Labor Day: Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson

I head back to university teaching tomorrow—and I know many teachers and students who are already back at it. In honor of this back-to-school season, here's an episode on a wild and wonderful song by New-York-based composers Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson. In addition to composing a wide variety of music as individual artists, they are part of a synth-pop duo called The Beverage Station. The duo will release a full album, including this song, on May 30, 2025, from Gold Bolus Recordings. 


Labor Day
Lainie Fefferman

Brand-new faces
Familiar halls
Tracking paces
Feel it in my throat

Bones break
Back aches
I could punch through walls

And then there's you

Heart explosions
Arms aglow
Big emotions
Pack up its time to go

Hours come
Seconds go
Cut to my fun walk home

Where there is you

Familiar faces
Brand-new halls
Making spaces
Sharing all I love

Calm comes
Back stroke
Keeping tallies of smiles and cheers

I know I've lost what I'm doing here

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome to Resounding Verse, a podcast about poetry and song.

“Labor Day,” by Lainie Fefferman.

Labor Day
Lainie Fefferman

Brand-new faces
Familiar halls
Tracking paces
Feel it in my throat

Bones break
Back aches
I could punch through walls

And then there's you

Heart explosions
Arms aglow
Big emotions
Pack up its time to go

Hours come
Seconds go
Cut to my fun walk home

Where there is you

Familiar faces
Brand-new halls
Making spaces
Sharing all I love

Calm comes
Back stroke
Keeping tallies of smiles and cheers

I know I've lost what I'm doing here

The words I just read you are words to a song written by Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson, two composers who live in New York City.

Lainie is someone I've known for, gosh, over 20 years—like 25 years. I first met her when I was a graduate student at Yale and she was an undergraduate finishing a music degree, and we've been friends since. When I told her I wanted to do a podcast episode on this song by her and Jascha, she wrote me and said, “Those words are Lainie words,” she called them, not “poety words.”

And indeed, she told me that the words came in the midst of the creation of the song. She didn't write them down first and then set them to music. Instead, she and Jascha started creating sounds, creating a kind of musical groove with a repeated loop, and then Lainie started singing over that groove, and then the words gradually emerged from there.

So I promised her that I wouldn't treat them too much as “poety words.” I wasn't going to do extensive and detailed scansion of the rhythm and meter and the rhyme scheme and the like.

But here's the thing: they are really wonderful words as words. And I think there's real benefit in treating them not like a poem per se, but treating them like something beautiful and interesting and clever that demands a bit of scrutiny on its own, without the music.

As I've listened to more and more songs over the years, I've come to feel that the boundary between lyrics and poems is really quite fuzzy. We might think of lyrics as things that are meant to be sung and poems as things that are meant to be read. But in fact, many poems were meant to be sung and written for that purpose. And many lyrics exist on the page. They're written down, and they can be appreciated as little art forms in themselves.

Lainie actually wrote down these lyrics on a piece of paper, and she sent me a scan of the notebook page where she wrote them down. And if you read them on the page, you discover some wonderful features.

And one of those features which first struck me when I read them is a kind of ambiguity about what's actually happening in the lyrics.

When I first read them a few weeks ago, I thought about my kids going back to school. We have a 12-year-old and a seven-year-old, and they had just started sixth grade and second grade, respectively. And so my mind and heart were with them as they headed back to school and encountered “brand-new faces / familiar halls,” to quote the first two lines of the lyrics.

So just listen to these opening lines again and imagine a kid returning to school:

Brand-new faces
Familiar halls
Tracking paces
Feel it in my throat

Bones break
Back aches
I could punch through walls

And then there's you

I can certainly remember going back to school as a kid and feeling it in my throat, feeling anxiety, feeling a bit awkward, wondering how the year will go. I can also remember seeing certain people that made that anxiety go away, like a best friend I hadn't seen in some time, or a teacher that I really loved.

“And then there's you.”

I even thought of my two boys, Sam and Paul, who go to the same school and who sometimes run into each other in the middle of the day. And although they're brothers who fight, they really love each other. And I could imagine, in the stress and hubbub of the first week of school, them seeing each other on the playground and thinking, “Ah, there's you. There's my brother.”

So I was reading Lainie's lyrics and I thought, aha, I get what this is about. This makes sense to me. It's about kids going back to school.

