434. Pavement, "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain"

 

So far in this project I've encountered the first album I personally owned, but here we have the first album that is one of My Favorite Albums of All Time (so much so that, when I did the incredibly predictable music nerd exercise of compiling a list of my Top 20 Albums ever in 2009, this was #11), so I may not be completely objective about it.  I know this album so well that I really didn't have to listen to it again for this project but it's always a pleasure to return to so I did anyway.

Big picture, this, to me, is an album about growing up, becoming an adult.  Not that growing up between 18 and 25, but the slacker Gen X version of growing up between 25 and 29, when you're realizing you can't just hang out and drink beer every day any more, that you have to move on and actually become an adult.

"Gold Soundz," the centerpiece and best song on the album, is a paean to lost love and a lost life:

So drunk in the August sun
And you're the kind of girl I like
Because you're empty and I'm empty
And you can never quarantine the past
Did you remember in December
That I won't need you when I'm gone?
And if I go there, I won't stay there
Because I'm sitting here too long

That line - "So drunk in the August sun" is so evocative, I think, because we all have powerful memories triggered by a little slip of verse like that.  It's so relatable.  

"Range Life," another classic, gorgeous song, scoots closer to the themes of having to begrudgingly give up the slacker life and move on:

After the glow, the scene, the stage, the set
Talk becomes slow, but there's one thing I'll never forget
Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent
Over the turnstiles and out in the traffic
There's ways of living; It's the way I'm living
Right or wrong, it's all that I can do and I wouldn't wanna let you be

There's also one of those wonderfully evocative passages in this song - "Out on my skateboard, the night is just humming/And the gums smacks are the pulse I'll follow if my Walkman fades/But I've got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame" - that just, for me, perfectly conjure a time and place and feeling and mood.

Now, I realize that a lot of this is personal to me.  This album came out just as I myself was making that transition, and so of course, in the way of music nerds everywhere, I came to believe that this album was written specifically for me.  I later learned this is not true, sadly.  But I think for a whole subset of  kids born around the same time as me, it probably had a similar effect.  Even today, hearing the opening cymbal crash and guitar squeal on "Silence Kid," the first song, can trigger a complicated rush of nostalgia and heartbreak and longing for a specific period in my personal history that's impossible to escape.

For a complicated mix of reasons, I only saw Pavement once in their glory days in the '90s.  Then, as a personal gift to me, they reformed and cashed in on a reunion tour in 2010.  I saw them at the Greek Theater in Berkeley.  Now, also for a complicated mix of reasons you'd have to ask my therapist about, I almost never cry, but I 100% cried when they played "Gold Soundz."  For that minute, I was back in that place, and the world was spread open, but I just wanted to hang out with my friends in the park.