Carissa’s Wierd And Their Beautiful Misery: Songs About Leaving

September 20, 2024

Carissa’s Wierd And Their Beautiful Misery: Songs About Leaving

by Jack Griffis

Spinnaker Radio DJ, Host of Jacksonville Vice

Last week’s album overview was about the feelings of dissociation and isolation hidden under a thin layer of outstanding tech-influenced art punk with The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I. This week, were taking a look at an album that does away with any notions of hiding the true melancholia of your lyrics at all, and instead embraces gloom with violin in hand. I of course refer to Carrisa’s Wierd’s final album, Songs About Leaving, one of the greatest slowcore albums of all time and one of my favorite albums to boot.

Carissa’s Wierd (purposely misspelled) were formed in Tucson in 1995 by two teenagers, Mat Brooke and Jenn Champion with very rudimentary equipment, and as much as “spectacular success” can be applied to the small labels and tiny venues of the indie scene, they very much were a spectacular success. Over the course of their careers they released four albums and a handful of compilations and singles, before breaking up to form separate projects in 2003. Frankly, I wish they had stuck around, or at the very least stuck with a record label that would repress their vinyls (because currently they cost 150$ on discogs), but I suppose four unique and emotionally poignant albums is better than a lifetime of mediocrity following their great successes. My buddy Andy put it best when he said its better they don’t burn out and become another case of Weezer-itis. Still, I long for the unique stylings of Carissa’s Wierd, when no other band can scratch the same itch for melancholic Americana-tinged indie music that seems to speak to every soft misery you’ve had to endure. Carissa’s Wierd is funeral music for the living it feels like, not gothic, but rather with a downtrodden folk influence that memorializes waking life and longs for the peace of sleep. And that downtrodden nature is what makes their final album so special– a finale for a band built on the feeling of the living end, a walking death that seems to stick to you no matter where you walk. Its bittersweet, in an odd way, but I suppose all bittersweet things are.

Songs About Leaving would be released on August 6th, 2002, one year before the band’s parting. It was a critical success upon release, scoring solidly on Allmusic, Pitchfork, and SputnikMusic, the latter two giving it a 8.0/10 and 4.5/5 respectively, with Pitchfork remarking that Songs About Leaving was “all the more devastating for being the band’s final act,” a sentiment I find myself sharing every time I give Carissa’s Wierd’s discography another listen, and upon the conclusion of “(March 19th 1983) It Was Probably Green” wishing in vain that there was more. But I suppose that’s the trouble of being conditioned by an infinite slough of streaming sites giving us more seasons to shows no one asked for, more TV show reboots, more Star Wars movies, more MCU “movies” (if they can be called that), the prevalence of the short form video on Instagram Reels and TikTok, and God knows how many other forms of instant gratification– when we’ve got an ending to something beloved, we are never satisfied, never able to take it as a definite ending. But I digress.

My first interaction with Carissa’s Wierd would’ve been roughly when I was 12 or 13 years old while I was on this huge kick of watching student animations or short form animation work– once I had cleared through the large catalog of CalArts student archives (which sadly hasn’t been updated in years the last time I checked), I stumbled upon a Spanish animation, the name of which has escaped me for years now. All I particularly remember is a very tired looking man wandering through his day to day 9-5 grind, with various mundane objects such as street lights and elevators being composed entirely of human beings forced into drudgery and labor unthinkable to us. Everyone was downtrodden and formed entirely of all too pale flesh, and the world around these characters was composed of a limited palette of beiges and browns. It was a bleak, bummer animation that still kinda kicks around my mind when I think about working a 9-5. But what’s important about it was the background track, a track that came from this very album: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero.” A decade and a half since the bands parting, their waves of melancholy and fuzzy vocals were reaching out to a barely-teenager who frankly, just couldn’t get what they were putting down. It would take a few years, but I’d find them again listening to Duster back in 2019 (which I can proudly say I got into them before they became a darling of TikTok some years later), and suddenly the time was ripe to get into Carissa’s Wierd, Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon, and the wonderfully depressive world of Slowcore. I’d listen to “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” and “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave” on loop, but given a few more years, I eventually gave the entire record a spin. It’s one of the best musical decisions I’ve ever made. Songs About Leaving is a weight on your chest that keeps on growing heavier with age, a fine wine of melancholia that eats at you with a delightfully corrosive sadness, a sadness exemplified from every note of its instrumentals, to every line in the poetry composing its lyrics. There will never be another Songs About Leaving, which is both a sadness in its own right, and a testament to the once-in-a-lifetime talent of Carissa’s Wierd. Without further ado, I’d like to talk about two songs that exemplify that talent: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” and “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave”.