And then my eye moved to the right of the title of the poem. And I should have seen this right at the beginning. There are some notes to herself where she's listing some of the feelings she's trying to get at in these lyrics. And at the top of that list, she writes, “teacher feelys.”

And those feelys are, in Lainie's words: “pumped, exhausted, sick and aching, nutty, adorable, overexcited kids, and smooches when we get home, giggles.”

Ah. So of course I thought: this isn't about kids going back to school, it's about teachers going back to school.

Lainie Fefferman teaches at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she's a professor of music and technology. And Jascha Narveson, her partner, is on the computer faculty at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn. So they're headed back to school too, and they come home at the end of the day and see one another for what she calls “cuddles and smooches.”

My wife and I do too. We both teach at the University of Oregon. And as I record this, we are gearing up to return to our academic year, preparing to see brand-new faces and familiar halls and leaning on each other as we do that.

So here's one of the wonders of Lainie's words, which for her may not be poetry, but in my mind do what the best poetic words do: they give you just enough information to create a scene, to evoke a feeling, but they don't give you so much as to give everything away. There's enough ambiguity in these words to open them up to be interpreted in different ways by different people.

At the same time, there's enough specificity to give them real vividness and to make them pack a punch. I say the word “punch,” of course, thinking of that line “I could punch through walls,” which just perfectly captures that feeling that we've all had.

But there are other lines that also have that effect, lines that convey emotions clearly and economically with just enough words to make the point. I'm thinking of lines like “Feel it in my throat,” which I mentioned before, and even a simple two-word line like “Calm comes.” There's a nice kind of alliteration in that line, as there is in so much of these lyrics. And who needs any more words than that to make the point?

I've been talking about individual lines and their simplicity and directness, which is one thing I love about these lyrics. But the lyrics as a whole also have a clear structure to them. There are later lines that satisfyingly echo earlier lines.

The lyrics begin:

Brand-new faces
Familiar halls

And then later we have:

Familiar faces
Brand-new halls

So there's a kind of inversion going on, which might suggest that the going-back-to-school experience, whether for teachers like Lainie and Jascha or for students like my two sons, is different depending on where you are.

If, say, you're going back to the same grade school but there are new kids joining your class, you might see brand-new faces in familiar halls. Or you might be seeing familiar people in a new setting—if, as is the case with my 14-year-old niece, you're heading from middle school to high school, to a new building, but you see many of the same people that you already know.

There are other echoes too, like:

Bones break
Back aches

earlier in the lyrics, and then later:

Calm comes
Back stroke

So the word back appears again. These kind of percussive consonants—“bones break,” “calm comes,” “back stroke”—recur and give a sort of rhythmic rhyme to these parts of the lyrics.

And then, of course, there are those two lines:

And then there's you

midway through, and:

Where there is you

a little further on. Lines that, by the way, have nothing percussive in them at all.

“And then there's you.”

Lines that sound the way a warm embrace at the end of the day feels.

The one line in the lyrics that I have to confess I didn't totally know how to feel about, I didn't know how to make sense of, is the last line:

I know I've lost what I'm doing here

The lyrics as a whole seem to be about finding something, not losing something. Finding a sense of community, finding a sense of calm, finding the smiles and cheers that take away the edge of the first week of school.

Well, Lainie gave me her take on this line, and she said it was about forgiving yourself for feeling lost, or even celebrating that feeling. In her words, she said it was about “giggling at being lost and deciding to love it as a feature, not a bug.”

Starting a new school year as a teacher, as a student, can be disorienting. It can make you feel lost. But Lainie is saying: give yourself a break, laugh at yourself. And what a lovely sentiment that is.

However, it's not the sentiment that Jascha Narveson had in his mind when they were writing the song. She talked with him about this line, and he said, for him, it referred to the creation of the song itself, where, as they went along and as they approached the end, they kind of got lost in the process. They got to the end and kind of wondered, “What are we doing here?”

So here is proof yet again that good words, whether we think of those words as lyrics or poems or something in between, are good in large part because they can be read in different ways by different people.

“Labor Day,” by Lainie Fefferman.

Brand-new faces
Familiar halls
Tracking paces
Feel it in my throat

Bones break
Back aches
I could punch through walls

And then there's you

Heart explosions
Arms aglow
Big emotions
Pack up its time to go

Hours come
Seconds go
Cut to my fun walk home

Where there is you

Familiar faces
Brand-new halls
Making spaces
Sharing all I love

Calm comes
Back stroke
Keeping tallies of smiles and cheers

I know I've lost what I'm doing here

And here is the song, “Labor Day,” by Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson.

