Popcorn Noises

All’s Forgotten Now

Perhaps in the shuffle of holidays and EOY lists in December you missed One Week One Band’s theme week dedicated to album-closing tracks? It was cool: we got to read a bunch of different writers all following (at least loosely) the same format one right after another. OWOB is itself a bigger version of this, but condensing it helped illuminate the variances in style, taste, and listener experience, which is always a great thing to observe. Brad Nelson’s stellar write-up of Boz Scaggs’ adult-contempo ballad “We’re All Alone” stuck with me the most, reintroducing me to a song I’d probably heard somewhere in the background of retail stores my whole life and making me an honest-to-goodness fan. I especially like the way he situates “Alone” in its own time and place—L.A. in the mid-70s—and reads it as an existential treatise on the kinds of lives being lived there.

[…] A ‘70s situated inexorably in Los Angeles, land of hot sidewalks and terrors and a supernatural belief in architecture as an indicator of spiritual wealth. Houses were set wide and apart, their own compounds, theologically sealed, the final sum of anarchic urban planning. Lawns served as borders and tributes to a totally conquered desert, at least psychically. There is always the threat of the old dead landscape lurking at the edge.

Between the song and the above description, which highlights the sense of domestic melodrama that colors it (“Close the window, calm the light”), as well as the dark, desolate picture of Los Angeles we all saw in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, I’ve been toying with a mental map of the city, a somewhat romanticized sense of ennui that a place like, say, New York doesn’t have. Credit some of this to the shared cultural mythology of L.A. itself. I mean, Drive is positioned within the continuum of film noir that’s always revolved around California and, aside from New York, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more mythologized American city. This is where a line gets drawn, though, because New York has largely been spoiled for me. I tend to think once you’ve lived in a place you can’t be as seduced by its twisted folklore anymore. It turns out that—surprise!—people live mundane, comfortable lives in even the biggest, brightest, most dramatic cities and chances are you will too. Myths (especially dark ones) are most gripping when they’re all you have to go on.

Scaggs understands the inevitable pull of regularity, which is why he chooses to paint L.A. in that suburban light, but since this is pop music it still winds up warped and skewed into an outsized legend. He draws a direct line from the relentless rain storm seen through a window (as if the city were trying to drown its inhabitants) to being swept out to sea forevermore. Dangling on the edge of the Pacific, his weepy, curtained version of L.A. is still the last outpost of the West, the end of civilization before the (other, aquatic) desert. It’s a place where stories get told and then wither almost immediately, imparting a magnetic lure to the notion of being swept away and forgetting everything. Even mundanity is overpowering there.

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When it comes to using music to conjure up real places, tweet-master John Darnielle is one of our longest-standing laureates. Though I admit I’m a bigger fan of his newer, more spruced-up work (which bars me from “real” Mountain Goats fandom, I know)—Sunset Tree, Get Lonely, and the underrated All Eternals Deck—and much of his geographically-based stuff predates it, his sheer globetrotting thoroughness means he’s probably hit on at least one place that’s important to you. Take, for example, the opening scene of “Dance Music,” where 5-year-old Darnielle hides from an abusive stepfather in his room on Johnson Ave. in San Luis Obispo, two hundred miles up the coast from L.A. and, as it happens, only a mile or so from the duplex on Couper Dr. where I spent my first 5 years. And let’s not forget the affirming mantra from “Jam Eater Blues,” which last year served as my personal reminder of why leaving Florida would be worth the risks: “Life is too short to spend the rest of it down here in Tampa.”

Lately, though, it’s been Deck’s “Outer Scorpion Squardon” catching my ear. The song’s gracious piano chords have an elegance to them that can be absent from Darnielle’s blockier jams—the work of a songwriter, not just a writer. It’s also a song about time instead of place. “If you really want to conjure up a ghost / cultivate a space for the things that hurt you most,” he sings, recognizing how the traumas of the past stick with us the longest (like, say, the childhood hardship of the aforementioned “Dance Music”). In just a handful of lines he wrestles with the desire to kill those painful memories—“Ghosts of my childhood stay with me, if you will / find a place where there’s water, hold you under til you’re still”—while still resigning himself not only to accepting them, but to embracing them as part of himself, delivering in the process one of the most heartening lines of his career: “Don’t let anybody call them ugly.”

Like the apocalyptic desires lurking behind “We’re All Alone,” the conflicted self of “Outer Scorpion Squadron” moves beyond the common artistic tropes of conflating pain and beauty. Neither song is built to revel romantically in its own despair. Darnielle isn’t holding up his ghosts for all to see and Scaggs never forgets the cost of forgetting. If the things that hurt you most make you who you are, then the challenge becomes finding a way to not hate yourself for being damaged. Notice how both songwriters allow no place for shame, Darnielle in his defense of ‘ugliness’ and Scaggs in his creation of a safe place. “All’s forgotten now, my love / we’re all alone,” isn’t just an escape route from a grim Los Angeles of the mind, it’s an invitation to be openly, finally honest.