Full of What’s Not Real And Full of Empty Tears: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero”

Sung in the form of a spoken word, “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” comes across as a poetry recitation from inside a dark apartment, the last gasps for air of someone at the end of their rope. Its sound is possessed by this feeling of personal collapse greatly– the vocals are muted, muffled even, sung under a thick fog of despair that struggles to rise over the strumming guitar drowning in eerie reverb that haunts the song. The vocals fluctuate in the song, wavering between something akin to a sob and the muted tone of someone so dejected as to be almost dead in their speech. It’s haunting, the cries of a living ghost, the lyrics containing a desolation not out of place in a suicide note– “So You Wanna be a Superhero” is Carrisa’s Wierd at their darkest, most beaten down.

Carissa’s Wierd, like many indie bands of their ilk, seems to be possessed of a spirit of mystery that compels them to rarely, if ever give an interpretation for their music. To be frank, for something as emotionally charged and poetic as their verses, I think that instinct is for the best. However, in the realm of musical journalism and analysis, I do wish I had the unique input of Jenn Champion and Mat Brooke regarding their haunting lyrics to integrate with my own writing on the subject– but oh well, we are bereft of their literary talents in regards to the origins of their tracks. However, in the case of “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” what is being discussed isn’t exactly abstract– very clearly this is the chronicle of someone in the chokehold of depression, reduced to very little but isolation and anhedonia, unable to stand such a desolate existence as they reckon with a spiritual hollowness.

The opening lines are stage-setters for the entire song, providing a potent musical image–although we are not told of the subjects circumstances, or given very much information about their life, opening with “There’s banging on the wall/It’s 5 am, I’ve got no sleep at all” gives us a potent image of a beleaguered insomniac, wasting away in bed as the world outside grows in irritating and mind-corroding noise. When listening, there’s a feeling of peering into a life of suffering, a squalid apartment and its anguished dweller, staring at the ceiling with a dead expression. The moaning, dejected voice of Jenn Champion struggles to break through the song, and past the first line, seems only to sink deeper into a soul-consuming malaise, incapable of escape from the internal circumstances that lurk throughout the song. For the protagonist, all of life seems to be a struggle through a mixture of apathetic melancholy and total soul crushing misery– “Too much time in one day/Too much time to occupy/With boring thoughts/And boring moods/And boring bedtimes” speaks to a feeling of utter emptiness, incapable of filling the day with activities that can provide solace from the depressive state that eats at the subject of the song, incapable of finding any joy in life itself– and so everything becomes crushed under a haze of gray, with no joy to be found that could perhaps alleviate this. What drives this home is the following line, “It’s all a joke/It’s all been wrote down by someone who’s probably dead.” There is no comfort to be found in life, no empathy among the living, and so the subject turns her eyes towards the ground– that those who have suffered their fate have long since died, more than likely by their own hand. It is a devastating sentiment of being incurable, that the subject has reached a terminal state of emptiness and lack of interest in life, a living death that only waits for the paradox of her heartbeat to stop.

