Note From Author: Heads up! I’ve got a sinus infection this week, which means another 1 song mini-article as I’d still like to write with the energy I have. Additionally, this week I’m beginning a new project to broaden my horizons. I’ve gotten 86 albums, ranging the gamut from Christian industrial, Japanese noise rock, avant garde medieval compositions, and good ol’ 90s alt rock, all downloaded onto an old Ipod Nano. Their common factor? I’ve never listened to any of them. For 90%, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the band. I’ve deleted all my streaming apps. I’ll be listening to two of these albums a day, compiling my thoughts on each, and publishing a mega article near the end of the fall semester. Be on the lookout for it! 

Big news for those of you who loved the indie kick I’ve been on as of late, because we’re going to one of the first indie albums that settled in my mind, and has still kicked around however many years later from its introduction. We’re taking a step back from Jack Stauber’s endlessly inventive synths and acoustics, and stepping back into charted territories of electric guitars, soft-singing male vocalists, and meat and potatoes (but the exceptional kind of meat and potatoes– 5 sticks of butter, Alaskan Golds, and the finest Wagyu, treated with kisses and grass grown over 1000 years until its moment of death) 90s alternative rock. Charmingly catchy poetics, head-bobbing guitar work, and a kind-hearted sincerity mark one of the great achievements of the 90s alt scene: Built To Spills’ There’s Nothing Wrong With Love.

Formed in Boise, Idaho, like the previously discussed Carissa’s Wierd, Built To Spill brought a particularly west-coast indie sensibility to the outer sphere of the Mormon Belt, centered around the vocal and guitar talents of their only permanent member, Doug Martsch. The band centers around his exceptional skills, and like a postmodern Steely Dan, he makes use of a rotating cast of musicians that, far from making each album a sea of confusion, only further harmonize their shared skills into something wonderful. This is only amplified on 1994’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love: Drummer Andy Capp, and bassist Brett Nelson formed a triple threat with Martsch, a veritable armada of musical talent that would cause There’s Nothing Wrong With Love to become a smash hit, propelling Built To Spill into a household name of Indie music, and like an atom bomb of heart-string playing vulnerability, forever altered the cynicism of the genre. 

I’m not alone in my near-worship of this album: the notoriously sharp tongued critics of early Pitchfork gave it a 9.3/10, with other reviews bouncing between 3.5’s to a perfect 5/5. It’s beloved, a watershed moment that changed the genre, and permanently branded its brand of smile inducing lyricism into my heart. 

I was lucky enough to see Built To Spill play live at Jackrabbits during my Freshman year at UNF, and its an experience I’ll never forget. 90 degree, overcrowded room, 5$ waters, atrocious bathrooms, and yet Doug Martsch’s beautiful voice cut through all the muddle. They didn’t exclusively play tracks off of There’s Nothing Wrong With Love of course, but each one they did play gave so much life to already evocative tracks. I’ll never forget smashing an All Star Plate at Waffle House at 1AM with my buddy Nathan after the concert ended, and then passing out in a sweaty mess on my dorm bed once I finally got back to UNF. This album has stuck with me since I was 14, and 6 years on I hope to listen to it for 6 more, and so on after that. Strap in, and get ready for one of my favorite indie albums ever.

Wicked Stab of Nostalgia Without Context: “Twin Falls,” 7 Years On

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that although I mention first being exposed to this album “6 years ago,” the anachronistic caption above makes note that it was in fact 7 since I was first exposed to the less than two minute ballad that is “Twin Falls.” There’s a simple explanation for that– my first exposure to Built To Spill didn’t come from Built To Spill themselves, but from a cover of “Twin Falls” on the Ben Folds Five album Naked Baby Photos, where they perform a live version with Ben Fold’s outstanding pianowork taking the place of Doug Martsch’s guitar (Coincidentally, I saw Ben Folds live in Savannah over the summer during their paper airplane tour, and prayed with all my might for Ben to grab my airplane and play Twin Falls. It didn’t happen). I first listened to that album at 13, courtesy of my friend Nathan, who was pretty much the sole reason for me learning so much about 90s alt rock, and is also the reason I saw so many sick concerts. We had no access to youtube or any other sort of music playing sites while at the after school program, so to alleviate the malaise of waiting 4 hours for your parents to pick you up, he ripped all the 90s CDs his dad owned onto a flashdrive, and gave me a copy of the files to enjoy on the computer’s in built music software. Frankly thats the only reason those hours were tolerable– but I digress. For a year I labored under the illusion that “Twin Falls” was Ben Fold’s own original composition, and frankly was upset he never made any more songs in its evocative, brief, and melancholic style– a short, punchy tune that called to mind a life that the listener had never lived, yet struck a chord as though it did. 

