Death with Wilco, Life with Peter Gabriel, and Change with David Bazan | SOTW 08/23/2024
Wow, it feels good to have one of these done and dusted after three months—some of the entries coming this week and next week have been percolating for some three months now, and hitting “publish” on this feels like popping a cystic zit. You guys want to read some cystic zit?
Seriously though, if you are reading this, thanks for sticking with me through a content-less summer. As I detailed in my update last month, I’ve been pretty burnt out on Songs of the Week for a myriad of reasons, but since I’ll never stop loving music, these posts aren’t going anywhere—just slowing down, especially as I enter grad school. For now, though, I’ve got not three but five weeks worth of songs to send your way since I know no moderation, starting with this week’s material from, uh… early June? Yikes. Fittingly for something I’ve held in this long, it has exploded into something not only excessively long, but also a bit more personal than usual, so content warning for some hokey earnestness and some drama that doesn’t need to be drama. You know, the usual, and with the usual comes the usual suspects—here’s a lot on death, life, change, and Chelsea Wolfe.
SAY YOU LOVE ME | Wilco Hey, do you guys ever think about dying? I find it hard not to most days. I’d truly hate to invalidate anyone’s tightly-held beliefs about what waits on the other side, but I find any idea of an afterlife to be unconvincing beyond its symbolism for the many metaphorical deaths and rebirths we each experience. To be clear, I’d very much like to be convinced—a lot of dogmatic institutions warn against a secular upbringing, and the one thing I think they’re right about is that the lack of a guiding mythology leads inevitably towards nihilism. Still, I can’t will myself to believe a fact about the outside world that I know to be unverifiable—empirically, all I know is that I didn’t exist before, and someday, I will not exist again. And when I hear that, it’s like… great, thanks. That’s fuckin’ warm and fuzzy, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Sure, there are plenty of agnostic ways people have poetically coped with how little we know, but unfortunately, I find these equally unconvincing—I try not to say this in front of any genies with a wicked sense of humor, but to me, utter erasure, the inability to even sense or think or feel, seems surely less preferable than any inconceivably cruel hell, because at least you’re sensing, thinking, and feeling there. Sure, I’ve already experienced nonexistence before I was born, but I wasn’t me then, and I won’t be me when my consciousness disintegrates with my body—no sensing, no thinking, no feeling. Sure, every moment is now, and I will always exist between the day I was born and the day I will die, but there’s no guarantee that my thus-far linear consciousness will somehow always be experiencing that slice of time after one go. Sure, if we view life on Earth four-dimensionally, every living thing is a single organism—an immortal molecule—whose many individual branches grow and wither while passing that same, modified molecule onto their descendants in a single, blossoming strand, but… well, as spiritual as it is, I cannot define my consciousness, my experience, my memories, as anything beyond my individual branch. I am me. “Me” is finite.
For some reason, I’ve especially felt death in the air this summer (which, to my understanding, is not very brat). Maybe it’s the senseless slaughter of Palestinians overseas that’s funneled from my tax dollars, or maybe it’s the wildfires that recently boxed in both my current and childhood homes, close enough that it was inadvisable to breathe outside. When I first began this draft, even my country seemed to be on death’s door, represented by two near-octogenarian politicians eating themselves alive before a resigned nation. Of course, we’ve since had an assassination attempt and a step-down, but as bleak as it got, I’m almost convinced things could get better now (reminder that a very necessary vote for Harris doesn’t mean we still can’t hold her feet to the fire). Still, things got grim for an eternal minute. Appropriately, I spent the fourth of the July talking about America and death with my girlfriend and a great longtime friend of mine, who has worked against death as both a paramedic and a telomere research lab assistant in the past. Ever since CGP Grey’s semi-serious proclamation that death is simply the next chronic disease to be overcome, my friend and I both have held out hope that, like all diseases, there is a cure for death—as far as we know, the process is purely biological, so why shouldn’t there be (and before you get all Flatliners or Sorcerer’s Stone on me and say we’re not meant to live forever, of course there would be problems, but I would hope immortality might come with the maturity to transcend them)? Telomeres, for some, have shown a glimmer of promise in this area. For those unaware, my friend explains Telomeres as “the aglets of your cells”—repeating nucleotide sequences of 5'-TTAGGG-3' capping off each of your chromosomes that tell your cells where DNA ends. Every time your DNA replicates—which, as you may know, happens every time your cells divide—your telomeres get shorter until your cells, eventually, can replicate no longer, causing aging and, eventually, death. Even within our own bodies, though, this process is not irreversible—the enzyme telomerase actively lengthens your telomeres, though not at a significant enough rate to reach an equilibrium. My friend, a few years ago, worked in a research lab increasing the telomerase in mice in hopes to increase their lifespan, but when I asked him about it this Fourth of July, he seemed grimly resigned, explaining that letting cells divide indefinitely in any other scenario is what most people call “cancer”—leading right back to death’s door. Though I’d seen him optimistic before, he now seemed fairly certain that our generation would not be the one to see anything like anti-aging gene therapy. So, we return to the reaper—and where else is there to go?