Rather than dying away in the outro, the songs strumming begins to reach a feverish tempo alongside Jenn Champion’s voice ascending to an apex, a twisted and melancholia-warped shout wherein the only “hope” the song can offer is found– in the phantasms of sleep, the subject dreams of a world in which she may escape her chains of suffocating anhedonia, and perhaps prove some unknown point to her pitiers. She cries out, “ My dreams are full of what’s not real/I’ll fly away and save the world /I’ll make you proud someday/I just won’t be around to see your face,” to a subject “out of frame” as it were. The “superhero” referenced in the songs title is a misguided fantasy of the subject, that perhaps some miraculous strength that will rescue her from her quiet and unending torment, that perhaps she will be able to crawl out of the haze that chokes her life away into a series of late, sleepless nights, and unchanging, miserable days. And yet, even in this fantasy, the presence of death lingers– she won’t be around to see her observer’s pride, and will only meet the fate of death that followed her emotional peers(as noted in the line “It’s all been wrote down by someone who’s probably dead.”). In her only brief moment of hope, the subject still seems incapable of escaping the conclusion that death will take her, the end result of the depressive disease that has stolen all her vitality. The fantasy of sleep provides her only exodus, and yet as she lays awake at 5AM, it seems the solace of dreams grows ever scarcer, and the shape of death grows nearer as morale dies away.

I’m never so bold as to proclaim that my peers were the “best minds of a generation,” as Ginsberg did, but I have seen them consumed by an addictive kind of digital isolation and melancholy that has ruined them for years, the same as he saw his peers destroyed by the influence of heroin. Urged on into their patterns of digital self destruction by years of isolation, first sparked by COVID, then continued out of apathy, they fell deeper and deeper into a pit of online anhedonia– constantly logging in, playing the same games that brought them no happiness, gambling what money they had on cases and online currencies, locked into a cycle of apathetic rage at their circumstances, a faint hope that things might get better, and the complete lack of energy to escape this skinner-box turned skinner-home. It wasn’t their fault. Circumstances as they were, plenty of us sought refuge online– its a time honored tradition, even pre-COVID. Some of us just never escaped that isolation I suppose. I bring none of this up to do an exploitationist “tell all” on those who are stuck behind the screen, but rather to say that 20 years after its release, the tale within “So You Wanna Be A Superhero” still rings true for a generation lost in cyberspace, stuck within digitally-assisted depressive boredom. Only in sleep do some find respite, and others, not at all.

Trying To Find Love Between The Lines: They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave

“They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave,” fittingly titled for the album Songs About Leaving opens on a much more minimalistic tone compared to its sibling songs. Beginning on a simple piano and guitar melody, the song lingers in this quiet space for a while before gradually a violin and quietly grooving drums enter the mix, resting with each other as the song picks up in speed to the strumming of an electric guitar. The violin’s tone, already somber, throws itself deeper into melancholy as the song hangs in the air, bereft of vocals for a while. Suddenly, Mat Brooke’s voice enters and the entire song begins to grow in speed and intensity, rivaling Mat’s voice as he struggles for control auditorily, ultimately exploding into a medley of instruments at full tilt. Taking the same stylistic cues as “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” Brooke’s voice primarily remains in the form of spoken prose, but his vocals experience a kind of dissonance that surrounds the listener, adding to the overwhelming feeling that takes hold at the songs swelling within the second minute. “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave,” features all the hallmarks of a great Carissa’s Wierd song, accompanied by the downright solemn violin and downbeat drums that dances with the vocals, and a reverberated guitar that bears heavy musical omens of exhaustion in the face of unending personal sorrow. The pseudo-Americana that Brooks and Champion have incorporated into the band’s wider sound is evident here, living within the folkish rhythms of the drums and the southern gloom of the violin. Electric and acoustic coexist in their suffering, two burnouts sharing a cigarette outside a bus station. To complete this grand work of indie melancholia, Brook’s and Champion’s outstanding lyricism is found in abundance. As I said prior, it seems to almost be THE Carissa’s Wierd song, incorporating all of their stylings and themes into one beautiful mixture of tears and memories of lives no longer lived in.

