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Background: Amazing things can happen when you stick with your passions long enough. Today’s case in point: Lizard McGee’s decades-long pursuit—and often successful capture—of the perfect pop song. Lizard (his real name, and he’ll arm wrestle you if you don’t believe him) and his Southeast Ohio-based group Earwig have recently reemerged with the Secret Studio Sessions EP, featuring four new songs that somehow improve upon the quartet’s criminally underheard catalog of hard-jangle power pop.

The songs were recorded live off the floor during the filming of a yet-to-be-broadcast band spotlight for Columbus-based docuseries CTV. Lizard and the group—which now features his daughter James McGee-Moore on co-lead vocals, as well as bassist Constantine Hondroulis and drummer Jeremy Skeen—were so pleased with the results, they “accidentally” released the songs as an EP, pressing “publish” on their Bandcamp page before realizing they hadn’t made the files “private” and figuring the songs were meant to be heard. Fans of indelible pop played by a lean-muscle guitar band are all the better for it.

Earwig are currently re-recording the songs as part of a full-length album—the follow-up to Pause for the Jets, released in 2016—but these versions have an immediacy and economy that showcases the quartet’s prodigious strengths. True to the group’s name, the songs lodge in your brain after only one listen but earn their keep with plainly stated declarations of high-stakes emotions. As Lizard and James harmonize on “Late September Song”: “I never wanted you to worry that I forgot you. If I could sustain you with a song, yeah, you know I would. It’s never for money, and it’s always for love. In a fucked-up world, you are the only girl, and you know you’re still the one.”

The EP will more than tide us over while we await the release of the full-length album, and there remains a world of other great albums to explore in the meantime, as well. In honor of Lizard’s dedication to his craft and vision, here’s a vintage interview I conducted with him in 2007, along with a review of Center of the Earth, the album he was promoting at the time, which featured regional hit “Used Kids.”

We recently reunited in person when my duo Reaper On Red played Lizard’s adopted hometown of Athens, Ohio, and it was like no time had passed since we first met in the ’90s. We didn’t have time to visit the reportedly haunted Moonville Tunnel, referenced below, but hopefully we’ll get a chance to explore his “fantastic planet” before long.

Earwig: The Strange Case of Lizard McGee and Other Weird Stories

By Robert Cherry

Lizard McGee loves secrets. While trying to make headway in the music biz out in California, the Ohio-bred singer-guitarist paid the rent as a tour guide at the Winchester Mystery House, in San Jose. There he led thrill-seekers through the allegedly haunted mansion of the late Winchester rifle heiress, up architectural curiosities such as stairways that—metaphorical of his experience with major labels—led nowhere. 

When he returned to his native Ohio and his D.I.Y. roots and his longtime band Earwig, he sought songwriting inspiration in another alleged occult space, the Moonville Tunnel, a disused railway passage in the dense forests of southern Ohio, patrolled, as legend has it, by the specter of a lamp-swinging brakeman from the late 1800s. Fittingly, the album that resulted in part from that visit, Center Of The Earth (on McGee’s own LFM Records), features not only well-crafted, heartfelt tunes with smart lyrics and hooks galore, but also a few mysteries of its own. 

“I have a copy of film footage that purportedly shows the Apollo astronauts faking the lunar landing,” says McGee. “The countdown in the album’s intro is from the rocket launch, but the voices that are buried in the mix [of opening track “Used Kids”] are taken from the footage of them faking the moon landing. It’s footage that was never meant to be public. It’s secret. The things they say—if you can make them out—are pretty revealing. And so far, I have not had anyone guess what the backwards recording is saying in the second verse, after the line ‘a message hidden in the music he plays.’”

For almost 15 years, Earwig, which also features drummer Justin Crooks, bassist Matt Wagner and the production touch of Eric French, has itself been something of a secret to anyone outside of the band’s home state. But that’s changing. Thanks to the group’s sweat equity on the road and the shout-along chorus of the aforementioned “Used Kids,” Earwig now has a regional hit at a time when such things seem like impossibility. 

Currently in frequent rotation at Columbus’s commercial-alternative station, the song takes its title from a local independent record store, and further mythologizes one of the store’s long-time employees, Ron House, former howler for the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and before that, the Great Plains. But even “Used Kids” isn’t what it seems on its power-pop surface—it’s actually a word-for-word recounting of a fever dream McGee experienced.

“In my dream, I was at Used Kids on campus… but it was also a 7-11. I was trying to get out of the store but Ron wouldn’t leave me alone. He was freaking out about Y2K and the end of the world. He was following me around the store with a copy of The Weekly World News with a picture on the cover of Jesus’ face in a mushroom cloud. To him this was a sign of Armageddon. I was a little worried about him and asked him if he needed a ride home. His response was [what became the song’s chorus], ‘Hey man, don’t worry. I got a ride. I’m going home with Jesus tonight.’

“So it’s not a religious song, just a song about a very, very strange dream.”

Earwig, Center Of The Earth (Lizard Family Music) Armed with indelible hooks and a sharp wit, Earwig crawls from the center of the earth—a.k.a. Southeast Ohio—with a fresh line-up and its first full-length in over half a decade. The result: an essential collection of bright power pop sung and played with a slight Ohia twang and pushed forward by a muscular rhythm section. Lizard McGee, the trio’s fantastically named guitarist-vocalist, balances the infectious with the affecting through 12 keenly observed story-songs casting life in middle America as some sort of celebration. On “Used Kids,” a shoutalong character study of Columbus indie-rock hero/bar-stool philosopher Ron House, McGee sings, “He says today’s kids are used up and anxious, they think they see a sympathetic look in my eye. But Ron says he never says he’s sorry ‘cause he doesn’t like to lie.” By the end of the album, you might find yourself driving to the group’s adopted hometown of Athens, Ohio, just to experience McGee’s fantastic planet for yourself.

©2007 Robert Cherry, all rights reserved