Superdrag – In the Valley of the Dying Stars

I’m in love with Superdrag’s 1996 album Regretfully Yours. I bought it as a teenager for the “buzz” single “Who Sucked Out the Feeling?” and immediately put it on infinite repeat. The album is a power-pop masterpiece from an era that neglected that sort of music. It’s dense with hooks, and every song has at least one. Best of all, there’s a real commitment to melody. Predictably, Superdrag didn’t get much promotion and nobody bought the record. Nobody but me, that is. For a decade, I’ve been sneaking solitary tracks onto mixtapes I’ve made, secretly hoping someone would ask about them and I could share this record with another person.

Oddly, despite how much I adore Regretfully, I never looked for a follow-up until a few months ago. Based on my familiarity with their debut, I had high hopes for In the Valley of Dying Stars. It’s not as good as Regretfully Yours, but it’s a solid rock record. I found that after a few listens, I could sing along to parts I remembered, which is a good litmus test for power pop.
I will definitely seek out the other 2 albums they recorded since Regretfully Yours—A Head Trip in Every Key and Last Call for Vitriol.

Common – Like Water for Chocolate

The only song I really liked was “The Light”, which was the only song I already knew. Seems like the A&R guy that picked the single knew what he was doing. Forgettable.

The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America

One interesting distinction between popular music and books is that music is usually inward-oriented and books are not. The vast majority of songs are written from the singer’s perspective and deal with the singer’s feelings and relationships. The first several examples I can think of (and seriously, this took 5 seconds):
The Rolling Stones – “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Stevie Wonder – “I Wish”
The Beach Boys – “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”
Cheap Trick – “I Want You To Want Me”
I could go on and on. I would guess that 95% of the popular music at any given time reflects this perspective, which makes sense if you think about it. Writing and performing a song is a very personal endeavor.

Books, by contrast, are “extrospective” as often as or more often than they are introspective. This is especially true for good books. While a rock songwriter might get away with detailing his love for a groupie for three and a half minutes, an author would be hard-pressed to do the same over 200 or 400 pages (the non-sex parts of romance novels being the notable exception). Books typically require more than one character, so unless an author has a good ear for how other people speak, and an eye for how they act, his writing will seem phony. Consequently, you see more books written from the “Third Person Omniscient” perspective than from the “First Person”. (And regardless of how often authors claim that even books written in the third person are very personal, or how often one of the characters is modeled after or is a stand-in for the author, that typically only applies to one of the several characters a book needs.)

This is essentially the distinction between poetry and prose. Song lyrics are poetry. They usually rhyme, they often employ metaphors and similes, and they have a particular meter (based on the rhythms of the songs they accompany).

This distinction is why Bruce Springsteen’s music interests me. His songs, even when they’re sung from his perspective, typically include other characters. Springsteen uses lines or even whole verses describing these characters and relating the experiences they’ve had. That sounds like exposition, a hallmark of prose. Take Springsteen’s song “Glory Days”, for example. This song is about how Bruce’s best days are behind him, but it’s more nostalgic than bitter. It’s not just about Bruce, however. Each verse has him meeting up with other characters, each with a past of their own.

Anyway, lots of the songs on this album are like that.