You know, this was supposed to be a song review, not a soapbox, although they’re increasingly difficult to tell apart here, aren’t they? Luckily, who came to the rescue this summer but Wilco, surprising us less than a year after their last release, Cousin, with a rare EP: Hot Sun Cool Shroud. Whereas Cousin sounded firmly like winter bleeding into spring, Hot Sun Cool Shroud for me captures summer in six, polished songs. To be fair, “summer” is a pretty loaded term associated with music releases, but this isn’t summer in the break sense, isn’t summer in the Sabrina Carpenter or Charli XCX sense, but summer as I’ve really felt it the last few years: heat-beat, buzzy-muggy, and inescapably exhausting (I know, I’m a lot of fun at barbecues). Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty that justifies summer’s great reputation, and Hot Sun captures this too, but an angry-hot tone sizzles through most of this album’s unique sound, which has a little bit of everywhere Wilco’s gone before. Here, there’s the lo-fi sadboy attitude of Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the rockin’ guitar of Wilco (The Album), and the syrupy experimentation leftover from Cousin, all blended into an EP that feels quintessentially Wilco. Even with just six tracks to write on, I’ve got enough thoughts for Hot Sun to make 2o24’s Songs of the Year, so as you can imagine, picking one to spotlight this week took some serious thinking. I’d love to talk about the humid, angular freakout “Hot Sun,” the shocking AC/DC shreddage on “Livid,” or the muted, melty, melancholy of “Ice Cream,” among other things, but with a closer that seemingly responded to my death fixation, there wasn’t any other choice but “Say You Love Me.”
After an EP that’s buzzed, simmered, and trudged thus far, an intro that gently fades in with trembling violin and sparkling synth might come as an emotional surprise. Though we begin with notes of Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37),” I’m happy to inform listeners that this song progresses towards a happier sort of hurt. Still, once Tweedy’s poem begins, just know you’re really in for it:
Once you're born, a single drop of sun
A ray of light holds you in its arms
Once you're gone, you shine on in your friends
And then
Everyone you love
Hears your voice withinSo say I love you again
And I’m just gonna encourage you to let that sit for a second, because, like, fuck man. Yea.
My internal Neil Tyson, devil horns a-glinting, says this is no different than being a branch of the immortal molecule. Every trace left by me, left by you, is just an echo—isn’t me, isn’t you, isn’t the way we sense, we think, we feel. Still, I’m so moved by both the human desperation here and the transpersonal wisdom that exists despite it. It reminds me of a dream psychoanalyst Carl Jung recounts towards the end of his reluctant memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
I was walking along a little road through a hilly landscape; the sun was shining and I had a wide view in all directions. Then I came to a small wayside chapel. The door was ajar, and I went in. To my surprise there was no image of the Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only a wonderful flower arrangement. But then I saw that on the floor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi in lotus posture, in deep meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.
In other words, Jung’s ego here—in this context, his conscious, individual “I”—is being reminded that it will most certainly die. The yogi with his face, however, to Jung represented the undercurrent of the Self within him—of the unifying miracle of all creation, which defines him as uniquely as it defines any rock, tree, or ocean—not only predates his ego, but will exist long after it. Similarly, “Say You Love Me” never denies the reality of personal death —“once you’re gone” is outright accepted—yet for me, death stops being a personal issue when I’m reminded that the essence of “you,” of me, plants a seed in everyone else. It’s no seed I can remain fragmentarily conscious through, no seed I can continue to sense, think, or feel from, and yet there’s agency in choosing what part of you, of me, lives on beyond the grave—the part you feed in your friends and family. Jeff Tweedy is one of those people I refuse to admit will die, but should the worst come to pass, his words, just like those of a friend, will remain not just in me, but in everyone I’ve ever shared Wilco with—his reminder to “say I love you” is more powerful than death, at least for as many generations as we let it be. What about my words? What will those closest to me hear my voice say within? I don’t want it to be all of this malarkey about the inevitability of nonexistence, whether or not it proves true. I can only speak for so long, but I’ll always say the other thing I know to be true: to sense, to think, to feel, is an everyday gift, an act of defiance, so sense, think, and feel because my god, you can—and say I love you again.
