jakobnicholas

TBTD is decent, but Go-Go Boots is the worst album of their career. Even more tired and tedious.

Just for balance, I'd like to say I think Go-Go Boots is the best DBT record since Southern Rock Opera. (The Dirty South comes close but the 2nd half doesn't match the great first half.)

I actually have no idea where I'm going with any of this except that I've listened to the thing more than 15 times, love every song except Every Day Is Yours to Win (like the music, the lyrics not so much) and am thrilled REM have made a record in 2011 that I like this much.

Ditto (mostly). Lyrically, I kinda agree about "Every Day's" lyrics. But something about the structure and sound of the song that I love. One of my favorites. But yes, I agree that "Collapse" is a very likeable record. It's been a roller-coaster for me since "Hi-Fi".

- UP: I like a lot because it's cool and interesting to hear a band struggle and experiment with how to make a record with a major band member gone. Buck and Mills created some nice sounds that maybe they never would have had Berry stuck around. I love the diversity of the record, and Stipe's lyrics of picking yourself up and moving on are inspiring and heart-felt. Only complaint is that it's probably a couple songs too long.

- REVEAL: Seems criminally under-rated, but I think that's due to a middle 4-song stretch (She Just Wants to Be, Disappear, Saturn Return, Beat a Drum) that likely bog down the record for most.

- AROUND THE SUN: Depressed me a bit, 'cause it's the first time I felt R.E.M. was lost. I still like many of the songs, but I've always felt the album as a whole just isn't good at all, despite many attempts to like it even a little bit. I have a few of my favorites on iTunes, otherwise don't listen.

- ACCELERATE: Nice attempt, nice energy, but not a good R.E.M. album to me. Seems musically and lyrically forced many times. I hardly ever (never) feel inspired to give it a spin.

- COLLAPSE INTO NOW: Sounds like a very confident band. Overall, it has a fun and positive vibe found that hasn't existed on an R.E.M. record since Out of Time.

I wasn't judging the album, I was judging the clips that NPR chose to play.

What specific clips did they play? I can't think of many parts of the record I'd describe as "garbage".

NPR did a piece on this album yesterday afternoon. They said it's the best album they've done in 16 years, but every clip they played sounded like garbage.

What better way to judge an album than by listening to a few clips on the radio.

None of the songs made me get a goofy grin on my face, meaning "I'm so happy that R.E.M. is back with something new and awesome."

That's too bad. For me, "Discover", "Uberlin", "Every Day is Yours to Win" and "That Someone is You" accomplished that. That's about the same number of songs that got me on "Up" and "Reveal". "Around the Sun" and "Accelerate" each had maybe 2 songs that made me feel that way.

Just curious, what songs since "Hi-Fi" have made you feel that way? I think it's a huge, nearly-impossible chore for a band like R.E.M. to keep their fans excited with with new songs after releasing 10+ albums of greatness.

I think it's fair to say the album lacks great "rockers", but I think the pop is great.

Sorry, but Kot's review BLOWS. I agree with dtram. A record DOES NOT have to always break new ground to be a good record. I actually think "Collapse Into Now" has a lot of freshness to its sound, but I'm not the music "expert" that Kot is, so what do I know?!

Kot writes snarky, condescending crap like "Patti Smith plays shaman-like muse to Stipe on the eerie soundscape “Blue” (which demands to be listened to once, then never again);" I can imagine Kot patting himself on the back after writing that. I put the record on and let it go until finished, and enjoy nearly all of it. Is it their best? No. Is it in their top 3? No. Top 5? No. Top 10? Maybe. Who cares! To me, it's a fun record to listen to.

I've been listening to Rollingstone.com's stream and enjoying Collapse Into Now a lot. Overall it has a very positive and, more importantly, confident vibe. Probably their most confident-sounding record since Hi-Fi. Stipe, Mills and Buck all seem unafraid to let it loose. The rockers rock, the pop is very poppy, and the slower songs have real emotion. I can't name any song that I consider a clunker. (maybe "Walk it Back", but not really). "Everyday Is Yours to Win" is a beautiful creation by all the band. "That Someone Is You" is 2 minutes of pop bliss.

R.E.M. could never match the mystery and perfection of some of their early great records. And maybe it's not on the level of Out of Time or Automatic, but that's a high level. Since Berry's departure, the band has never really seemed sure of what they wanted an album to be. "Up" came the closest perhaps, but was probably a few songs too long. "Reveal" mostly succeeded at making a summer record, but was inconsistent. "Around the Sun" sounded like R.E.M. was lost. "Accelerate" tried too hard to sound like there old selves. Considering their age and history, I think R.E.M. nailed it this time.

