Lay It Down in Full View: Collected Writings on Silkworm and Their Music (plus some words on Bottomless Pit)

Hello there, readers! Some of you may already know this, but yesterday, a book was announced called Lay It Down in Full View: Collected Writings on Silkworm and Their Music. It was edited by Paul Duffus and features a bunch of very good writers attempting to interpret, in some way or another, the work of the greatest rock band of all-time. I can’t wait to read it! Oh, and I was asked to contribute a chapter to the book myself; I wrote about Silkworm’s posthumously-released final EP, Chokes!. Maybe you’d like to read that. If you purchase the book, you can. If there’s a link to the book by the time this goes live, it’ll go here!

Initially I had a broader, more wide-ranging idea for a chapter in this book. I wanted to talk about “endings” throughout the musical career of Silkworm and its key members. I eventually realized that just writing about Chokes! was more than enough for me to tackle, but I did produce a somewhat substantial essay on “Felt a Little Left”, the song which ended up being the final track on the final album by Bottomless Pit (co-founding Silkworm members Andy Cohen and Tim Midyett’s band after Silkworm’s dissolution, for those who don’t know). On the occasion of Lay It Down in Full View finally getting announced publicly, I’m sharing this “outtake” to, perhaps, get you excited about what actually is in the book.

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“I guess it’s better than nothing / To find yourself on the street,”

In Bottomless Pit, Andy Cohen had perfected the art of the windswept, shellshocked alt-rock anthem, moving with a naturalness that his songs in his previous band, Silkworm, never quite approached in their lurching and plateauing. You can tell because the finest example of it was also the last one to appear on a Bottomless Pit record–“Horse Trading”, the penultimate track on their third and final LP, Shade Perennial. As the three-minute song nears its close, Cohen and the rest of Bottomless Pit take a rare turn toward the indulgent, soaking in the ragged glory of the core of the track by slowing down in the homestretch, even as its distinct Andy Cohen-isms (“My bondage feels so good to me / Without it I would fall”) never disappear. 

This is the context in which the final Bottomless Pit song, “Felt a Little Left”, emerges. More accurately, it’s the context in which Tim Midyett’s voice, unaccompanied, jumps into the fray. The song starts with Midyett singing that opening line on his own for two entire seconds–the rest of the band leap in to back him up in the middle of the word “nothing”. At the risk of dwelling too long on two seconds of a song that balloons to more than six minutes in length, it’s this ever-so-brief headstart that the rest of the band give Midyett that’s essential to setting the tone for “Felt a Little Left” (somewhat helpfully, the studio version of “Felt a Little Left” is exactly 365 seconds long, so perhaps it’s helpful to view these two seconds as one’s birthday and Christmas. Or, if we’re actually shooting for importance, Tax Day and Election Day). Tim Midyett sounds like he’s leaping from a burning building, the flames licking and tendrils of smoke following him immediately afterward in the form of Cohen’s six string, Brian Orchard’s bass, Chris Manfrin’s drumset. And, of course, Midyett’s own baritone guitar–to the extent that a band as workmanlike as Bottomless Pit could ever have a “calling card”, the band’s signature sound throughout its three albums and one EP.

There are a few videos of the band playing “Felt a Little Left” live on YouTube. The highest-quality one is, of course, their KEXP session, followed by a version they did as part of Epitonic’s “Saki Sessions” (they played all of Shade Perennial as well as their remarkable cover of Songs: Ohia’s “The Big Game Is Every Night”). In both of these videos, Midyett starts the song with his baritone guitar, pulling something ambient out of the instrument in order to accompany his voice. The a capella Midyett beginning, then, is a studio creation (from a band even less known for “studio creations” than Silkworm were), something the band visualized or stumbled upon that turns the song into a more frantic final statement (speaking of YouTube videos of “Felt a Little Left”, shout out to kingofthecastle7 for capturing an early version of the track in Cleveland in 2011, a full two years before the song would be released–interestingly enough, that version starts with Manfrin’s drums, and features a more “classically Bottomless Pit” two minutes of full-band instrumental before Midyett steps up to the mic).

