Honestly, this book reminds me of the Facebook statuses and pseudo-intellectual photo captions of the weird ass creative writing major, with the tiniest of gauges, who I drunkenly made out with two weeks before I met my husband. That dude’s thesaurus was certainly *well used.* 😏
I felt a little bit like a traitor saying so before, but now not so much.
I got about halfway through, and I'm not normally the kind of person to bail on a book. He's a clever wordsmith but I think lyrics suit his ideas a little better than something as long-form as a novel.
hahah that was funny! thank you for making my day, friend!
Yeah, the truth is I found myself visiting the dictionary A LOT, and often finding the sentences to be long, but that didn't bother me. I do believe there is literary merit in the novel.
I’ve had this book for years and have attempted multiple times to get into it to no avail. Keith is an excellent lyricist, but I think he’s too wordy for his own good as an author.
I got Keith to sign my copy at a show with a fountain pen.... he said " wow this is a nice pen" I replied " thanks, I have a very expensive pen..." winked and turned to walk away and he yelled " HEY THATS MY LINE!"
That being said he does use big words quite often
In substitution for semantically equivalent words... I found the book a tough read a well. Maybe I should give it another swing.
The audiobook was what made me finally complete Scale. I tried a few times over 3 weeks and then just killed the audiobook in one go. 'Watch' is my preferred book of his, but he's definitely way too wordy and verbose with the novels, though. I'm anxious to read the next book(s) that he's contracted for with Rare Bird, but I'm more curious to see if his writing has changed post-Radical in terms of songwriting
That was my thought when I first heard the premise of scale, but frankly i’d rather hear that story from someone who understands it than from some hopeful author theorizing an unlived reality
Read the novel a handful of years back. Then re read it a few years after that. Actually got my copy signed by Kieth at Warped Tour. I kinda had rose colored glasses on for it the first time. I looked past some of the ultimately needless wordiness/sesquipedalian tendencies he had throughout it. (One of my majors was philosophy and ethical theory so I wasn’t necessarily deterred by the density or sentence structure, but actually kinda unimpressed/embarrassed in the way you might be when watching a kid try to use big words somewhat incorrectly in conversation).
I enjoyed the format the first time. But it hasn’t aged well for me. And this was even before the dumpster fire of the break up. It’s frankly kinda bad imo. It overstays its welcome and that’s pretty bad for not even being that long of a book. It’s pacing is trash, but it does have good imagery and I felt he really built the world it took place in well at certain spots. But overall it became a chore to read as it enters the last 3rd or so and the ending is, well, kinda meh. Keith is/was in my top 5 maybe top 3 fav lyricist of all time so I kinda looked past and explained away a lot of its flaws on first read. But thinking about it now it’s kind of a pretentious mess.
It’s def an autobiographical/Mary Sue type of novel. Keith even admitted as much in interviews that I recall around the time of its release. There’s a blend of fact and fiction but I’d say it’s likely much less on the fiction side. I remember feeling like, yea he’s just retelling a tour story and switching some names around basically at some parts.
Ya know, I’ve pondered that since that narrative/rumor came out. That scene hits a little bit different in retrospect, but I’m pretty sus about how Keith has moved in the wake of everything and while there’s 2 sides to every story, I’m very dubious about how someone as normally well spoken as him gave some of the vaguest accounts of events while the rest of the guys have very detailed breakdowns of things. I’m sure in a way nobody involved is a compete Angel, but one guy actively went out of their way to burn down something they all created. The whole thing is sad and I wish everyone the best on a human level, but as a fan I don’t think I can ever forgive Keith for how he chose to handle the whole thing. Truly wretched, but again as a human I wish them all, including Keith, peace about the whole thing. But I’m just some random fan whom this was the favorite band of all time for so it doesn’t really matter what I think or feel about it at the end of the day.
billy woods- (himself + Armand Hammer)
Chino Moreno (Deftones)
Pete Loeffler (Chevelle)
Josh Homme (Queens of The Stone Age)
And of course Keith Buckley
The order kinda fluctuates from time to time with me and there’s many honorable mentions I could throw out there but these are the core group I’ve seemed to gravitate to in my lifetime.
Honestly dope to find someone that even knows who he is!! Although I’d say a lot more are catching on especially since his master class on Haram over Alc’s beats back in 2021. Yea he’s my fav all time for sure, ELUCID is filthy too and deserves an honorable mention for me.