I like the music and sound of Go-Go Boots. But I think what makes me REALLY like it are the stories and characters. In the liner notes, Patterson Hood explains how this cd is the "Movie Version" of characters and stories that they may or may not cave culled from real life. The music, to me, fits the songs and stories perfectly. There are some really great lyrics throughout the disc that paint a picture of real people. Many times you feel like you really understand and/or care for a character with just one well-written line:

"Hey Ricky, don't let the Diabetes get you!"

"I figured after forty years, I wouldn't still be having nightmares. You'd think that now that we're older, that war would finally be over."

"He woke up real early, but he's late for his appointment."

"I got scars on my back from the way my Daddy raised me."

Some reviews have used the word "claustrophobic". I kinda agree.

To me, that's not a negative, but rather explains maybe how some feel listening to it. The first 5 songs surround you in repetitive beats and sounds and blips and claps and hums and other sounds. Thom's voice is the only sign of life, and even his voice has a foreign sound mostly. "Codex", with its keyboards, sounds refreshing...like giving you a breathe of air. Then "Give Up the Ghost" reverts back, before the closing "Separator" lets you ease out of the album with a very likeable song.

I think artistically it's a very good record. Cannot make out hardly any lyrics, which kinda irritates me. The phrases I catch are pretty dark.

The most thrilling thing about the King of Limbs release is that EVERYBODY is hearing for the first time. Journalists don't have time to listen for a month before giving a review. Bloggers everywhere can chime in with their immediate reactions as easy as paid critics.

It's fun searching around for people's reactions. Some guy named Adrian McKinty gives a track-by-track account, including a comical take on track 1:

1. Bloom: tinkly piano sounds good...oh no bleeps and snare repeating Kid A fashion. Bleeps going on and on. Thom Yorke begins to sing: "open your mouth wide" he seems to say. Doctor heal thyself, Yorkie, I can't really understand what you're saying. Something about an ocean. Violins kicking in - they sound a bit Eygptian. Organ now. A bit Day in the Life here as everything builds to a crescendo...Back to the bleeping again...this is getting tiresome. Yorke likes to hear himself howl (like a girl I used to know but that's another story). Merciful heaven track 1 is over. Nope. More ticking noises now. Finally.

it doesn't have any traditional chord changes, few catchy melodies and little guitar. kinda like Kid A when everyone said that one was bad.

 

-justin

Except Kid A kicks you in the butt with National Anthem, Optimistic and even the glorious yelp of Yorke on How to Disappear Completely.

"King of Limbs" is SO reserved. Because of their history, I keep waiting for the few jolts typical of Radiohead. They never come. I'm not ready to say tha that's a bad thing. I just feel a bit under-whelmed. I do think, however, the album will improve with more listens.

Another minor gripe is that it's hard to hear much of the lyrics. Or rather, not many lyrcis jump out like I'm used to with Radiohead. Again, time will hopefully improve that.

I'm not totally digging the mostly techno-sounding direction and the album seems to just plod along without many sparks. It's very restrained-sounding overall, musically and vocally.

But it also sounds like a record that could reward multiple listens and it has a very cohesive feel. Too early to say if I like it, and if so, how much. Right now it's just kinda "nice". And that's not the adjective I'd hope I'd use to describe a Radiohead album.

Pitchfork ranks it 7.7. I'd rank it higher, but it's a positive review that I pretty much agree with. I particularly like the last paragraph. I agree that there's a nice "textural range". As a whole, it ranks very high in the Truckers' catalog of music.

There are two corpses on the Drive-By Truckers' new album, Go-Go Boots. Both the title track and the eight-minute forensic epic "The Fireplace Poker" are about women who meet bloody ends at the hands of their husbands, who are both preachers. These two songs are the inverse of the true-crime saga "The Wig He Made Her Wear", a standout from the band's 2010 album, The Big To-Do, about a woman in a small Tennessee town who shoots her allegedly abusive husband, a Church of Christ pastor, in the back with a shotgun.

"Go-Go Boots" is the better of the two new songs, not only because it's shorter but because songwriter Patterson Hood is more interested in the aftermath than the murder itself. The pastor's ne'er-do-well son, with a pregnant teenage girlfriend and a job pumping gas, can't confront his father for fear of losing his temper, so his anger just sizzles and fizzles inside him, with no outlet. Hood intimates a sad arc to his life in a single verse, an impressive lyrical trick that lends the song its considerable gravity. By comparison, "The Fireplace Poker", with its curious guitar curlicue wrapping around Brad Morgan's stoic drumbeat, just recounts the details of the crime and sits aghast at a man's capacity for cruelty.

