silent houses
I think one of the most gifted songwriters of the past twenty-five years or so is Neil Finn, best known as the frontman of Crowded House. And by the way, Crowded House is a seriously overlooked band: musically, they occupy a place on the Beatles Family Tree not too far from Oasis, and one way to think about Neil Finn is as the Gallagher brother who didn’t go bad. This means that his songs are sweeter than theirs, and often more complex — you can write songs like that when you’re really talented and not drunk out of your skull — but in other respects musically similar, and catchy in some of the same ways.
After a long hiatus during which Finn was occupied with other projects, Crowded House released a record in 2007 called Time on Earth. It’s a pretty melancholy record, colored by the recent deaths of Finn’s mother and the former Crowded House drummer, Paul Hester. And the melancholy songs are the record’s best: “Nobody Wants To,” “Pour le Monde.” (The Pitchfork generally positive review strikes me as a fair one.)
One song from the record I’ve been thinking about is called “Silent House”, because it concerns matters that we’re not used to hearing about in pop songs: aging, loss, dementia. It’s clearly about Finn’s mother and his grief at seeing her lose her memory and awareness, and at seeing a once-vibrant home become a “silent house.” It’s a lovely song, I think, even if the Dixie Chicks covered it.
But it’s rather strange to think of pop and rock music coming to this. Rock lyrics have always been strongly first-person, experiential, and confessional — but the experiences confessed have, of course, typically been those of young people. And when experiences of aging have come into play, they have tended to do so either in third-person narratives (Elvis Costello’s “Veronica”) or in deep comic irony (Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”). Country music has always been open to a wider range of human experiences, which is why it’s not altogether surprising to find the Dixie Chicks recording the song (as much as I hate to grant to what they do the honorific title “country music”). There are a lot of country songs about aging, most of them humorous; but it’s strange to think that the idioms of post-Beatles pop can come to embrace, straightforwardly and unironically, the experiences of middle-age and after. I wonder how all that is going to sound in the coming years.
Have you heard the comeback Tears for Fears record? Supposedly quite good if you like that sort of thing, and I do think they’re pretty woefully underrated as actual song- and tunesmiths. On an unrelated note, Cuervo Gold, regardless of what it’s paired with, doesn’t make ANY night a wonderful thing, though I may still be too young to know better.
— James · Jan 13, 07:34 PM · #
Who did that country song “I did [X] rounds with Jose Cuervo”? Heard it in a bar one time. In Canada, oddly enough.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 13, 07:45 PM · #
Looking at the other end of life, Neil’s brother Tim did a song “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” that was later covered by The Wiggles – a band with a fan base of 2 – 5 year-olds. Tim Finn is a guest vocalist on it. As soon as I heard it, mixed in with a bunch of toddler music while trying to get my young son to sleep, all I could think was “Crowded House” (it turns out it ws originally a Split Enz song). It’s a strangely beautiful but melancholy thing to listen to, in any event, with your three-year-old on your shoulder.
It was Tracy Byrd (sp?) IIRC.
— Jim Manzi · Jan 13, 09:46 PM · #
Jim does in fact RC. It’s Tracy Byrd and, along with ten or so other country songs, can always, after 10pm or so, get an entire bar to start singing.
The entire bar singing thing is a lovely lovely southern idiosyncrasy.
— JA · Jan 14, 03:49 PM · #
Is the entire bar singing really just a southern idiosyncracy? Being a southerner who only spent 4 years above the Mason-Dixon line, I never realized that to be the case.
Any song mentioning Jose Cuervo brings back memories of my Wheaton College roommate coming back from a night of illicit revelry, standing on my desk in the dorm room at 2:30 a.m. and regaling me with his rendition of Shelly West’s “Jose Cuervo, You Are a Friend of Mine.”
— Karl · Jan 15, 05:23 PM · #