Interview: Matt Nathanson (October 14th, 2015)

Last week, I got to speak on the phone with the ever-amusing and ultra-talented Matt Nathanson. In our interview, Nathanson described the disjointed but ultimately satisfying nature of his brand new album, Show Me Your Fangs. We also discussed the unpredictable audience-request format of Nathanson's current tour, how some of the best records have "great topography" instead of being thematically or musically cohesive, and how elements of hip-hop and R&B have slowly crept into Nathanson's singer/songwriter-oriented music.

 

 
Matt Nathanson: Craig!

Craig Manning: Matt, how you doing?

MN: I'm great dude, how are you?

CM: I'm pretty good! Been a long day, but this is a highlight. Glad to be on the phone with you.

MN: Yeah, man, I think it's probably the highlight for me too, of a very long day as well. We lost our bus yesterday morning in New Orleans and then flew to Austin and then picked up another bus at the end of our set. We played like a spartan set with just acoustic, just Aaron and I and that was it. It was super fun. And then we did the radio this morning in Austin and then made it to Dallas. So yeah, I know the long day is never fun.

CM: Yeah, I saw your tweet yesterday and actually got in touch with [your press person], because I figured if you were flying to Texas you wouldn't be able to do an interview. (Note: This interview was originally supposed to take place on October 13th.)

MN: Yeah, I'm sorry about that, it was just super fucked up. It was one of those things where everything kind of worked out, though. Like, a new bus arrived just as we were getting to the airport in Austin, or just as we were checking in, and then they drove to meet us, and it was like a nine-hour drive. It's crazy.

CM: Wow. Well, other than that, how's the tour going?

MN: It's pretty fun! I think it was a neat idea, the wheel thing is a neat idea. Like, the wheel of all the old songs. The only thing I didn't...I guess I underestimated how much I like control. And so, getting onstage and sort of ceding control to the wheel like five or six times in the arc of the setlist, and giving it to fate of this spin...I've been sort of mixed on it. I sort of say to Aaron...I'll be like "That was fun, the wheel was merciful." (Laughs) And then sometimes it's like "Dude, fuck, I did not want to play that song," you know what I mean? Because you can get two or three slow songs in a row, some of which I wrote when I was...you know, a fucking kid.

And like, last night, we didn't have the wheel because of the bus breakdown, but I kind of did it anyway. Like, I asked what the crowd wanted to hear. And someone yelled "All Been Said Before," which is from Ernst, like...you know, way back. And I played it, and it was fun to play it. Like, I invest in playing it. But there's a certain...I get embarrassed, because you live your live thinking that you get...like, okay: creating music and thinking that the stuff you're making now...in order to feel like you're not a fucking sham of a human, you have to feel like you're progressing with every record. It has to feel like "Oh, well that's better than the last record," whether or not people think so or not. For me, it's gonna feel like "Yeah, this is a movement forward."

So to go back and revisit songs that are so obviously written at a time that maybe I can't access, or that reflect the way I played guitar or the way I wrote lyrics or any of that kind of stuff…it gets a little like showing your old haircuts. You know what I mean? Like, holding up a fucking billboard-sized picture of me with a mullet, or me with a fohawk (laughs). You kind of look, and you're like, "What the fuck was I doing?" And so, it's rad [to play those old songs] because people's response to it makes you feel good. But during the experience of playing it, some songs trigger this real sense of insecurity. Like, "What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing? Why did I do that?" And these people are all going to think, everybody but these six people that want to hear the song, they're going to think "I can't believe I paid money to watch this fucking kid play music." You know what I mean? So that happens. But other than, you know, being gripped by fucking complete fear of my past, it's really been a fun tour! (Laughs)

CM: Yeah, I was wondering about the wheel, like, if there we any songs that got voted for where you were just like "Oh, hell no."

MN: Yeah, it was funny because there was...I did as best a job as I good kind of weeding out [the stuff I didn't want to play], but there were some songs that hit really high numbers on the list when we compiled them that I couldn't say...like, I looked at Aaron and was like "Dude, I can't believe that song got X amount of votes." Like, I can't even think of the ones, but we ended up just...I kind of sucked it up, and I was like "I got this, we can make this work." And I put them on the list, but like..."Miracles," which is...I mean, that song is like nine minutes long, or it might as well be. And people want to hear it, you know, so we put it on the board and I just pray that it passes by. (Laughs)

CM: Do you have like...a binder of lyrics or anything, to help you navigate these songs that you haven't played in like 10 years?

MN: Yeah, I've got this huge binder full of shit. And after playing...every song's been landed on now at least once, if not multiple times. And so some of them have come back. They usually come back after one or two times of playing them in front of people. Like, no matter how much I rehearse them in my basement in front of no one, I don't feel them sticking. But as soon as you play them in front of people, it's like, "Oh yeah, I've got that one." But yeah, I've got a binder full of all my songs.

CM: Well yeah, it's not fair, because like Springsteen, he's got his teleprompter...

MN: Yeah, that guy's got a teleprompter for fucking "Born to Run." I feel like, maybe when I'm that age, my brain will forget as well. But yeah, Springsteen pulls up shit...so many songs. Just like the Elvis Costello thing. Because we got the idea for the wheel from Elvis Costello, and that guy sort of has...he has so many fucking songs. I mean, it's nuts. That guy just shit records throughout his life. (Laughs) So yeah, I'm amazed that...I used to think it sucked that people had a teleprompter up there. Like, Springsteen can't remember the fucking lyrics to "Nebraska"? And then I started pulling this together for this tour, and I was like "Oh my god." Because if that guy fucks up in front of 25,000 people, he kind of looks like an idiot. If I fuck up in front of...you know, most of these are small shows, so if I fuck up in front of 500 people, we can laugh it off.

CM: Well, the first time I saw Springsteen, he forgot he was in Michigan, so I think you're doing okay.

MN: ...Wow. When did you...when? Wow.

CM: I saw him in 2009, it was on the Working on a Dream tour, and he played Born to Run front-to-back, but for the first like...I don't know, five or six songs, he was like "Hello Ohio!"

MN: No! No! Oh no! (Laughs) Did he at least apologize when he realized?

CM: Oh yeah, he apologized profusely. But, he was like "At least now that I'm getting to this age I can just claim the onset of early Alzheimer's."
MN: (Laughs) Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, no, that guy's got fatter fish to fry. I guess he's just like...he's saving lives with his rock and roll, man. He doesn't need to know where he is. He's just making it happen (Laughs)

CM: For sure. So, moving to the new record...just because I need to ask this, it feels like there are some pretty heavy songs on here, so...are you doing okay, man?

MN: Oh yeah! Thanks! The good news is that, if I write a really heavy song, I'm usually far enough past it...this isn't actually true...but on this record anyway, I feel like I got past my problems enough to be able to write about them. When I'm in them...like, that record Some Mad Hope, when I made that record, I was like deep into...not awesomeness. But I was sort of...I was on the way out of it I guess? Maybe? And this one's the same way. I felt like I could address things un-self-consciously now, because my life is kind of going pretty great. My personal life is going pretty great. And my relationship with my wife is in such a good spot that I'm not...I don't feel like I'm doing a disservice by talking about things that don't work in our relationship in songs, because we're sort of like...we're finally in this great place. So all of that stuff feels like it's very in the past.

CM: Okay, that's good! But, I mean, there's also a lot of the more optimistic pop songs, like "Giants" and "Headphones" and "Summertime," and you've got that stuff in there next to "Washington State Fight Song" and "Disappear." Did you intentionally create that sort of balance, or did it sort of just happen as you were writing the record.

