“When Paula Sparks” by Copeland, Saturday, July 8, 2023

 

The list of albums turning 20 this year makes me feel really, really old. Earlier this week, I covered the youth group classic The Beautiful Letdown. Anberlin released their debut record Blueprints for the Black Market, which also made a huge impact on my teenage life. But then there were albums that came out that year that I didn’t listen to until later. I had known Copeland from their first low-budget video “Walking Downtown,” but it wasn’t until their third record, Eat, Sleep, Repeat, that I started listening to the band. The spring of ‘06 when I was about to graduate from high school I started buying Copeland’s CDs, picking them up on discount if I could from Best Buy. The first two records were perfect late spring/summer listening. 

I AM STARVED FOR HER ATTENTION. Copeland’s Beneath Medicine Tree has the most delicate lyrics of all Copeland records. The loose concept of the album deals with the death of lead singer Aaron Marsh’s grandmother and the hospitalization of his girlfriend at the time, Paula Sparks. In an interview on the Labeled Podcast, Marsh told host Matt Carter that writing and releasing the album “set [himself] up to not write anything that intensely personal ever again.” Songs like the sappy pre-Owl City “Brightest” are more abstract, but songs like today’s song “When Paula Sparks” reference very specific situations and people. Marsh broke up with Paula Sparks and recorded the song, posting it to MP3.com, and later recording it forBeneath Medicine Tree. One of Copeland’s early influences was the ‘90s alternative rock band Gin Blossoms. Marsh tells the story in the interview about a girl he knew named Allison Roads, who had a similar name to one of Gin Blossoms’ hits, “Allison Road.” Marsh tells Carter his thoughts at the time: “What if I put Paula’s full name in a song? She’ll feel so great. She’ll never forget me. . . It didn’t have the desired effect.” What started as trying to get the girl back turned into an awkward conversation.

THERE’S A BRILLIANT SKY UP ABOVE. In her, somewhat disorganized book on writing Bird By Bird, Ann Lamott writes a hilarious chapter on avoiding libel. One of the first rules is, of course, never using a real person’s name. Using someone’s real name in art opens artists up to lawsuits, but other specific details can leave them liable as well. While “When Paula Sparks” doesn’t have many other damning details in the song—having a girlfriend who was hospitalized is universal enough—it would have been good for Marsh to have read this 1994 book. Lamott writes in the chapter titled “The Last Class”:

Lamott goes on to cite (possibly coin before Dinitia Smith wrote about it in the New York Times and is credited for coining the rule) the “small penis rule”: 

Of course, Lamott’s advice isn’t exactly full-proof as Michael Conklin writes in the Nebraska Law Review when examining when author Michael Crichton disguised one of this critics into a pedophile with a tiny penis. Conklin writes that the rule “does not require the plaintiff to admit that he has a small penis in order to sue for damages. A potential plaintiff could simply list the small penis accusation as an additional defamatory statement from which to seek compensation, thus explicitly stating that the small penis accusation is false.” And that’s what happened to Crichton. This didn’t happen to Aaron Marsh and he didn’t write anything defaming Paula, but writing in such a way that he wrote left him too raw. And those raw emotions are the exact thing that made Emo such an uncomfortable trend. Harder Emo disguises the emotions with music, but with Copeland—especially on Beneath Medicine Tree—all emotions are left naked, exposed like a weird skinny kid in the locker room among the jocks. The vulnerability is uncomfortable, but it also connected with so many early Copeland fans. And some of these listeners were also Sufjan Stevens fans. Authenticity is both a strength and a weakness. 

Beneath Medicine Tree version:

Alternate version:

Read the lyrics on Genius.