Enthralled by small-town violence (he's reportedly working on a film about a southern crime syndicate), Hood has explored this material before, documenting crime scenes in song and relating blood splatter and gunshot residue in verse while the band draw the chalk outlines on the floor. As always, it's the carefully chosen details that give these songs heft and personality and keep them from becoming redundant. Hood is telling stories that are rare in rock music, if not altogether nonexistent, and the Truckers boast two other songwriters with similarly distinctive styles and subject matter. Mike Cooley writes in a cursory first-person, emphasizing aw-shucks wordplay and wry self-deprecation: "The Weakest Man" is classic AM country at its wryest, while "Cartoon Gold" is his Zevon anthem, set in a dark L.A. bar seen through even darker sunglasses. "I think about you when I can," he laments, "and sometimes when I do I still get caught."

Over three albums (she's been playing for five but only writing songs for three), bass player Shonna Tucker has grown into a sharp, imaginative lyricist, and her one track on Go-Go Boots shows she's absorbed Hood and Cooley's knack for character sketches. "Dancin' Ricky" depicts a man out on the dancefloor with a tight shirt and his "freedom out in the open," which I read as "tight pants." Rather than depict him as a fool, she paints him as a sort of antihero: "Hey Ricky, don't let the Diabetes get you!" Tucker cheers. Tucker may not have written "Where's Eddie", but she sings it like she did, in a performance that's restrained and soulful-- a bit of feminine guile to offset so much masculine songwriting.

Eddie Hinton wrote "Where's Eddie", and the Muscle Shoals Sounds singer and friend of the Hood family figures prominently on Go-Go Boots-- just as prominently as murderous preachers. The band recently recorded two covers of Hinton's songs for Shake It Records' singles series (Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli has also contributed), and both sides appear on the album, forming a mini-tribute to the troubled artist, whose success never equaled his talents and who died in 1995 largely unknown. Hood doesn't quite have the vocal chops to put across "Everybody Needs Love" as confidently as Tucker sells "Where's Eddie", but thanks to the band's exuberant take, it proves a potent block of southern soul that reveals the Truckers' range and sensitivity beyond the Crazy Horse guitar attack of recent albums.

In fact, Go-Go Boots sounds like a slight retreat from that rock noise, indulging Cooley's country jones as well as the band's more acoustic tendencies. It's a more dynamic record than The Big To-Do, recalling the ramshackle vibe of their first two albums. There's a greater textural range, from the noir ramble of "Ray's Automatic Weapon" to the spidery tension of "Used to Be a Cop", one of Hood's best character sketches. On the heels of Go-Go Boots comes the DVD release of the documentary The Secret to a Happy Ending, which chronicles the period in the mid-2000s when the Drive-By Truckers almost broke up. There's a telling moment when former guitar player/songwriter Jason Isbell asserts that that line-up was the most solid and the most creative in the band's long history of turnovers. It's no reflection on him, but Go-Go Boots goes a long way to proving him wrong, suggesting a band that knows where all the bodies are buried.

— Stephen M. Deusner, February 18, 2011

(Sorry....Cortez and I obviously posted at the same time.)

...from what I've heard of "Mercy Buckets", I may have to download that track. Decoration Day and Dirty South are where it's at for me.

"Mercy Buckets" is really nice. Hood says he was trying to write a prom song.

Really am liking it. It's getting somewhat mixed reviews...mostly favorable, but most seem to have a problem with the lack of rockers. I think it's a wonderful mix of country, rock, blues and storytelling. Hood opens with a great alt.-country-sounding song about his grandmother, then later makes us feel compassion for down-and-out characters. Cooley, as always, is limited in songs but delivers greatly. I've always liked his pure country voice. It's almost always perfect for his tales. Shona Tucker's 2 songs add nice variety. I LOVE her vocal on Eddie Hinton's "Where's Eddie". A mostly dark album is wrapped around the middle song "Everybody Needs Love", an uplifting feel-good Hinton cover nicely done by Hood.

I got to see the Stripes on their last U.S. tour in the summer of 2005. Jack White absolutley torched the place. He strutted out in a white suit and top hat with electric guitar in hand ("Say My Name" was the song I think). Then he spent 2 hours bouncing from guitars to keyboards to marimba. I'm very much a straight dude, but I could not take my eyes off the guy. He has an amazing prescence on stage and is incredibly talented and driven. I liked the mystery of the Stripes. Jack White made the band more than just music, although the music was damn good. I've seen White mutliple times with the Raconteurs and Dead Weather, and he was equally mesmerizing. Even seeing Jack White played behind Wanda Jackson on Letterman is worth 5 minutes of your time.

