Banal Stories #6: Things Would Never Be Better

When I bought Paul Westerberg’s 14 Songs in 1993, I hadn’t heard of the Replacements. No, instead I was doing what I did fairly often back then. Reading a review in Rolling Stone and buying the record if it sounded promising. During the same period RS turned me onto two other artists with whom I ended up having multi-album relationships: Bill Frisell and Pell Mell. Back then I had no idea how uncool Rolling Stone was. The magazine was the first education I had in seeking out new music and it’s shaped me in a number of key ways. Probably lead to FITA’s gently mocking me for sounding like Greg Kot.

So, yeah, Westerberg’s solo work turned me onto the ‘Mats, and to this day I have a very soft spot in my heart for 14 Songs. I probably know that record as good as any other album I’ve ever owned. It was on one half of a cassette shared with the Gin Blossom’s New Miserable Experience. I thought then that both records were masterpieces. Exemplars of great pop-songwriting, and the beginning of what would be a lifelong affair with sad-bastard musics. But when I was 18, I badly misconstrued the meaning of both records.

That happens when you’re young. Even when you’re 18, you tend to miss things at the movies an adult would see and hear. You read works into your own life. In 1993-95, when I played that tape to death, I heard the Gin Blossom’s record as an almost journalistic remembering of the recent past. A drunken college kid trying crawl back into the senior year womb. That’s where I was anyway. I knew what beer and cigarettes felt like, and I had broken up with my first girl because I liked another girl. Who ended up liking all that drama more than she liked me.

14 Songs sounded like an old guy’s curmudgeonly advice. A window into adulthood for a kid who needed one. Nearly the entire record is a series of conversations from the same helpful narrator, warmly coaching a friend or lover about how to cope with adulthood. I thought, this is what getting old is like. And it doesn’t have to be terrible.

Runaway Wind
You don’t blow like the breeze you were born to be
You die down in the trees and try to hide
Will you witness the dark
All you need is a spark
A cathedral of torches to light the night

Now I hear both records as concept albums about a bitter old dude’s delusions and nostalgia. But where New Miserable Experience’s vivid effort to undrink the last 15 years sounds earned and authentic and desperate (i.e., really real), the adult me hears 14 Songs as cheesy and cynical. About as sophisticated a picture of adulthood as an 18 year-old-kid might dream up. I had read that Westerberg wrote many of the songs for other people to sing; only now do I hear the compromises that seemed to entail. The adult me knows what it’s like to have your knees creak. And to drink light beer with your friends and talk about babysitters. Westerberg’s world on 14 Songs alludes to the boredom and regret without bringing it into focus. It’s the movie version of adulthood, where your old girlfriend comes back for one more fling and everything gets cool again.

Someone I Once Knew
Hey you someone I once knew, sit your butt down
You got brains all the way down
You’ve never changed
I just never got past
Your little rock & roll ass
Shot bolt upright
When you mention the whole night
I was on the mend when
You let a smile crack
And it all came back

It was hard to see what was wrong with Westerberg-lite back then. Although I bought Pleased to Meet Me and Let it Be fairly soon after discovering Westerberg in the pages of Rolling Stone, I wouldn’t find out how good he could be until early in the new millennium, when I finally bought Tim and when Mono/Stereo came out. To me, what’s funny is how much smarter and insightful Westerberg was when he was 8 years younger… and when he was 8 years older:

Baby Learns to Crawl
one last crushing blow
a final crashing bore
and it’s always time to go
as you’re inching to the door
(let’s go)

Or maybe, it’s just that I got smarter instead. I watched the rest of the movie.

I don’t want to sound to down on Westerberg here. I’m a huge fan, and 14 Songs is still incredibly memorable for all kinds of reasons, especially the amazing First Glimmer, which comes closest to capturing Westerberg’s gallows humor while still achieving the cinematic notes he was trying to hit:

First Glimmer
Wore my jacket and I wore your sweater
Underneath the bridge was an indian summer
Purple mascara, safety pins God did it hurt
Took off my jacket took off your sweater
And we made a wish things would never be better
Train whistle blew, and my wish came true

Finally, I’ll say this. One of the things I love about Westerberg is his insistence that a song be about something. I’ve generally insisted upon this principle in my own songs. As I suggested with Rod Stewart, I think giving structure and narrative to your songs sometimes leads you to soften the blow. But it takes courage to lift the veils of obscurity and pretense, and to let people accept or reject or ponder what you’re really saying. Rather than just mumbling words that sound cool together. Westerberg is the kind of lyricist that lets you explore songs without hearing them. And while that’s not the best way to experience a song, it should be part of the deal. It’s more than we get from most indie bands today.