As “So You Wanna Be A Superhero,” and the rest of their discography, Carissa’s Wierd have an unspoken loathing of speaking on their songs or providing much interpretation (though I imagine if I had a vinyl of Songs About Leaving, the price of which I’ve whinged about previously in this article, its liner notes would be of some use in this matter). And this loathing extends to “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave.” Nonetheless, the imagery in the song is compelling such that I find that an official “interpretation” would either be useless, or actively detrimental to the song.

The morning opens upon the song as the music swells, regret and despondency dripping off each line as Brooks sings “Not another sunrise, another dry stale taste in your mouth/You walked away from waking up inside of that house,” all seem to speak of a journey, far from what was once home– a refusal to deal with a situation that was draining you of life, another morning spent in regret. At the apex of the song’s introduction, the subject can no longer bear it, and must leave the house– not a home, but “that house,” a place of anguish not fitting of being a home.

The residents of this house are only spoken of vaguely, their emotions taking center stage– “they’ll only miss you when you leave” is spoken only once in the song, but is given great emphasis, overtaking all other sounds. The house is an entity of draining interpersonal strife, and the residents are cruel not in a fantastical sense, but in the sense that their love only extends to when the subject of the song is no longer present. The reality of the song’s subject is not palatable to them– only the idea, only the unseen subject which receives those “postcards with misshapen hearts besides the names.” And within these postcards, these scant messages that carry the subject’s name they “rearranged, analyzed the words/Tried to find something between the lines that wasn’t there,” perhaps searching for love lost or professed, yet never truly there.

One derives the feeling of perhaps an unwanted child, or a relationship that can only be feigned as love when the two are not in each other’s presence, or perhaps a friendship that has withered to very little over the years. Laying within a familiar yet unfamiliar place, a house in which one can find no shelter, the subject awaits a sunrise to give them cue to leave, an action capable of reigniting the feeling of “missing” each other between the two parties. It is a hollow love, one spoken of in letters and phone calls, yet not truly there, kept up for appearances or because the two are unsure what would happen if their neutrality or outright disdain was properly spoken. The final lines of the song “The storm will slowly close in on me/When it’s time to leave” repeated till the instruments finally die away, does not signal one of these incomplete goodbyes, but rather the crushing grip of pretending, the inevitable collapse of the two-sided farce. As the years of only finding comfort when the other is gone begin to take their toll, the storm closes in on the little seclusion and solace one can find, and eventually, that storm destroys the years of falsehoods each party has built. When it’s time to leave, all this will be over, and perhaps both parties of the song will find some peace.

I’ve sat through my fair share of forced smiles and hang-outs at the twilight of a friendship we knew we should’ve both left behind long ago. I’ve had nothing to talk about with people who I’ve known for years. Suddenly Halo split screen and red-40 infused concoctions of soda aren’t enough to keep everyone together. There comes an unfortunate weight of realizing the people you grew up with, who were there for the most formative moments of your youth, more than likely anticipate and enjoy your exit more than they do your entrance. “They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave” cries out to me as an anthem for those who know such things can go on forever, that they can’t lie to each other for much longer. As the passionate flame of youthful friendships subsides into the “once every month if we can” of adulthood, and communications grow more distant, and suddenly you just don’t know what to say to each other while sitting on a couch in a stranger’s home. For one brief moment, the illusion of young adulthood, the feeling of invincibility and a great abundance of raucousness and companionship is broken, and you suddenly feel very, very old. The storm comes, you will send your last text to those you once held close to your chest, and it will be your time to leave. Such is life.

This has been Twin Falls: Music and Memories, and it’s been a pleasure to write on one of the greatest t. I’ll see you next week with another review, and I hope you have a good weekend. And as always, catch my radio show Jacksonville Vice, airing on Spinnaker Radio, 95.5 FM WSKR, 11 AM every Monday (except for next Monday, September 2nd due to Labor Day).