Regardless of how that opening came about, the 363 seconds that follow on the record and the rest of the song as it’s played live converge and then diverge as something of the caliber of “Felt a Little Left” should. Recorded with Steve Albini (uncredited, unless you’d consider Manfrin’s drum sound a “credit”), it is at once both a sprint and a slow-motion explosion. That’s what one should expect when you’re hearing an orchestra as a four-person indie rock song, I suppose. The baritone guitar and the drums are the two tentpoles of the instrumental–Manfrin builds his end of the structure with a steady pounding, Midyett by hoarding notes and tones in whichever order he sees fit (which just happens to fit reasonably well with the percussion). Cohen and Orchard sound a little lower in the mix, but they’re still clearly there–the latter provides a land bridge between Midyett’s notes and the rhythms (as any quality bassist in a guitar-bass-baritone guitar-drums power quartet worth their salt knows how to do), while Cohen is able to graft the twin leaders together by creating an urgent shadow of Midyett’s playing that connects the brisk drumbeat to the unhurried baritone. It should be a miracle that the four of their tracks harmonize together in the way that they do, but it’s not. It’s just what Bottomless Pit did.

What’s Tim Midyett singing about, anyway? What’s worth all the hullabaloo? At this point, expecting coherent lyrical narratives out of Andy Cohen’s songs was unrealistic, so it’s unsurprising that the final words from the less direct of the two of them resist such readings, as well. The first line is its own world, and the following one that completes the thought (“…after a long night of limited light and unfamiliar sheets”) isn’t far behind. The images throughout “Felt a Little Left” are primal and opaque–cutting to an addressee who’s “out on the hastings”, heading “back to your home base, in a dirty shirt”, and then finding oneself “Back into the moonlight, the night cool on your skin”, and Midyett toggles and inverts the title line (“Felt a little left / left a little felt up / Felt a little left out”) in a way that drags down and complicates the sentiment in the title.

Less than a year after Shade Perennial came out in October 2013, Bottomless Pit were no more. An “indefinite hiatus” was announced in July 2014, and Midyett and Cohen both more or less immediately began solo projects (Midyett’s solo project, Mint Mile, is now a well-oiled Crazy Horse-indebted country rock and roll machine, while Cohen released a solo album backed by the band Light Coma–featuring Brian Orchard on guitar–in 2017, which stands as his only recorded output since the band broke up). With the members of Bottomless Pit spread out between three cities–Cohen is currently in Boston, Manfrin in the D.C. area, Midyett and Orchard still in Chicago–this hiatus is almost certainly permanent outside of potential one-off reunion shows (which I’d happily take). In a podcast interview from a few years after the fact, Midyett sheepishly discusses triggering the hiatus over email–burnt out on Bottomless Pit’s sound, he wanted the band to evolve, and calculated that the four of them just wouldn’t have enough practice time together to confidently pull off a smooth transition. Although much of that probably has to do with the heaviness surrounding Bottomless Pit’s origins and early subject matter, listening to “Felt a Little Left” is as life-affirming to experience as it is exhausting to imagine the work that went into constructing it. 

Midyett remains cognizant of the bond he and Cohen have as musicians, however–in a more recent interview, he referenced playing a solo doubleheader with Cohen at a restaurant in Chicago in 2019 to nobody (well, I was there, hiding in a corner booth) and reflectively saying he hopes to make music with the man again someday. He sounds sure of the fact that he will, but whether he has genuine reason to believe that or it comes from an inability to comprehend that he’d ever not is unclear. The early returns on the 2025 Silkworm reunion shows, announced after the initial draft of this piece was written, only bolster this, even as discussing new Midyett-Cohen music (let alone new Midyett-Cohen-Joel R.L. Phelps music) is putting the cart before all the horses one could possibly trade at this time.

So it stands in 2025 that “Felt a Little Left” is the final statement of Bottomless Pit and of Andy Cohen and Tim Midyett as creative partners (and even if we put our faith in the ability of the duo to reconnect and make something similar yet again, at the very least it represents a decade-plus-long break between two musicians creating music together virtually uninterrupted for nearly three decades). From the perspective of Bottomless Pit, at least, it’s something of a logical conclusion to the group–a six-minute, abstracted, controlled demolition of a band erected due to grief and tragedy. The last great trick Bottomless Pit pull is in the final minute of “Felt a Little Left”, where their white-knuckled grip on their hammer of the gods loosens into a haze of feedback and fading out so smoothly that we don’t realize we’re free until our ears start to ring.

(note: I don’t remember the exact podcasts I heard some of this information from; if any of you know, drop me a line. Probably either Conan Neutron or Vish Khanna or both).