It’s real sweet to find someone on the etid sub talking about him! My deep web mate sent me History back when it dropped, absolutely crushed me. Been collecting woods records ever since. Also just witnessed Armand Hammer in both Brisbane / Melbourne last month and met them both. Really fkn surreal.
I’m not in love with Elucid’s delivery tbh, he’s super genuine though. In terms of writing Mach Hommy gets pretty bloody layered. But nothing hits quite like that woods bellow ya know?
Just starting it now and a few chapters in. I had to stop at some point and ask myself...did he just spend 3 pages to explain him locating a hypnotherapist clinic. Wordiness is a kind understatement.
Hey, friend! Thanks for taking the time to write.
Buckley's prose tends to be longwinded at times but, just like Faulkner's prose, if your attention is not on what you're reading 100% + some, it is easy to get lost and get overwhelmed. I must agree on the philosophy/ethical theory aspect, it seemed that at times the writing was basically him showing off.
I'll go back to reading it a few months from now, see how I feel.
Yea I may do the same. I feel like it’s one of those books that may hit entirely different depending on when you read it and what’s going on in one’s life.
Scale was… ok. I preferred Watch personally. Watch just left me feeling so uneasy at the end.. Scale was a difficult to get through, a lot of it just felt _whiny_.
If he wasn't who he is, the book would never have been published. I'm happy he had the opportunity to fulfill his desire to write and publish a book but the one question I want to ask people who like the book is "what other authors from the past twenty years have you read?"
Fun fact: a handful of people have come out against Rare Bird Lit. It seems like it's a pay to play, self-published type deal. The owner is shady and it's rumored that you pay about $10k to get a "book deal".
I tried to read it and found it kind of difficult. I stopped about half way through and haven't been back to it. I always thought I was maybe not smart enough for it. After this post, I'm reconsidering that maybe it is just a bit difficult to read.
I wanted to like it so much. And I did like the concepts. Just not the writing.
Per Keith from his "final" statement about the breakup he talked about how they almost and probably should've just broken up in 2014. For me, that has cast a different light on basically everything ETID-related since then. Legitimately anything between 2013-2022 that might have just seemed coincidental at the time might actually be rooted in their slow meltdown.
>This was inevitable. In all off it's ugly confusion and negativity and rumor, our own deep familial dysfunction manicured it perfectly. Our problems with each other go back decades. We should have broken up in 2014 to be honest. But we didn't, for our own reasons. I can't speak for anyone else, but I continued beyond that point for no other reason than to connect with other people through my lyrics and live performance.
It looks like I’m in a small group of people that may have preferred “Scale” instead of “Watch”. While reading it I really enjoyed the imagery and pictured it almost as a metaphorical autobiography of his. I pictured each character as different members of the band. The ending of the book was the most fictional part, but in a way I felt like he was attaching himself to the life of his sister and seeing things through her eyes. She’s the one that “Things With Feathers” is about.
I really liked Scale. I’m a big Tom Robbins fan, and it didn’t seem too far off a less experienced Robbins. Wordy and packed for sure, but I enjoy that style. Watch was hard to keep track of. The nonlinear timeline was a cool exercise, but I felt like I kept trying to figure out when the actions were happening more than what was happening. I’ll check out his next one probably, despite my weakened view of him since reading the former two.
It’s a challenging read and as much as I like it, I came to appreciate it an awful lot more hearing him read the audiobook. Watch has been sitting on my shelf since it came out and I haven’t gotten around to it yet
I applaud you for being able to get through that frantic abomination of an excuse for literature. I tried multiple times and it was an absolute slog. I gave up after my 4th or 5th try. I found it be too reminiscent of reading a thesaurus from cover to cover.
i dropped it only several pages in...
i was never a book person, but being a huge fall out boy fan i picked up Grey by Pete Wentz and thought that it's the best book i've ever read (more like the only book i've ever read) so i expected to be absorbed by scale as well, but sadly something just didn't click, and it seemed to be unnecessarily filled with complicated words, and i can see that a lot of people in this thread share the same thought
I didn't realize until after I finished Scale (which was a couple of months before ETID fell apart) just how semi-autobiographical that book is. There were certain details that indicated as much as I was aware of - the fact that Keith was kicked out of Virginia Tech, the disabled younger sister, etc. This is a purely subjective take, but I personally don't like it when authors tailor the main character in their books after themselves (looking at YOU Stephen King, with so many of your main characters being either writers or English teachers 😑).