Pairs Well With: “Story to Tell” (Wilco), “Lady Stardust” (David Bowie), “Darkmatter” (Andrew Bird)
DOWN TO THE GROUND | Peter Gabriel & Thomas Newman [spoilers for Wall-E ahead] Of course, between birth and dying, there’s a whole lot of living, but it goes pretty fast if you’re not careful, and there’s no do-overs, but like, don’t think too hard about it. Life’s in the living, but I spend a lot of mine in the thinking—or, more accurately, the fearing—which, I think, is a core symptom at the center of several things I’ve neglected in my life of late. In a way, I’m sort of lucky that my sedative of choice is screen time instead of something like nicotine (although who can know for sure if it’s preferable to have withered lungs until zoomers start experiencing whatever early-onset Alzheimer’s is headed our way), but no matter the mental pollutant, it’s awful to watch life trickle by—ironically, it’s paralyzing, and what better way to soothe this than turning right back to the sedative?
It’s a cycle we’ll speak on more later, but it’s one I’m all too familiar with, having dealt with it on and off for the past five years but never fully shaken it. With Emily and I moving in together for the first time this July, I saw a chance to become the mindful, willful Max I’d need to be to break the spell, and made a plan for myself to change. Unfortunately, the thing about plans is that they make God laugh, and though Emily and I stayed a supportive, solid team through all of it, pretty much everything around us fell apart as soon as the move began, and we scrambled to pick up the pieces for an ensuing three weeks. When the dust settled, I found myself in the haze of a pretty bad slump despite regular reminders from my family and Emily to take care of myself. Though I wasn’t even fully aware of it (such is the point of sedatives), I found myself deeply sad for days with no reason at all. Writing about Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind last week, I was struck by its similarities to Wall-E, and, almost simultaneously, found myself remembering lyrics I’d never thought carefully about as a kid. Being one of my first-ever movies seen in theaters, of course Wall-E has emotionally wrecked me for as long as I can remember. Its themes of environmentalism, extinction, and deep time fall effortlessly in line with my paleontological interests, its vision of the soft apocalypse has deeply defined my outlook on life, but maybe most of all, its love story would always bring me right to the crumbling precipice of tears, though at eight or so, I was way too manly to admit it. And there, at the end, waiting with all of these threads woven together, was a once and future hero of mine, Peter Gabriel, with maybe the movie’s biggest tear-jerk: “Down to Earth.”
Written in collaboration with Wall-E composer Thomas Newman, “Down to Earth” synthesizes the rusty, plucky instruments that index Wall-E’s machine soul with Gabriel’s own soulful, earthy piano and vocals to create a piece that, though simple, would be worthy of a… what kind of awards do they give these things, Golden Globes? Academy Awards? Grammies? Well, to spare us the confusion, it won all three, and I think that’s thanks to Gabriel’s wisdom. As we’ve spoken on in the past, Gabriel’s prose isn’t all that imagistic because it doesn’t necessarily need to be—he’s the sort of wise man who needs not dress up his words because they’re already straight from the heart. When reminded of Wall-E, the lyrics that magnetically rushed up from my unconscious were these:
Did you think you'd escaped from routine
By changing the script and the scene?
Despite all you made of it, you're always afraid
Of the change
…which, given my present situation, felt like a splash of cold water in the moment. What a gently cutting callout—said without disappointment but a smile and a shake of his head, because who hasn’t been here? The trick isn’t, as Wall-E depicts, to avoid mistakes entirely, but to instead stumble, fall, and remember it so that you may walk once again. I’m not usually a fan of movie tie-in songs because so often, artists blamelessly eyeing their paycheck will simply repeat the movie’s surface plot in their lyrics and call it a day, but “Down to Earth” succeeds like the best of original songs because it riffs not on plot, but theme. Though I haven’t heard it said in these words, Wall-E is very clearly about sedation. If its plot is read as an internal struggle, when we neglect our inner environment—whether it be our bodies or our psychological landscape—we often mistakenly turn to outside sources, virtual worlds, to distract us from the problems festering inside. Funnily enough, given that Pixar was owned by Apple while Wall-E was in production, co-writer and director Andrew Stanton was one of the first to try the iPhone, and he was deeply unsettled by the experience—in this insane article, he recounts how its too-intuitive interface reminded him of being a smoker in college, and partially inspired the base-function baby people living on the Axiom. Of course, as “Down to Earth” plays, we are shown the Axiom’s passengers rebuilding the world that was always theirs, an externalization of the process all wounded people must go through: learning to be in their bodies—to be human—again.
