Writing About Music
Writing about music, breaking it down to notes and scales, time signatures and chord progressions, is asinine. Writing about your own life is equally vacuous, even more self-indulgent and, honestly, really boring. All that being said I can’t for the life of me figure out why combining these two hopeless, inane efforts somehow seems like fertile ground. For some reason documenting how the situations we find ourselves in affects the music we choose to listen to and how the music we listen to affects how we perceive everything around us just seems to make sense to me. For better or worse this is it, let’s throw it against the wall and see what sticks. Here it comes and there it goes.
One month ago my girlfriend Lindsey and I were sitting in a hotel room in Bloomington, Minnesota weighing the pros and cons of moving to Minneapolis versus moving (for me) back to St. Louis. In the end St. Louis won out and within a few hours we were headed back to our apartment in Columbia, Mo to start looking for places in the small swath of land between Hampton and Kingshighway in the Southwest corner of the city. It was around this time my Uncle Tupelo albums started to find their way off of my shelf and into the trays of my CD changer.
It had been nearly four years since I’d listened to these records, coincidentally four years ago I was a junior in college just getting ready to head up to Minnesota for my first extended stay away from all of my family and most of my friends on a six month cooperative work program. I don’t know what it is about UT’s music that suggests traveling, pulling up roots and replanting myself, maybe its the earthy guitars, maybe the way that down to its core the music is truly Americana, or maybe its just the feeling of secruity that comes over me when I listen to a song like “Give Back The Key To My Heart.” Just listen to that song, theres no way to really feel estranged and alone when that sing-song chorus hits. You don’t even have to be heartbroken, you don’t even have to have a mental image of the person your half singing, half yelling the lyrics at, its just flat out fun.
I didn’t think too much of how the music related to the situation then, and I only feel its significant now just because I have an alternate theory as to why I would suddenly be pulled to Uncle Tupelo’s tunes this time around. That theory: I was moving back to St. Louis. The band was founded a stones throw across the river in Belleville, Illinois, they cut their teeth in Cicero’s, they spearheaded a movement playing shows at the Nights. Uncle Tupelo’s music is home to me, the music I’ll always associate with the city. So its all well and good that its got the nostalgia angle covered, but that doesnt mean much if the music isnt up to snuff, and it is, it very much is. Organic is a good word to describe it, unapologetically Midwestern, its soulful but it doesnt make you feel good, which is amazing. There’s a touch of anger to their songs, often times just boiling below the surface but on other tracks its the focal point, like the speed and dissent of ”Train” or the raucous rambler “We’ve Been Had.” In songs like ”Black Eye” the lyrics hold a sense of regret expressed in their delivery (he had a black eye / he was proud of / like some of his friends) you can hear the disgust in Tweedy’s voice, this song, to me perfectly encapsulates what Uncle Tupelo is about, seeing what’s looming on your horizon and not being able to figure out a way to avoid it, whether its factory work, drinking yourself to death or just flat out not being able to make ends meet.
That sense of dread and impending doom fits in nicely with my outlook of late. Having completed our move nearly a week ago I’ve been working steadily on finding a job here, preferably a job in which I’d actually use my degree rather than the warehouse gig I’d been holding down for the past two years. I’ll listen to No Depression as I scan over listings for jobs on all of the typical sites and start to feel completely defeated as I realize how little I actually know. Usually by the time the album gets to “Life Worth Living” I actually stop and listen attentively, and wonder if I’m ever going to make it. Luckily, “Screen Door” is only a few songs away and it always picks me up, especially the lyrics, “sweat drips from the tip of your nose / you wear lose clothes / and you try to say cool”.
As much as I love Uncle Tupelo’s music, I have to admit I’ll be happy to see this brief period of my life they seem to be soundtracking come to a close, but for right now their the only thing I really want to hear. Everything else just seems to come across as a little impure and insincere. I’m not fighting it though, I’ve come to the realization that I have to move on in my life and let the music turn with me. Writing that makes me wonder if being “stuck” on a band or a record is something that’s more likely to happen when you’re down relative to when you’re feeling a little bit better. Hopefully I’ll be able to report on that soon. Things will always change, tides will always turn, when they do I think I’m going to celebrate by blasting “Longcut” and downing a Schlafly APA.
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