Day 1: “Honk If You’re Lonely” by the Silver Jews

When I was in high school, my brother was in his early 20s. He was, in some ways, what people would now call a “hipster”: underemployed, overeducated, into indie rock. He owned obscure Pavement singles and Frank Black solo albums, and made numerous mix tapes filled with obscure songs by obscure bands. He came back and lived with us for a year after college, and in that time shaped my musical sensibilities in an irreversible way; I’ve discovered many bands since then, of course, and I’ve also turned my back somewhat on some of the bands that he introduced me to and that I loved back then, but the “staples” that he fed me—R.E.M., the Smiths, the Pixies—are still the foundation of my pop music understanding, for better and for worse.

My brother liked farce and irony in his lyrics, he liked artifice (often in the form of electronic instruments posing as real instruments) in his music, and he liked a touch of cruelty in both. The aforementioned R.E.M. didn’t really fit any of these criteria, but he loved them regardless, and I, too, fell in love with their music, especially their early albums, stuffed as they were with indecipherable lyrics, fantastic harmony vocals, and angular guitar work. The Smiths didn’t use a lot of synthesizer, but they definitely fit the other two criteria; I didn’t immediately like them, but I certainly appreciated Johnny Marr’s guitar playing and the succinct brilliance of “Cemetry Gates” and “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.”

Pavement was a staple, and one that I consumed happily. I preferred “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” to “Slanted and Enchanted,” which was a mild form of heresy to my brother, who considered the latter to be the far superior album. At this point in my musical development, lyrics meant very little to me; I was, after all, only 15 or 16, and had neither the life experience nor the critical intelligence to appreciate “good” lyrics. Listening to early R.E.M. and Pavement, whose lyrics were largely indecipherable or obtuse, was not the best way for me to grow a good critical ear for lyrics, and so I for the most part ignored the lyrics in pretty much everything I listened to. I even consciously adopted this tendency into my pop music philosophy, deciding that unless lyrics were patently terrible they could not be “counted against” the song. I had no idea what any Pavement song was about (besides “The Unseen Power of the Picket Fence”), and I didn’t care.

I fell in love with an English major in college, and, a couple years after graduation, we began seeing each other (we’re married now). She was raised in Miami, and had almost no exposure to “indie rock” prior to going to college. When we started going out, I, being the music snob that I am, decided that I needed to introduce her to “my music.” In my arrogance, I suppose that I just assumed she would immediately like the same things I liked, and for the same reasons; she did not. “What the Hell are they saying?” she would ask in reference to the Pixies, early R.E.M., Pavement, etc., etc., etc. Sometime I had answers: “the Pixies are crazy—just go with it!”; “the vocals in early R.E.M. are really like another instrument—the song’s not really ‘about’ anything, per se.” But for Pavement, I had none. I liked them because I liked their precise sloppiness, their lazy melodies, their shouted choruses; I didn’t care about their lyrics, or even understand what they were saying. I had no answers to the questions she was asking me, so I did what we sub-30-year-olds do when we need answers: I looked on the internet and saw, for the first time, really, what Stephen Malkmus was saying.

Pavement lyrics are not patently terrible, but they’re not great, either. Like mid-60s Dylan or early Beck, Malkmus had (has?) a great ear for the way words sound, and his lyrics almost never grate. Unfortunately, they sometimes get into realms so obtuse that their meaning is lost on everyone who hears them, and perhaps even for the man who wrote them. It’s this last point that has increasingly bothered me as the years have gone on: it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) that a fair percentage of Pavement songs were not intended to be about anything, at least lyrically. The obtuseness isn’t a result of an incredibly complex message in the music, but rather obtuseness for its own sake. That’s OK, of course—it’s certainly not unprecedented in the history of pop music—but it’s something that’s become more and more irritating to my sensibilities as time has gone on. I can take the early R.E.M. vocals-as-music angle, and the My Bloody Valentine buried vocals angle, but the Pavement smart-ass obtuseness has begun to irritate me. At 16, I loved Pavement’s Pavement-ness; now, at 26, I wonder why I should bother to listen to “Loretta’s Scars” if the man who wrote it didn’t have anything to say. This change in my aesthetic was pretty much a direct result of my wife’s questioning. “What are they saying?” she asked me; not much, I realized.

My wife thinks that our musical exchange has been a one-sided affair, but I disagree: I may have introduced her to more music, but she has changed my entire aesthetic, the way I judge music. I don’t think I’ve changed hers as much: she didn’t like loud guitars when we met, for instance, and she still doesn’t. The things I’ve introduced to her that she’s liked have been things she would have liked regardless of the manner of introduction—I have merely been a conduit (for sale).

This brings us to the Silver Jews, the band fronted by David Berman that sometimes features Stephen Malkmus on guitar and is often mistakenly referred to as a “Pavement side project.” In high school, I bought a Silver Jews album (I honestly don’t remember which one) because of the Malkmus connection, listened to it once or twice, and filed it away. It wasn’t until years later, on a road trip with my future wife, that I heard them again. She had a copy of American Water, the Silver Jews’ 1998 album, and we listened to it on the drive from Illinois to New York City. I loved it almost immediately: the music has the same lazy feel as Pavement’s “country” numbers, and it features Malkmus’ ace guitar work, but the lyrics, though certainly obtuse, struck me as markedly better than Pavement’s, and easier to hear on top of that. I decided that the Silver Jews (with Malkmus on guitar) were the band I had always wanted Pavement to be, and that American Water was the album I had always wanted them to make. It’s a great album, full of funny, profound, profane insights, wonderful guitar work, and some of the worst singing you’ve ever heard.

“Honk If You’re Lonely Tonight” is perhaps the most straightforward song on the album, a plea for companionship from a lonely soul. The song, both lyrically and musically, is redolent of old country songs, but it’s played straight (to my ears)—any archness present is loving and slight. This is, for me, the difference between Malkmus and Berman: both write somewhat obtuse lyrics, but Berman has a heart. Not that having a heart is a prerequisite for musical greatness—I’m no self-righteous folkie, ready to crucify anyone who doesn’t illuminate the plight of the poor in their 5-minute pop song—but I think heartlessness and cold irony have become as old hat and boring as earnestness. The best lyrics mix irony and sincerity (think “The Village Green Preservation Society” or the entire oeuvre of the Magnetic Fields), and in doing so illuminate the interplay between feeling and self-aware understanding of that feeling (Berman even touches on this in “People” on American Water, reminding us that “you can’t change the feeling, but you can change the feeling about the feeling”); Malkmus, arch ironist that he was with Pavement, was almost always just being a smart-ass.

It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong: maybe Berman is actually putting us on with bad poetry à la mid-60s Dylan and “Gold Soundz” makes Stephen Malkmus cry. Malkmus, it should be pointed out, has become more “sincere” in his solo work, with mixed results. Sometimes, when you had nothing to say but pretended you did, trying to say something “for real” doesn’t work.