Sucks that the White Stripes are done, but I kind of like that they aren't risking tarnishing their great legacy.

I freely admit I could be missing something here but I don't get the lovefest for Uberlin. It's good but all the, "it's the best thing since ......" really has me scratching my head.

Hard to explain. Every now and then R.E.M. makes a song that just sounds like a totally fresh way to make an R.E.M. song....which is amazing that they can still do after so many great records. I felt the same way when I first heard "Lotus", "Why Not Smile" and "I've Been High".

I also like the lyrics of Uberlin..."Find the River"-ish.

Uberlin video

 

Cheesus, by the time March rolls around we'll all have heard the whole damn record.

No kidding. I wish R.E.M. would stop with the leaks, as I have zero discipline or patience.

I've liked (to varying degrees) every leaked song so far, but Uberlin is my favorite. Beautiful song.

I honestly could care less if one chooses to not believe in God or anything. Actually, I shouldn't say "care less", 'cause I DO wish that everyone in the world believed in Jesus.

But some don't. And that's how it is. And I understand it.

I have a good friend who is a devout, almost rabid atheist. And he likes to send everyone articles that are pro-atheist in content or youtube clips of atheists giving speeches, etc. And when I get one of his emails, I might skim over it but then delete it, and don't think about it anymore. I don't understand what he's trying to do.

NOTHING I read or hear is gonna change my faith. NOTHING.

So I'm puzzled by this article's line: "To make it on SuperScholar’s list of influential living atheists, an atheist can’t merely disbelieve in God but also must actively encourage others to disbelieve in God."

As a Christian, I don't encourage atheists to believe in Jesus. I tell my friend I'd like it if he believed in Jesus, but that's it. When he starts trying to push my buttons on reasons he think God doesn't exist, it seriously goes in one ear and out the other. I don't care what he thinks about it. He can think what he wants. But nothing he says is gonna jolt my faith. I feel like it bugs my friend and many atheists in general that I have faith in God.

Contrastly, it bugs me ZERO that he and other atheists believe in nothing. It's his life. It's his soul (if he thinks he has one). It doesn't bother me. I pray for him. And I pray that he can stumble onto God. But I don't push his buttons or try to convince him to change.

Why are some atheists so hell-bent on changing Christians?

I know SOME Christians are rabid and say stupid things about atheists. But most of us Christians think atheists have every right to think how they do. It doesn't bother us. We wish it weren't so, but it's your life (and afterlife) to live.

A FABULOUS piece of writing by Sports Illustrated editor Joe Posnanski:

THE PROMISE

Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown.

Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound.

Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go.

Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home.

– Bruce Springsteen. The Promise.

* * *

I remember the first time I heard The Promise. It was about a decade ago. The song had been around for a long time before I first heard it — Bruce Springsteen would say it was the first song he wrote after Born To Run made him a rock and roll star in 1975. It figures that this was the first song. Born to Run, the whole album, was about longing, open highway, the amusement park rising bold and stark, the poets who write nothing at all, the ghosts in the eyes of all the boys Mary sent away. Born to Run is about that brilliant age when you know dreams don’t come true, but you still believe they might come true FOR YOU.

And The Promise is about the every day numbing of those dreams. It is a follow-up to Thunder Road, that song about the guy who learned how to make his guitar talk, and the girl who ain’t a beauty (but hey, she’s all right), both of them, pulling out of that town full of losers, pulling out of there to win. Now, that guy’s got a job. It’s a night job. Some nights he don’t go. A friend told me, “You have to listen to this song. I can’t believe you haven’t heard this song.”

I listened to the version of The Promise on 18 Tracks. It’s not the version Springsteen recorded more than 30 years ago. This version is stripped down to almost nothing, just Springsteen and a piano.

And the weirdest thing happened, something I can never remember happening before or since when I listened to a song. I felt myself crying.

* * *

I followed that dream just like those guys do way up on the screen.

Drove my Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes.

When the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my own dreams

* * *

If I had to pick a single memory, the memory that best summarizes my teenage years, the memory that best expresses the kind of man I hoped to become … well, it is 6 a.m., and my bed shakes. That’s how my father wakes me up. He mildly bumps the bed with his knee. It is summertime, but rain pours, so it is still dark, a harsh gray. My father walks out of the room without saying a word. There is nothing to say. It is time to get up.

I dress quickly. There are no morning showers. We have timed our morning to the minute so that we can get as much sleep as possible … or, more to the point, so I can get as much sleep as possible. Dad doesn’t sleep much except for the naps he gets in front of the television. I meet my father downstairs. He is already there — he is always there first, dressed, ready to go. He is always waiting on me. He wakes up long before 6 a.m. on his own. His lunch is packed in a brown paper sack. It is probably a salami sandwich. It is usually a salami sandwich.

