On a recent Saturday at 4:55, novelist Matt Segur escaped his bulky coat and claimed a small table at cozy Simon’s Tavern in Andersonville. He’d agreed to meet Brook Long, a musician friend from his undergrad days at Northwestern, for drinks at five, but he didn’t seem to expect Long to show up on time, because he went ahead and ordered a Knob Creek bourbon, neat.
And anyway, as he worked on the manuscript, Segur was fomenting his own publication scheme. At Northwestern he and Long had accrued five or six like-minded friends with talent in the musical and literary arts, and the lot of them were plotting to start something like a souped-up record label. They wanted to print their own books, post their stories and short films on a Web site, and press their own CDs.
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Long, a charming blond from Evanston who claims he didn’t know the Northwestern campus was in his town till he was about to apply there, came in and got himself a beer halfway through Segur’s story. Long is currently the only member of Greentrials, whose CD, Where Eaglets Dare, is a delicious suite of hummable ghost tales. The songs all tell short stories, most narrated in the second person–as though his characters assume the feelings of the girls who reject them to be more interesting than their own. Long’s not entirely happy with it, because his lyrical electric guitar is fleshed out by a lot of pedal effects and keyboards rather than by the happy racket of bandmates. He says he lacks the time (he’s in law school at Northwestern now) and the wherewithal to get a band together: “It’s like there are five steps you have to figure out to even get going, and I don’t know any of them,” he says.
“Maybe I’m just afraid I’ll get busted about that stuff,” Segur said. “And Stanley’s not all that different from me, so I’m not as worried about making a mistake. So maybe I’m less careful…”
In feel and tone, Long’s CD matches the sweet-natured terror of the book. He and Segur swear they didn’t intend their first releases to form a companion set; none of the songs’ story lines echo Soft Power’s. But there isn’t a recording in my collection that goes as nice with Segur’s words as Where Eaglets Dare. Clearly the two have swapped their share of books and mix tapes.
