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On Jason Molina’s “Leave the City”

Here on the far side of a fading streak, my thoughts drift too far. Let me share a little solitude, buy the next drink, and try to defend these misunderstood hearts.
— after Dawes

The old Molina idea — half your life lived on highways, half of it chosen for you — still hits me hard.
— after Jason Molina

This post takes up the song “Leave the City” by Jason Molina. Molina recorded both under his own name and under the name Magnolia Record Co. Leave the City is collected on the record Trials and Errors, released on Secretly Canadian in 2005. It is track 8 of 10, anchoring the back half of the record. It also appears, in a different version, on the record “What Comes After the Blues,” also in 2005 and also on Secretly Canadian. What Comes After the Blues was produced by the Uber-producer, now deceased, Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana among many others and also recorded his own music with a few different bands. On What Comes After the Blues, Leave the City is track 3 of 8. I prefer the Trials and Errors version; it is more acoustic, contains less reverb, and for my money there is just a little more emotion in Molina’s voice, however both versions are great.

This piece will be a little different in that I won’t actually comment on or analyze the lyrics. They totally speak for themselves. What I will say, and if you have been following along with my story you will have already intuited this, if Molina spent half his life on the highway, well I have him beat.

Molina was born just one year before me, and died in 2013 at the age of 40 of advanced alcoholism. On Leave the City, especially again the Trials and Errors version. I don’t know what kind of issues really he may had had, but some for sure. You don’t write Leave the City without issues.

I too left the city, left my place of birth, and moved halfway across the world when I was 22. Before that, I spent my junior year in New Zealand, also a long way from home. I wrote about this year here in my Hamilton College series. I plan to recount more about my moving to Asia and subsequent events in future pieces, however for now if you want to understand why I left, while I think I always had a taste for adventure, but also there’s this.

The song opens with Molina describing how leaving the city shattered what was left of his heart — the part that wasn’t already broken. He admits he once had good reasons for leaving, but can’t name a single one anymore. It was a hard time, and somehow he came through it, grateful in a bruised way for the blues that carried him.

He sings about spending half his life on highways, half in places he never quite chose. He remembers catching the North Star over a freight yard — a moment of lonely illumination that told him just how rough the road had been, and yet how it still carried him forward.

The line that always devastates me is his admission that someone was waiting for him, but he “had so many things to do.” It’s the gentlest explanation and the harshest truth. He knows the person deserved better luck, but his voice softens: with them, he’s not giving up — not tonight.

Dedication: For the road, tiring as it may be. You do meet a lot of interesting folks along the way.

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I Have a Crush on Katie Park From Bad Moves

Epigraph:

Could you read between the lines
Or was it just so obvious?

Bad Moves

New Note: This is an older piece, however I am re-releasing it here. I recently shared a longer piece about some aspects of my life, including, quite centrally, music, so this seemed like a good time.

As with anyone’s story, there are layers to mine. One pretty big layer is when in 2018 I traveled to New York/ Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. to see the band Phosphorescent. I saw Phosphorescent four times total on their C’est La Vis tour and they were amazing. I bought a sweatshirt from the merch table and the merch gal told Matthew Houck, the lead singer, about me because I told her I’d come all the way from Japan to see the band. He came down from the stage and gave me a big bearhug, not once but twice at two of the shows. He knew I was going through it, and I needed a hug. He’d been through it too, big time, before and when he was writing Muchacho a few years prior.

As I was seeing Phosphorescent I also took the opportunity to see a few other bands. I saw Yo La Tengo twice at the Borwey Ballroom, Jay Som in Boston, and most memorably The Hold Steady twice at the Brooklyn Bowl where they were playing a three night set. The opener for The Hold Steady was a band called Bad Moves. I had never heard of this band, however, and I don’t say this lightly, they put on a better show than The Hold Steady. Now an opener should try to do just this, to “steal the show,” so to speak. A Bad Moves stole it big time. I was enraptured by their lead singer Katie Park, and met her at the merch table which she was running, which is recounted below. My friend I met at the shows, Austin, pushed me to check out their album Tell No One in depth, which I did, and I loved it. On the train from Washington D.C. back to New York I wrote the first version of this piece, which has been fairly extensively edited since then. This is my sneaky favorite piece, maybe not my best, but you can be the judge. Here it is:

I love live music. More than that, I love live music fans, and music fans in general. This piece is basically about being a music fan, and was inspired when I saw the band Bad Moves open for The Hold Steady in 2018 at the Brooklyn Bowl. They were touring on the back of their first full length, Tell No One. While at the Bad Moves/ Hold Steady show a music geek introduced me to a band called Swearin’. Swearin’ has been around a little longer than Bad Moves, and in 2018 had released Fall Into the Sun. The two bands don’t really sound all that much alike (Bad Moves is basically “Power Pop” and Swearin’ is basically “Indie”) but they write somewhat similarly about matters of love and friendship.