We trudge out to the car, a declining Pontiac T-1000 that I hope to buy at the end of the summer. The rain hits our necks, but there’s no running. We ride in silence for a few minutes. Then, we start to talk about small things. We stop at Popeyes for a breakfast biscuit. The morning gains light slowly, like an old television picture tube coming to life. The ride is 30 minutes or so. There is little traffic this early in the morning.

And then, we get out … and go into the factory. Alisa is the name of the place. It is a knitting factory. We make sweaters, I guess, though I never actually see any sweaters. Everything is yarn. It is hard to breathe because of the heat and the humidity and the dust and the cardboard boxes, and because the yarn chokes the air. I feel sure that a sweater is being knitted in my lungs.

My father’s job is to make sure the knitting machines run. He unclogs jams, quiets the guttural sounds, tightens bolts that break free, loosens bolts that choke the machine. His hands are unnaturally strong; I have known this since I was a boy. Now I see that he uses his fingers to loosen bolts that are wedged tight. There is no time to find a wrench. Sometimes, when the machines run smoothly, I see him drawing Xs on graph paper as he works out a sweater color design. When kids in school used to ask me what my father did for a living, I would tell them he designs sweaters. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of what he did; quite the opposite. That was how I saw him.

My job is to stay in the warehouse, move boxes of yarn in and out, and, one day a week, Thursday, unloaded barrels of dye from a truck. I am doing this to raise enough money buy that old car, that Pontiac. I’m 18 years old and thoroughly without purpose, except for that, I desperately want my own car. I am an accounting major at college though even the most basic accounting concepts baffle me. I can’t help but think of debits as good and credits as bad. The professors keep telling me that they are not good or bad, but I don’t believe them. I already know I won’t be an accountant, but have not admitted it to myself yet. I don’t have any idea what I will do — or what I can do. Everything feels out of reach.

I work six days a week at Alisa, and the pay, if I remember correctly, is $4 an hour. The minimum wage at the time is $3.35 an hour, so this is the second-highest paying job of my young life. The highest paying job, at $4.50 an hour, involved calling people who were past due on their mortgage. My job there was to set up a payment schedule with those people. I wasn’t good at this; I didn’t understand the fury and desperation of the voices on the end of dial tones. I got threatened a lot. I don’t get threatened at the factory. Yelled at, yes. Threatened, no. There’s no point in threats, not here. It’s understood by everyone how easy I am to replace. I’m scrawny and weak and viewed as a non-prospect. I’m only here as a favor to my father, the only guy who knows how to fix the machines if they break down.

* * *

Well now I built that challenger by myself.

But I needed money and so I sold it.

Lived a secret I should’a kept to myself.

But I got drunk one night and I told it.

* * *

Springsteen wrote The Promise for the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” album. People who follow the Springsteen story know that the time when he wrote The Promise, that time after Born To Run made him a star and before Darkness made him an adult, that was a strange time for him. He was locked in a searing legal battle with his manager Mike Appel over creative freedom — the thing Springsteen called his musical soul — and he was also struggling with what it meant to be a huge success for the first time in his life. He hated success and loved it, and hated himself for loving it.

And the music poured out of him like sweat. He was 27 and hungry, still hungry, but he was not entirely sure for what. He was listening to punk music. He was listening to Hank Williams. The Born to Run sessions were legendary for Springsteen’s refusal to compromise, his 14-month insistence on making every single song sound exactly like what he was hearing in his head no matter how many different ways he had to stretch the songs. But at least with Born To Run, there was a clear vision everyone could understand. Springsteen simply wanted to make the greatest rock and roll album that had ever been made. That’s was 25 year old musicians did. The kid had ambition.

But nobody quite knew what Springsteen was trying to do with Darkness, maybe not even Springsteen himself. The band learned song after song after song. Some of the songs sounded like hits, but Springsteen seemed uninterested in those. This was the time when he would give “Because The Night” to the punk star Patti Smith — her biggest hit. This was the time when he gave “Fire” to The Pointer Sisters — their biggest hit. He gave “This Little Girl” to Gary U.S. Bonds … and it would become Bonds’ first hit in almost 20 years. He gave an older song, “The Fever,” and “Talk to Me” to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. He gave “Rendezvous” to Greg Kihn. In the documentary about Darkness, Springsteen’s guitarist and foil and alter-ego Stevie Van Zandt would say, seemingly without irony, “It’s a bit tragic in a way. Because he would have been one of the great pop songwriters of all time.”

