One of my favorite things over the past seven (!) months is the rise in quarantine music. As much as I love the high-end production of pop albums that have slowly trickled out, there is something more immediate and exciting about hearing art that was made from a certain psychological standpoint. After all, 2020 has proven to be such a dire year in terms of productivity and if you don’t have a strong focus, this time will be extremely miserable. The rise in mental health discussion is happening for a very obvious reason. It’s hard to know what even matters anymore when there are few places for social gatherings, let alone ways for artists to express themselves.
While I have largely been a writer who’s worked from home, I have done my best not to get in that rut myself. The Memory Tourist was made specifically to fight my personal anxieties of being lost without any way of expressing myself. I learned real quick that I wouldn’t be able to just comment on new entertainment on a weekly basis and have that be fulfilling. I needed to form a personal dialogue with my audience, letting them know when I was feeling happy or sad. I needed some way to express myself to keep my day from turning into a dark and terrible void. I was lucky enough to figure this out early into the pandemic (even before the world was technically “shut down”), but I recognize that there’s still a struggle for fulfillment on some days, especially when you read that casualties stateside has climbed to over 210,000 (though if you follow what the president says, he’s probably wanting to triple that number by December).
It’s the fight between fulfillment and disappointment on a regular basis. What does life even mean when every day feels the same? Routine is nice, but there are times when you can feel like it’s not doing its thing. In that respect, I almost admire artists like Charli XCX more for making “How I’m Feeling Now” into a grand statement of her personal loneliness and eagerness in these times. It speaks more to me if just to say that life doesn’t shut down because you can’t go to the movies or live theater. We can still dream of those days, but for now, we need to stay productive. They say “publish or perish” for a very good reason.
That is why I’m willing to contend that Laura Jane Grace’s surprise album “Stay Alive” deserves to be considered among the very best albums of 2020. While I have a soft spot for the quarantine albums by Charli XCX and Taylor Swift’s “Folklore,” there is something even more amazingly forthright about her collection of songs. The Against Me! frontwoman has this way of capturing a more familiar, bipolar pain at this moment. She screams from behind an acoustic guitar about her own personal fears in the world, this frustration that everything will crumble. Many have made “political” albums during this time, but few have managed to feel more organic and of one’s identity quite like this.
It’s not that the songs here are necessarily written about the pandemic, and yet they’re a pain that feels perfectly accentuated because of it. Grace had intended these songs for her band’s next album, but everyone knows how that story went. Following the abrupt cancellation of a tour, she was forced to figure out what to do with her life, existing in a month and a half of frustration as she questioned what was even meaningful anymore. How does an artist express themselves if there’s not an audience to listen to? Having the crowd at your disposal is an addictive force that you want to continually pull from, feeling like someone is out there listening to you.
What makes “Stay Alive” even more impressive is that Grace teamed up with producer Steve Albini in Chicago, IL over the course of a few days. She felt a personal need to get the music out there, to let it escape her soul, and speak to an audience out there. For the first time, she went solo with nothing more than a guitar, a drum machine, and sometimes doubling up on harmonies. More than “How I Feel Now” or “Folklore,” Grace makes this all feel like it’s pulled specifically from her soul. Suddenly it feels crass to imagine these songs set to traditional punk rock orchestrations. These emotions are stripped down, needing to breathe away from any reverb or static that could build up. They might work, but some emotional weight could be lost.
As the sped-up production would suggest, everything feels cobbled together, managing to create this manic pacing where songs come and go as they please. There are points where they exist more as sketches, even incomplete as a thought fades without some musical accompaniment. It’s clear that part of the appeal of “Stay Alive” is the ideas, capturing what Grace’s life has felt like over the past few years, bringing with it a pain that is difficult for most Americans to feel. Even then, as she revels in these dark details, she comes back to one of the most inspiring messages you can have: stay alive.