So, obviously, this concept fucking obliterates me in itself (and there’s a reason, I think, these lyrics magically resurfaced in my time of need), but Peter Gabriel isn’t famous for his words—his talent is bleeding them into music and visuals. I’ve already mentioned the fact that co-composer Newman’s synths gradually give way to human acoustic and vocals, but perhaps the earthiest of these additions is the backup provided by the Soweto Gospel Choir. Their inclusion instantly invokes the proper religiosity of becoming one with the Earth—becoming one with oneself—after feeling lost in space, and though I was somehow stubborn enough to stay composed through it as a kid, their harmonies on “coming down” at the end just kill me these days. We’re talking full body chills on the last note.
Completing this perfect vision is the accompanying credits sequence, which, much like Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, depicts humanity’s future through the stylings of the past. If you haven’t seen it, watch the goddamn movie first, but for those who have, here’s your refresher:
Through the surprisingly mature implication that reconstruction—rebuilding trust with the Earth—takes place over centuries, the art style shifts from cave paintings, to Egyptian hieroglyphics, to Roman mosaics, to Japanese line art, on through European impressionism and faux Van Gogh while humans remember their latent past. It’s only upon reflection that I’m realizing just how impactful this epilogue was on my early conception of history, time, and nature. I remember, in attempting to create some crossover chronology to justify my Wall-E toys interacting with my, like, Batman toys (or something), figuring that Wall-E’s entire history had taken place first, and that our current history was the second repetition of events because I didn’t want to think about Earth being ravaged to the point of inhabitability happening in my future. Whether or not that happens (vote Harris please for the love of god), that cyclicality—that depth of history and time—probably informed a lot of my fascination with past, future, and scale going forward. For how integral it is to my viewing experience of Wall-E, it’s surprising that allegedly, this sequence was added as a response to focus group feedback. As the story goes (a story I wish I could find a better source for, but TV tropes is the best I’ve got so far), test audiences were skeptical that humans could ever survive on Earth again—a rational but sad outlook that tells us how far removed we already are. Skeptical as I am of focus groups, I can’t imagine a Wall-E without this integral sequence—without this beautiful song—that will always be there when I need a reminder to return to my roots. Just as in the last frame of the credits—Wall-E and Eve holding robot hands next to a sturdy, gnarled oak, which is revealed to be grown from the sprout Wall-E first discovered—the smallest glimpse of resistance can, with work, bring anyone back into their body.
Pairs Well With: “Wall-E” (Thomas Newman), “Firestarter” (Torre Florim covering The Prodigy), “You’ll Be Bright (Invocation Part 1)” (Cloud Cult)
BLESS THIS MESS | David Bazan And bless David Bazan, too, for who better to speak on the habit-breaking work that wills Gabriel’s aforementioned “escape from routine?” While we’re passing out blessings, I’ll also throw the most important one my Dad’s way for embodying what good can come outside the cycle in so many ways. Not only has he been the figurehead for ending a family curse of substance abuse, but he’s thrown so many bones my way by way of other role models—seemingly innocuous songs by artists who end up saving my life in some small way. Bazan’s sensibilities may orbit, in Emily’s words, “Wilco-core”—in other words, par for the course on my Dad’s regular rotation—but the last role model I expected from his music taste was a one-time Christian rocker.
Growing up just a mile from a Pentecostal Evangelical church where his father worked as a music pastor, it’s no surprise that David Bazan was fast-tracked into the Christian rock scene. Signed by a Christian punk label (the far more surprising part of this story) called Tooth and Nail, Bazan soon found his footing as founder and frontman of indie band Pedro the Lion, a group who, according to Matt Fink of the catholic media ministry Busted Halo, refreshed a scene oversaturated with “the celebratory and often cloying praise and worship music that was popular within mainline Christianity.” In his (I typed and deleted “enlightening”) informative article “David Bazan’s Journey into Darkness and Doubt,” Fink warily attributes Bazan’s appeal to the fact that he, even then, was “drawn to (some would say fixated on) the dark realities of faith—the fact of sin, the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of believers, and the difficulty of living a life dedicated to faith.” In this same article, however, Fink begins with an anecdote happening knee-deep in the shitstorm Bazan’s lyrics had been stirring from the beginning—not a storm stirred amongst the virtuous audience around him, but a storm stirred within. Performing at Geneva College in 2007, a bristling Bazan projected the growing friction between his faith and his politics out upon a venue of christian students, tip-toeing ever closer to the line by prodding the hapless Bush Administration, the Iraq War, and Mel Gibson fresh off the heels of The Passion of Christ. According to Fink, Bazan finally lost his quietly vexed audience after a tirade about Blockbuster censoring explicit material in its rentals and encouraging customers to boycott and rent sexually charged media elsewhere. As the story goes, he said that together, they could “bring those fuckers to their knees.”