MN: It kind of just happens. For me, bands like R.E.M. and U2 are examples of bands that classically made albums in a way that kind of had this great topography. Like, for example, an album like R.E.M. - Green had songs like "You Are the Everything" and "Hairshirt," which are these two sort of heart-wrenching songs, and then a song like "Stand," which is sort of goofy. For me, it's like...okay, Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker is an incredible record, right?

CM: Right.

MN: Like, as a whole, it feels like you put it on, and it just takes you to this place. I've always been the kind of person that doesn't make records that way. I've always fallen into the kind of R.E.M./U2 model, where it's like, the record has to take you on this journey that has highs and lows. And, it's funny, I think it comes down to being self-conscious as well. It's sort of like, at shows...my shows are like, here's the quiet sad song, here's another one, and then, okay, here we're gonna go up. Like, I don't want you to stay down there too long, because if you don't want to be there, I don't want to seem gratuitous. Or, here's the happy song, I don't want to beat you over the head with happy songs because that also feels gratuitous. I want that dynamic to be there. So the record...all my records have sort of consciously tried to have that, whether I've succeeded or not. But, I feel as I get to make records more, I feel like the more dynamics they have in terms of the energy, the better they work for me.

CM: The new record feels like it's been in the works for a while. You put out "Headphones"...it had to be last summer, right?

MN: Yeah...that was...it was two summers ago, wasn't it? Maybe? Summer of 2014 or something. Is that possible? Yikes. I thought the record was going to be done sooner. We were going on tour with Gavin DeGraw and we were like "Let's put the single out in advance of the record!" And then the record was kind of just...not finished.

CM: Yeah, I think I remember reading that it was supposed to come out a year ago, originally. But that song was always meant to be on the album? I just didn't know if it was supposed to be sort of a one-off thing, or if it was always going to be on there.

MN: It's a funny thing. It was always going to be on the album, but I always thought I could remix it after the fact, because I wanted it to fit the record more. And I hate when people do that. I hate when people put the songs out and then when they put the record out it's a different version. But I was determined to do it anyway, because "Headphones" is really poppy. Like, it's got a sheen to it. And the rest of the record was shaping up to not have that sheen.

So I was like, "Great, we'll just remix it and it'll all work!" But the way it works on iTunes is that, if you remix a song, it's a brand new song. So, they wouldn't allow us to do, if you bought "Headphones," you can complete your album. So it was going to end up that all the people who bought "Headphones" as an individual song were going to have to buy the song all over again for me just remixing it. And I was super fucking bummed. I was like, "Well, I don't want to do that at all, I don't think people should pay for the song twice, and I don't think I feel that passionately about remixing it." But it ends up, like, when I was sequencing the record ["Headphones"] wouldn't fit in the way that I wanted it to fit. So when all was said and done, I put it at the end of the record, because it sounded so much different than the rest of the record. But then it ended up being a rad kind of positive way to close out the album.

CM: Yeah, it's like a victory lap or something.

MN: Yeah! Yeah, I try to always end with something that is uplifting. And this record has so few uplifting songs (Laughs) that by the time I got to the end, I was like "Oh my god, we can put 'Headphones' at the end.' And that was totally why it's there, because like, sonically, it worked best for me at the end and then also it was a positive thing. But I think if I could have remixed it and done it that way—and then there were also a couple of songs that didn't make it to the record that were almost done, that just...I couldn't finish—then the structure of the record, the sequencing would have been a little different. But yeah, Apple kind of held all the cards on that one.

CM: Gotcha. So, where did the title of the album come from? And the art. I think the art's really cool.

MN: Dude, I'm psyched you think the art's cool. There's so many fucking people that...that when I posted the art on Facebook, they were like, "Ku Klux Klan!" And I was like...what? That would be the most subversive...I mean, I'm a Jewish man. That would be incredible if I put the Ku Klux Klan on the cover of my own album. But I came upon the art, there's this woman named Angela Dean, and she's this artist, what she does is she paints over found photographs. And I discovered her work a couple years ago on Tumblr, and it was just so...that particular picture...I mean, all the pictures are great, but that particular picture that she let us use for the cover is just so heartbreaking to me. Like, it kind of stopped me and made me super sad, and also super kind of blown away, because it's just a very moving image of these, like...it's a family disconnected from each other, but connected to each other, you know, in this beautiful, serene setting. And so I was so moved by it that I threw it in a pile in my "This is an awesome image file" on my computer.

And then when I was looking for a record cover, I came up with the title Show Me Your Fangs because Sleater Kinney put out a reunion record, and when I read about it—it was like, in January or whatever—I read about their reunion record, and I said "Wouldn't it be awesome if they called this record Show Me Your Fangs?" I don't know why it just happened, but I was like, "I wish they had an album called Show Me Your Fangs. I wish they had a song on this record called 'Show Me Your Fangs.'" And then I started going...I've done that before where I sort of imagine, bands that I love, I imagine song or album titles, and then I just kind of make them up for myself. And Show Me Your Fangs was one of those ones where I was like...because, you know, I thought No Cities to Love was kind of a neat title for their record, but I thought Show Me Your Fangs would have been way fucking cooler. So I was just like, "Well then I'm just gonna use it." And then I paired it with the image independent of that, like I was flipping through this folder I have, and I was like "Oh my god, this fucking picture would be incredible," and I was like "Show Me Your Fangs. Fuck. Let's do this."

And then Angela Dean said yes and I felt like...that's always this weird moment, of putting the album title with the album cover. I feel like, on the last record, we lucked out with that guy Mr. Toledano who did the picture of the guy's exploding head. And I found that on Tumblr, and I was like "Well, there's no fucking way this guy is going to let us use his art." And I felt the same way about Angela Dean. There's no fucking way this woman who's this talented is going to think I am even remotely cool enough that she's going to fucking want to let us use her photo. And she ended up being super cool and so did Toledano, and both of them let us use their stuff. So that's been pretty neat.

CM: Awesome. So, who produced this record? I couldn't find that info anywhere. I think I read that you worked with a number of different people, but I just wasn't sure who.

MN: Yeah, it was kind of like a hodgepodge of folks. The album was all mixed by this kid Jake Sinclair, and I think he kind of brought the uniform-ness to it. But it was all a bunch of disparate people. Some of them were people I had written with, who I'd written songs with. Some of them...this record, I had a really hard time finding one person...I don't think I knew what I wanted, and so it was going the opposite direction from strengths. As opposed to, like, moving forward and being like, "I want the record to sound like this," I was sort of stumbling around trying to find it. And in the process, we were amassing all of these songs. And it was funny, when the record was finished, I got really kind of down on feeling like...I'm a very perfectionist type of person, a completist. So for me, a record that's made by a bunch of people always sort of represented to me, like, "Well this record can't be good, because just look at all these fucking people that worked on it." You know what I mean?

And then I started to realize, well, this was the record I had, and...because to me, the ideal like "pipe dream" record-making process is me and one other person, fucking hammering out this thing with this passionate concept in mind, and you're kind of sticking to the concept. But because I didn't have a concept for this record, it was just like...the concept just ended up emerging throughout the process. And sometimes, I think that's sort of the strength of the record, and sometimes I think it does the record a disservice. Like, not to go into specific songs, but there are certain songs that I wanted to find a way to make them work differently, and I just couldn't. And I felt like if we had had a producer and a vision before, then we could have followed it. But instead, we kind of found the vision as went. And it ended up working just as cool, and in retrospect, it works and it holds together as a unit. But it didn't start that way. You know, it started as kind of a disparate bunch of songs.

CM: It sounds to me that there are a lot of R&B and hip hop and modern pop influences on this, along with sort of what you've always done. I was wondering what you were listening to when you were writing and recording the album, and if you meant to include those influences or if they just happened as you were trying to find the concept.

