photo by Daniel Muller
John Pedersen stands sturdily on the coffee table. I look past his unflinching frame and steady eyes to his father, on the couch opposite me in a warm-as-morning-coffee Omaha home.
Although his son stands between us during the interview, the father does not deploy the ellipses one might expect to find loaded in his diaphragm. He doesn’t stamp down an exclamation point, a metaphorical pin to John’s balloons, which rest on the floor after their maiden voyage from a friend’s birthday party.
No, instead, Steve Pedersen finishes his thoughtful, uninterrupted answer before letting his wife take John, “as cute and as cuddly as he is,” to the kitchen as we talk about Steve’s song “The Coincidence.”
It’s a Saturday evening in Omaha’s Fairacres neighborhood, one week before Pedersen’s band Criteria is to play The Waiting Room on Nov. 24, and 11 years after he wrote “The Coincidence,” an ode to a life in transition. It does take the three periods of a false start for him to remember the exact year. After initially reaching further back, Pedersen’s memories dial in to 2001 as the song’s birth year. Its seven chords and second-person lyrical insult entered the world without a band to provide a roof over its head. It waited a number of months, too, before Criteria formed and adopted it.
Rewinding a bit, though, 2001 for Pedersen marks the end of a band and the end of a relationship. It means no job and no house. The two strands of his life story then that wind their way to the future he now inhabits are a degree from Duke University School of Law and a move back home to Omaha. It was in Omaha, after all, where Pedersen had helped build the foundation of a growing music scene in the ‘90s. In 2001, the eastern Nebraska city was beginning to look like a proper home for nationally known bands.
One of those bands was Cursive, which Pedersen departed from amicably in 1998 before relocating in North Carolina for law school. He says his songwriting shares none of the “grand lyrical or storyline visions” his friend Tim Kasher writes into Cursive’s material. Primarily a guitar player, Pedersen writes the words last.
“So I will accommodate the structure of the words,” he says, “to how I viewed the melody fitting into the song as a whole. Sometimes that requires unconventional word selection.”
Imagine telling your ex as Pedersen sings, “No synchronicity between you and me. The coincidence of chance makes faulty circumstance.” What might not work as spoken words move in lockstep when they’re sung with the music of “The Coincidence.” Pedersen says it works best live, too; he values the way a song is delivered as much as he values crafting it.
“The angle that I hold my pick on a downstroke or an upstroke, all those little details change how the song sounds,” he says.
At the beginning of “The Coincidence,” Pedersen plays upstrokes because the first note he picks, a high F#, is the dissonant note that scrapes against the root note of G. He wants to accentuate that dissonance.
Although his life now is fulfilling, with a job as legal counsel to online retailer Hayneedle, a home and a family that stars John, his “ball of joy,” Pedersen still plays the past in songs such as “The Coincidence.” To keep the emotional energy, he says he puts himself in the shoes of friends going through transitional periods.
And to return to a younger form at concerts, Pedersen says he and Criteria were just talking about playing a basement show again. After nearly 10 years of existence, with about five years of inactivity thrown in to build the near-legendary status of the band — at least in some circles — can Criteria play a small show?
“Oh, sure,” Pedersen says. “The truth of it is, we play when Marc Leibowitz of One Percent and Waiting Room sends me an email message asking if we want to play a show. … So (a basement show) is probably possible, but we just haven’t done it because we play so infrequently.”
House show venues, take note. Criteria might join your bill.
Q&A (but mostly the A)
CHORDS
Gmaj7 – D – A – D
Gmaj7 – D – A – A
Gmaj7 – D – A – D
Gmaj7 – D – A – A
Gmaj7 D
I have devised a way
A D
Where I don’t care what you say
Gmaj7 D A
‘Cause talkin’ with you’s impossible
Gmaj7 D
We’ve reached a stalemate
A D
We could lose a million ways
Gmaj7 D A
Still the result is the same
G D
So why try to debate?
A D
The pettiness is what I hate
G A
Breaking all ties to you
G D
‘Cause you don’t fit my brain
A D
No offense, just circumstance
G D A
Didn’t lend itself to us
C G D
No synchronicity
C G D F#m
Between you and me
C G D
The coincidence of chance
C G D
Makes faulty circumstance
G – D – A – D
G – D – A – A
G D
Why can we not operate on confidence
A D
Recauterize a broken fence
G D
But as for me
A
This shit is through
G D
I have laid across the tracks for you
A D Bm A
Your broken leg I went through, two
G D A
But you give me no reason
G D
To not rise above
A D
Release me from your untrue love
G D A
Because you give me no affection
No affection
G-D-A-D
G-D-A-A
G-D-A-D-Bm-A
G-D-A-A
C G D
No synchronicity
C G D F#m
Between you and me
C G D
The coincidence of chance
C G D
Makes faulty circumstance
Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. As he listened to Pedersen sing of rising above, Michael was sailing over the clouds. Reach him at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.