[Music excerpt]

Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson are part of what they call a synth-pop duo called The Beverage Station. And this track that you just heard comes from an album that's going to be released on May 30 by Gold Bolus Recordings. It's the second track to be released from that album. The other is called “One and One.”

Lainie and Jascha are not just a part of this duo, however. They each compose their own music, and music in a variety of styles.

Jascha is a composer, an audio engineer, and also a teacher. And he writes music for acoustic instruments and also for electronic instruments. He composes electronic music for dance companies, for installations, and for video.

Here's an example of one of his pieces. It's from a series of pieces called Sound Paper. And this is Sound Paper Roll 4, and it's called “Tree Waves.”

Jascha describes it as “a slow ramp-shaped wave that branches into many copies of itself.” He also calls it “a rustling canopy of sound leaves.” That's a great descriptor.

I love the way the piece is built upon a recurring loop. That's the ramp-shaped wave that changes as it goes. The entire piece is over 50 minutes long, and it's mesmerizing.

Here's just the opening of it.

[Music excerpt]

Lainie Fefferman is also an amazingly gifted composer who writes for acoustic instruments and electronic instruments, and also with a real sense of playfulness, but a serious sense of purpose at the same time.

Here's a track from an album that she just released called Here I Am, which is a meditation on the Hebrew Bible. Lainie is a Jewish American, and this album shows her wrestling with how she understands this text as a contemporary Jewish woman.

This track is called “And Their Bloodguilt Shall Be Upon Them,” and the words come from the book of Leviticus.

This is what Lainie says about this track:

I was hearing so many politicians in the news quote verses from the Hebrew Bible book of Leviticus as their guide for defining what should or should not be a legal marriage. I lost my cool on that one. “Have you read Leviticus?” was something I routinely yelled at the screen. Half of my life as a modern American Jew was in violation of the laws laid down by Leviticus. I ate shellfish and bacon. I routinely wore wool and linen together in the same outfit. Politicians didn't seem to invoke chapter and verse for my heinously blaspheming sweater choices. I decided I wanted to meditate on the weird and wild emotional places I'm sent by reading the Book of Leviticus.

Here's a bit of that track, and it is indeed weird and wild.

[Music excerpt]

So what do you get when you combine the immense talents of these two composers?

Well, something like “Labor Day,” which has electronic music, loops like what we heard in Jascha Narveson's piece that change over time, and music with a touch of whimsy but also a powerful emotional core.

One of my favorite things about this song is its groove, which has this steady feel. You can kind of tap your feet to it, but it's also wildly unpredictable.

The feeling I get when listening to it is sort of like walking in a crowd. I'm walking steadily, but I keep being bumped and jostled by things around me, the way I'd be jostled if I were a kid or a teacher walking through the halls of a school where there's turbulence all around me. People heading into classrooms, people getting stuff from their lockers, people accidentally bumping into me in the hallway.

There's a lot happening rhythmically and metrically to make this groove sound steady but unpredictable. But I think the easiest way to get a sense for how Lainie and Jascha create that effect is to hear a steady but predictable version of the song.

What I've done is a little trickery to make the groove sound kind of boring, in fact. I've cut up the waveform so that things repeat in eight-beat chunks. So it could have sounded like this:

[Music demonstration]

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Or like this:

[Music demonstration]

Less boring, but still a little pedestrian.

One, two, three...

But that's not what Lainie and Jascha do. They're much too interesting for that. Their groove moves in nine-beat chunks.

[Music demonstration]

Six, seven, eight, nine, one, and so on.

That's a weird and wild groove, all the wilder because—and you might have noticed this—the numbers that I counted don't always sound like they're falling on beats. That's the kind of tripping effect that you experience.

And there's a reason for that too. And it has to do with what we might call the smaller cycles within that larger nine-beat cycle.

And I'm sorry for getting a little technical here, but imagine that the one, two, three, four—that those beats I was counting were quarter notes. And there were nine of them in one big measure.

Well, a quarter note has four sixteenth notes in it. One, two, three, four becomes one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a, three-e-and-a, four-e-and-a.

Well, what's so cool about this groove is that the main motive that starts it—this motive—and it happens quickly...

[Music demonstration]

That was it. Just five notes that rise in thirds:

Da-da-da-da-da.