MN: It's funny: being brought up as a kid, I listened to metal and I listened to folk. And then, as I'm getting older and exploring things on like Spotify and playlists and things...there's like no barriers now to music anymore, as you know. It's this incredible thing where it's like the world is an iPod that switches from Slayer to Taylor Swift to Kanye to...you know. And so for me, my listening habits have changed over the course of time. And records that I may have never given the time of day, because I sort of had an elitist idea of how things should have worked or..."Well, you know, there's not real musicians playing on this" or all these kind of constructs that I had put in place listening to music, and the biases that I had had before, they really like...they sort of don't exist anymore.

And now it's like, well like, what moves me? What blows my mind? And a record like...I mean, in my opinion, the Lorde record, the Kanye records, the first Kendrick Lamar record: these are like incredible records made by people in their bedrooms. You know what I mean? Or, you know, their very expensive bedrooms, but you know what I mean. Like, there's no...I used to think "It has to be this, it has to be that." It has to be people playing together...and the togetherness of that thing. And now I just think, whatever it takes to get something to move you, that's what it's about.

And so, hip hop has become part of the way that I listen to music in a way that it never was before. And it's starting to infuse itself into playlists I make for myself, or records I buy. And so...I love the acoustic aspect of things, because I think I'm storytelling. And I kind of think that Kanye West...well, acoustic is the wrong word. The spartan idea, where it's like, you have a rhythm, and then you have maybe one instrument, and then you have the story being told. And I was super motivated by that on this record. I really didn't want to have a band of people in a room, banging out shit. Because I've done that so much, and it just wasn't exciting to me to be like "Let's do this again." So it was like, "Okay, how do we make this work as best we can where it's like the stories are coming out and there's this rhythm underneath?"

And that was kind of how it happened. Again, it it was intentional, but still not intentional. It wasn't like I went in and set parameters for myself, which I think would have been a better way to go. To accept limitations. Instead, it was kind of like, "I have no idea what I want, we've just gotta find it."

CM: I think my favorite song on the record is "Bill Murray," which is just a completely fresh and quirky take on a love song, without being too quirky. How did that idea come to you? Did you actually have a dream like the one you describe in the song?

MN: So, the funny thing about "Bill Murray," I had this song, and when I wrote it, it was just piano and myself. And I wrote that "Let me be your man" part. The original lyric was "I want to be your man" or something...I forget what the fuck it was. But it was so...I'm so not into the idea of, like, "I want to be your man." I've never thought that way: "Let me be your man." That's just not how I approach my relationship. Like, I was sort of turned off by it.

So I sent an email to my friend John Darnielle, who's in this band The Mountain Goats. And I've known John for like 25 years. We went to college together, and I sort of always bounce lyrics off him. So I sent him this thing and I said, "Is this sexist of me to say, like, 'let me be your man'? Like, where does this land?" And he sent this incredible email...he's very articulate. And so he articulated to me this idea of saying "It's not that. It's not that it's sexist, it's that it's earnest..." I forget exactly what he said; I could read it to you. But it sort of put me at ease about the lyric, and then from there, "Well, I've got this lyric and it sings really well, and I love it, but I'm self-conscious about it. How do I make this work?"

I don't know how I married them, but I'd always wanted a song called "Bill Murray." I thought that Bill Murray was the best. So I said, "Maybe this can be my Bill Murray song." And then I was like, "How the fuck can this be my Bill Murray song? Is this something maybe he would say?" And then I was like "No, man, imagine if I was getting love advice..." I watched Lost in Translation for like the 200th time, and I was like "Imagine if that guy was my friend." Like, of all the people on earth, that guy just seems like the kind of famous person you want to hang with. Whereas most famous people are fucking idiots. And you want to hang with that guy because he seems like he understands passion and un-self-conscious living and all this kind of stuff. And I just kind of created this idea of Bill Murray and I, and of him giving me guidance in my relationship. And it made it all work, for me.

CM: That's awesome.

MN: So, that's a very roundabout answer to your question, but yeah, it was super. I'm super proud of that song. And I'm proud of them all, but "Giants" and "Bill Murray" to me feel, when I play them, they feel like they've always been here. Which is a really neat feeling.

CM: Alright! We're out of time, but thanks so much!

MN: Hey, you're the man. Thanks so much, Craig, for being so...fucking awesome. (Laughs) Your reviews are so fucking dead-on that I almost feel like you know all of these things I'm telling you before I tell you them. Like, you know that some records feel disjointed or that some feel...just, you're super insightful. It's really flattering to have you listen to the music the way you do. Number one because I listen to music that way so I can relate, and then another part of it I'm just so flattered that anyone listens to my music that way. It's incredibly humbling. So, thanks, man.

The Bonus Questions

Our phone interview got cut off after a half hour, because Matt had another interview right after. I still had a few questions left, though, so Matt offered to answer those queries over email. Here are the final three questions from the interview:

CM: When you play live shows, you will often fit snippets of other artists' songs into the middle of your songs. I remember one time when I saw you, you incorporated "Exit" by U2 into "Detroit Waves." How do you decide which songs you want to do snippets/covers of, and by extension, how do you decide where to put them?

MN: I don’t usually decide before hand what snippets I’m gonna do. I usually just wing it and try to jam a song I dig into one of my songs. Sometimes it fails EPICALLY. Yikes-city. But when it works, I usually keep doing it for the rest of the tour.

CM:Because I love the hell out of this record, I've gotta ask: any chance of us ever getting a vinyl pressing of Some Mad Hope? I guess the 10-year anniversary isn't too far off now.

MN:Oh man, first off that fucking rules that you dig it. I love that record too. It was a heavy time in my life, and it really is a snapshot of where I was at. That isn’t usually the case with records of mine, but it is with Some Mad Hope, for sure. As for the vinyl pressing...I wish. I hope. Who knows? My label got bought by another label recently, and that record is probably not high on their priority list to re-release on vinyl. But who knows, anything is possible!

CM:And since I know you're as big a music fan as I am: what are your top five albums of 2015?

MN: It’s tough to only pick five. I’ll just list the ones off the top of my head that are ruling me:

Sleater Kinney - No Cities to Love
Kendrick Lamar- To Pimp a Butterfly
Awolnation - Run.
The Mountain Goats - Beat the Champ
Faith No More - Sol Invictus
Jason Isbell - Something More Than Free
Protomartyr - The Agent Intellect

Matt Nathanson - Show Me Your Fangs

The last time we heard from Matt Nathanson, the Massachusetts-born singer/songwriter seemed to be having a bit of an identity crisis. Broken to a nationwide audience by the 2008 radio hit "Come on Get Higher," Nathanson could easily have sold out and turned himself into a global celebrity by writing similarly sensitive college-dorm-ready love ballads. But Nathanson, ever the classic rock geek and always the most sarcastic guy in the room, is the type of artist who could never fully neversell out. He wrote what sounded like a summer pop album with 2010's Modern Love, but the lyrics were witty, whip-smart, and frequently cynical. His next album, 2013's Last of the Great Pretenders, was even weirder, a collision of beat-heavy, hip-hop inspired pop songs, U2-esque arena rock, and classic singer/songwriter fare. I loved the album, but in retrospect, I view it as Nathanson's least focused. The songs were all good, but they didn't really hold together as a cohesive album.

Oddly, Show Me Your Fangs, the follow-up to Pretenders, is every bit as scattershot. These songs cut a bizarre figure, split just about half-and-half between ridiculously catchy pop songs and crushing singer/songwriter ballads. It's as if Nathanson just threw his last three albums (Pretenders, Modern Love, and his still-career-defining 2007 disc, Some Mad Hope) in a blender to see what would happen.