The one thing Springsteen knew for sure is that he didn’t want to be a great pop songwriter. He did not want hits, not then. He did not want to repeat Born To Run. He wanted to say something, and he wanted to “leave no room to be misunderstood.” He didn’t want to try to make the greatest rock and roll album of all time, not this time. He wanted something else, something harder to describe. “I wanted to make an honest album,” he would say. The band rehearsed and recorded “The Promise” for three months, trying to get it just right.

* * *

All my life I fought that fight

The fight that you can’t win.

Every day it gets harder to live

the dream you’re believin’ in.

* * *

My job at Alisa is monotonous and soul draining. Oh, it has sitcom elements — I am still young enough and detached enough to see that. There is the vicious boss who loves to yell at me for no apparent reason except that I’m not good at moving boxes and he hates his life. Once he takes me and a couple of warehouse guys, puts us in a truck, drives us off somewhere without explaining where or why. We end up in a ritzy neighborhood. Turns out the owner of the factory needs his couch moved. And so we move his couch.

There is a humorless old man who works with us in the warehouse who constantly tells us that he has seen kids come and go but that he has survived for all these years (we sometimes attempt to guess what he’s making after all these years; we think $5 an hour). There is the preposterous nature of the actual work — my job is to move boxes of yarn here, no, over there, no, back here, no, leave it there until later. There are even young non-beauties-but-hey-they’re-all-right identical twins who look better and better the longer I work here (it is fitting, I suppose, that in time I come to like one of them, the prettier identical twin if that makes any sense, but it’s the other one who seems to like me).

But elements of comedy or not, there is little funny about the place or the job. Alisa is day after day after day after day after day of endless work that never gets completed. There is always another truck to unload, another tour of the floor (“Box ‘em up!” the boss used to yell), another run to the dye part of the factory, which is poisonous and bleak and dangerous, like something out of a Dickens’ novel or the Batman movies. All the while, the machines whir and shriek and clank and buzz — the noise so overpowers everything it makes the boxes shake, but after a while I stop hearing the noise, at least while I’m in the factory. My ears ring for hours afterward, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I still hear those machines.

I make it through the first couple of weeks on adrenaline and exuberance, and make it through the next two on the promise of owning my very first car. But at that point, one month in, I lose all inspiration. I go to work simply because my father kicks the bed every morning, and I know he’s waiting downstairs, and I do not know exactly how to quit. I work all day on automatic pilot — I become proficient with hand trucks, I surprise myself with how much strength I build up, I try to hide in the gaps between the boxes every now and again, I sweat off 20 pounds that, at the time, I did not have to lose. I go home exhausted and desperate for something … something hard to explain. And the next morning I wake up at the kick of the bed, and the blurry picture of my father dressed and ready, and stumble into my jeans and into the Pontiac and go through it all again.

I believe that this will not be my life. I suppose this is what keeps me sane. This is not my life. This is only temporary. I do not know what I can do. I have a hard time looking at my life realistically. I’m 18 years old, living in my parents apartment, failing accounting at a city college, and drifting through life without any marketable skills I know about. All I have is youth, and youth tells me that this will not be my life, cannot be my life, that this is a summer job so I can buy my Dad’s car and drive off and that I really will do something bigger … all I have is youth telling me that someday summer will end.

* * *

When the promise is broken, you go on living

But it steals something from down in your soul

Like when the truth is spoken, and it don’t make no difference

Something in your heart runs cold

* * *

In the end, Bruce Springsteen stripped everything out of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” except for the hardest songs.

Badlands, I think, might be the quintessential Bruce Springsteen song, about defiance in the face of the bitter winds of daily life.

Adam Raised A Cain is is about a son clashing against a father who “worked his whole life for nothing but the pain.”

Something In The Night is about two people trying to find escape in the night but getting caught at the state line.

Candy’s Room is a hard-bitten love story about a boy who loves a beautiful prostitute who cannot be shielded from her sadness.

Racing In The Street — probably my favorite song on the album — is about a man who has lost his dream (haven’t they all lost their dreams) and finds his last bit of wildness and hope racing his ’69 Chevy Chevelle with a 396 turbojet engine at night. There’s a love story in here to, a love story with a woman he won in a race against a Camaro and who now “stares off along into the night/with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”

The Promised Land is another anthem, the flip side of Badlands — “I get up every morning and go to work each day/But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold/Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.”

Factory is … about Bruce Springsteen’s father going to work at the factory in the rain.

Streets of Fire is more about those lost nights — “I walk with Angels that have no place.”