Jack Stauber's HiLo: The Only Redeeming Memory of Being 13

September 20, 2024

Carissa’s Wierd And Their Beautiful Misery: Songs About Leaving

by Jack Griffis

Spinnaker Radio DJ, Host of Jacksonville Vice

Full of What’s Not Real And Full of Empty Tears: “So You Wanna Be A Superhero”

Trying To Find Love Between The Lines: They’ll Only Miss You When You Leave

A Reflection on The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I

September 13, 2024

A Reflection on The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I

by Jack Griffis

Spinnaker Radio DJ, Host of Jacksonville Vice

Like a ghost, a creaking and subtle feeling of melancholy and aimlessness, a sort of spiritual vagrancy settles over the end of the 20th century and the entrance into a new millennium. Emo (short for Emotional Hardcore and generally recognized as a Post-Hardcore genre), once known for its fast and aggressive cries of social dissonance, influenced by the political intensity of the hardcore scene that birthed it and characterized by bands such as Rites of Spring, transforms into the (relatively) quiet and socially-agonized Midwest and Second Wave Emo of the 90s, producing bands such as American Football and Jimmy Eat World. And then, the unnameable arose: The Internet. Suddenly social connection is available across the globe, international trade is now possible on a level of organization previously unthinkable, and cultural exchange can thrive. And yet, more than anything, the world’s musicians, students, and youth who are the first generation to be molded by the internet have never felt more alone. This is 1999. If Y2K was going to end the world, it seemed no one was bothered too much. But at the end of this tunnel of gloom and fear in the face of a changing, yet all too static world, stands Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I, a mosaic of early adulthood fears, recollections of lost loves and friendships, and the feeling of utter alienation in a world of rapidly changing social standards and fads. Emergency & I is an album that seems to look at the year 2000 with a depressive indifference begetting someone who feels that no matter how much things change, for the unnamed subjects of each of its eight songs, it’ll all be the same, miserable life.

Released after two mildly well-reviewed albums with unremarkable sales (those being 1995’s ! and 1997’s The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified, both landing solidly in the ⅗ range of most reviewers) in 1999, Emergency & I would ultimately put The Dismemberment Plan on the map of the indie scene, escaping their relatively small roots of DC Post-Hardcore and propelling them into the tours of bands such as Pearl Jam and Death Cab For Cutie throughout the early 2000s, only furthering their influence, particularly among the audiences for the early emo inspired Death Cab For Cutie. However, beneath the art-punk and strange new techniques afforded by their new studio (with The Dismemberment Plan being acquired by Interscope Records before the production of Emergency & I), the frantic guitars and the vast influences (ranging from Bob Dylan to Motown) ran a hidden stream of tragedy and change that producer Chad Clark described as providing the album “gravity.” This gravity is a result of the album living in the shadow of guitarist and vocalist Travis Morrison’s triple-hitter of vast life changes–those being the death of his father, the birth of his younger sister’s child, and his girlfriend breaking up with him (the latter quite literally taking place during a recording session for the album). The specters of death, heartbreak, and birth within a relatively short period for Morrison all provide a background of vast and meaningful interpersonal change– changes that within Morrison caused a seismic shift in his view of his former influences. In the wake of these occurrences, his perspective shifted, forming a belief that the melancholy of Emo and Punk music was self-absorbed and melodramatic, with Morrison describing such music as “deep within one’s own butt” in terms of its perspective. The vast changes within his life and the strange new conditions of the lingering final years of the first millennia were the pressure and heat that created Emergency & I ’s figurative diamond. Morrison’s sorrow and his gradual broadening of perspective were a key influence on the lyricism and sound of Emergency & I, and it is this gradual transition from youthful melancholy to the maturing sorrows of a young man that allowed him to escape “within his own butt” as he might put it. The adolescent-political (what one might refer to as immaturely anarchistic) woes of late Cold War hardcore have transfigured themselves into the crooning digital-toned and endearingly odd cries of a 27-year-old Morrison, reckoning with change and stagnation, the loss of flighty youth and the end of his own self-pity in the face of greater anguish.

