Unraveling Millenial Manhood and Dad Rock

I have been an outspoken opponent of the suffocating genre classification of “dad rock” for years, but, until recently, I hadn’t thought about why the term has rubbed me so abrasively other than its primary purpose is to belittle the value of bands I love (most while still being critically acclaimed for the majority of their careers). Many of them I first fell in love with while in college (say at 20) over a decade ago, and many I champion just as adamantly, if not more so, today, now past 30.

Wilco. The National. Ryan Adams. The Walkmen. Nada Surf. Drive-By Truckers. Conor Oberst.

The National, photo credit: Dierdre O'Callaghan

The list goes on. As long as musicians no longer in their twenties brandish at least one guitar, play versions of mid-tempo rock and roll and delve into mature lyrical themes that swim near the waters of aging, marriage, divorce, parenting, and existential hand-wringing, there will be admonishing, trendier types writing it off as dad rock – not of commercial potential in today’s industry, not relevant to the times, sequestered within an older family-oriented man’s worldview, a fossil in a cacophony of EDM, dubstep, cookie-cutter fist-pumping radio country, and soulless Auto-tune pop by child TV personalities from long ago.

Just as there are plenty of popular musicians who transcend those groan-inducing trends, there are many beloved bands (that I also love) with members on the north side of thirty that still play rock and roll with guitars to sustained acclaim, yet generally don’t have to endure dad rock slander.

Spoon. Radiohead. LCD Soundsystem. Modest Mouse. Kurt Vile. Arcade Fire. Phoenix. The Black Keys.

Don’t get me wrong; many of the critics who subvert the worth of the bands that make “dad rock” are slightly less approving of the music of the latter bands than the near-universal gushing praises of their fans and vast majority of critics. To paraphrase those dissenters (even if they pen a positive review for these bands), the artists are still out of touch with the moment we reside, which should lessen their influence. Those who live by (i.e. me) and invest in this music are “rockist”.

I’ve long come to terms with being classified as rockist, but should I be considered “dad rockist” if many of these are my favorite bands even if I’ve never been married and have never been a father?

Sure, I was linked for years in my late twenties to a woman who had children, but does that worldview fully carry on with you once you’re in your thirties with three roommates, no serious mate and no kids? Does any of it matter when we’re talking about music?

To me, someone who takes listening as personally as anything in life, it must.

 

I found myself outlining this post today after listening to Ryan Adams’ new self-titled album (probably my 30^th spin of that record) and a recent Canadian release sent to me by a friend, Dan MacCormack’s Symphony of Ghosts. Adams’ record is characteristically brooding and is as unified as anything he’s ever done, awash in heartache, 3am colors and lusting electric guitar swaggers. MacCormack was a name new to me, but that album, although neither high enough on the radar nor classic four-piece-based enough to be in danger of being called dad rock, is a mature, swooning collection of string-and-steel-driven folk with intermittent rock flourishes and uncommonly potent songwriting that rings of literature (the songs are inspired by the writing of novelist David Adams Richards, whose novels are set in MacCormack’s home of New Brunswick) and rustic imagery and adulthood.

On “Feels Like Fire”, Ryan Adams sings, “Just so you know, you’ll always be the hardest thing I will let go / passing by your church and all the houses in a row / feels like fire.” It’s a chorus written by one of my favorites and carried the weight of a hundred things that had regularly popped in my head without reprieve for the better part of a year. It’s the kind of line that wouldn’t mean a whole lot to teenagers or college kids listening to whatever the hell is on the radio or queued up in their Saturday night Spotify playlist, but it hits me as heavily as that metaphorical swinging anvil he begs for in “My Wrecking Ball”. MacCormack offers up lyrics taking stock in the magnitude of raising another man’s child as your own or having a father “who has never walked a straight line past nine” and loving him just the same. Stuff like empathy isn’t child’s play. It’s not hard to imagine this kind of music invoking a rush of emotions for the right listener at the right moment in just about any year. This music (and much of the music I adore) may often be about relationships (thriving or failing), aging, doubt and the like, but for my money, I can’t think of many themes I’d rather spend my time on.

Jeff Tweedy (left) and Spencer Tweedy (right)

Hell, for that matter, Jeff Tweedy (another of my songwriting heroes) has fronted a band that, since about Sky Blue Sky, has been the quintessential poster outfit for dad rock. A month ago, he released a damn good double album under the name Tweedy with his 18-year-old son, Spencer, on drums and named the collection, Sukierae, after Tweedy’s wife and Spencer’s mother. I guess that’s about as uncool as it can get to the casual music fan, but I honestly can think of few things cooler and with more heart at its core, especially when the songs are at one of his highest calibers.  

Another favorite songwriter, Jenny Lewis, unveiled a dazzling (if more polished and pop-oriented compared to the Rilo Kiley of a decade ago) album, The Voyager, a short few months ago. Produced by Ryan Adams with an assist from Beck and veteran Heartbreaker Benmont Tench, Lewis’ writing and delivery impressively walk the tightrope of being both as gorgeous and venomous as ever while tackling topics most other songwriters would shy away from.