From the outside, this is hilariously uncomfortable, but it’s far from the behavior of an aforementioned role model, especially with the sad conclusion to this story—that Bazan, having fully ostracized his now pearl-clutching listeners, ended the night schnockered senseless, slurring “heartfelt goodbyes” to strangers he’d isolated. With the warmth of Christian forgiveness, Fink remarks that this “might be normal behavior for typical rock and roll hedonists, but for a headliner at a Christian music festival, his behavior was a bit of an outlier.” Much as this sentence stings, it highlights what a particularly vicious cycle Bazan was caught in—how brutal it must have been to have his work depend on believers in a faith he found himself increasingly unfit for; so unfit he first had to spread his existential discomfort, and then sedate himself silly when the embarrassment only made the pain worse. Here, nearing what I can only assume was Bazan’s lowest point, is where his wisdom begins—for who better to speak on quitting hardened habits than a man who summited deconversion and sobriety simultaneously.
Of course, I’m being a little unforgiving of Fink here—even with all of the sympathy in the world, who wouldn’t be uncomfortable around a stranger actively indulging in brain damage and making it everyone else’s problem? Forgiveness and discomfort don’t have to be mutually exclusive, nor do holiness and hard times, which is exactly the essence of the original Christianity Bazan harkens back to in Curse Your Branches, his so-called breakup album with God. While many songs are more pointedly aimed at his inability to reconcile what Jesus preaches with what many contemporary Christians support, “Bless This Mess” cuts deepest for me because its beatitude framing does little to mask its brutal honesty. With a trudging acoustic tempo bolstered by harsh, churning synth, “Bless This Mess” sounds like a one-man work song where Bazan can only harmonize with himself every step towards sobriety. As mentioned above, the chorus’s repeated beatitudes both provide a sturdy structure and allow for deeper reflection as Bazan’s blessings become more abstract. His first chorus is a family portrait under glaring fluorescents, surviving but starkly so:
God bless the man who stumbles
God bless the man who falls
God bless the man who yields to temptationGod bless the woman who suffers
God bless the woman who weeps
God bless the children trying her patience
The second chorus expands to a biblical perspective, biting back against the rhetoric that keeps Bazan ashamed. Each line here rebuts an oft-quoted bible verse:
God bless the house divided
God bless the weeds in the wheat
God bless the lamp lit under a bushel
Though Bazan himself has lamented isolating his audience by using Christian language to express how Christianity has hurt him, I find this bit to be a moving reclamation of one’s worthiness despite making (many) mistakes. Rather than Jesus’s “a house divided against itself cannot stand” (Mark 3:25), Bazan blesses unequally yoked families still fighting to stay intact despite digging into ideological incompatibilities and the vices that threaten to tear them apart. Rather than the parable of sinning weeds growing amongst virtuous wheat where the weeds are burned on the harvest day of judgment (Matthew 13:24-30), Bazan blesses those who grow a different way. Most important of all, rather than admonish the lamps who hide their bright, shining souls beneath a bushel for fear of believing the wrong thing (I can’t find the exact citation for this, but it’s from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount), Bazan blesses those whose inner light burns apart from their community, and their struggle in discovering a personal truth that exists contrary to a possibly dogmatic community. In all this, it’s clear why Bazan’s solo career has been quite controversial amongst his Christian audience, but nowhere here do I read Bazan saying “it’s cool to live immorally, yo” (whatever that means). His last chorus clears things up in that regard:
God bless the man at the crossroads
God bless the woman who still can’t sleep
God bless the history that doesn’t repeat
In other words, every person strays from the path, those who find themselves lost deserve dignity and grace instead of the domineering threat of damnation by a God they were born involuntarily indebted to. Bazan’s verses even detail how these thoughts spiraled directly into his addiction, singing:
I discovered hell to be the poison in the well
So I tried to warn the others of the curse
Then my body turned on me; I dreamt that for eternity
My family would burn, then I awoke
With a wicked thirst
That devastating note is where I find solace in this song, for while I haven’t endured deconversion like Bazan, I am all too familiar with this feedback loop of shame and sedation, and his raw lyrics put me in the hot seat. Like we’ve spoken about with Peter Gabriel, Bazan certainly taps into poeticism when he needs it, but only as a palette cleanser for clarity that stares listeners in the face without hiding behind prose. In this instance, the bridge is what really did me in:
By my baby’s yellow bed
I kissed her forehead and rubbed her little tummy
Wondering if she’d soon despise the smell
Of the booze on my breath like her mom
Through a darkened mirror I have seen my own reflection
And it makes me want to be a better man
After another drink