Imagine my surprise when a year later, I decided to actually look up “Twin Falls” and found out that it was in fact made by a band called Built To Spill, and the album that “Twin Falls” came off of was quite well regarded. I Youtube2Mp3’d the entire album (that being in those dark ages between the fall of the Napster Empire (which I was not around to see) and my parents letting me have a Spotify account– I was a musical visigoth scraping crappy 192 kbps MP3’s off the walls of a long gone empire at that point) and organized it on my Itunes into a playlist so it appeared to be an actual album. I gave their “Twin Falls” a listen, found it just as satisfactory as the Ben Folds Five cover, and then decided “eh, what the heck, give the album a listen.” I state a lot that so-and-so was the best choice I could’ve made for my taste in music, or that whatever album changed my tastes or something– but I really mean it. But “Twin Falls” always stuck out to me. Maybe it was the nostalgia. Maybe it was my tendency to like the somber more than the joyous when it came to music. Or maybe it was just a darn good song. Whatever the case, I latched onto this one. 

Feeling like a snippet of a scatter brained conversation heard in a bar put to music more than a proper song, Doug Martsch walks the fine line of “spoken-word/singing” here with his naturally butter-smooth voice, fluctuating between highs and lows in each word in a way that manages not to come off as whiny or childish sounding. It’s a journey, a heartbreaking tale that most of us know– someone with dreams, with hopes, aspirations, who has to settle down at a young age in the small town they were born in (of course with Jacksonville, it’s not a small town geographically by any means– but in terms of the bleakness of living here, I’d rank us about the same as a Post-Soviet city in the far eastern holds.) because of an accident, or because of an ailing parent, or any number of reasons. Naturally they fade from our memory, spare a few keen screenshots of the time we knew them that play across our minds in the dead of night. Even if you never knew that experience, the keenness of the lyrics reach out to you so much that it feels as though you’re in Twin Falls, or maybe some place thousands of miles away, reflecting on that same archetypal stay-behind. 

Going with the generally accepted idea of There’s Nothing Wrong With Love being about the aches and pains of a mildly troubled youth paints an evocative picture of an American interstate emigree not just remembering a girl from his youth, but a world left behind. The imagery of locations is vivid– the cafeteria at Harrison elementary, games of Seven Up, the summer of 1983; although not present for these things, they are conjured as vividly as our own memories. “Last I heard, she had twins, or maybe three…” is such a fitting last remark on someone you knew and have no way of knowing where they stand now. In the times before Facebook, before cheap long distance calling, for a vast majority of those who left their hometown, the world left behind was consigned entirely to disintegrating memories. There’s something melancholic about this disintegration– maybe the protagonist of “Twin Falls” was in love with this girl he left behind. Maybe he hated her. More than likely he felt ambivalent. Whatever the case– those fleeting moment, the cafeteria, games of seven up, uncertain knowledge of the fact she had children, form the mosaic of the song. These recollections fly in by night after the troubled youth that guides There’s Nothing Wrong With Love– those troubled last gasps of teenager-dom are long over, and all that remains are the memories of a small Idaho town. 

My own perception of the song is often tinged by those memories of middle school. A constant ever present sense of growing older, yet still feeling oddly between worlds– stuck between the stage of playing seven up and getting out “before I got too old.” Already at a young age, for different reasons than those I possess now, I wanted to get out, somewhere, before I was anchored to North Florida. The feeling only grew more pertinent into the next year– awkward, gangly, out of place in my high school, with no ability to make new friends or to talk to the people I wanted to talk too, I felt more than ever a drive to make haste like “Twin Falls” protagonist. 

But for a brief moment, this song, and There’s Nothing Wrong With Love as a whole did not represent utter alienation from my peers– it represented connection. As clear as day, such that I can see this memory almost from third person when listening to the album, I remember working on the first ever Pathfinder Tabletop RPG campaign I ever played with friends (for those unaware, Pathfinder is essentially the “pen-and-paper” style Roleplaying game where you and some friends pretend to be knights and stuff, popularized by Dungeons and Dragons) at my old wooden desk while songs like “Cleo” and “Twin Falls” played. For a brief moment before the two seniors we had in our campaign graduated, there was a brief little light this album represented; whenever I had it on, I was writing, coming up with new and more perilous dungeons, fascinating magical rewards to give to my players, and a cavalcade of hilarious characters. I miss that campaign, even though we were all sort of bumbling about. I miss our imaginative games of bloodthirsty knights and musket toting bounty hunters– and like the mysterious subject of “Twin Falls,” often those knights come across my memories when I lay awake at night. I don’t know where Liam or Aaron went, or any other host of people I knew in high school who I just never kept in touch with after COVID, but sometimes I still remember the time I accidentally fried some noble’s brain using lightning from my hands, and we all had to skip town. The last full campaign I was ever a player of ended when COVID killed it, and I memorialize that one just as much. For me “Twin Falls” is not just an anthem of geographical memories left to waste in the dustbin upon an egress, but an anthem of youthful joys left behind in the face of a miserable four years in high school, joys stripped away as people moved and COVID altered the social landscape, and trying to find my personal footing in college.

This has been a shorter article of Twin Falls: Music and Memories, examining the song that my blog actually takes its name from! As always, look forward to 11:00am Monday for Jacksonville Vice, where I’ll be DJ’ing, and next Friday for a much longer article when my health is in better straits.