Ironically, Emergency & I falls into my life at what I consider the apex of my own self-pity and adolescent woes: 15 years old. I was an unreasonably downcast teenager, and the onslaught of a lockdown didn’t help. One of the few benefits of being stuck inside was the free time it afforded me to explore music, and it just so happened that Emergency & I popped up on my recommended page (or was it autoplay? So many years and so many concussions have passed I forget how) and brought me the odd stylings of The Dismemberment Plan. I would listen to it, and enjoy the tunes, but frankly, at the time the outwardly energetic stylings turned me off. It would be another few months before I traversed into the hardcore and crust punk genres, as gradually their abrasive stylings brought me up to a higher RPM. But for the moment, I was hopelessly in love with the twinkly slow-jams of American Football’s American Football, an album that has consistently landed in my Spotify top 100 for five years running, go figure. Emergency & I remained extant in the back of my mind, popping up on shuffle, maybe prompting me to give it a relisten and find it was still a pleasant album. Oddly enough, it was a song from the earlier The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified, “The Ice of Boston,” a track about an unfortunate New Year’s Eve party drenched with the wide-shot melancholia that would be further developed in Emergency & I, that would provide me the impetus to go back and give the album a serious listen, a jaunt I’m glad I undertook.

Rather than provide a brief snapshot of my feelings on each song, I’d like to dive into two of my favorite songs, their production and general sound, a potential interpretation (alongside a comparison with the “official” interpretation of both the band and lyric collecting sites), and what each song means to me personally. Imagine it as a kind of lyrical tarot card reading– the surface, the meaning of the symbols, and a look inward related to each song. For those of you who might be keeping track at home in the future(and a retroactive thank you to those who are!)– if I stick to this format of writing on music, this’ll be where it starts. Without further ado, I’d like to discuss “Spider in the Snow” and “The City,” my favorite tracks off Emergency & I.

Same VCR, The Same Cats: The Desolation of “Spider in the Snow”

Opening with a right-ear leaning high-pitched synth, “Spider in the Snow” is a song that from its beginning seems to resound with restraint and compactness– a short loop of catchy drum grooves, subtle bass work, and the high-pitched yet immediately dejected sounding guitar define the song, overlaid over that same two-note droning synth. Then, suddenly it descends into only the riffs of a bass and the grooving of a drum, and there from a dark corner in a small room seems to arise Travis Morrison’s youthful and subtle voice. Not possessing the screaming, dial tone electronics of “Memory Machine” or the breakneck speed of “Gyroscope”, instead the defining trait of “Spider in the Snow” is its studio apartment-sized ennui.

The first verse of the song is fittingly composed of brief, almost spoken prose, restrained similarly to the rest of the song’s form. Morrison describes a social amnesiac of sorts– “The only thing worse than bad memories/Is no memories at all/From the age of 20 to 22 I had five friends/None of whose names I can recall.” It’s a powerful quintet of lines that establishes the lonely themes in “Spider in The Snow” almost immediately. We are presented with a picture of a man completely disconnected from his own life, left with very few memories of anything he can call his own.

Following another stanza regarding the life changes that the narrator has experienced, which ultimately amounts to very little spare “similar alley, different rats” outside his window, Morrison breaks into the equally minimalistic chorus, a cry to an unknown second person–perhaps us as the listener, perhaps a lost love, perhaps lost friends. His three voices overlapping themselves, Morrison cries “You can’t say it but I know that it’s in there/You don’t know it but I know that you’re scared/Obvious and lonely, a spider in the snow” over the now intensified (yet still constrained, auditorily) drumming. The image is clear– across a city-covering deluge of white stands the outline of a living spider, its dark form contrasting vividly against the alabaster fields, both without its fellows and immediately noticeable as such.