And this, unfortunately, is the part where I get really personal in an unsuspecting music review, so apologies in advance—skip to the last paragraph if you’re uninterested but don’t want to end on a bummer. Though I don’t live with Evangelical guilt, I may as well impose it on myself, because among my great shames is also being an addict who can never seem to get it together until it hurts my relationships. It feels so pathetic, so drama-thirsty, to get this “woe is me” about my aforementioned screen addiction—it’s not like I have meth mouth or liver failure over here—but at the end of every day, I blink and realize how many hours, how many entire days before that, I have lost while hypnotized by an algorithm siphoning meaningless slop into my peeled-open eyelids, one video forgotten by the time the next starts, trapped in a riptide of informational morphine. There are weeks from last summer or of college before that smear together like the shorts and reels that squeeze into every surface of your screen to maximize attention—all that attention and yet I remember nothing, every sense pulled too far from the rest to form a single thought. I go back and forth between feeling this poetically serious about it and then thinking it’s cringe to act like this is any serious problem when everyone else has the same phone but requires no willpower to put it away. Suddenly, I’m both the problem for being too weak to handle it, but I’m also problematic because I’m just another Todd fallen to the family history of addiction—I used to try to tell smoking strangers they were making a bad choice as a toddler, and look at me now! Do you see it? The shame overwhelms, I sedate to regulate, I’m ashamed of sedation, I sedate the shame. “Through a darkened mirror I see my own reflection / and it makes me want to be a better man / after another drink.”
Much like a recovering alcoholic only being able to socialize at bars, success in both my work and hobby requires social media, but when I noticed these circumstances sliding me back into bad habits at the beginning of the summer, I saw an opportunity to change things. Of course, as we discussed earlier, it’s been a rockier ride than I’d have liked, and I can’t say it’s been effortless to get back on the wagon—in fact, I’d say it’s very much ongoing—but since I was visited by “Down to Earth” and “Bless This Mess,” I have had an insatiable urge to write that I’ve not followed like this in months, and I’m lucky to have had my support network and these songs to get me there. So, in keeping with the chorus: God bless my family, God bless my Emily, God bless the musicians who reached me through my dreams.
On a much lighter note, Bazan has apparently acknowledged similarities between “Bless This Mess” and the Jim Henson Dinosaurs Theme Song, and, like… I don’t really see it, but it makes for a really morbid fan edit.
Pairs Well With: “Theologians” (Wilco), “Limbo” (Shakey Graves) [Reviewed 10/06/2023], “Dirty Whirl” (TV on the Radio)
MER | Chelsea Wolfe Alright, after three heavy hitters, let’s talk about our least on-theme pick for today, though amidst twelve contenders and multiple lineups for this week, this song has always been in the top 5. I’m talking, as I often do, about Chelsea Wolfe’s “Mer,” probably the darkest “light” pick I could choose for today, but trust me when I say this song is way more fun than it is scary. Despite what a Chelsea Wolfe mega-fan I am, I’ve only ever listened to her latest four albums in full, but after what a blast discovering “Mer” has been, I can’t ignore her back catalogue for another moment longer.
Not that the French need any more inflating, but between you and me, I’ve always felt “La Mer” feels intuitively far more fitting a word for “the ocean” (though, without “La,” I went far too long pronouncing this song like the impractical jokers guy, and that’s purely because of Primeval’s mer-creatures, which once again proves Primeval was ultimately detrimental to my childhood development)—maybe it’s just looking in from the outside, but there’s a capital R Romance to “La Mer” that captures both the summer-fun, feel-good beauty of the ocean and the overwhelming terror of its black, thalassic smother. In “Mer,” Wolfe likens this sinister side of the sea to suffocating in the constant taking of a relationship that looked desirable from a distance, though even this interpretation feels like a stretch from the sparseness of her lyrics. More than any individual words, it’s their cadence that says the most—they’re a chant, with only one to three words between commas that barely form phrases. This choice was undoubtedly so that her vocals would be subsumed by the rhythm, as with every other instrument. Here, the guitar rolls relentlessly without rests between measures, and perhaps my favorite part—the drums—match nearly every note, blending melody and beat. The only thing that came to mind in comparison was the much more produced (though no less impressive) percussion of Mastodon, with “Mer” falling somewhere between the tempo of “Andromeda” and, fittingly, the key of “Seabeast.” I’ve always loved “Seabeast” in particular because its drums, too, roll like roiling waters, an effect I think “Mer” achieves with more immediacy—less like the patient crash of waves on shore, and more the thundering pummel of battling an open, angry ocean. Though not particularly loud, “Mer’s” instrumentation still sounds heart-pounding in its refusal to pause, brewing only towards a boil. This unvacillating path gets particularly hair-raising with the cherry on top: background whimpers and whines that writhe dissonantly like cetacean distress songs. It’s an addition which felt particularly hard to hear after recently visiting DMNS’s heartrending orca exhibit, but under any other circumstances, they’re delightfully eerie—a worthwhile polish to a powerhouse song.