On one hand, this album should have fans and casual listeners alike wondering why Nathanson never had more hits. The lead single, "Headphones," has an indelible chorus that sticks in your head after a single listen, and "Gold in the Summertime" is a smooth soulful jam about hanging out on a "rooftop in Soho" and listening to "Prince on the radio." The song, which sounds equally inspired by classic Motown pop and horn-led rock bands like Chicago, should have been a contender for the superfluous mainstream "song of the summer" title this year. It didn't even crack the pop charts. In case anyone was wondering, this is why I have yet to turn on the radio in the car I bought back in April.

Opening track "Giants" is the kind of big, beating heart pop song that Last of the Great Pretenders didn't have enough of. Nathanson wrote the best pop album of the year back in 2011, with about nine of the 11 songs on Modern Love featuring the biggest sing-along hooks on the block. There was a reason I kept that album in constant rotation in my car that summer. "Giants" is cut from the same cloth, with a shimmering and optimistic chorus ("The world don't speak for us/They lack the confidence/Yeah, we're only hearts and bones and blood/But we are giants") that sounds readymade for a summer road trip mix.

Between "Headphones," "Gold in the Summertime," and "Giants," one begins to wonder why the hell Nathanson sat on this album until fall, instead of dropping it in the middle of the summer. As you get deeper into the record, though, it becomes clear that Show Me Your Fangs is more complex and layered than Modern Love was. It might have some of the catchiest singles of the year, but a summer pop album this is not. At times, the songs here get darker and heavier than anything Nathanson has written since Some Mad Hope—an album he wrote after he and his wife came perilously close to a divorce. Show Me Your Fangs frequently sounds like is also about a relationship on the rocks.

"Bill Murray," for instance, seems like it should be quirky pop ditty based on the title, but is actually a contemplative piano ballad. In the song, Matt describes a dream where he was pals with Bill Murray and the two "Drove the world from Boston to Japan/Blasting old Van Halen." In the dream, Murray acts like a spiritual guide, helping the narrator realize the importance of the person he loves most. "One night over drinks Bill started crying," Matt sings in the surreal first verse. "He said to me 'Kid, of all the stupid things I ever did/You know, I let go when I should have pulled her in.'" It sounds hokey on paper, but the song is actually brilliantly effective, with a spartan piano arrangement and ample conviction in Nathanson's voice selling the number as a unorthodox but sincere love song. "I won't only love you when you're winning/Other fools pretend to understand/Come on take my hand, and we'll go down swinging/Let me be your man," goes the chorus, a gorgeous payoff for the funny and touching verses.

Things get even heavier in the record's second half. "Disappear," for example, might be the darkest song in Nathanson's catalog. Somewhere in the midst of a lonely, drunken night spent in a hotel room, Nathanson starts having a go at himself. "For my greatest trick, the one everyone cheers/You're deep in love, and I'm not even here," he sings in the second verse, before delivering the stark admission of the chorus: "I can make good turn amazing/Then disappear." "Washington State Fight Song" is equally desolate and continues the album's themes of broken relationships, self-loathing, and regret. When Nathanson sings "I want to start over, pack up, disappear/And come back treating you better/But there's a girl up in Spokane, and I'm like a moth to a flame," it's arguably the bluntest he's ever been in his songwriting. "Playlists & Apologies," meanwhile, might sound upbeat, with a hip-hop ready groove and beat, but there's nothing happy about the lyrical work. "We had an epic movie trailer love," Nathanson quips on the verse, but it wasn't meant to be. "Now all that's left of you and me, playlists and apologies."

For someone who has often masked the melancholy in his music with big hooks, clever lyrics, classic rock references, and plenty of self-deprecating humor, Show Me Your Fangs is a shockingly revealing and astoundingly sad record. The three songs described in the paragraph above—"Disappear," "Washington State Fight Song," and "Playlists & Apologies"—are downright harrowing, so dark and devoid of hope that it's almost remarkable they came from the same guy who wrote "Come on Get Higher" or anything on Modern Love. If you've ever seen a Nathanson live show and witnessed how he pairs his musical performances with almost stand-up-level comedy bits, you might forget that he can even hurt like this. But Nathanson vowed a few years ago to be more direct in his songwriting, and to never pull his punches, and the heavier moments of Show Me Your Fangs are the clearest evidence yet of that new songwriting mentality.

The catalyst for Nathanson's change in direction was "Wedding Dress," the song on Some Mad Hope that most directly addressed his "almost divorce." When fans started telling Nathanson that they were playing the song at their weddings, he decided that the gross misinterpretations were his fault, and that he needed to be blunter and more direct with his writing. In a 2013 interview with Huffington Post, he explained the epiphany, saying, "The things that saved my life as a kid and the records that save my life now are records that you hear and you're like, 'I can't believe that person just said that.' I love music so much that I felt like music deserves more than my trying to save face and be clever. If I get to do this for a living, I feel like I have to be straight, as straight as I can be, you know?"

The best songs on Show Me Your Fangs, unsurprisingly, are the ones where Nathanson dares to be completely honest and candid. Honest about his failures and mistakes, honest about the lonesomeness of being a touring musician, and honest about how it's important to always love your better half—even when things aren't going well. Of course, the entire record isn't breakups and bad news. The simple presence of songs like "Headphones," "Gold in the Summertime," "Giants," and "Shouting" keeps Show Me Your Fangs light enough to be blasted in the car. Unlike with Last of the Great Pretenders, though, the different styles and songwriting approaches don't feel like an identity crisis this time around. Rather, it feels like Nathanson made a deliberate choice to give the album both a light side and a dark side—just like Springsteen once paired his most hopeless ballads with his most raucous bar band rockers on The River. As with The River, the song pairings on Show Me Your Fangs don't always make sense. It's particularly odd to have "Headphones"—a single that's been out for more than a year now—positioned as a victory-lap closing track. But also like with The River, there's something beguiling and ultimately uplifting about hearing Nathanson's most celebratory highs and most crushing lows side by side.

Matt Nathanson - The Last of the Great Pretenders

For a very long time, Matt Nathanson was a live performer first and an album maker second. That’s not an insult: it took Springsteen a few tries to really translate the emotion and energy of his live show into a studio recording, and the same happens for quite a few natural-born talents. Quite simply, the stage and the studio are two very different beasts, and mastering the latter when you are so used to performing in the former cannot possibly be an easy task. It took Nathanson longer than most to make the switch, though: the troubadour released his first full-length record, titled Please, in 1993, and while it showed off great songwriting, it sounded like a demo. Ten years and four releases later, he was still struggling: 2003’s Beneath These Fireworks was a move in the right direction, but almost all of his fans admitted that At the Point, the banter-infused live record he dropped two years later, was the better document of his talents. Nathanson just sounded looser and more alive in front of an audience, with nothing but an acoustic guitar to aid his sound. And it certainly didn’t hurt that he was an immensely charismatic performer with a knack for profane humor.

When Nathanson finally broke the studio curse and figured out how to translate his live energy into his recorded output, it was hardly a surprise that he broke through to the mainstream as well. In comparison to his earlier work, 2007’s Some Mad Hope—which housed the near-ubiquitous pop single, “Come on Get Higher”—sounded like the work of a new man. The hooks were bigger, the ballads hit harder, and Nathanson himself sang and played like the artist everyone who had ever seen him live knew he could be. Now, after another terrific pop record with a few modestly successful singles—2010’s excellent Modern Love—Nathanson is back. The new album—his seventh—is called Last of the Great Pretenders, and from the very first moments of the very first song, it’s clear that Nathanson hasn’t just gotten over his studio jitters, but left them in the dust altogether.