No official interpretation or discussion was ever released regarding “Spider in the Snow” from The Dismemberment Plan, but the meaning seems apparent. Spider in the Snow is a haunting refrain to whoever it refers to, a cry for someone stuck in social dead air, stuck in the rut of their own life, afraid of nothing ever changing (a fear apparent to their peers, hence the contrast of the spider in the snow). The few connections they’ve made are forgotten, annihilated with cerebral white-out, and all that remains is the image manifested by the song lyrics–a dead-end job, the squalor of apartment living, a pit within your chest yawning, and a complete disconnect from your peers as the years move on, all contrasted against the gloom of a frozen-over city, covered with snow. As story after story hits the press about the lack of social connection among those now entering the cusp of adulthood, the societal effects of a lack of social cohesion, and who to blame (phones, COVID, violence, etc) it seems we are given a microcosm into that loneliness from the far-flung year of 1999– a figure, who like us, is all too obvious and lonely, all too alone. The final line of verse three even provides an almost abstract call to the false salve that was the social connectedness of the internet– “How can a body move the speed of light/And still find itself in such a rut?” as fiber optic cables seemingly “connect” the entire world at the speed of light, why do so many feel like a spider in the snow?

From a personal perspective, the song feels like an anthem of my misspent years. When the lockdowns hit, I retreated, and seemingly all progress I had made in high school to become a social sort of person was annihilated. All I was able to cobble together was a discord server full of a bunch of my malcontent buddies I had collected over the years– some friends from high school, some buddies from Port St. Lucie I knew through a tenuous connection, and some random batches of whoever else wanted to hang out. And thus became my life, and what remains my life for almost 5 years running– we’re still trying to figure out what to do on our 5th anniversary of hanging out come April of 2025. How can a body move at the speed of light and still find itself in such a rut? I feel uniquely qualified to say it’s not something you apply conscious effort to. Time burns up like high-octane gas when you’re under the watchful glare of a 1080p monitor and a handful of losers with very little going on in their life. Eventually, you try to take a step out from that apartment where you watch the rats consort in the alley and find that you too have become disconnected from your peers, one more casualty of the digital age, a spider in the snow.

The Urban Poetry of “The City”

Comparatively, the opening to “The City” takes a much more complex approach– two guitars, one strumming, the other playing a riff, sets the scenery as Axelson’s drum work once more adds a groovy, jazz-esque feeling throughout the song (a groove that nearly tears itself apart with frenzy toward the outro of the song), and alongside this ecstatic setup steps in a woo-woo sounding synth, which in turn sets the stage for Morrison’s solemn vocals to pour through, once more in the spoken-word style of singing that the album has in spades. “The City” is the quintessential Emergency & I song, containing all of the album’s strongest elements of production, and making extensive use of the interpersonal anguish that lends the album such gravity, mixing both in with exquisite neo-noir lyricism describing a city, that although populated, nevertheless feels agonizingly lonely. The final cries of “All I ever say now is goodbye!/bye!/bye!/bye!” are some of the most tormented lyrics within the album, which may appear short and blunt, but when infused with Morrison’s clear and intense vocals, seem to shake the record with the power of his sorrows.

Once more, “The City” is left without an official statement regarding its meaning, but one can be almost certain of some of the broader points. Certainly, it is about a lover walking out of the subject’s life– lines refer to the emptiness of the protagonist’s bed, being unable to provide for another’s wants, and attempting to discern why exactly the protagonist’s former lover left. Although the lyrics were written before Morrison’s relationship with his girlfriend ended (if the 2011 reissue liner notes present an accurate chronology), it cannot be held in doubt that such an event would undoubtedly influence the recording, and in rough terms, the emotion in Morrison’s voice throughout the song. This is not a breakup song, it is a post-breakup song, reckoning with absence after the initial emotional shock (further reflecting Morrison’s commitment to escaping the petty struggles of youth that motivated much of punk’s lyricism), and a beautiful array of poetry presenting itself through architecture. Verse two contains one of the most striking depictions of the particular feeling of alienation that city living can give in someone already predisposed to melancholy–