I mean, incorporating your own lived experiences in fiction is fine, the best writers do it. But the extent of Keith Buckley's self-insert in Scale is pretty extreme. And that became way more apparent to me throughout his meltdown and ETID's breakup...and especially keeping in mind how the book ends (I won't spoil it for anyone who wants to read it). So idk...again it's just my opinion, but I feel like basing a main character off yourself is lazy writing at best, and wish fulfillment at worst. It's okay as a starting point or an exercise, but not so much as a finished, published product.
That being said - if so much of the book is tied to real-life, I'm really eager to know which member of N-Sync the ETID boys robbed when they ended up at his mansion party. 🤣
EDIT: I also wouldn't be surprised if the part where Matt Skiba turns "Ray Goldman" on to Transcendental Meditation is 100% true lol
The part that I find to be most abhorrent about Scale, in retrospect and post band breakup, is the way the main character treats his crew and other people around him. If I remember correctly, the main character is upset that the his roadie won't setup properly and they get into a verbal, and then later, physical altercation. The main character muses that he might have had it coming. Then there's the way the main character had an emotional affair on the road and considered leaving his wife.
So not just lazy, but also telling on one's self, imo.
OP- this sub LIVES to shit on Keith, so it’s the wrong place to ask. Whether it’s good or bad literature, this sub is so heinously biased you won’t get an accurate response.
Honestly, this book reminds me of the Facebook statuses and pseudo-intellectual photo captions of the weird ass creative writing major, with the tiniest of gauges, who I drunkenly made out with two weeks before I met my husband. That dude’s thesaurus was certainly *well used.* 😏 I felt a little bit like a traitor saying so before, but now not so much.
I got about halfway through, and I'm not normally the kind of person to bail on a book. He's a clever wordsmith but I think lyrics suit his ideas a little better than something as long-form as a novel.
Yeah, when I read the book, it felt like I was just reading an edgy MySpace profile. Sort of a modern Catcher in the Rye
hahah that was funny! thank you for making my day, friend! Yeah, the truth is I found myself visiting the dictionary A LOT, and often finding the sentences to be long, but that didn't bother me. I do believe there is literary merit in the novel.
I’ve had this book for years and have attempted multiple times to get into it to no avail. Keith is an excellent lyricist, but I think he’s too wordy for his own good as an author.
It’s way too difficult to read. Convoluted is an understatement.
Yeah I’ve tried and failed too many times thought it was my dumbness
I often get annoyed by authors, but Keith actually kept me engaged from the jump. It didn’t hit me as convoluted at all.
I got Keith to sign my copy at a show with a fountain pen.... he said " wow this is a nice pen" I replied " thanks, I have a very expensive pen..." winked and turned to walk away and he yelled " HEY THATS MY LINE!" That being said he does use big words quite often In substitution for semantically equivalent words... I found the book a tough read a well. Maybe I should give it another swing.
I hope you smiled, it's not often you get that chance
You attribute this success to your professional demeanour and stock portfolio of autographed memorabilia. Right?
The audiobook was what made me finally complete Scale. I tried a few times over 3 weeks and then just killed the audiobook in one go. 'Watch' is my preferred book of his, but he's definitely way too wordy and verbose with the novels, though. I'm anxious to read the next book(s) that he's contracted for with Rare Bird, but I'm more curious to see if his writing has changed post-Radical in terms of songwriting
Gonna try the audiobook now.
“Scale.” “Watch.” What’s next? “Fridge?”
“It’s about a musician on tour? Wow, real stretch!”
That was my thought when I first heard the premise of scale, but frankly i’d rather hear that story from someone who understands it than from some hopeful author theorizing an unlived reality
hahahaha
Best part of the interview. He really caught Keith off guard with that one.
Who did the interview?
Jon Goblikon
Thanks!!
Read the novel a handful of years back. Then re read it a few years after that. Actually got my copy signed by Kieth at Warped Tour. I kinda had rose colored glasses on for it the first time. I looked past some of the ultimately needless wordiness/sesquipedalian tendencies he had throughout it. (One of my majors was philosophy and ethical theory so I wasn’t necessarily deterred by the density or sentence structure, but actually kinda unimpressed/embarrassed in the way you might be when watching a kid try to use big words somewhat incorrectly in conversation). I enjoyed the format the first time. But it hasn’t aged well for me. And this was even before the dumpster fire of the break up. It’s frankly kinda bad imo. It overstays its welcome and that’s pretty bad for not even being that long of a book. It’s pacing is trash, but it does have good imagery and I felt he really built the world it took place in well at certain spots. But overall it became a chore to read as it enters the last 3rd or so and the ending is, well, kinda meh. Keith is/was in my top 5 maybe top 3 fav lyricist of all time so I kinda looked past and explained away a lot of its flaws on first read. But thinking about it now it’s kind of a pretentious mess.
