This week, we reflect on the experience of growing apart from bands we love; plus, checking hip-hop’s vital signs, a reggaeton icon at the Tiny Desk and more.
Photography by Graham MacIndoe / Dave Herring / Joel Jasmin / Collage by Jackie Lay / NPR
This weekend, NPR Music published a lovely and only mildly heartbreaking piece by Grayson Haver Currin, chronicling his decades-long relationship with the band The National — a deeply personal affinity that began to feel distant recently as the group’s music stopped speaking to his own life experiences. It comes with a fair critique of The National’s last two albums, both of which came out this year, but also an acknowledgement that the soundtrack of our lives is often unique to the moments in which we’re living.
“In my 20s and 30s,” Grayson writes, “The National had served as grumpy but avuncular mentors, five men a decade or so older than me who had endured the mystery, injury and wonder of growing up, then written songs that suggested I too would get by, no matter how gray the dawns seemed.”
Now, listening to last month’s Laugh Track, Grayson finds a lesson in the form of a warning sign: “Don’t buy into your own success so much that you simply sit still in it. Perhaps the group that had helped lead me into and out of early adulthood had nowhere else to guide me. Maybe there was a lesson in that, too.”
The piece gets considerably more personal, while doubling as a thoughtful review of The National’s 2023 output. It also got me thinking about artists whose music soundtracked key moments of my own life, only to lose me over time.
The Mountain Goats’ bare-knuckle, scream-along songs about romantic torment, personal loss and tenuous survival (“No Children,” “This Year,” “Estate Sale Sign”) have been staples of my musical diet during some of my life’s most unstable stretches. Those songs still pour hydrogen peroxide on my seeping psychic scabs all these years later. But many of the Mountain Goats records since have been built around bloodless, vaporous arrangements that seem engineered to dilute the venom in John Darnielle’s words.
It’s been a musical choice as much as a philosophical one. Darnielle remains an astute and inventive songwriter who can wring pathos and big ideas out of subjects as far afield as underground wrestling and Goth bands of the ’80s. But the part of me that has needed the Mountain Goats’ music — that doesn’t find it pleasurable so much as medicinal — isn’t content to simply admire its craft. As the band keeps returning to its softer side, I can’t help but feel left behind.
Which is, to put it mildly, no one’s fault. I no longer live my life neck-deep in crisis, and have mostly, blessedly, outgrown the far-too-lengthy phase in which I fancied myself to be some broodingly troubled Man of Torment. Thankfully, I don’t actually need a new song that loudly wishes for death or screams that “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” If the Mountain Goats and I have grown apart and settled down, then that’s probably good news for both of us, right? They’re not obligated to keep manufacturing feelings they no longer feel, or move at 150 mph, any more than I am.
All of which ties neatly into Grayson’s piece about The National, in which he offers a possible path forward for the band: “What I want to hear now is this group of inveterate mopers dealing with how good they have it, with the thrill and mystery of still being around, because that’s honestly how I feel, too.”
The National might get there eventually and might not. But the latest chapter of my own relationship with the Mountain Goats offers a bit of hope: Last year’s Bleed Out, a concept album about action movies, restores much of the musical fire I’d missed, and even busts out a few scream-along choruses to suit the subject matter. It recreates the catharsis without sounding forced or wallowing in agony. And, while the band’s new album (Jenny From Thebes) returns to softly peppy arrangements that do less for me, it’s reassuring to know that the band I love is still in there.
The National is still in there, too. And, best of all, those old songs will never die.
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More to read, watch and hear
The great Rodney Carmichael attended the 2023 BET Hip-Hop Awards so he could take the vital signs of hip-hop in the aftermath of its 50th anniversary — or, to put a finer point on it, “amid a midlife crisis.” He also came away with a note of hope as he praised “two performances that embodied the genre's range: Sexyy Red, who hit the stage three times in close-cropped booty shorts with choreographed twerkers in tow, and LL Cool J, who fronted a live band with bell-bottom pants and a microphone in his hand for the set with the highest energy all night.”
WRTI’s Nate Chinen recently spoke to pianist Adam Birnbaum, who gives Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier a contemporary jazz makeover on a beautiful new record called Preludes.
World Cafehas an interview and performance with the Puerto Rican-born musician Pachyman, whose new album Switched-On takes dub music in new and exciting directions.
It’s actually quite a week for Puerto Rican musicians at NPR Music, across genres and styles: Bad Bunny dropped a new album Friday, Pachyman was just on World Cafe (see above) and Ivy Queen just released her Tiny Desk concert (see below). Now, my brilliant colleague Tom Huizenga — who’s made it a habit to interview contemporary women composers — has an expansive and thoughtful conversation with the Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón.
For the latest installment of New Music Friday from All Songs Considered, we couldn’t get our greasy mitts on Bad Bunny’s new album. But I did guest-host a discussion of freshly released records by Australian pop star Troye Sivan, Chicago singer and poet Jamila Woods, and the experimental project L’Rain, among others.
The “El Tiny” takeover of the Tiny Desk brings us to the reggaeton icon Ivy Queen, whose performance — a rare after-hours set, recorded on a Friday night — was lit, in part, by a Bad Bunny candle.
Also this week: Powerhouse pop singer Caroline Polachek and her band perform four songs from her killer album Desire, I Want To Turn Into You.
One More Thing
NSYNC is back with its first song together in more than 20 years. From the upcoming animated epic Trolls Band Together, I present to you: “Better Things.”
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