“Sometimes I stand on my roof at night/And watch as something seems to happen somewhere else/I feel like the breeze could pick me up and carry me away/Out and over the iridescent grid/Up and away from the bar fights and neon lights/And out and away from everything that makes me what I am”

Completely disconnected from his own life, he watches on in envy as the various other city dwellers seem to be able to simply live. The fact they are capable of being present, that their lives are filled with “bar fights and neon lights” rather than the emptiness that composes the narrator is a reason for envy, a reason for being a voyeur into a world of social cohesion, free of depressive isolation. The unspoken breakup that hangs over the entire song has torn open the narrator, left him with nothing but a disassociated sadness wherein he wishes he could shed all of his problems and simply hang above the earth, an asocial neon-tinted angel surveying the hordes of lovers and fighters, all the people who are capable of having life happen to them.

Further compounding this dissociative melancholy that is filtered into every lyric is his vivid description of the world in the absence of his lover– now bereft of something to focus on, someone to love, he takes notice of how truly lonely the city is without the ability to interact with others– although teeming with people, he feels entirely alone (although the song primarily concerns a lover leaving, he remarks that his telephone is entirely silent as well, indicating the presence of few if any friends.), leaving him to ponder on nothing but the desolation of a city that lacks anyone to speak to. These architectural observations wander broadly across various urban landscapes as he remarks “Now I notice the streetlamps hum/the ghosts of graffiti they couldn’t quite erase/ the blank-faced stares on the subway as people go home.” The narrator is surrounded in effect by ghosts– the ghost of light that manifests as sound, marks left behind by other people that cannot entirely be destroyed, and the drained and exhausted workers unable or unwilling to speak to him within a crowded subway car. Although he is surrounded by all indicators of a thriving city environment, by the teeming masses of people who could provide some company in a subway car or through the urban communion of street art, he is inescapably alone, a ghost himself in the face of the breakup, one more empty face within an empty city.

Similar to “Spider In The Snow” the themes of loneliness strike my chords something fierce in this song– it’s one of my favorites from the album to listen to on repeat, just sit in bed and listen to the amazing intermingling of new age synth and the excellent indie rock stylings that are at their best in this song, absorb the poetry of the lyrics and imagine the narrator’s vision of the world with my eyes closed. Although a romantic undertone was present to me while I listened, I always associated the song with the loss of friends, whether purposeful or through social erosion, watching as time and distance made our texts more infrequent, and conversations shorter. Those who left my life, bit by bit, mile by mile, or those whose lives I left for my own reasons. No one expects every friendship to last forever, but when scrolling through a list of names on my contacts page, looking for someone to hang out with in a dark, lonesome room and wading through a marsh of those who I no longer speak to, who no longer live close by, who no longer wish to speak to me, I can’t help but feel Morrison’s crying voice of “all I ever say now is goodbye!” Jacksonville, as many of you know, is not a city that particularly lends itself to much in the way of social intercourse that I imagine more populous cities do, and when I wandered around downtown on a Saturday afternoon and found myself walking for five minutes before I ran into another person, one can’t help but think that Morrison is correct in stating that the city is dead. One can only hope for that same breeze to lift them over this sprawling, but ultimately empty city, and to see life happen somewhere, because it certainly isn’t happening to you.

This has been the first post of Twin Falls: Music and Memories, and it’s been a pleasure to write for those of you who took the time to wade through my self-indulgent reflections on an indie rock album near and dear to my heart. I’ll see you next week with another review, and I hope you have a good weekend. And if you like the way I write, I go into more abbreviated details of various songs on my radio show Jacksonville Vice, airing on Spinnaker Radio, 95.5 FM WSKR, 11 AM every Monday.