husband&wife
Subtleties Of Our Melancholic, Loving And Uncrackable Tendencies
Jan 29, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Comp Jam
This song started out being about a friend of mine whom I've known for a long time, but then it dipped down into something a little heavier, maybe even spiritual, before it just became superficial again. Isn't it funny how you can know someone pretty well for a long time, but every decision they make is still baffling to you? Really, the lyrical content of this song is secondary. I think the mood and the idea of building something interesting out of a two chord progression are the best things about this one. It came out feeling pretty good.
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Red Cross Fever
This song is for my friend, Cara, who is one of those unbelievable folks that dropped everything and drove to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. I couldn't have done that…I didn't do that. That's really humbling, and I feel like I owe her a huge debt of gratitude. This song is my first (measly) offering. As a side note though, and this is true, Cara's mom and dad are both named Terry, although one of them might be spelled with an "i".
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Don't Change
This is an old dude. I wrote this song for my Dad. It's kind of about how my parents are two of the most fascinating, friendly, genuine people in this life, but you wouldn't necessarily know that by meeting me. Although, it took him just a week to make the moon and the stars, the Sun and the Earth, and Jupiter and Mars. How loving and patient he must be, because he's still working on me. …I try to remember that.
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Support Yourself
A while ago I was feeling pulled in many directions all at the same time, and was struggling under the stress. This song grew out of that. This is a song that when it was written sounded nothing like this (in my head of course). Mike, Will, and Bryant took it to new places. They made it fun. They made it bounce a little while still giving it a groove. It was dead without them. Songs:Ohia and Damien Jurado were where I thought this song was coming from and going to, but after the guys got their hands on it there was a sort of Cass McCombs vibe. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.
A line in one of the newer Husband & Wife songs goes exactly like this, "You aren't the only one to tell me I'm wrong about love," and you can hear it in all its streaming glory over at their MySpace page, right next to the photograph of the four Indiana residents standing in the basket of a largely tomato red hot air balloon. As that line is sung, there's an immediate flood of rationale that comes over this guy that has me completely in their thralls, dialing up old and bound memories that were punishing in their collusions with those younger days of extremities that have been happily left behind in the coughing dust, the hacking exhaust of goodbyes. It recalls all of the romantic failures that didn't make sense at the time, but now are no longer fuzzy and completely justifiable. The chemistries were rank from the start, the two of us meshed atrociously and we should have known it, but there were blockades and foolish blinders slid into place to assure that it wouldn't happen, that we'd just have to find out for ourselves what exactly we knew about love and what exactly we could find out about each other through the old conventions and the old feeling it out process. They don't make easy buttons for chemistry experiments, and they (whomever they are) don't make them for people. People are going to screw up love more than they screw up anything else in their lives from here until the last feeble blips of their pulses run themselves all the way down to straight lines of cold blood. The Bloomington band willingly goes after their own rejections and their own sad lucks with keen acknowledgement that these are gentle matters, those of the heart, and they can't be pushed too hard or startled because they will vanish along with time and then there's just a hollow and hulking pit to build around. A longing develops and then it turns itself into an eyesore for all to see. People, when they want to interact with one another, need to be gentle and would actually prefer it, even those most hardened and strong. Someone wrong about love - and being told that they're wrong about love by the very people who they're trying to love - is not going to recover from such a conversation as quickly as one might recover from a comment alluding to someone thinking you're a jerk-off. Being told you're wrong about love means that there is a possibility that there will always be a vacancy felt and a vacancy pending if something does not change. Husband & Wife have expertly created a tone and an undulating milieu that provides a melancholic version of compassion that isn't at all self-deprecating or amusing, but more of an involuntary reaction to the ever-evolving terrain of what it means to be uncertain about some of the human basics. Shelter and food are intrinsically easy - it's made of trees and rocks and it's grown on trees and next to rocks - but it's that love thing, nay the capacity to love properly, that is such an odd thing to confidently roll with. A sweet blending of Matthew Caws-like cool and gravity, along with a succulent and smoky wall of melody and requisite indie rock and roll guitar narrative to go with a beat of spring storms is the shape that the band lives through and they get us asking questions that won't budge. The answers lie in the possibility of betterment and oddly, in questioning the potentiality of betterment, of learning the secrets of our subtleties that refuse to be unveiled without some incentive.
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