Prove It All Night — this was an album about endless nights leading into unchanging days, the same endless nights that inspired a million country songs, a million short stories, a million brilliant paintings and almost every sad thing Frank Sinatra ever sang.

Darkness on the Edge of Town, I think, is about the same guy from Racing In The Street, only now his woman has left him, and he tries to keep his secrets, and all he has are “things that can only be found/in the darkness on the edge of town.”

Anyway, this is what I hear when I listen to the songs. The album is dim and black and unrelenting, there is no escape. There is not one bar song on the album, not one beach song on the album, not one happy song on the album (even though Springsteen and Stevie Van Zandt messed around one day and wrote one of their happiest songs, Sherry Darling). There is not even one hopeful song on the album. And yet, the album is not without hope. The music is the hope. The music soars and it swoops down, and it grinds, and it quiets to near silence. It is the music that insists on that notion, that notion deep inside, that it ain’t no sin to be glad your alive, the seminal lyrics from the album, I think, the thing that it’s all about in the end.

And, as you know, as you can see, the song “The Promise” is not on Darkness. The band played it, and they knew it was great, knew that it might be the best song that Bruce Springsteen ever wrote. And it fit on the album, it was in many ways everything that Springsteen was trying to say. Only Springsteen could not let go of it. The song was too close to him. He has never been able to explain it any better than that. Some think The Promise is really about his fight with Appel for control of his own music. Some think it is about his fear of losing himself in success, his fear of losing what he thought was the best part of himself. Some think it is about his friends who got left behind.

In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter what The Promise means to Bruce Springsteen — doesn’t matter beyond trivia. Like all great songs, all great art, it only matters what it means to the person who accepts it. Springsteen did not put The Promise on Darkness, though for a while he played it at clubs. Then he stopped doing that too. By the time he released it in 1999 on 18 Tracks — the first version I first heard — it was a different song, more wistful, less bitter, more sad, less rebellious, all piano. And now, more than 30 years later, Bruce Springsteen releases an album of those songs that he recorded and left by the side of the road while making Darkness. There is the bar song “Rendezvous” and his raw version of “Because The Night” and the upbeat (if disturbing) “Fire” and a remarkable rock version of “Racing In The Streets” that sounds like it belongs on Born To Run (In this version, the car is a Ford, with a 383 — probably a Mercury Marauder Engine from the late 1950s). Springsteen is 61 now and he writes now that these songs are like old friends.

And, of course, The Promise is on there — the album, in fact, is called The Promise. On this version, the song does seem to be more personal, less universal, more about what Bruce Springsteen was going through at the time — the Challenger is almost certainly Bruce’s music, the secret is almost certainly the depth of feeling he had for his music, and he sold it, he told it, and this has brought him to doom. It’s a beautiful version of the song, but I’m glad it’s not the first version I heard. Because the version I heard isn’t about Bruce Springsteen and Mike Appel and a fight for art. The version I heard is about a car ride to the factory …

* * *

Thunder Road

For the lost lovers and all the fixed games

Thunder Road

For the tires rushing by in the rain.

* * *

My memory, the one that echoes in my mind, is not of my time in the factory, or the work, or the people (I cannot remember their names) or the death I’d feel at the end of the day, or even the fear I had that this is all I would become. No, the memory is of that rainy day in North Carolina, my father driving, me staring out the window, both of us sitting in what would become my first car. That Pontiac did not have a 396. It struggled to go uphill.

And I think, for the first time, I understood, really understood, what my father did. I knew of other fathers who brought home their frustrations, their fears, the discouragement, but I had never really understood them. My father did not drink. He did not rage. He did not race cars in the street. He smoked two packs of Kents a day, and he bowled on Sundays, and he played chess at the club one night a week. He coached my Little League team, and he drove all of us around the neighborhood so we could see the fireworks on July 4th, and he always bought champagne and caviar for New Year’s Eve. He came home with oil on his pants, and salami on his breath. He fell asleep in front of the television.

I don’t remember what we talked about in the car. Sports, maybe. Television, maybe. Factory politics, maybe. I only remember the rain — the tires rushing by in the rain — and the way the wipers squeaked against the windshield. I only remember the way the realization hit me — that this was my father’s life. I still had years and the promise to shield me. In the end, I figured that I was pretty smart, that might get me through. Of course, my father was smarter than I was — still is smarter than I am. My father, like all men of his generation (it seemed to me), could fix anything, could solve anything, could lift anything. My father also could play chess with grandmasters. My father could hit any target with a rifle (though he hated guns; he had learned to shoot in the Army). My father could dribble a soccer ball forever, it seemed, and throw pop-ups high above my imagination, and quote lines word for word from any song of the 1950s. And this was his life, this morning drive to the factory, every morning, for another sunless day in the howl of sweater machines.

