A song about my cut-short relationship with Lance Hahn from J-Church, a musical and lyrical tribute to the seminal East Bay pop punk songwriter.


The Background

Cringer was the band that Lance Hahn and Gardner Maxam had before JChurch. This was one of my first exposures to East Bay pop punk, I believe that Denny Sicko first told me about them. The Karin 7" captured a happy go lucky, shambling, unserious tone that came as a welcome relief in the context of the intense heavy styles of 80s hardcore punk and 90s Seattle grunge. The artwork on the cover and inside was goofy and low budget, but painstakingly assembled, reflecting (to my mind) the surfeit of time and deficit of money of young artists who were gleefully opting out of society in general and the music industry in particular. The songs were catchy and sloppy, and the lyrics were thoughtful, revealing Lance to be a sort of intellectual of the punk world. This unique combination was very appealing to me, and lit up my imagination with possibilities for my own music. I remember sitting in my rented room after a day at my loading dock job, playing this single over and over on a $10 thrift store turntable and speakers. In grunge-explosion 1991 Seattle, it was comforting to know that there were people somewhere who "got it", even if "it" was still forming in my mind. For me, this disc became a window into a world of low budget tours, arty record labels, weird intellectuals, frenetic joyful music, accepted misfits, cheap living, and 2nd hand combat boots; a million miles away from the leg humping meat-headed stupidity of the Seattle grunge world. I wanted in. Cringer broke up and Lance moved on to start J-Church, a band I came to love, but was at first a bit wary of. How could they break up? They were one of my favorite bands!

Later, I had started Sicko with Josh and Denny, and we were on tour to California. Josh and I were at the Epicenter Zone in San Francisco perusing records before a show. Flipping through the bins, I saw J-Church's first LP, and made a negative comment. I remember saying "I Liked Cringer Better". I didn't realize that that guy standing next to me filing records was actually Lance himself, we'd never been introduced! In the years that we knew one another after that, he never let me forget that I said that. He was indeed kind about it, but would tease me mercilessly when he saw me, saying "here comes Ean 'I liked Cringer better' Hernandez!" Years later, we were playing a gig in Portland OR, and when Lance went to open his guitar case, the neck had snapped off! That night he borrowed one of Denny's guitars, and I took Lance's, telling him that I would get it fixed as a few days later was a show in Seattle and I knew a guitar tech who could probably put it back together. I got it fixed for him at Stevens' Stringed Instruments on Westlake, and it turned out the problem was the ancient and barely applied glue had dried and broken. The fix was easy and overnight the neck was stronger than ever. I returned the guitar to Lance, we played the gig, and we went our separate ways.

Lance was an easy guy to pick up with, whenever we ran into one another he would be cheerful and warm, like we'd just seen each other last week. Even if it had been years. This made it easy to feel like we would always have more time. A few years later, I moved to England to go to grad school at Oxford. England is a little overwhelming to a guy from a small city in the American West… crowded, humid, strange accents and customs. When I missed home, and I did a lot, I would put One Mississippi or Whorehouse Songs and Stories and wander around in fuzzed out haze of pure perfect American underground pop punk. J-Church (and the Magnetic Fields) were my dreamy security blankets that year, and well into the next when I finished my degree and moved to work in London.

A quote from the blog I kept at the time…

I switched to J-church as I walked up out of the tube station into a nearly silent canary wharf. This took me right back to that day I spent walking around cambridge...

"I walked around in a self imposed headphones isolation but with the whole gang and felt really weirdly close to them."

I went straight through "one mississippi" that day, and on to "69 love songs". I'd been really relating to Jchurch that year, because it took me back home a bit when walking in the foreign streets. So on that day, the glowy feeling of the beer, twilight, colleges, the disconnected connection with my fellow students and music mixed in with the melancholy of knowing that it would all be over soon. White noise filtered in from the edges of vision and hearing, and I felt something really beautiful. 10 months later Lance died on a table having his blood cleaned. I found out 3 months after that.

Stepping up into the silent wharf, listening to one mississippi and feeling a bit alone, I suddenly felt really sad. Tears are no good at work, even on christmas eve, so I turned poor Lance off, wiped my eyes and walked through the front doors.


The Idea

I wanted this one to be a melancholic hooky song in a happy key, a musical and lyrical tribute to the seminal East Bay pop punk songwriter. I wanted to document my journey from fan to comrade to friend to mourner, and make a bit of a tribute to someone who had an outsized impact on my musical development. I also wanted to try and write a song that sounded a little like a J-Church song.



Making the Song

The song came together very quickly. It's really pretty much the same chords over and over, just voiced and emphasized differently. The real hook is Jeff's descending vocal in the chorus, that's what makes it one of my favorite songs on this record. I also think the big guitar sound works best on this song out of the whole record, there is enough space for it in the slower tempo. For the video, I got photos from past band members, and Lance's partner of many years (thanks Gardner, Adam, David, Ben, and Liberty). At the end of the video, there is a little clip from Josh's Sicko tour video of me trying to interview Lance outside of Bottom of the Hill where we had played with MTX and J-Church that night. Lance was NOT going to let me get through that without bringing up the Epicenter incident!