With such an evocative song, you all already know I’m calling dibs for usage as a needledrop when I have a million bajillion dollars to spend on making movies, but Chelsea Wolfe’s own music video translates this song into visuals excellently. Check it out:
Though everything here is pretty standard goth fare, I think it’s the movement specifically that hammers “Mer” home—specifically, I think its tempo hits a sweet spot where small, fast movements can click perfectly with large, sweeping movements, if that makes sense. Here, the women (nuns?) walking hand-in-hand across the beach wobble unsteadily, but pass across the screen in perfect synch with the larger movement of the song. Similarly, the curling snakes and the cardboard, theater waves rolling in front of Wolfe both keep to small, circular paths that still create a larger sense of direction. Do you see the vision? If not, I hope you can at least appreciate details like those little wave props (one of my favorite parts), or the antler-candelabra framed behind the blindfolded guy, or, perhaps most importantly, the seven women casting coins and mirrors into their beachside bonfire. God, this song is so fucking cool. I love Chelsea Wolfe so much, you guys.
Pairs Well With: “Seabeast” (Mastodon), “Children of the Grave” (Black Sabbath), “Symbol” (Adrianne Lenker)
COFFEE HOMEGROUND | Kate Bush As someone still just sticking their toes in the door of writing journals, I get all sorts of emails for contests requiring the most impossibly sparse stories—a limit of 1,000 words if you’re lucky, sometimes entirely written in dialogue or another fun challenge like that. While I wouldn’t say my, uh… rap sheet really fits their bill, I always think that in some dark timeline where she never committed to music, Kate Bush would at least be slaying these contests. For how much deserved praise her vocals and performance receive, I rarely hear mention of her serious storytelling chops—though often skimmed past, it’s this key component that elevates her from musician to all-out bard. From my second Kate Bush review (“There Goes A Tenner”), I’ve always been struck by how effortlessly evocative her lyrics are—one verse, and you’re in her world, and the story doesn’t stop rolling ‘til the sound fades to silence. Kate Bush’s stories have as much range as her music, but whether it’s “Tenner’s” commanding “okay, remember / that we have just allowed half an hour / to get in, do it, and get out” between huddled thieves or “Experiment IV’s” cold, confessional “we were working secretly / for the military / our experimental sound / was nearly ready to begin” sung like an apprehensive whistleblower, that first verse is always deceptively spellbinding. In that sense, I shouldn’t have expected “Coffee Homeground” to be any different, but here I am surprised after some ten listens enjoying just the music, of all things—a pretty stark difference from where I started with Kate Bush.
I’ve been a diehard Kate Bush worshipper for almost three years now (and my parents before me for over thirty), but “Coffee Homeground” is probably the last song I’d recommend to myself any time before that, and if I were forced to sell it, it’d be by the lyrics and not the music I now love. In 2022, many found a gateway into Kate Bush via “Running Up That Hill” and its angelic, eighties album Hounds of Love, and my Kate Bush awakening wasn’t so different—after a spontaneous double-listen to Hounds of Love and The Dreaming, I never looked back—but were it not for their stark, synthy sound, I’m not sure I or any of her more casual fans would be able to ease into her wilder early years. After her debut The Kick Inside flaunted funk-rock ballads and baroque laments, her next two albums settled into this jaunty cabaret era, with the latter, Never for Ever, misfiring on some of its ambitious experimentation due to both technological limitations and the sheer cheese of this sound. I know, this was blasphemy when I said it on my first listen and is blasphemy today, but though jaunty cabaret Kate is one of my least favorite Kates, I’ve become earnestly endeared to this theatrical style, rich with just as much genuine wit and heart as any later Kate Bush release. In particular, the more cohesive album of this pair—Lionheart—has repeatedly surprised me on subsequent listens, though you know I’m really whipped when I say I’ve come to love songs like “Coffee Homeground.” Shock of all shocks, I was caught by this song’s clarinet and muted-trumpet combo, stepping moodily down with sophisticated strings and stuck-up drums. It’s a style Bush revives to pay homage to Austrian-American singer and actress Lotte Lenya, who, along with first husband Kurt Weill and unconventional playwright Bertolt Brecht, were extremely influential in 1930s performing arts. I mention all this because, unwittingly, I was going to talk about Brecht and Weill’s famous “Alabama Song” (performed extremely eerily by Lenya), which was covered famously by The Doors but, IMHO, ever-so-slightly better by Bowie. Ironically, though the song I know Lenya’s vocals from is deeply creepy, Bush invokes Lenya’s likeness here to turn humorous a situation she herself found creepy. It’s not the move I’d make, for sure, but unsurprisingly, it works beautifully in her hands—and her lyrics.
