I've known this day was coming for a while, and here it is, and I still have the same problem: how to write about an album that's intensely personal to me, one that I've listened to all the way through maybe more than any other album in the last 20 years, one that's rightfully regarded as one of the best, if not the best, record of the 90's, and still languishes here at 376. Not everyone likes this album and that's fine. There's a probably apocryphal Jerry Garcia quote that goes "Not everyone likes us, but the people who like us really, really like us," and that's true of this album as well.
How to describe this album. I guess it's lo-fi psych-folk, with some funeral marches and Bulgarian folk influence? No, it's campfire songs for those with schizoaffective disorder? No, it's indie rock from an alien planet? The very first thing you hear, in "King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1" is a simple strummed acoustic chord pattern and then Jeff Mangum's otherworldly, nasally voice, spinning out a story of young love and lust against the backdrop of a home in chaos and violence:
When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers
And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees
In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your feet
And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder
And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor
As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for
Some people think it's about incest, or about two halves of the same person, or reincarnation. A lot of Mangum's lyrics are like that. They often lend themselves to multiple interpretations, or to none at all. Sometimes you just have to let them wash over you.
Mangum has said that the album was greatly influenced by his reading of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, and that gives a gloss to the lyrics once you know that, and sometimes it's more explicit than others, like in "Holland, 1945," a gorgeous garage-rock-meets-Eastern-European-folk song that rocks super hard and somehow makes the darkest subject matter inspiring:
The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening, 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone
"Ghost" is, again, about death, but, as the name implies, about life after death. It includes this haunting (ugh, no pun intended) passage:
And one day in New York City, baby, a girl fell from the sky
From the top of a burning apartment building 14 stories high
And when her spirit left her body, how it split the sun
I know that she will live forever, all goes on and on and on
Which is probably not about this, but made me think of the iconic Life magazine image of a beautiful young woman lying dead atop the crushed-in roof of a car after jumping from the Empire State Building. Now, the facts of that case don't match the lyrics, exactly, but the imagery of the album was so strong it pulled up a memory of seeing that picture from years earlier. A lot of his lyrics have that evocative ability. Ten different people could, and have, listened to this album and have ten very different but very powerful reactions to it.
In the end, the touring and the pressure and wore on Mangum, and he stopped performing or even going out in public. I don't know if it was the terrible power of this album that wore him down or the baring of his soul to all of us, but the band broke up and the album went quiet, only to resurface and be discovered again and again by new waves of disaffected youth like myself. I was lucky enough to see Mangum at the Great American Music Hall in 2012, and the best way I can put it is that it was INTENSE. Not just seeing these songs that mean so much to me played live but Mangum himself was INTENSE. Pretty much what you'd expect.
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