1. I found a local vintage electronic repair shop willing to take a whirl at fixing the power board on my Tascam 246 (a 4 track recorder that I *might* someday get working). I tried pinpointing the problem myself, learning a fair bit about circuit boards in the process, but my small apartment (housing my small 3 person plus one dog family) doesn’t have any space to accommodate a lengthy teardown (at my skill level, the thing would lay open for months while I trial-and-error it to a pulp). Space and time are colluding to defeat me in my long term goal to recreate a vintage 1984 home studio…needless to say, I’m thrilled that an expert can look at it and help me realize this archaeological project.

2. Space and time are also working against me on so many fronts. Again it’s the small apartment, which we can’t really move from for at least a few more years, yet even then, on a professor’s salary, one can’t afford much more than a 2 bedroom apartment in a crap neighbourhood in this city. So I don’t have a clear path toward having a proper music studio space for anything. The rental situation for music spaces in Vancouver is dire, too, also because of the vastly outsized property values here.

3. Try practicing vocals in a small apartment! I’m auditioning a song in a couple of days, to hopefully be part of a show my choir is putting on. Every year, we do a winter show wherein members of the choir have an opportunity to perform a song solo on the bill between the regular choral sets. I’ve been working on Daryl Hall’s 1972 pastoral masterpiece, “Waterwheel” (here), which is quite a challenging song, vocally, for me. I’ve worked at creating a guitar accompaniment (adapting the general harmonics and rhythms of the original piano) while also striving to soften some of the rough edges in my falsetto. Man, that man had/has an extraordinary voice. My neighbours in my apartment building surely despise the song at this point. I’ll share a recording at some point, if I manage to capture a good take.

4. Started a local songwriting circle with people I have met through choir, as well. There are seven of us, and we’re meeting on a monthly basis. After some searching, I found a really great space for us to rent that isn’t a “jam space” (those usually smell bad, and it’s impossible to compete with the punk and metal bands in the next rooms – nothing is ever soundproofed well). Instead, we are renting a largish music instructional space that has some spare time open. It’s a good, comfortable find for our purposes for now. We’re sharing ideas, and doing challenges to sort of get to know each other a bit first. I was inspired to set this in motion by my wonderful experiences at fawm.org a few years back, which leads me to…

5. I have 5 or 6 songs ready to record and publish. The writing for most of them began in 2023 (for FAWM), but I packed em up and left them alone until now. I’m not sure how they’re going to land, but I’ll probably put em on bandcamp in a few months. Mainly guitar based and roots-influenced, but I’ve been pushing in a retrofuturist-70s-soul-rock direction with some of them, so we’ll see.

6. I’ve been patching together some oddball generative patches on the Empress ZOIA modular pedal. It’s a really great instrument. I’m working on a mutitrack looper, but the hard part is designing an intuitive interface page I’m comfortable working with.

That’s about it, but now I see that that’s kind of a lot going on. More soon!

What am I trying to accomplish here? After recently diving into episodes of the now-concluded(?) Out of Touch: A Hall and Oates Podcast, along with reading a thoughtful essay at Picking Up Rocks, I got to thinking about how an extended examination of H2O might resonate with others. I hope to expose some readers to the sophistication and complexity in H2O’s music, and to reassure existing fans that they’ve been right all along about Daryl Hall and John Oates: that there are meaningful reasons why this music continues to resonate with us culturally and personally.

I’m starting off with a post about their 1983 song “Adult Education”. When envisioning this project, it was the first song to come to mind.

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“Adult Education” is an unusual moment for Daryl Hall and John Oates. It was released as one of two newly recorded tracks on a long-playing collection of former hits, Rock & Soul Part 1 (1983). It is musically darker and tonally more serious than most of their other songs. It almost functions like an evil twin to its more congenial AM radio-friendly sibling, “Say It Isn’t So” (the other newly recorded track on the collection). But while it is an unusual song for the legendary pop duo, it is also arguably one of their most interesting, for its thematic complexity and its innovative sound design.

In terms of sound design, it certainly stands out amidst their catalog. “Adult Education” ventures into unusual aesthetic territory for the duo. Forget the music video for a moment, and close your eyes.

The opening sounds are the backup vocal tracks, chanting “adult”, pronounced in two different ways. Then the listener hears the most prominent musical motif in the song – a guest guitar riff by Nile Rodgers, played on a clean Fender Stratocaster. When the rest of the ingredients in the main groove are added in, we see that this riff leads and dominates the song, imposing an art-funk style [1].

The song is mid-tempo, upbeat, but in a minor key, which is unusual for the duo at this point in their career. Rhythmically, it comes off very mechanical, almost industrial (reflecting its institutional/prison-like setting). It lacks the rounded soul and blues rhythms and tonalities normally present in H2O songs, and it also lacks the affection, sweetness, or warmth that a Hall & Oates song usually showers listeners with. It is all about “long halls and grey walls”; it is cold as high school. The rhythms also evoke a “late night prowl” kind of vibe. On top of it all, the narrator (Hall) seems to take a somewhat paternal tone toward his subject matter, as if giving teenagers lectures about how to live their lives.

The thunderous drum production (likely the work of producer Bob Clearmountain) gives depth to the mix, a sort of explosive core to the song. The chorused electric guitar strumming brings this rhythmic core into a somewhat more controlled, human-scaled, organic space than it would otherwise be in on its own. The bass is heavily sustained and used to build texture, as are the synthetic horn-like instrument sounds. There are only a few more ornamental elements – arpeggiated accents in the second verse, power chords, gate-reverbed drums, the cheerleader chanting, G.E. Smith’s rock guitar solo, and Hall’s soulfully sung -if defiant- narration.

