my son used to use my computer all the time and I’ve watched him with my own eyes edit an umpire’s Wikipedia page to add insults after a bad call at the plate . . . mystery solved?)
Anyway, thank you for your patience as I got to the bottom of this not-even-really-a-mystery-if-you-just-paid-attention thing that I just HAD to put to bed in order to sleep at night. I really hate being WRONG and I’m sorry to that tour guide who had to put up with the Paramore Chips on My Shoulders while he was just trying to snap his fingers and earnestly get us all to sing along to old country songs.
I love “Told You So” and the video for it btw — if I’d actually gotten to write a 33 1/3 book about this record I promise I would’ve talked more about the song itself and not just me Encyclopedia Brown-ing my way to an answer that could’ve been found in a single picture. One thing I did give a lot of thought to, as I was planning my potential After Laughter book, and then as I was processing the fact that I wouldn’t have the chance to write it — these newsletters are a lot different than actual, researched, organized chapters about music. For better or worse, but I do think sometimes for the better.
For example, in a published book chapter I don’t know if I’d tell you about how I first heard “Told You So” right when it dropped, sitting with my sister at a Starbucks while we each put one earbud in and stretched the wire between us so we could listen to the song. I don’t know if I’d tell you that I walk around my house singing For. all. I. know so often that I don’t even know that I’m doing it, that I started singing For All Mankind to the same tune when we were watching the Apple TV show of the same name. I don’t know if I’d tell you that once I was watching a live performance of this song, and my husband made a passing comment about how hard it was to just start off a song as the singer like Hayley does, to sing the first notes before any instrumentation comes in, and because he knows more about music than I do I always hold elegant little compliments like these to my chest even though they are not about me lolol they somehow still give me a glow like they are for me. I don’t know if I’d tell you that when I sing along to this song in the car I always do the bigger, angrier PULL ME OUT AGAIN! at the end of the bridge, the way she does live, even though in the recording you only hear it in the backing vocals.
Maybe I would. But maybe I wouldn’t, you know?
Currently reading . . . FITTINGLY I just finished reading another friend’s manuscript, and this one I can talk about more because there’s already information out there about it. And I say FITTINGLY because August Lane by Regina Black is all about country music, so I was all over it! I could still feel the buzzy twang in my soul as I devoured Regina’s beautiful, tender, thoughtful, angsty words about a Black one-hit-wonder country star who comes back to his hometown to the woman he left behind — and whose song he stole. This book has so much of what I love in it — meditations on creating and art and what they can mean, those connections you can only make with someone when you’re both young and dreaming about what your future might hold, the pain of coming back to a town and people who’ve moved on without you but also put you right back in those emotional, nostalgic places . . . I don’t know, it was so good and so HOT. I’m trying not to give too many specifics, but yeah. Next summer! If you loved The Art of Scandal as much as I did, if you’ve had Cowboy Carter on repeat, or just in general if you love a good BOOK, definitely put this one on your radar!
I also just finished reading Wild About You by Kaitlyn Hill, and what a CHARMING story! It follows Natalie and Finn, two college-aged teens who are paired up together to compete on a wilderness survival reality show. This also felt super fitting to me, since it takes place in that Tennessee/Kentucky region of the Appalachian Trail that I was semi-driving near and around. Maybe this one’s a stretch, but I just like when you feel like you find the right book at the right time. I loved that Natalie was unapologetically just “like other girls,” and that Finn started off seeming so grumpy and critical but then came around to be such a sweetheart. This book also reminded me a tiny little bit of Reality Chick by Lauren Barnholdt, just in the college-aged reality TV competition aspect of it all, which I am mostly mentioning here because I want to see if anyone else has formative core memories around that book the way I do!
watching . . . Believe it or not, tonight my family watched an episode of . . . Forged in Fire, a reality TV show about making knives? This is not something I EVER would’ve thought to watch, but it was there and we put it on and it made me think more about the making of a knife than I ever have before lol. I do kind of love how quickly you can feel like a mini expert on something after watching half an hour about it. “Oh, that’s not good,” I say knowledgeably when a judge points out that the handle curves above the blade. This is also why I’m looking forward to the Olympics. I love suddenly having Strong Opinions about sports I only just found out existed.
listening to . . . I just got this “I Still Listen to Motorcycle Drive By Every Single Day” bumper sticker in the mail, so I put on that song just so the bumper sticker wouldn’t be a lie, and then it automatically kept looping so . . . yeah. It really has been the same song over and over for the last 30 minutes, and it was “Motorcycle Drive By.” Someone asked me to sign a book with my favorite Third Eye Blind quote, and I think I chose I’ve never been so alone/And I’ve never been so alive but this whole song rips honestly.
As someone who, as a teen in the pre-internet days, thought "There is a continuity error in this complete Sherlock Holmes anthology" and had like, a whole notebook trying to pin down the timeline (I think it was about when he quit cocaine, lol) I very much loved all these words about a recording studio!!
We were at the Thomas Wolfe house in Asheville last month, and it was already irritating me that all the big quotes about him on the walls of the pre-tour exhibit were by men, so when the tour guide assembled us, she said, "His editor, Maxwell Perkins, also edited F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway," and I blurted, "And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings!" I was going to add that Perkins gave Wolfe's manuscripts to Marjorie for a second opinion, but maybe I will just save that for when I retire and get my master's degree in Florida literature.