At Least For Now - The Posies - Failure - 1989

I've spent a lot of time on this blog writing about nostalgia...both wallowing in my own nostalgia, or waxing philosophical about the way that music can bring a certain time and place to mind in a few short notes...but this song brings up a phenomenon that I don't think I've covered before.

I purchased the Posies 3rd album (Frosting on the Beater) with the money I got for my high school graduation. I had read a favorable review of them and wanted to check it out, despite having never actually heard the band. While I was initially disappointed in the album, I eventually fell in love with it. For a long while it was "my favorite album" (I already have tickets to see them perform it in it's entirity at The Bell House in June)...as such I went out and purchased both of the previous Posies albums during my freshman year in college.

This song, one of the less juvenille tracks from their self-produced first album, is fairly indicative of the band in it's early stages: Annoyingly, self-consciously literate lyrics, Smiths-y instrumentation, Big Star Melodies and pitch perfect harmonies. It's good without being noteworthy...except one thing.

But what I find most interesting is that the nostalgia that this song summons up is NOT for summer of 94, when I purchased this album...but rather for 1989 when the song was actually recorded. Now in 1989, I was still 4 years and all of high school away from ever hearing The Posies...and yet, that is exactly what this song makes me think of...of painfully awkward 8th grade dances, of getting into fights with my Sunday school teachers that would ultimately lead to me quitting the church, of being just mind-bogglingly, blisteringly horny and yet having no idea what to say to girls, of finally being tall of eating so much that my parents nearly went broke...all of those things that are from years before I ever heard that song.

But why? Is there something about this sound...a sound that I wasn't even listening to in 1989 (I was a million times more into GnR than The Smiths)...but do recorded sounds just take a piece of the time that they were recorded in with them? Is it just a mental trick my brain plays, knowing that the song was recorded in 89? Is it something about the specific combination of instruments and recording techniques that label it as an artifact from 1989? As always, I have no answers, only more questions.

Apology - The Posies - Dear 23 - 1990

Okay, one thing I definitely need to remember...just cause my gym gets a hold of some new exercise equipment does not mean that I need to try it out. I looked at all the shiny new back exercise machines and thought "Yeah, I could strengthen my back...maybe that'd help my posture..."

Now my back is a solid cape of sore muscles...not pleasant at all.

Anyway, here is another obnoxiously literate song from the Posies first real album. Words and phrases featured in this song: Disenchantment, Running Rampant, If it Illustrates the Nonesuch Nomenclature, "And The Stones Will Weep, in a Modest Fashion, but Don't Expect Too Much You Might be Disappointed."

With a vocabulary like that and a need to show it off, no wonder everyone hated me as an 18 year old.

This song is also an unfortunate example of a song whose verses are better than it's chorus...the chorus becomes something of a let down. But still The Posies sharp harmonies and Beatlesque melodies make the song at least somewhat worthwhile.

Any Other Way - The Posies - Dear 23 - 1990

Met up with my buddy Rance in Park Slope for some Guinness last night. Much as I am not a fan of the coming cold weather, it is kinda nice to wear a sweater and drink some tasty stout. I mean, who the hell wants one of those things when it's 90 degrees out? But when there's a nice crisp chill in the air, there are few things better.

If you want a concise picture of what I was like as a 19 year old, you could do worse than this song. Hyperarticulate, but perpetually heartbroken. Snide and snarky, as method to mask the crippling pain of adolescent "love" (It's telling that the one line in the song that is not said sarcastically is the plaintive wail of "She Left Me Alone!!!"), but still self-aware enough to know that it's all ridiculous and to have a gallows-humor laugh at the pain.

For instance:
"She Left Me Alone/Could you believe we ran out of things to fight about
I was crushed of course/but at least I have something I can write about
I guess that I'm just so proud of my contempt/it gets paid for having nothing good to say
And even though it doesn't pay the rent/I wouldn't have it any other way."

Ahhhhh, it's all so freaking smug...

This song pretty much wraps up everything I loved about The Posies as a teenager, the clever word-play, the heart on the sleave, the pitch perfect harmonies...and it also sums up most of the things I'm embarrassed about in my youth. Kinda makes me want to go find my teenage counterpart and shake some sense into him.

All U People - Jon Auer - Private Sides - 2003

This song is probably Auer's best song on this odd split EP, with three songs each from both of the primary songwriters for The Posies...as I've previously discussed, the two of them were just not the same without each other...and put on the same EP together this mutual deficiencies. Auer misses Stringfellow's bitter cynacism and clever word play, while Stringfellow in turn misses Auer's rock instrumentation.

Incidentally, has there ever been another case of a songwriting partnership in which the more bitter is also the more musically mellow?

Also, this song is almost ruined by the odd, dated and lame Austin Powers ref at the beginning. I don't understand why he'd do that.

Adios - Jon Auer - Songs from The Year of Our Demise - 2006

In my late teens/early twenties I was a giant Posies fan. This probably says more about what a callow beta-male I was as a young man than it does about The Posies, but I will still find myself rushing to their defense. Sure the "you were an idiot to get married so young" didactics of Dear 23 now seems preachy and stilted, but Frosting on the Beater remains a glistening gem of power pop.

The Posies solo careers have not been as fulfilling as some fans might have hoped. Like many successful song writing partnerships, the dissolution sheds greater insight into why the partnership worked. Ken Stringfellow, who always seemed the angrier, punkier one, has since moved to Paris and puts out 70's AM Gold records that sound basically like Todd Rundgren albums. Jon Auer, on the other hand, seems to have shelved his experimental side and puts out perfectly nice albums of sub-Big Star power pop. His albums definitely hew closer to The Posies style, but without Stringfellows acid tongue and golden harmonies, they mostly seem a bit lackluster.

This song is no different.