That opening track—the rousing and uneasy “Earthquake Weather”—is not only Nathanson’s most fully fleshed out song to date, but also the first indication that he could really transcend his pop singer/songwriter roots. Gone are the pristine and poppy hooks of Modern Love and the bubblegum lyrics of “Come on Get Higher.” Instead, we get ominous piano chords, fractious guitar scrapes, and a charging bass-line that recalls “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the iconic opener from U2’s legendary Joshua Tree album. Considering Nathanson’s love for that record, the sonic parallel might not be a mistake. Add loud, urban vocal harmonies and massive hip-hop ready beats, and “Earthquake Weather” is unlike anything Nathanson has ever put his fingerprints on: more My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy than Room for Squares. “I’d kill anyone who treat you as bad as I do,” Nathanson mutters over the song’s opening chords, before letting forth an unhinged wail at the end of the song’s refrain. The songwriter has never sounded this aggressive, and while his new mask may not appeal to some of the listeners who jumped on board with Some Mad Hope, it fits him damn well nonetheless.

Second track and lead-off single, “Mission Bells,” is in the same vein, powered by a trippy and chopped up vocal sample, a relentless beat, a killer chorus, and some powerful interlocking bass work from co-producers Mike Viola and Jake Sinclair. Both players deserve a shout out for their work here, as the production and bass lines consistently stand out during The Last of the Great Pretenders’ 12 tracks. Viola is a singer/songwriter and sessions musician arguably most well-known for singing the lead vocal line on “That Thing You Do,” a song from the 1996 Tom Hanks film of the same name. Sinclair, meanwhile, is the bassist for Butch Walker’s backing band, the Black Widows, and has contributed his talents to a range of popular records over the past few years, from Taylor Swift’s best-selling Red to Fall Out Boy’s Save Rock and Roll. Both are very welcome additions to Nathanson’s crew, and help add a modern flavor to his sound that has been absent in the past.

One of my favorite things about Matt Nathanson has always been his passionate and infectious love of pop music. Whether he’s sharing an “album of the day” on Facebook, blogging about the spoils of his most recent trip to the record store, or interpolating classic songs into the center of his own compositions during live shows, Nathanson seems like one of those guys who makes music because he wants to give back to the industry that has given him so much. That feeling is all over this record, both lyrically and sonically, and it’s a treat to pick out the nuances of Matt’s influences. In one track, he’s pining after “the girl in the Kink’s shirt.” In another, he’s mourning the loss of “late night drives to Boston” and “Cure songs to get lost in.” And in a third, he boldly declares “I found religion in a record store.” Call that last one a homage to Springsteen’s “No Surrender” and the classic “we learned more from a three-minute record, baby, then we ever learned in school” line from that song’s iconic opening verse. With any other artist, the connection would be tenuous at best; with Nathanson, you know he’ll be holding court from behind the microphone, just hoping fans will draw the parallels themselves so he can break into a few impromptu covers.

The references aren’t limited to lyrics, either. Nathanson belts like Bono on album highlight “Last Days of Summer in San Francisco,” a gorgeous sun-soaked piece of stadium pop that rises from a tinkling piano intro into the finest chorus on the record. “Love, no one cares about the stories they’re not in,” Nathanson grandly proclaims. “We will fade out to whispers, it’s the last days of summer in San Francsco.” The penultimate acoustic-based gem, “Sunday New York Times,” is sophisticated and timeless, radiating elements of both classic and contemporary singer/songwriters, from James Taylor to upcoming tour mate, Joshua Radin. And the staccato piano lines at the top of “Kill the Lights” recall moments from fun.’s world-beating LP, Some Nights, a record whose blazing and bombastic pop production provides a template for where Nathanson goes with Last of the Great Pretenders.

However, simply calling this record a play for pop stardom in a post-fun. world would be reductive. Sure, songs like “Earthquake Weather” and “Mission Bells” focus heavily on beats and production, and “Last Days of Summer in San Francisco” is as grandiose and earnest as U2’s finest, but those larger-than-life trends don’t define the record. More accurately, Last of the Great Pretenders is the album where Nathanson throws everything at the canvas to see what sticks. For every bombastic pop song, there’s a stripped down acoustic confessional (“Sky High Honey”). For every Modern Love-esque summer jam (“Kink’s Shirt”), there’s a more old-fashioned piece of songwriting (“Sunday New York Times”). “Birthday Girl” sounds like Nathanson circa-2003; “Heart Starts” has a breezy Caribbean feel to it; “Annie’s Waiting for the Next One to Leave” is Cheap Trick-flavored power pop; and while most of the record may play out like a perfect summer driving mix, Last of the Great Pretenders ends amidst New Year’s Eve countdowns and snatches of “Auld Lang Syne” on the sweeping “Farewell, December."

Somehow, it all combines into what is arguably the most cohesive record of Nathanson’s career, and the element that ties it all together is the spirit of San Francisco. Nathanson wrote and recorded all of these songs in the city of the Golden Gate, and the result is a patchwork of snapshots and stories that capture what it’s like to spend a season in the city Nathanson came to love. Albums that capture this much of a place have always caught my attention, from Andrew McMahon’s whirlwind-summer-in-Los-Angeles masterwork, Everything in Transit,to the New York City love letter that is Billy Joel’s Turnstiles. With Last of the Great Pretenders, Nathanson captures the organic energy of a city full of exuberant personalities, legendary landmarks, and gorgeous vistas, and the result is one of the most bulletproof summer discs to come along this year.

Every lonely heart could use an honest song...

A discussion of the summer of 2011, musical connection, entertainment criticism, 
and The Dangerous Summer's War Paint

One year, three months, five days, and twelve hours ago (give or take a couple minutes), I sat down for my first listen to The Dangerous Summer's War Paint. It was one of my most anticipated records of the year, and right from the first instant that the title track's thick wall of guitars burst out of my headphones, I knew it was something special. It was the album that would go on to claim my album of the year title, the album that would dominate my summer playlist and define almost every vestige of my life. Today, I put that album on for the first time in a month or so, and everything still felt the same: just like I thought it would, it took me back to that summer season. It transported me back to countless reflective night drives, moments with friends or with the girl I love, to performances and beach days and times spent with family. In short, it encapsulated what my life was in 2011, and that's something I will always cherish. I always make myself wait at least a year before I "officially" place an album on my all time favorites list, but doing that for War Paint has almost felt like a chore. Every time I've listened to it in the past year and a quarter, since that first night that it found its way to me, its resonated more than any other album in recent memory. But now that the requisite year has passed, I feel completely confident in what I'm about to say: that the perfect score I gave this album was more than deserved and that it has at last found its way into the very top tier of my music listening experience...all the way into my top five.

But the elevation of War Paint to a place alongside the four albums that I have called favorites since 2009 or so (Springsteen's Born to Run, Butch Walker's Letters, Jimmy Eat World's Futures, and Jack's Mannequin's Everything in Transit, in that order) is only the tip of the iceberg for how fondly I remember last summer, and most of that is due to how impossibly splendid the soundtrack was. Of the albums I placed in my top ten last December, eight of them had found me in the heat of the summer, somewhere between the time I drove triumphantly away from my sophomore year of college and the day I embarked towards my penultimate one. Those albums managed to supply soundtrack to every kind of emotion and situation, from sunsoaked pop splendor (Matt Nathanson's Modern Love) to the bittersweet feeling of summer's dwindling (Charlie Simpson's Young Pilgrim), from the massive excitement I felt as I drove to pick my girlfriend up at the airport after some time away (Mat Kearney's Young Love) all the way to the loud and brash but surprisingly tender rock 'n' roll record that played as I drove away from it all (Butch Walker's The Spade). It was albums like those (not to mention late-night slowburns from Bon Iver, The Damnwells, or Mansions) that made last year my favorite music year in recent memory: a flawless summer soundtrack, with one of my all-time favorite albums leading the charge.