Let’s play a game that we live in a world where a record by a band like Bad Moves or Swearin’ would produce radio hits. I want to live in that world. Or maybe I don’t; maybe it’s better for everyone that bands like these stay a little more on the DL. Let’s first take a look at Fall Into the Sun. (Swearin’s frontwoman is Allison Crutchfield, and the band is mostly her baby.) My pick for the single would be the lead off track, “Big Change.” 

The song opens with this soft-spoken reminiscence — basement shows, empty cans, old romances, long nights of half-drunken idealism. Crutchfield sketches a friendship held together by music, chaos, and the sense that they’d accidentally stumbled into their own mutant little world.

I really like what Crutchfield does here. She is basically writing about a friendship solidified over a shared love of music. Now, I know a lot of people. I also have some friends. When you ask an adult, “How many real friends do you have?” the number will vary widely. A lot of people will say “four or five,” something like that. People in general have surprisingly few real friends. I have ten or fifteen, maybe more, but am only in regular contact with about half that number. A good friendship, in my opinion, is one where no matter how long you and your friend have not hung out, if you see them it’s as if not a day has passed. With this sort of friend, I’ve found, there is between yourself and them something fundamental shared. It can be anything really. For example, I first met my good buddy when we were both in graduate school in Arizona, and at first I thought he was a total dick. He was loud, interrupted people constantly, and loved being the center of attention. One night we were drinking as a department and he started razzing me there on the street, just casually insulting me left and right. Suddenly I got where he was coming from. This was, in fact, his way of offering to be friends. Once I understood this, I began to give it right back to him. Called him every name in the book. And he ate it up. By the end of the night we were fast friends and have been ever since, because we share an understanding that our friendship is based, in part, on ripping on each other. Music, obviously, is another great basis for a friendship.

When Crutchfield sings “no art degree, no conservatory/ just Katie and me,” I’m reminded of the refrain from Don DiLillo’s Underworld: “who’s better than us.” If they can do it, why not us? Fuck ’em. That’s what attitude looks like kids–take notes.

So “Big Change” is my single from Fall Into the Sun. (“My single” here just means the song I would choose as the single. For some records, the single is super obvious, while for other records it’s debatable. Bands and producers, in my opinion, do not always get this right.) A good record will tend to have at least two singles; three is a bonus.

For Fall Into the Sun’s second single I’ll go with “Grow into a Ghost.” It opens with a chugging guitar riff with an almost Krautrock drum line. The song is a perfect 3:10–in and out. Do you know anything about lost love? Swearin’ does.

Midway through the record, she writes to an old love with that drifting, half-in-the-desert melancholy she does so well — remembering who she’d been before they met, watching someone fade into absence until they feel more like a ghost than a memory.

Swearin’ is good, but Bad Moves is better. And the star of Bad Moves is the exquisite Katie Park. (I know they are a collective, but my world is my world baby.) Before their show Katie was at the merch table selling…magic eye! That she made by hand. And what did it say? The magic eye said “Bad Moves.” Obviously. I checked it out and chatted for a few minutes with Katie, trying to play it cool. It was the highlight of my year. 20 minutes later she and the band were on stage, crushing it.

The single here is pretty easy. It’s “Crushed Out.” The band released “Crushed Out,” “Spirit FM” and “Cool Generator” as the singles, all of which are excellent. Maybe “Spirit FM” is catchier than “Crushed Out”? Possible. But “Crushed Out” has more lasting power in my opinion. “Crushed Out” is about exactly what it sounds like. It has a basically perfect power pop structure with a killer hook, a classic bridge, and a theme at once super obvious and super deep–the power of a crush.

The whole song is a tumble of infatuation — that feeling where you can’t focus, can’t think straight, and every look or scribbled message feels like it should be obvious to the other person. It captures the power-pop rush of a crush so clearly it almost stings.

Baby, if you are crush-prone that power never goes away. Bad Moves knows this–it’s kind of what the record is about. Crushing out that way can be pretty obvious–do you think I’m crushing out on Katie at all? Nah, this is just a piece of music appreciation.