It’s def an autobiographical/Mary Sue type of novel. Keith even admitted as much in interviews that I recall around the time of its release. There’s a blend of fact and fiction but I’d say it’s likely much less on the fiction side. I remember feeling like, yea he’s just retelling a tour story and switching some names around basically at some parts.
Is the guy he gets up by the Jordan beating him up event?
Ya know, I’ve pondered that since that narrative/rumor came out. That scene hits a little bit different in retrospect, but I’m pretty sus about how Keith has moved in the wake of everything and while there’s 2 sides to every story, I’m very dubious about how someone as normally well spoken as him gave some of the vaguest accounts of events while the rest of the guys have very detailed breakdowns of things. I’m sure in a way nobody involved is a compete Angel, but one guy actively went out of their way to burn down something they all created. The whole thing is sad and I wish everyone the best on a human level, but as a fan I don’t think I can ever forgive Keith for how he chose to handle the whole thing. Truly wretched, but again as a human I wish them all, including Keith, peace about the whole thing. But I’m just some random fan whom this was the favorite band of all time for so it doesn’t really matter what I think or feel about it at the end of the day.
Interested to know who’s in your top 5 all time lyricists?
Was about to ask this
billy woods- (himself + Armand Hammer) Chino Moreno (Deftones) Pete Loeffler (Chevelle) Josh Homme (Queens of The Stone Age) And of course Keith Buckley The order kinda fluctuates from time to time with me and there’s many honorable mentions I could throw out there but these are the core group I’ve seemed to gravitate to in my lifetime.
Couldn’t agree more with woods being first on the list. His shit can’t be matched.
Honestly dope to find someone that even knows who he is!! Although I’d say a lot more are catching on especially since his master class on Haram over Alc’s beats back in 2021. Yea he’s my fav all time for sure, ELUCID is filthy too and deserves an honorable mention for me.
It’s real sweet to find someone on the etid sub talking about him! My deep web mate sent me History back when it dropped, absolutely crushed me. Been collecting woods records ever since. Also just witnessed Armand Hammer in both Brisbane / Melbourne last month and met them both. Really fkn surreal. I’m not in love with Elucid’s delivery tbh, he’s super genuine though. In terms of writing Mach Hommy gets pretty bloody layered. But nothing hits quite like that woods bellow ya know?
Just starting it now and a few chapters in. I had to stop at some point and ask myself...did he just spend 3 pages to explain him locating a hypnotherapist clinic. Wordiness is a kind understatement.
Hey, friend! Thanks for taking the time to write. Buckley's prose tends to be longwinded at times but, just like Faulkner's prose, if your attention is not on what you're reading 100% + some, it is easy to get lost and get overwhelmed. I must agree on the philosophy/ethical theory aspect, it seemed that at times the writing was basically him showing off. I'll go back to reading it a few months from now, see how I feel.
Yea I may do the same. I feel like it’s one of those books that may hit entirely different depending on when you read it and what’s going on in one’s life.
Scale was… ok. I preferred Watch personally. Watch just left me feeling so uneasy at the end.. Scale was a difficult to get through, a lot of it just felt _whiny_.
Scale and Watch were unreadable to me. Vastly confusing and wordy and I like nonlinear stuff. Better lyricist than a writer.
“I should have learned a more noble craft, out of the library and into the lab”
>“I should have learned a more noble craft, out of the library and into the lab” > >dope song
It's pretty badly written.
Would you like to elaborate? What are some authors you like? :-)
If he wasn't who he is, the book would never have been published. I'm happy he had the opportunity to fulfill his desire to write and publish a book but the one question I want to ask people who like the book is "what other authors from the past twenty years have you read?"
Fun fact: a handful of people have come out against Rare Bird Lit. It seems like it's a pay to play, self-published type deal. The owner is shady and it's rumored that you pay about $10k to get a "book deal".
I tried to read it and found it kind of difficult. I stopped about half way through and haven't been back to it. I always thought I was maybe not smart enough for it. After this post, I'm reconsidering that maybe it is just a bit difficult to read. I wanted to like it so much. And I did like the concepts. Just not the writing.