This past summer brought me a lot of great and meaningful music too. The Gaslight Anthem's Handwritten striking through the hottest days of the year to become an anthemic badge of honor; Japandroids' Celebration Rock blaring from my car speakers at full volume, whether on carefree summer afternoons or late nights near the end of the season; John Mayer's Born and Raised kicking things off in splendor, or Yellowcard's Southern Air serenading the poetic finale to what was probably my last summer in my hometown. But for as many unforgettable moments as there were, nothing ever became a War Paint-like soundtrack. Maybe that's because the season was so entirely different than the last one: my girlfriend was gone for over a month, away in Colorado at a Graduate program, and when she finished, it was off to start a job, a life, a new world. That meant that I was spending less time in the car, with fewer late night drives or sunset cruises to let these albums really sink in the same way that War Paint once had. I was also working my own jobs, spending six days a week putting in hours for a marketing company, writing for a magazine, or performing shows at my local dinner theater. I would turn to the music at the end of long days or late nights, but for the most part, I was spending less time with it.

I've often thought that how an album hits you--how much you love it, how long it stays with you--depends entirely on when it comes into your life. Perhaps that's an exaggeration, since a lot of it also has to do with the music at hand, but I actually think the "objective" elements are a lot less important in the long run. That's why I try to inject a little bit of my personal story into my music criticism, at least when it comes to the artists and albums that are really important to me. Part of the reason Roger Ebert is such a renowned film critic is that he spends a lot of time in his reviews not just talking about the film, but also about his personal reaction to it. I think the first time I ever realized that was during my junior year of high school, when Ebert's review of Martin Scorsese's film Goodfellas appeared in the textbook for my A.P. Language & Composition class. Why was it that, in a book of literary essays and poetry, this one piece of entertainment criticism found is place? That became quickly evident as I read, because Ebert doesn't kick off his review by talking about a filmmaker or a rating or even about the gangster film genre. No, he begins it by talking about himself:

"For two days after I saw Martin Scorsese's new film, "GoodFellas," the mood of the characters lingered within me, refusing to leave. It was a mood of guilt and regret, of quick stupid decisions leading to wasted lifetimes, of loyalty turned into betrayal. Yet at the same time there was an element of furtive nostalgia, for bad times that shouldn't be missed, but were."

That opening paragraph took my breath away. The idea of relating the emotions of a work of art to one's self, to personal moods and experiences and memories, resonated with me on a purely primal level, and I have, largely, been writing in a similar manner ever since. That's why, when I reviewed War Paint towards the end of last summer, I focused on the personal context rather than the musical nuances of what is, on the surface, a fairly straightforward emotional pop-punk record. That's why, when I compiled my end-of-the-year list for 2011, most of the entries blended notes about the songs with explanations of how those songs impacted me. For me, music has always been, first and foremost, about the visceral connections I form with it, and there are few albums more visceral than War Paint. So yes, it might only be a year and three months after the fact (already?!), and many may deride this band and write them off for all of the dramatic shenanigans its members have be involved with in the past year, but there's no other way I can describe this album other than to call it one of my favorite albums of all time. I do believe it's earned that classification.

Jim Ivins Band - Everything We Wanted

Jim Ivins Band - Everything We Wanted

Unsigned, 2012

Three and a half stars

Late last fall, I stumbled upon Late Night Drive, a solo EP from Virginia songwriter Jim Ivins. It was a beautiful, introspective collection of acoustic music that culminated in one of the best songs anyone wrote all year. That song was "House of Three," a viscerally emotionally ode to his mother and the times they shared together, and it's broken my heart pretty much every time I've listened to it since. Everything We Wanted sees Ivins back in the company of his band (a four piece, including his older brother on drums), and far more buffeted by electric instrumentation and pop production, but at its heart, the record is a very natural progression for him. Ivins, who has worked with the likes of Ace Enders, opened for bands such as Switchfoot, The Ataris, and Parachute, and listed artists like Matt Nathanson, The Goo Goo Dolls, and Third Eye Blind among his biggest influences, channels all of his musical experiences into a record awash with nostalgia, introspection, and big life issues, all to a modern pop rock sound that hearkens back to bands of the late '90s or the early '00s. Indeed, while Ivins and his band remain fairly underground today, the sound of Everything We Wanted made me wonder how the band would have fared a decade ago, when this type of surging, melodic pop-rock was all over the airwaves.

A bell-like guitar heralds the arrival of "Run," the sunsoaked rocker that kicks off the set and one of the many highlights therein. Ivins' vocals sound more full bodied and confident this time, replacing Late Night Drive's falsetto atmospherics with fist-pumping choruses and a more optimistic lyrical outlook. Pounding pianos accent the song's bridge, while a drum section and a distant vocal harmony dissolve the song and give way to the anthemic guitar sound that kicks off the next cut, "The Sight of Fire." Rarely do transitions sound this good or well planned, and "The Sight of Fire" actually ends up being a better song thanks to the extended lead in that "Run" provides. The song (also the first single), is a perfect showcase of Ivins' ability to wrap difficult subject matter up in pop sensibility. Late Night Drive embraced darkness and sadness more completely, in both sound and content, while Everything We Wanted is a heavily produced, muscular set up pop-rock songs that could easily end up on the radio, but bits and pieces of that darkness still creep in here. "The Sight of Fire" is a song about the debilitating effects of addiction, a fact that passed me by until the song's key line ("Cause it's funny how we kill ourselves/When we're trying to feel alive") hit me and made me pay attention. Everything We Wanted is a catchy and sonically pleasing record from the get go, but it's also extremely lyrically driven, and it became much more resonant to me when I really paid attention to that aspect.

Three of the songs here ("Run," "Rollercoaster," "It's Getting Better") have been re-recorded from Ivins' first solo album, and while there is a notable difference in lyrical maturity between these songs and the new material (especially with "Rollercoaster," where Ivins indulges in a few cliches, only to directly acknowledge that he's doing so), it isn't jarring. Ivins has gone on record saying that the duality of the songs and their content means to represent the journey his life has taken in the years since he started writing. Where "Run" is a song about feeling young, immortal, and limitless, and where "Rollercoaster" is an irresistible depiction of first love, many of the other songs on this record are coming from a man who has lost one of the most important people in his life and been battered by the world around him. In that respect, it's a record about growing up and coming of age, where the naiveté of those three songs gives way to songs about a person who understands that life really can get hard some times, but who is still fighting through and searching for the good.

But even as Ivins seeks to find himself in these songs, the ghost of his mother still hangs heavily over the proceedings. Never is this more evident than on the title track, which carries the record out in a moving and uplifting fashion. It's a song about picking up the pieces of your life in the wake of tragedy, and in that respect, it's really a sequel to "House of Three." Where the last EP ended with Ivins packing up his life and driving away because he couldn't face the grief anymore, here he's mastered that pain and is ready to move on. As the song floats through a couple of stunning verses and an anthemic chorus, carried along by the talents of his band and the pristine, radio-ready production of Pedro Aida (Carbon Leaf), he finally comes to the realization that life really does go on. And when he sings "I'm not dead yet/Now I'm finally alive" at the song's climactic moment, it's both a catharsis and a commencement to a new life. While most of my listening tends to revolve around full length albums rather than EPs, and while I do really wish Everything We Wanted lasted beyond its 23 minute runtime, these seven songs constitute a musical journey that is both relatable and fully formed, and the result is my favorite EP of the year so far; I can only hope that The Jim Ivins Band gets the attention they deserve for it.