I had this weird experience a couple of weeks ago — I was on a plane, and I was watching the movie Invincible, you know, the one about Vince Papale, the Philadelphia bartender who tried out and made the Eagles in the 1970s. I had seen it before. I have no idea why the movie was even playing — it’s a few years old. But I was watching, and it’s entertaining enough, and then there was this scene when Vince’s father was telling him how Steve Van Buren’s touchdown, the one that gave the Eagles their championship over the Chicago Cardinals in 1948, how that touchdown was what kept him going through all the painful days.

It was just a corny line in a corny movie on a plane heading to the next city and the next assignment, and dammit, I felt tears in my eyes. The same tears from The Promise. What kept my Dad going? It isn’t the sort of thing you talk about except in movies and songs. In the car that day, I finally figured it out … finally figured out what kept Dad going through all those long, dull, painful, agonizing days at the factory. He didn’t say it. I didn’t say it either. The rain kept showering down, but gently, and we stopped for our biscuits, and then we pulled up to the factory just as the gray darkness turned to light.

I'm hoping it's more like Late Night (silly, weird, funny, subtle, irreverant) than his Tonight Show (a little forced, non-subtle...a feeling that Conan was trying to get a more broad audience).

Stewart/Colbert cover politics very well. Letterman's show is getting more political. I hope Conan doesn't attempt many political jokes or content. I don't think it's his strength.

Looking forward to Jack White (no way Meg would make a surprise appearance is there?) and curious who the surprise guest is.

IF the Tupelo gang ever agreed to do some shows together, it would only be because it's something they decided they want to do. Therefore, it would be friendly and amicable and probably well-worth the ticket price to hear some great, great songs live and to see the two together on stage. I'd pay to see it.

More than a concert together, I've always hoped that somewhere down the road Tweedy and Farrar would write an album together. I liked Tupelo a lot because of the contrasting style and sound of the two. Wilco and Son Volt are very good bands, but it's very clear who runs the show and does all or most of the writing. It'd be fascinating what an album made by the two would sound like right now. They wouldn't have any troubles finding great studio musicians to flesh out the sound of the album.

]Hmm... is Bill Berry still available.

I wish.

I wonder if there's ever been a more important drummer to a band. I've read that he had a pretty big say in the studio. I think he was always about getting to the hooks in songs and punching them up. I don't know this for fact. But it's undeniable how important he was to R.E.M.

I'm listening to "Hi-Fi" right now and, besides "Up", it shames everything they've done since in my opinion. I can't help but think that Berry was much more than just the time-keeper.

REM, Radiohead & Wilco....3 veteran bands who garner much talk on this board....are all recording or finishing recording their next record. Hopefully all 3 will be out by late Spring 2011.

1. Which of these 3 records do you look forward to most?

2. Which do you expect to be the best?

3. Can REM eek out one last great record after a string of so-so ones?

Me?

1. Wilco. I've got a gut-feeling they're gonna try something a little different and less "pretty" and more edgy and/or funky. That would be a good thing.

2. Radiohead. From what I've read, Radiohead is really hunkering down and serious about whatever record they release next. Hail to Thief sounded kind of rushed and could have been edited down. Rainbows was cohesive and great.

3. Probably not. Stipe's lyrics seem too litral and forced lately, and Buck/Mills seem to be mailing it in half the time. I hope I'm wrong. "Accelerate" was a noble thought, but even though it rocked and sounded more spontaneous, it had a sameness to it. It didn't have the REM magic. Around the Sun DID have some great REM moments, but it was mostly a train wreck.

I didn't know Wilco and Radiohead were still connected in people's minds or any other way.

They're really not for me anymore. But Being There, Summerteeth and YHF....in my opinion...were similar to Radiohead in the sense of experimenting with different arrangements and sounds. I think a magazine or critic called Wilco the American Radiohead...a rootsier version of blissful, experimental rock.

Not to start a big Jay Bennett hubbub, but I really liked Wilco's sound when Bennett's arrangement skills were handy. He was maybe the Johnny Greenwood of Wilco. Greenwood used classical music as take-off points, while Bennett used older rock music as his take-off point. Tweedy and Yorke are similar....very great songwriters and directors of what the album should be and sound like. They both took Bennett's and Greenwood's ideas and sounds and made them better, adding their own bits

Radiohead can make Rainbows 'cause all the parts are still in the band. Wilco's hugely talented, but the last couple records definitely lack something in my opinion.

I'm hopeful that the band can add some fresh ideas to Jeff's always great songwriting skills.