That motive is spaced out so that it lasts nine sixteenths, then nine sixteenths, then eight sixteenths, and then ten sixteenths.

What, you may be saying?

Well, here is that groove, slowed down, and I'll count those sixteenths. And I'll start over at one each time that low note, da, appears.

[Music demonstration with counting]

And so on.

Another way to think of it, especially if you didn't track all of that counting, is that you have a sheet of paper. And that sheet of paper is the nine-beat groove. And you want to divide it into four equal chunks, but it's kind of like you mess up a little bit. The first two chunks are the same size, but the third chunk is a little too short, and that means the last chunk is a little too big.

Except that Lainie and Jascha didn't mess up. They did this on purpose, to make the groove sound a little jostly, a little bumpy.

And if you thought that was bumpy, here's the last time through that groove, where they quote-unquote “mess up” even more. Instead of nine plus nine plus eight plus ten, we hear nine plus nine plus eight plus nine.

[Music demonstration with counting]

So if your head hurts a little bit after that exercise, I'm sorry.

But the point is here: if we could peer behind the curtain and look at their compositional workshop, there's a method to their madness. This groove sounds off-kilter, and it sounds off-kilter because it happens in larger cycles, but things are broken up unevenly.

And indeed, Lainie told me that when they started to write this groove, they were thinking about nines.

Here's the groove at full speed, and just feel its jostly, bumpy effect. And imagine walking down the hallway of a school and feeling a kind of pleasant chaos.

[Music excerpt]

Then Lainie starts singing the words:

Brand-new faces
Familiar halls
Tracking paces
Feel it in my throat

[Music excerpt]

What's striking here is that for all the visceral energy of this groove, her singing sounds kind of detached. She sings in a breathy tone. She's not always on those beats. She's allowing herself to kind of float between them.

And it sounds almost like she's watching this scene from afar. It could be that she's remembering it. Imagine coming home from school as a child or a teacher and looking back on your day.

Or it could be that she's kind of watching herself from afar in the moment. I've certainly experienced that before, especially when I'm feeling a bit of anxiety, when I'm encountering something new. It's as though you're experiencing it in two ways at once, in the real moment and also from the outside, like you're watching it through a camera.

Here's a later section of the song, about a minute's worth of music. Listen for that detached quality, and also for a couple other things.

Notice how Lainie sings the words:

Where there is you

almost in a whisper. She could have made a big deal out of these, singing them really loud, but instead it sounds like a quiet realization, a tiny private moment of bliss.

Notice also the steady hi-hat that comes in at the beginning of the next section, so after “where there is you.” There's a real thickening of texture.

I'm probably hearing too much text painting here, but to me this steady hi-hat sounds like footsteps on the walk home, or the pulse of your heartbeat as you think about the person you'll see when you get there.

[Music excerpt]

So one more thing about this back-to-school song.

Remember when I talked about the last line:

I know I've lost what I'm doing here

which puzzled me a bit, and then Lainie told me it had to do with enjoying the feeling of being lost in your life, and Jascha told her that it had to do with enjoying the feeling of being lost at the end of the song and ending up somewhere beautiful and unexpected?

Well, the music loses its way too.

More notes get added to that groove. Lainie sings the word “here” and then uses a bit of tech trickery to sustain it forever above a low drone, as though we've gotten stuck on that note. We get enveloped in a wash of sound. It's kind of like colors on a page being blurred together, and then the song suddenly, unexpectedly stops.

[Music excerpt]

I love that ending.

And I love the way this pop song works—whatever that word means to you, quote-unquote “pop song.” It's a song that's written with grooves and synths and all the production we associate with pop music, but written by two composers who write quote-unquote “art music,” with words that were written down on the page, not meant to be poetry, but with all the richness and subtlety of poetry.

In short, it's a song that doesn't fit into neat categories. But maybe, maybe we don't need those categories after all.

Maybe all we need when we listen to any piece of music is an alertness—an alertness to the craft that went into it and the emotions that it evokes.

Here once again is Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson's “Labor Day.”

[Music excerpt]

Thanks to Lainie and Jascha for sharing so much about this song. If you like this music, check out The Beverage Station online and look forward to the release of their album this May.

To listen and subscribe to the podcast, go to resoundingverse.buzzsprout.com.

Resounding Verse is produced by me, Steve Rodgers. Thank you for listening.