Jason Mraz - Love is a Four Letter Word

Jason Mraz - Love is a Four Letter Word

Atlantic Records, 2012

Three and a half stars

Jason Mraz has been a presence in the pop music world since his debut, Waiting for My Rocket to Come, dropped back in 2003, but he became an industry behemoth in 2009 when the gratingly catchy "I'm Yours" took over the airwaves. To say that song overstayed its welcome would be a vast understatement, and it's one of those pop hits that I never, under any circumstances, want to hear again, but the rest of the album that spawned it (We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things) was a decent mix of Michael Jackson-esque pop and acoustic balladry, and I still give some of those songs spins every once in awhile. Listening through Mraz's catalog, it's clear that he has a diverse side to him that most pop singer/songwriters don't attempt (his eclectic sophomore album, 2005's Mr. A-Z, hit everything from hip-hop to opera), but his latest, Love is a Four Letter Word doesn't breach a lot of new territory. That's fine, since the 12 songs (13 if you count the hidden track) here are easy, breezy summer-pop gems and since Mraz doesn't try to blatantly rewrite any of his previous hits, but overall, this record is a fairly straightforward one, offering just what most would expect from Mraz, and not a whole lot more.

It doesn't help a lot that Love is a Four Letter Word kicks off with its weakest track, the hippy-folk, Bob Marley-aping "Freedom Song." It's pleasant enough, with horn sections added for extra effect, but the chorus of back-up vocalists comes across as over-the-top, and the song never rises above its cheesy, self-serious lyric. Things get better quickly though, with a trio of surefire radio singles filling slots 2-5. Best is "I Won't Give Up," which bears an ineffable hook and a splendid, earnest vocal from Mraz (who I've always believed to be one of the most technically gifted singers in the pop music world). The other two - "Living in the Moment" and "The Woman I Love" - will be too sugary for many, but those with a soft spot for well-crafted pop music will find themselves whistling the melodies after a single listen. The same goes for songs like "Frank D. Fixer" (despite clunky lyrics), or album-highlight "93 Million Miles," a glorious slice of summer pop that will probably make it onto countless mixtapes and playlists during the upcoming season. The latter epitomizes the laid back, breezy nature of this record, and while that's not necessarily a quality that's going to lend Love is a Four Letter Word much lasting value in the long run, it's hard not to enjoy it for its immediacy.

Then, three-quarters of the way through the record, Mraz makes a sudden and jarring turn from summer-pop record into break-up album territory. The transition doesn't quite work, mostly because the intimate songs that close out the record, stuff like "Who's Thinking About You Now" and "In Your Hands," sound like they would have felt infinitely more at home on this record's predecessor than they do here. Luckily the songs, especially the latter, are good enough to not completely derail the album's flow (which up to this point is seamless), and the closer, called "The World as I See It," is a sonic feast, bursting with strings, vocal harmonies, bells, and electric guitar accents that carry the album out in grand fashion. Mraz's voice, which rises slowly out of the texture to nail a glory note at the song's climax, before melting back into a final chorus, sounds immaculate. "Coming Over," the hidden track, is nearly as good, with a falsetto-laden vocal line and a driving drum rhythm combining to form an irresistible nighttime atmosphere.

There are a lot of good songs on Love is a Four Letter Word, and they make for an enjoyable and relaxing listen, but the album as a whole never becomes more than the sum of its parts and that keeps it from standing alongside the year's best pop releases. Mraz has never sounded better, and he clearly knows how to write a memorable hook, but his lyrics too often drift into trite territory, and the album never quite decides what it wants to be. It's a solid collection, one that I can see myself playing, in bits and pieces, a lot throughout this summer, and one that will probably land somewhere with my slew of honorable mentions at the end of the year, but probably not one I will ever love. Mraz is a talented melodist, and an even better singer, and his pop songs are fun, I just wish that he would shed his formulaic format more often than he does. When he plays things a little bit looser, like with the deep rhythmic groove of "5-6," or with a lot of the stuff from Mr. A-Z, he comes off as a lot more interesting than he does on his radio hits. As is, Mraz sits in the middle of the mainstream road, better than contemporaries like Jack Johnson and Gavin DeGraw, but not ready to play in the ranks of John Mayer, Matt Nathanson, or Mat Kearney. He certainly has the talent to get there, but I think he's going to need to take a few more risks - or at very least, write some better lyrics - before he can make the jump.

Train - California 37

Train - California 37

Columbia Records, 2012

Three stars

I can't say I've ever been a fan of Train, nor have I, until now, ever listened to a full-length album by them, but that hasn't stopped their long line of pop singles from managing to constantly pervade my everyday existence. From their breakout hits ("Meet Virginia" and "Drops of Jupiter," which were all over the place in my radio-listening days), to the singles from their third record, My Private Nation, which actually managed to make it onto a few mixes I burned for myself back in my pre-album listening phase ("Calling All Angels," "When I Look to the Sky"), all the way to the incredibly annoying cultural ubiquity of "Hey Soul Sister" back in 2010, which gave the band a renaissance of sorts, Train has managed to stick around, even as many of their early contemporaries have diminished in presence and disappeared. At very least, the San Francisco natives deserve a commendation for not only surviving, but thriving in a decade that largely rejected their brand of pop-rock. And despite the fact that I've never really liked this band, or that lead singer Pat Monahan's voice has always had a strong knack for getting on my nerves, the band's tendency to tour with some of my favorite guys making music today (Butch Walker, Matt Nathanson, Mat Kearney), has recently made me wonder if there's more to them than I thought; more than just the singles, at least.

Producer extraordinaire Butch Walker.

California 37, the band's sixth (!?) full length LP, finds them in the wake of their most successful hit ever, basking in the same brand of sunny hooks and shiny pop-production that made "Hey Soul Sister" such a success. And really, it's not so bad. Make no mistake, Train's music is just about as disposable as ever, but songs like opener "This'll Be My Year," which plays like a modern-day update on Billy Joel's  "We Didn't Start the Fire" (complete with a massive refrain-chorus), or the sweeping mid-tempo balladry of "We Were Made For This," which features one of Monahan's best vocal performances to date (at least that I've heard), as well as an explosive guitar solo mid-way through and a bizarre but atmospheric bagpipe outro, are pleasing and well-executed. If those two songs are among the best on the album, then it's hard to not see Butch Walker, who lends his writing talents to both, as one of the prime reasons. Walker, who has made a name for himself writing and producing for the likes of Avril Lavigne, Pink, and Weezer, knows his way around a hook better than just about anyone in the business today, and his fingerprints are all over this album, whether he's receiving writing credits or production kudos. Walker produced half the record himself, and shared duties with Espionage (the production duo who manned the boards for "Hey Soul Sister") for the rest, and throughout, he brings something to Train's music that has been lacking in the past. His presence is palpable on album closer "When the Fog Roles In," which recalls the band's '90s alt-rock roots, thanks to its piano-led orchestration and atmospheric flourishes of organ, brass, and guitar, or on the second single "Feels Good At First," whose pleasant acoustic-guitar loop and folk-pop aesthetic make for a song that wouldn't be so unwelcome as a dominating radio force.


 These songs were written and recorded while the band (and Walker) toured in support of their last album (2009's Save Me San Francisco), and as a result, they have a looser, more spontaneous feel to them than is usually present in modern pop music (Train's included). The cover depicts a classic car roaring down a sunlit highway, and that's fitting for a record that would be perfectly well suited for a spur-of-the-moment summertime road-trip: these songs are drenched in the kind of sunsoaked melodies that have formed the backbone for many a brilliant summer record, with hooks the size of houses and dynamic instrumentation. Songs like the pop-countrified "Bruises," complete with a guest vocal from country singer Ashley Monroe, or "Sing Together," which is essentially a rewrite of "Hey Soul Sister," right down to the chord progression and ukulele accompaniment, are poised to take over your local radio station this summer, while even the less commercially viable options are loaded with pop-sheen, from the Mariachi-influenced verses of "50 Ways to Say Goodbye" (and the skyscraping chorus they explode into), or the whistle-led "You Can Finally Meet My Mom," which is a lot of fun despite dumb lyrics.