Jenny Lewis, photo credit: Autumn De Wilde

A former child star now in late thirties and still possessing centerfold beauty and style of yesteryear, Lewis is still one of the best feminine (and I’d argue feminist) voices in rock-based music today. Even if she plays guitar and writes mid-tempo songs steeped in unshakeable melodies, it’s somewhat interesting to me that nobody will call her music dad rock, especially when most longtime fans lament some sort of decline since the collapse of Rilo Kiley (typically citing Under the Blacklight as the death knell). It’s curious then that The Voyager most closely resembles that poppier-than-previous-albums swan song from 2007 (coincidentally, the same year Wilco released Sky Blue Sky and The National gave the world Boxer) and has likely struck some of the same wrong chords with those fans still wishing for another Takeoffs and Landings thirteen years later. In any case, anyone who has listened to The Voyager or its Beck-produced lead single, “Just One of the Guys”, it’s hard to ignore the coup de grace line in that song, when all the “oohs” and background accompaniment drift away and we come to the bridge with nothing but Lewis’ crystal clear, undeterred voice drops a half-heart-on-sleeve, half-tongue-in-cheek zinger (and a solid argument for this piece):

“There's only one difference between you and me
When I look at myself, all I can see
I'm just another lady without a baby.”

That’s as honest, unapologetic and illuminating a line as I’ve heard in 2014, but it would also seem to be grossly undervalued if “Just One of the Guys” really tried to fit in on the radio or against the most popular genres of the moment. The thing is…it has a kindred spirit with the very music I love that is called dad rock, but its core purpose is to skewer vapid young twenty-something girls at parties and illuminate the chasm between her, them and the guys.

Where does dad rock begin and end?

Are single thirty-something guys who adore the music Wilco, The National and Jenny Lewis but have no kids dad-rockists?

Is this really a genre, or can something positive merely be said for people who appreciate meaningful storytelling with often-mature themes put to rock music by actual adults and played by veteran musicians?  
  

Cory Branan - The No-Hit Wonder

The No-Hit Wonder, the fourth album (second on Chicago’s Bloodshot Records) from Memphis-bred, Nashville-based veteran Cory Branan, is the kind of album that somehow manages to pack punches full of maturity, wit, heartache and tenderness with such consistency and genre-defying verve that it has the quiet power to make even the most jaded listener hopeful about the current states of popular music, wordplay and love. Branan’s lyrics are arresting enough on paper (which explains why his way with words has been championed by the formidable likes of Jason Isbell, Lucero and Chuck Ragan, who has deemed Branan “the greatest songwriter of our generation”), but in the narrative context of a country-rooted song that is anchored by his knack for crafting an indelible melody, those words convey often-conflicting emotions honestly and set scenes with such vivid (and discernibly Southern) details that the end result tends to feel more like a great novel you’ve lived inside for a month, rather than a three and a half minute tune that should be a hit on the radio but probably never will be. Hence the album title and hard-charging knockout title track, an anthem for any protagonist spending “years of living blood to string, gig to gig, east to west, north to south.” Branan (with an assist from the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and Steve Selvidge) knows the score isn’t pretty in 2014 though, which is why he turns one of my most-despised aphorisms into one of my favorite choruses of the year: “It is what is.”

 

In addition to Finn and Selvidge, Branan taps an armful of the top-shelf contemporaries to flesh out the winsome highs throughout The No-Hit Wonder: Isbell steps in for harmonies on the opener “You Make Me”, a love song with a crackling tempo and lyrics that mesh sentimentality with prison break urgency, and “The Highway Home”, a vintage rambler’s opus with a sweeping, sung-to-the-skies chorus that’s compelling enough to have the country fans, rockers and punks singing along without reservation, Caitlin Rose and Austin Lucas chime in on the lovely, steel-driven ballad “All the Rivers in Colorado”, punctuated by the refrain “all the rivers in Colorado couldn’t wash you off my mind / not that I’m trying, just a thought though / it might be nice to keep from crying,” and Tim Easton sinks his teeth his backing vocals on “Sour Mash”, an electric cut of punk-infused, Sun Studio-adoring rockabilly that feels destined to soundtrack many drunken nights in pubs and honky-tonks alike.

Branan is an artist in such control of his craft as a songwriter and musician that much of the pleasure of taking in The No-Hit Wonder time and again is rooted in how offhand many of its finest moments seem. On first listen, a waltzing country number with a jazz lounge delivery (“C’mon Shadow”) or a bouncy tune with an accordion lead and a state fair spirit (“Daddy Was a Skywriter”) can seem a bit precious alongside other songs here, but it’s upon delving into the genuine, earned humanity at their core that you see quite realistic portraits of a searching life on display. Branan is the sort of intuitive songwriter who has no qualms about tossing in a well-worn cliché (“it is what it is” on “The No-Hit Wonder”, spraying names on a bridge so the town will “recall What’s His Face loves So and So” on “The Only You”) as a rope-a-dope that frees him up to cut to the bone with his cunning wizardry with words whenever he feels like it. A favorite example comes in the first verse of “The Only You”, which immediately follows the “it is what it is” mantra of “The No-Hit Wonder” and precedes the song’s eventual bridge and the spray-painting of the literal bridge within it. Branan sings, “I hear you’ve got another boy, I hear he looks a lot like me / There’s some calm with some kind of guarantee / Well, I got me another girl and she looks like you at 23 / while she sleeps I trace the places where your tattoo used to be.” It’s equally heartbreaking, hilarious and tender stuff, and Branan delivers revelatory moments like these more routinely than just about any other songwriter around today. “Yeah, when I get lonely, sure she’ll do,” he later confesses, “but you’re the only you.”

It may be somewhat predestined in today’s mainstream music landscape that Cory Branan will never beat the odds to earn praise beyond being many of your favorite songwriters’ favorite songwriter, but The No-Hit Wonder is his best album to date and it is, quite simply, all kinds of wonderful and filled to the brim with should-be hits.

Cory Branan’s The No-Hit Wonder is out now via Bloodshot Records.  

*This review first appeared in No Depression on August 20, 2014.