a comical genius' satire
The Birth of a Tragedy
A look at the man-babies behind Noon on Friday, shining stars of emo-punk
By Jack Wolfe
You don’t touch Gerard Heart’s cookies.
I found this out the hard way as we sat together in his luxurious pad to conduct an interview. We both got settled, he in his tiger fur couch and I in the adjacent wooden rocking chair. It was then that I saw the Thin Mints on the coffee table. As I reached over to grab one, he slapped me on the wrist and said something along the lines of:
“MY cookies!”
I, of course, should have known better. As lead singer of emo-punk band Noon On Friday, Gerard Heart has made a career out of losing his temper. His band’s second album, “Manic Depression is a Many Splendored Thing,” has peaked at number three on the Billboard charts. Legions of dissatisfied upper class Caucasians model their own rhythm deficient poetry on the musings of Noon On Friday. It’s easy to see why the band has such an established fan base when you hear Gerard Heart’s achingly sincere tenor wheezing over a series of tender, tuneless chords on the album’s first single, “Painfully Cremate My Face.”
“That song’s for my ex,” Heart says when I ask him about it. “It’s about loneliness and depression and stuff.” Such concepts are the muses for all Noon On Friday songs, apparently. A mere glance at the back of their second album reveals the sorts of misery Heart and his band encounter on a daily basis, with songs titles like, “My Palms Get Sweaty,” and “I Encounter Misery On A Daily Basis.”
“That stuff’s all true,” he says proudly, taking a sip from his tall latte. “I wrote some of it even before I met Jeffrey.” Jeffrey Dent is Heart’s best friend and Noon on Friday’s bassist. He arrives at Heart’s house some thirty minutes after the interview started. Dent is a handsome man with pierced lips and a crooked posture, quieter and more reserved than Heart. Some of Dent’s friends attribute his solemnity to the death of his goldfish Megan nearly two decades ago. But the man himself never revels the real cause of his depression.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” Dent whispers. Instead, Dent channels his feelings into the emotional lyrics that have people falling for Noon On Friday. Whereas Heart’s compositions are raw and aggressive (a particularly bleak stanza being “you don’t like me/I don’t like you”), Dent’s lyrics are much more moody and subversive (check out the tasty metaphors in the lines “You make me blue/ I don’t like you”).
According to Heart, the two friends moped into each other on a spring break in Cozumel. “I met the kid, and we just clicked,” Heart says. “I mean, he wrote heavy stuff, and I wrote sad stuff, so I figured we would start a band.” All the two boys needed was a drummer. They found that crucial piece in Robert Beach, an Inuit percussion prodigy. “We knew that Robert would be a perfect fit for the band,” says Dent. Beach’s colossal triangle fills are the perfect complement to the clashing euphony of Heart’s guitar and Dent’s bass. Unfortunately, Beach could not make the interview due to what he described on the phone as “a beastly hangover, dude.”
Heart and Dent finish their caviar and ask me to “come with them to the studio.” I am led into Heart’s basement, where various instruments are scattered around the room. “This is where the magic happens,” Heart says. The band claims they are planning a “more experimental third album.”
“Ah, yeah,” Heart says. “We’re gonna crank out the weird time signatures for the next album, you know? Jeffrey says he’s got a three-not melody planned for it.” Dent smiles at me for the first time. I ask him to refrain from smiling ever again and he starts to cry. Heart points at him and nods.
“See man,” he says. “That’s the feeling. That’s how you feel on Noon on a Friday. All you wanna do is let loose, but you can’t because of society.” Dent begins to wipe away his tears as Heart continues. “We as a band allow people to channel that feeling through everyday life. And I think that’s what makes us great. We’re like John Lennon for the kids.”
Except John Lennon would have given me that cookie.