But even despite Walker's welcome presence and a lot of enjoyable songs, Train are still the same band they've always been, and California 37 does end up falling into a lot of the same traps that have plagued most of their singles for the past fifteen years. Monahan stumbles upon a sincere line here and there, but for the most part, his lyrics are gimmicky and dumb, and in the worst cases, completely nonsensical. His songwriting partners (Walker and the guys from Espionage, among others) help to temper that habit on the album's best songs, but it's allowed to run wild on many of the album's more "commercial" tracks, and as a result, those end up bringing down a record that I actually could have seen myself listening to a lot this summer. First single "Drive By" is a particularly egregious offender ("When you move me, everything is groovy/They don't like it, sue me, mmm way you do me"), but drivel like "Mermaid" and the title track don't really help the band's case either. Monahan's pop music clichés and unfunny pop culture references extend beyond those three tracks, but in most cases, the melodies are strong enough to render them harmless. When Train is trying to play towards today's pop-music trends, they sound awkward and strained, and the results are as grating as the worst singles the genre has to offer; when they play it straight, they land somewhere between Counting Crows-lite and sugary pop singer/songwriters like Jason Mraz and Gavin DeGraw. Neither version is transcendent by any means, but overall, California 37 is a pleasant surprise from a band I've written off more times than I can count: it's disposable and largely forgettable, and it's not going to get anywhere near my end-of-the-year list, but it's fun, and every once in awhile, that's enough.

On the majestic, bombastic sounds of the summer album...

*I wrote most of this in a one-night creative/nostalgic burst that I had earlier this spring, back when the weather first started to warm up and summertime seemed imminent. I left it behind, thinking it was unfinished, but I read it over and liked it to much not to put it up.

It happens every spring: as inevitably as the blooming of the trees, as sure as that first 60 degree day, where myself and thousands of others jump the gun, throw on shorts and a t-shirt, and roll down the windows in the car, pretending like it's May or June instead of March or April. I am speaking, of course, of my tendency to anticipate summer through music. And it always happens on nights like this: nights where a warm breeze blows through the trees, nights where the ghost of winter finally lifts, disappears, and is replaced by evocative smells and rivers of nostalgia; it happens on nights where my neighbors shoot off fireworks and scream in celebration at two in the morning, on nights where the people on the porch across the street drink beer and shout through their intoxication, and on nights where those things, for whatever reason, don't bother me, where I realize (to quote The Dangerous Summer's "I Will Stay"), "oh my God, it's almost summer."

Summer music is my favorite kind of music: I don't know why that is, but it's most certainly true. Every year, most of my favorite albums seem to drop in the summer (last year, I believe eight of my top ten came into my life between leaving school in the spring and returning in the fall); so many of my favorite songs or records recall glorious moments of summers gone by. And every year in recent memory, it hasn't felt like spring or summer until I've given some solid play time to a few key records. The most obvious is Jack's Mannequin and Everything in Transit, with its whirlwind depiction of a California summer and its power-pop aesthetic. It's a record that has served as soundtrack for a lot of important moments in my life over the past few years, and which has even served as a welcoming committee of sorts for Earth's most flawless season. This record has an interesting connection to the summers that followed my two freshman years: first, when I was fifteen years old, I was a year late to the party (Transit released the summer before), but that turned out to be okay, because the season that it did end up soundtracking instead was remarkable. I still remember long evening runs on the golf course near my house, with the sun setting over the hills and the sounds of that album blasting through my headphones. Andrew McMahon has a lot to say about being young and completely alive on Everything in Transit, and that was a theme that I related to that summer and during every single one after it. The other freshman year, the college one, included probably the most definitive experience I ever had with the album (which, for a record that had been one of my all-time favorites for four years at that point, was saying something). It was two years ago this month, and I'd just wrapped up the last exam of my first year in college. The weather was glorious, with sun streaming down from the sky and the temperature rising. And when everything was packed and I'd checked out of the dorm, I got in my car, scrolled through my iPod, and picked this album out. What followed remains one of my most fondly recalled road trips: the weather, the music, the anticipation to be going home for the entire summer, it all made me feel immortal: it was a great start to what turned out to be the best summer of my life.
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But even though it might always be the definitive summer record for me, Everything in Transit is merely one of many that fit that qualification. Perhaps the first was either Counting Crows' Hard Candy or Sister Hazel's Chasing Daylight: I don't quite recall which I snagged first, but I know for certain that both came into my life in the summer of 2004, and both were instrumental in shaping my love for music: they're still among my all-time favorites. Hard Candy has probably the best summer bookend lyrics out there: "Up All Night" and the line "we could drive out to the dunes tonight, 'cause summer's almost here" still drives my anticipation for the season to a fever pitch when the temperature starts to warm up, and the part in "Miami" that goes "the bus is running, it's time to leave/this summer's gone, so are we" transformed the song into my definitive, bittersweet end-of-summer ceremonial for years on end. But after those two came along, there were plenty more to come, and I can still hear pieces of my past in each of them: childhood memories echoing through The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album; a perfect family vacation in the strains of Better Than Ezra's Before the Robots; the angsty remains of my first summer with a job and a car in Safetysuit's Life Left to Go; the duality of the summer that followed my graduation, the balance between victory and uncertainty, unbridled freedom and fear of what my life would bring, and of course, day and night, represented by Mat Kearney's City of Black and White and The Dangerous Summer's Reach for the Sun; the first love that I discovered to the final two tracks of Dashboard Confessional's Dusk and Summer; and, though it seems like it was only a couple of months ago, last summer, completely encompassed in the flow of The Dangerous Summer's War Paint.

All of those records have played a massive role in my life, and each is at least partially responsible for my infatuation with this so-called "summer music," but even after getting the "soundtracks" out of the way, there has still been so much more: the boozy bombast of The Hold Steady's Boys & Girls in America,  the soaring voice of Chad Perrone, on his solo records and on Drawn to Revolving Doors with his old band Averi, which still take me back to the beginning of summer 2010; a slew of classics from last year, from the lovelorn pop symphonies of Matt Nathanson and Mat Kearney, to the dusky jams of The Damnwells' No One Listens to the Band Anymore; from the immaculate midnight atmospherics of Bon Iver's last record, all the way to Butch Walker's The Spade, which played as soundtrack for my farewell from town at the end of last summer, and will do the opposite upon my return for this one. And of course, there's Springsteen: Born to Run, which hardly left my stereo for the entire spring of my senior year of high school, soundtracked my graduation, and remained in constant rotation all summer long, and The Wild, The Innocent, The E-Street Shuffle, which is about as perfect an inaugural summer record as any I know.

When I look back at the summers of my life, I do so through the eyes of the songs that latched themselves onto moments from each and immortalized them. When I hear these records, they take me back to hundreds of reflective late night drives, to every brilliant moment spent outside in the glorious weather, enjoying the company of the people I love, and cherishing every splendid moment. I don't know what this summer will bring: I know that it could very well be one of the last I spend in my hometown, this place where I grew up and where so many amazing moments of my life have played out. If it is the last one, if a big chapter of my life ends in four months time, I can only hope that it's one of the greatest as well. And whatever record that comes along to encapsulate that? It's going to be one that I treasure for the rest of my life.