Cool Generator is my second favorite song on the album, but my “sneaky favorite” is “Missing You.” A sneaky favorite is just what it sounds like: it’s that song that may fly under most people’s radar but that you have a special soft spot for. My all time sneaky favorite song is “Three Drinks” by Craig Finn of the aforementioned Hold Steady. “Three Drinks” shows up on Finn’s 2016 EP Newmyer’s Roof. It’s nearly acoustic, unlike most Hold Steady songs, and sounds just a little bit country. Three Drinks is about a woman (most great songs are) who may have been a child star once upon a time, and is now a drinker. It is an example of a certain type of song that Finn is amazing at, the deeply empathetic look at adult relationships in all of their gloriously flawed complexity. In this sense, Three Drinks fits in with “Spinners” from The Hold Steady’s 2014’s Teeth Dreams, “Tangletown” from Finn’s 2017 solo record We All Want the Same Things, and “Esther” a Hold Steady single from 2018. Finn’s writing on Three Drinks and Tangletown is at its absolute apex. 

“Three Drinks” delivers Finn at peak empathy. A woman with a messy past drifts through a hotel lobby filled with minor disasters, trying to hold herself together until that magic window — the hour between the third drink and the one that tips the night over the edge. Finn nails that space between fear and transcendence where people feel briefly holy.

The refrain focuses on that magic hour between drinks 3 and 4, when matters begin to move from the slightly anxious first stage of the evening to something entirely other:

So anyway, my sneaky favorite on Tell No One is “Missing You.” The song starts like the others, high-speed power pop, and after two verses switches to a near-spoken word breakdown of the tug-of-war between a crush and the expectations of the world around. Guess which wins?

“Missing You” turns into a spoken-word confession halfway through: the push-and-pull between what the world tells you not to do and the crush that keeps winning anyway. It’s simple rhyming, almost naive, but devastatingly effective.

I officially support these sentiments. .

So that’s my sneaky favorite –doesn’t mean it’s better than “Crushed Out” (it isn’t) it’s just a little sneaky. I’m all about sneaky babes and sneaky favorites, on all levels.

In addition to the Magic Eye, Bad Moves also engage in a little publishing. A little literature. Specifically they publish a pamphlet called “The Virtues of Wearing White.”

Chatting with Katie, she acknowledged more than a passing familiarity with the literature of the Jehovah Witnesses. I love Witness literature. Both Witness and Bad Moves publications have a real “it’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day” vibe. If you know me this is not a secret, but I’m a hardcore closet New Ager. There, secret’s out. I’ve messed around with all kinds of New Age action. Once I attended a Kabbala meetup in Manhattan. There were some hardcore New Agers there too, seriously. Those folks were not in the closet at all. Shining eyes, whatever color they are wearing. Me, I like black because it’s easier to launder, but Bad Moves have me thinking. (One other publication you should take a look at if you are into this kind of thing is the Christian Science Monitor. It’s a serious piece of literature. God is great baby, god is great.)

When I was younger my parents had a friend called Tom Hutchinson, who, predictably, went by “Hutch.” Hutch owned a boutique coffee shop there in town and I drove a delivery van for him for a bit. But that’s another story. Anyway, Hutch was a weird guy and he hated the Witnesses. It was one of his favorite topics. He’d call them the “Witlesses,” and say: “When they come to my house I turn the hose on ’em.” People thought this was pretty funny, but I was not that into Hutch’s attitude to the Witnesses. I mean, he didn’t want anyone trying to convert him on his property, which is fair; however, I felt, and still feel, that if someone wants to come to my door, give me a little literature, and talk about how god loves me I’m gonna let them. I genuinely like the Witnesses. They seem like lovely people. Read more

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Scenes from St. George’s VIII: On the Passing of Dyche Alsaker

Say hello to Mr. Midnight
tell him he’s still got that same old shine
Tall, dark, walking wounded
heart as lonesome as mine

Paul Westerberg, refracted

Note: I thought I was done with the Scenes from St. Georges series, however circumstances have arisen such that I am compelled to write one final entry. I recently learned that my high school classmate and friend, Dyche Alsaker, passed away in September of this year. This is a tremendously sad circumstance, and my heart goes out to Dyche’s family and all of those, and there were many, who loved him. In addition, I wish here to write a kind of second coda to my last piece in the St. George’s series, which can be found here. In that piece I wrote about my friendship with Dyche, mostly during senior year and the summer after, as well as a regrettable conflict that arose between our respective fathers several years after we graduated. I won’t reprise all of that here, however suffice it to say that, in a set of events that had really nothing to do with Dyche and myself, Dyche’s father was part of the board of directors of the school when my father left after challenging the then principal, and I guess by extension the board. Here is the second coda.