It begins simple enough with the opening song “The Swimming Pool Song,” which compares her soul to water:
I am a haunted swimming poolI am emptied out and drainedMy capacity remains unchangedI don't know the source of my faithBut I know I will be full againCome on in and take a swim
That is what makes the album feel more essential. Even if it has anger to it, Grace comes from a place of humanity, believing that everyone is deserving of love. Because she feels like an outsider, she understands why everyone needs to feel like they belong. Society is too far divided at this point, and attacking each other won’t do any good. The symbol of a pool that may look empty, but can be filled, providing life with replenishment. After all, California has been in draughts before, but one day rain (and change) will come to wash it away. Things may look bad, but those who keep looking forward will be rewarded.
Speaking as this is an album full of ideas, it’s hard to not just quote every song, pointing out the many observations that Grace has made that feel profound. It’s clear that these songs mean a lot to her. The way that she aches, yelling over the guitar accentuates a tenderness and frustration that she’s rarely expressed before. The guitar’s tempo is allowed to move slower, letting the lyrics be the driving force. This is a study of America in a way that’s lonely and in need of major repair it comes quickly with “The Calendar Song” alluding to her need to get out and explore the world, or “Return to Oz” which comments on her own medication. By the time of “The Mountain Song,” she begins to comment on “the cost of livin’,” which is one of the most deliberate cues to the pandemic one can recognize.
It’s not about her, and yet it feels like it is. However, most of her power comes out on “Hanging Tree,” where everything becomes the most straightforward, claiming that “You can’t trust a man with hair like that.” While this has been an applicable rebellious song at any time since 2017, it feels especially true in 2020, where the fatalistic language no longer sounds like overreacting. It’s poignant, deserving to be held up with the best of the protest music of this time:
Learn to beg, learn to beg harderPray for walls, pray for slaughterWe don't want to die quietlyWe want to fuck shit up and cause a sceneYou're tweet-tweet-tweeting from a golden towerAin't got no soul to sell and that's your power
It’s the chef’s kiss of this album, finding deliberate commentary on the hatred that informs the apocalyptic nature of the rest of the album. Everything around it is trying to hold onto optimism, finding it doused in dread and fear that you’ll wake up dead. Whenever she comments about her own identity and this hostility towards people, there is a pain inside of her, like in “Please Leave” where she clearly is pulling from years of turmoil. By the end, she revisits the concept again on “So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Fuck Off,” albeit in more of a stylized production that distorts her words under the rare flourish.
Then there’s the closer “Old Friend (Stay Alive).” After an album that feels like trudging through the battleground that is the past four years, Grace ends with something that feels like a conclusion. This is what everything has been building up to. Much like the pool that started things, she ends by being honest with her audience, the reflection for her mental health dripping over every lyric:
Old friend, I'm losing my mindWatching the days burn into yearsWatching the years burn dryPlease stay alive
It’s the feeling that we’ve all faced, and one that Grace has probably felt even more directly thanks to her personal pain and feeling undermined by society. She wants to live in a better world, and having this form of expression is the closest that she’ll get to achieving it. Because of that, there is some catharsis that actually works at making one believe that we’re not alone in this chaos. It’s a political record, but more importantly, it’s one that encourages mental health and believing that the world will be all right, so long as we work together.
It’s a great and brisk album that never lets up. While it may have uneven production, the rush makes everything pop with more of an urgency, making you understand how sincere every line is. There is so much to unpack in things that will only become more relevant as time goes on. Even if these songs arguably have been written years ago, they still have a timelessness today that will reflect how sad and trapped everyone feels in 2020, in a pandemic, and a time when everyone has their own bit of suffering.
To Grace, I want to say thank you for making this brilliance of an album. I know that it’s maybe your least thought-out record in theory, but it has this way of connecting to the soul of the listener, asking us to not give in to hatred. Instead, look for answers. Instead of wallowing in pity, why not try to be creative, express yourself, and put a little optimism in this world. As she would put it, this album puts engineers and photographers to work, and that’s what’s important right now. Nobody is suffering alone. The sooner you realize that, the sooner that you can begin to see the light, even in these dark, dark times.
Comments
Post a Comment