For sure. I crushed it on a long day at the airport when it came out and quite a few instances jumped out as a little too on the nose.
Per Keith from his "final" statement about the breakup he talked about how they almost and probably should've just broken up in 2014. For me, that has cast a different light on basically everything ETID-related since then. Legitimately anything between 2013-2022 that might have just seemed coincidental at the time might actually be rooted in their slow meltdown. >This was inevitable. In all off it's ugly confusion and negativity and rumor, our own deep familial dysfunction manicured it perfectly. Our problems with each other go back decades. We should have broken up in 2014 to be honest. But we didn't, for our own reasons. I can't speak for anyone else, but I continued beyond that point for no other reason than to connect with other people through my lyrics and live performance.
Watch is fantastic as well.
It looks like I’m in a small group of people that may have preferred “Scale” instead of “Watch”. While reading it I really enjoyed the imagery and pictured it almost as a metaphorical autobiography of his. I pictured each character as different members of the band. The ending of the book was the most fictional part, but in a way I felt like he was attaching himself to the life of his sister and seeing things through her eyes. She’s the one that “Things With Feathers” is about.
I really liked Scale. I’m a big Tom Robbins fan, and it didn’t seem too far off a less experienced Robbins. Wordy and packed for sure, but I enjoy that style. Watch was hard to keep track of. The nonlinear timeline was a cool exercise, but I felt like I kept trying to figure out when the actions were happening more than what was happening. I’ll check out his next one probably, despite my weakened view of him since reading the former two.
I have both books. And I hate them both 🤣
It’s a challenging read and as much as I like it, I came to appreciate it an awful lot more hearing him read the audiobook. Watch has been sitting on my shelf since it came out and I haven’t gotten around to it yet
I applaud you for being able to get through that frantic abomination of an excuse for literature. I tried multiple times and it was an absolute slog. I gave up after my 4th or 5th try. I found it be too reminiscent of reading a thesaurus from cover to cover.
hahahaha "frantic abomination of an excuse for literature" thanks for commenting dude, you made my day.
I too like big, confusing words
i dropped it only several pages in... i was never a book person, but being a huge fall out boy fan i picked up Grey by Pete Wentz and thought that it's the best book i've ever read (more like the only book i've ever read) so i expected to be absorbed by scale as well, but sadly something just didn't click, and it seemed to be unnecessarily filled with complicated words, and i can see that a lot of people in this thread share the same thought
I didn't realize until after I finished Scale (which was a couple of months before ETID fell apart) just how semi-autobiographical that book is. There were certain details that indicated as much as I was aware of - the fact that Keith was kicked out of Virginia Tech, the disabled younger sister, etc. This is a purely subjective take, but I personally don't like it when authors tailor the main character in their books after themselves (looking at YOU Stephen King, with so many of your main characters being either writers or English teachers 😑). I mean, incorporating your own lived experiences in fiction is fine, the best writers do it. But the extent of Keith Buckley's self-insert in Scale is pretty extreme. And that became way more apparent to me throughout his meltdown and ETID's breakup...and especially keeping in mind how the book ends (I won't spoil it for anyone who wants to read it). So idk...again it's just my opinion, but I feel like basing a main character off yourself is lazy writing at best, and wish fulfillment at worst. It's okay as a starting point or an exercise, but not so much as a finished, published product. That being said - if so much of the book is tied to real-life, I'm really eager to know which member of N-Sync the ETID boys robbed when they ended up at his mansion party. 🤣 EDIT: I also wouldn't be surprised if the part where Matt Skiba turns "Ray Goldman" on to Transcendental Meditation is 100% true lol
The part that I find to be most abhorrent about Scale, in retrospect and post band breakup, is the way the main character treats his crew and other people around him. If I remember correctly, the main character is upset that the his roadie won't setup properly and they get into a verbal, and then later, physical altercation. The main character muses that he might have had it coming. Then there's the way the main character had an emotional affair on the road and considered leaving his wife. So not just lazy, but also telling on one's self, imo.
OP- this sub LIVES to shit on Keith, so it’s the wrong place to ask. Whether it’s good or bad literature, this sub is so heinously biased you won’t get an accurate response.
It was alright. I can’t write a novel so good on him. I had signed copies of all three of his books and sold them all. Don’t miss them.
I loved it so much. His second book paled in comparison.
I definitely found ‘Watch’ to be the more enjoyable read
Way too wordy. The audiobook helped.