I wrote seven pieces in my series from St. George’s over a few years, and the first six were easy. These were mostly cheerful and sometimes humorous reminiscences about my time there and some of the characters, students and teachers, that populated the school. The seventh piece, on the other hand, took a while. This was because of its somewhat difficult content and because the structure and tone needed to be a little different, however mostly this was because I wanted Dyche’s permission, essentially, to publish it. Readers of that piece may recall that it dealt with the end of my father’s time at St. George’s, which stretched over two decades. The way that time ended was, I believe, deeply painful to both my father and my mother, and as a result, I guess, they have never really talked to me about it in any detail. As I wrote in the prior piece, I had to sort of piece things together from bits and pieces I heard over time. Because Dyche’s father was also a central player in that drama, and because I hadn’t talked to Dyche since that time when I was working on the series, I didn’t know how he felt about that whole time, and what he might think about the piece which would end up being dedicated to him.

The St. George’s series had a number of readers, mostly I suppose because over time people become increasingly nostalgic and some folks probably re-lived their own years at the school though my memories, which was really gratifying. Dyche was one of my best readers, and he commented on a number of the pieces, and helped shape one of them as well. Therefore, when it came to the last piece, I actually wanted to talk to him and get him to vet what I was working on, so to speak. So I contacted him through Facebook and told him what I was planning and that I wanted to connect. At first he said that he had to think about it, and then he got back to me and said he would like to talk. I called him, sometime in late 2022 as I recall, from the street here in Kyoto, and we talked for about an hour. He told me some of the things that were going on in his life, mentioned how much he enjoyed the series, talked about The Replacements, and then we talked about the conflict that led to my father leaving St. George’s. Dyche mentioned that his own father, much like mine, seemed to avoid the whole topic, and that what he himself knew of the events were also pieced together from reports of other of our classmates. We discussed how odd it was that the topic was essentially verboten in both of our households, and he gave me his blessing to write the piece. We parted on good terms, and I was very grateful to him for his time and his kindness. Then, I sat on the piece for more than a year because I just couldn’t find the tone.

Finally, in early 2024, I re-engaged with the piece and was able to get my head around a structure. The first half of the piece was an easy-going and upbeat account of my memories of hanging out with Dyche for a few months between high school and college in 1992, and the second half was a kind of reconstruction of what I understood to have occurred between our fathers and the school board in the early part of this century. I was happy with what I came up with, but still felt the need to run it by Dyche before I hit publish. So I sent him a draft by email, and he said he had a lot going on but he’d get back to me soon. About a week later he wrote back saying he thought I had written fairly and congratulated me on the whole series. He also said something kind of funny, which was that he was thinking of asking me for an update on the piece but didn’t want to seem egotistical. I was once again moved and grateful to him; I made some edits and published the piece. Maybe because of its content, or perhaps because it had been a while since I had updated the series, the piece got somewhat less feedback than the earlier ones, however a number of people read and reacted to the piece. I was done with St. George’s and moved on to writing about the songwriter Craig Finn.

I am not sure about this, and people who were closer to Dyche in his later years than I would know, but I wonder if he was already sick when he wrote to me in 2024. If he was, he didn’t mention it. When we communicated that year he alluded to some challenges in his life, but I’m not sure.

Before I close, I want to mention one memory I have of Dyche that I left out of the earlier piece. I recall him saying once that “if someone asks you to do something, do it really badly. That way they’ll never ask you again.” Now Dyche did many things very well, so I think he was just being sarcastic, but I always found this comment funny, and it stuck with me.

Overall, as I wrote prior, Dyche was a big influence on my life in terms of the depth of his music fandom. And, I really liked him. He was funny, generous, and had a huge heart. Everyone impacts someone I guess, but Dyche impacted so many people in a positive way. He will be greatly missed.

Dedication: As piece VII was already dedicated to Dyche, I guess this one will be for Spokane. The picture in the header is of the Spokane River, not the one that passed by the St. George’s campus, but the larger one. I never really loved Spokane to be honest, and haven’t been back since 2001, but I know a lot of people do. I understand this–it’s where we grew up after all.