Song of the Month - January 2023 - "Especially"
Bret Hartley said to me something to the effect of “Here is my best Johnny Marr. Give me your best Morrissey.”
The result is “Especially,” the Single of the Month for January 2023 from Branches Breaking from the Weight.
Morrissey has been a familiar voice around my house decades. For 20 years, we’ve had an iPod with somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 songs on it, and its music serves as ambience while we cook or eat or hang out. It gets turned on after work and occasionally doesn’t get turned off until we go to bed. Of these 2,000-ish songs, a few have been on there for the entire 20 years—most of the songs on R.E.M.’s first five albums; a smattering of 90s hits by Nada Surf, Counting Crows, and Matthew Sweet; and a good portion of the Smiths’ catalog. Of course, I’d flipped out over the Smiths and Morrissey’s solo work long before then, but these days, this iPod is where I hear Morrissey most of the time. It’s hard to imagine a musical artist who’s been as ubiquitous in my life as Morrissey. Maybe R.E.M. Maybe the Replacements. Short list.
I wrote an essay about Morrissey’s work for a publication that has since gone dark, but the gist of my piece was that we love Morrissey’s music because it gives dignity to our personal laments. I am a midwestern boy. I tend to keep myself from expressing my travails too freely. To put it another way, I have a serious aversion to whining, especially my own, and therefore I keep it to myself most of the time. For those like me, Morrissey’s laments in his music allow us to process the similar conflicts we feel during our lives and don’t express. In this way, Morrissey acts as a sort of real-life surrogate for this part of ourselves. We don’t always get what we want, and sometimes we’re not big on complaining about it, so we let Morrissey do it for us. Listening to his music and going through this process feels good. Hopefully, it allows us to move beyond the pain to the more productive and fulfilling aspects of our lives. I think popular music plays a similar role for most people. I know Refreshments fans have expressed similar things to me about our music and the role it plays in their lives.
As a songwriter, it’s impossible for me to hear someone like Morrissey and not, on some level, wonder if I could do it too. What makes his work so effective? Why don’t I try it? Still, I don’t expect I ever would have given it a go if Bret hadn’t suggested it.
Bret and Kevin’s hunk felt special to me. It had one of my favorite Bret hooks, a meandering walking line low on the fretboard that ended on a minor chord, and Kevin’s drums felt driven and deliberate, reminding me of his approach to “Kingdom Come.” Everybody seemed to understand that this was an important song for the overall range of styles and emotions on the album. The singer needed to show up.
The verse lines came from imagining the ultimate failure of a thing I’d been trying to accomplish for months. This thing was important to me, and it involved someone else with more power than me doing something that would make my accomplishment complete. It wasn’t complete, but I was hopeful it would be complete soon. Imagine I was sending my demo to a record label in the hopes that I’d get signed. That’s not what it was, but that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. The thing hadn’t failed yet, but to inspire the Morrissey-esque emotions I wanted in the song, I had to imagine it had already failed.
While the verse deals with my frustration—in this imagined scenario—with the other party not agreeing to help me with my accomplishment, the chorus puts the failure back on me. “It’s not you, it’s me.” In the above example, my demo wasn’t good enough. I’m not a good enough songwriter or musician. I’m a failure.
I like to think the finished song dramatizes, when we don’t get what we want in life, the way we bounce blame back and forth in search of a cause. We blame someone else—anyone else, everyone else—then we blame ourselves. It’s a cycle marked by extremes. It’s definitely all your fault, then it’s definitely all mine. It can be a hard cycle to get past, but we do it all the time. Music helps.
So, that’s where the lyrics of “Especially” came from. I was more or less imagining pain that hadn’t happened yet, but it felt real, just like Morrissey’s songs feel real.
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