So caught up in this song’s rustic coffeehouse vibes aloft on portly tubas, it took me literally until now to actually pay attention to what she was singing—recounting an anecdote that, contrary to its instrumental backdrop, started in America. Supposedly, this song’s narrator is based on a cab driver who, in her words, “was a bit nutty,” paranoid that someone was trying to poison him. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this nutty—it seems like a perfectly relatable train of thought that we all cycle through from time to time to time—but I think Bush made a good choice taking the power out of paranoia by leaning into its absurdity. For as real as my Wilco-calmed death-spiraling always seems, it’s rationally absurd to spend my precious life worrying about death when all I’m doing is forgetting to live. The atmosphere may be perfectly quaint in “Coffee Homeground”—there may be no danger in sight in what I can only imagine is a warm, wooden coffeehouse or wine cellar—but how could this façade ever be nice if it’s only death’s mask? Perhaps it’s better told in her words, in all their first-verse magic:
Down in the cellar
You're getting into making poison
You slipped some on the side
Into my glass of wine
And I don't want any coffee homeground
It’s such simple verbiage, but tidbits from the phrasing of “getting into making poison” as if it’s a hobby or the subtler detail that it’s out of sight (and therefore fabricated) are such clever fun. It’s no surprise, either, that knowing her love of classical literature and history, “Coffee Homeground” is full of allusions. Aside from a full list of poisons—deadly nightshade, AKA belladonna (“in the coffee”), arsenic (“in the pot of tea”), hemlock, and of course, hints of cyanide (“But tell me just how come / They smell of bitter almonds?”)—the coffeehouse has pictures of the notorious killer Dr. Harvey Hawley Crippen, which are conspicuously “Lipstick-smeared.” Even without references, her poetry stands on its own, with a bit immediately after saying that the torn wallpaper reveals hiding listeners. I don’t know, that sounds kind of nutty to me, but the Crippen picture seems pretty incriminating… whether this is real for our narrator could go either way. The cherry on top is the goofy, german voices saying "Noch ein Glas, mein Liebchen" (“another glass, my love”) and "Es schmeckt wun-derbaaaar!" (“it tastes great!”) as the music fades out—it has a very “community theater immersive dialogue” feel that might never had worked were it not by Kate Bush. As I always say—her unbridled creativity does half of the lifting, but her equal passion for her performance is what gives her music such momentum.
Unfortunately, that should clue everyone into how I feel about all other cabaret-esque music, which means I owe everyone an apology for these pairings—you know a song’s out of my wheelhouse when the closest match I know is from VeggieTales. Oh, you thought I’d sneak that one past? I’m proud of my heinous playlists.
Pairs Well With: “Endangered Love” (VeggieTales), “Blow Away” (Kate Bush), “Ashes to Ashes” (David Bowie)
THE GREEN KNIGHT | Written & Directed by David Lowery I don’t often use movie frames for the art segment of Songs of the Week (on Max! Todd! Dot! Com!), but I figured with all of this existential reconnection stuff, I just needed a nature figure glowering over it all. I say “glowering” because the Green Knight is a lot spookier than most of the Cernunnos art I was eyeing for today, but I think it’s fitting with the movie and myth’s main message—a relationship with nature requires just as much giving as it does taking. David Lowery’s The Green Knight had pretty mixed reception because it was (I think rightfully) extremely faithful to the dreamlike imagery that makes the original story so potent, but even if you’re not as receptive to that stuff as I am, the visuals alone are worth watching this movie for. Stunning in colors beyond green, if you can believe it.