The “cheerleading” sounds work a bit cinematically here. It sounds almost like the song is being performed as part of a high school musical, on the high school’s playing field, right before a game, as if to warn the students about their terrible predicament in this mixed up “education” they’re receiving, where “adulthood” as an idea is rendered more chaotic and confusing, not less. The truncated “oh-oh” samples of chanting women perfectly punctuate the narrator’s key points in the second verse. The “oh yeah-oh yeah” response to Hall’s line “student body’s got a bad reputation” concurs with him, reinforcing Hall’s insistence that the students deserve a better education than this.

Perched at the peak of H2O’s fame, it sits atop their catalog as a pivot point. It looks forward, toward the funk-inflected Big Bam Boom album (1984), and away from the smooth, soulful pop arrangements of prior hits “One on One” and “I Can’t Go For That”. It stands in obvious contrast to the trademark driving piano tropes present in hits like “Kiss on My List” and “Private Eyes”.

But what is the song about?

I think the answer partly lies in the word “adult”. “Adulthood” is the central thematic concept in the song’s lyrics. The “adult/adult” backing vocal is also a rhythmic anchor for the song musically. And, whether intentional or not, the alternating pronunciations of “adult” (featured prominently at the opening of the song) create a strange semantic instability inside the song itself.

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “adult” is “borrowed from French & Latin; French adulte, going back to Middle French, borrowed from Latin adultus, from past participle of adolēscere, adulēscere “to become mature, grow up,” from ad- AD- + alēscere “to be nourished, grow up,” probably inchoative derivative of *alēre”, to grow,” stative derivative of alere “to nurse, feed, nourish”.

Why point out this difference? Is it meaningful? Is the word “adult” even semantically distinct based on its pronunciation? Etymologists are silent on this, pinning the different pronunciations solely on regional differences — with American English speakers preferring emphasis on syllable 2 (iambic), with the UK and Canada being the sites for an accent on syllable 1 (trochaic).

Based on how I’ve heard the variants used, here’s how I interpret them. The trochaic version sounds more formal than the iambic version. The iambic pronunciation seems to connote “forbidden” in a way that the trochaic version does not. The iambic also lends itself well to the word’s use as an adjective – we don’t usually say “A-dult films”. We say “uh-DULT movies”. But we do say “act like an A-dult”. Then again, we now say “uh-DULTing” (a verb form of the word that didn’t exist in 1983).

Does this tell us something? If so, the logic might read as follows: the trochaic “adult” is a noun, and a model for us to emulate, a model of a mature, responsible human. The iambic “adult” is a more promiscuous signifier – at once a noun, an adjective, and perhaps also a verb – flirting with all the taboo aspects of adulthood. Adulthood is about responsibility (in terms of how you are supposed to learn it in high school), but it’s also inevitably a world of corruption, promiscuity, and debauchery.

This aligns well with the dualism expressed in the lyrical description of a high school where the real lessons are hard, ugly truths about adults who do not provide strong modeling for young people. And since the song is concerned centrally with what adolescents learn in the highly sexualized, competitive world of high school (while formally training them to be responsible adults), the dual connotations that may attach to different pronunciations lend support to the overall theme.

But there’s an additional layer to the word “adult” – its original Latin form is derived from the concept of adolescence (not the other way around, which one might intuitively expect). Adolescence is the central concept; “adult” is a modification, meaning “post-adolescence”.

It is in this sense that adulthood is positioned as something one must be ritually transformed into. This comes across as a kind of variant on the PSA: “believe it or not, there’s life after high school”, a proto-“it gets better” reassurance from the narrator of the song. High school is where that transition is ritually performed on you.

“Adult Education” confronts the confusing dualities – the madness – of high school, repeatedly contrasting institutional ideals of discipline and maturity with the chaotic emotional and sexual realities of teenage life. Hall and Oates interrogate high school, and find a bleak, competitive reproduction of the adult world within it. In response, they shrug, saying “deal with it” – a distinctly Gen X version of reassurance — less hopeful than “it gets better,” but in roughly the same spirit.

Eight years later, Nirvana issued a more apocalyptic evacuation order for the same American high school paradigm, in “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Hall and Oates issue a warning and reassurance, rather than a call to abandon the project of adulthood. High school is here, it’s big and it’s bad, and there’s nothing you can do except cope and hopefully live through it. Compared to other iconic “high school” songs, the message that “high school sucks, adulthood sucks, deal with it” is a far cry from Nirvana’s “entertain us” fatalism, and from Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education” refusal.

So what, in the end, made this recorded song unique? Was it Bob Clearmountain’s production work? Or the influence of Nile Rodgers (who contributed the song’s distinctive, agenda-setting guitar riff)? Or was it simply setting us up to look for more binary oppositions with these conspicuous pronunciation variations of “adult”?

I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward a broader theory: that H2O were trying to build upon a somewhat darker thematic thread that weaves in and out of their first twelve LPs of material. This thread consists of elements of occult and American gothic aesthetics and subjects. I am working on another essay in which I explore this thread more closely.

“Adult Education” sits in the H2O catalog as a rare minor key song, somewhat didactic in tone, with little of the trappings of soul or R&B. It’s rock, not soul. And it provides a helpful PSA for early 80s middle schoolers, trying to make sense of the contradictory models of adulthood that they would see in institutionalized life every day.

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As a bookend for this reflection, I want to add that “Adult Education” is an interesting perch from which to observe broader changes afoot in music and popular culture in the early 1980s. It looks forward to the emerging future (funk, digital samplers, MTV) and away from the past (roots music, the Fender Rhodes, LP records). As I will discuss in a later chapter, this historical context brings additional layers of meaning to the song itself.

N’Oates

[1] Notably, this guitar riff is very similar to – and occupies a similar space in the music and sound mix to – another riff Rodgers created, for David Bowie’s “China Girl”, in the same year.