One Hundred Albums Issue No. 21
the ghost of cash, musical doppelgangers, and lovin' me ain't easy
SIXTY the ghost of cash
Johnny Cash American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around, November 5, 2002
In September of 2003 I loaded a backpack with a toothbrush, a few t-shirts, socks and underwear, and took my 80s pearl-wrapped Slingerland drum set and embarked on my first tour of the Midwest and South with a band called MAP. It was both a hopeful time – I had just moved in with Heather in a tiny bungalow in Silver Lake – and a somber time. Johnny Cash had died the previous Friday. My grandfather had passed a few months earlier after falling asleep at the wheel and colliding with a telephone pole. Then, an old mate from high school, deliriously off his anti-psychotic medication, jumped off a freeway overpass in my hometown.
Since my childhood best friend’s death in a car accident when I was 16, I thought about death a lot. This tour would be no different. As the American Southwest unraveled like a plotless dream before me, I looked out a small rectangle window of the Tacoma seated in a tiny bucket seat behind the driver and wondered what the final moments before we pass are like. I vacillated at the thought of my death between being frightened and being relieved.
Just outside of Victorville, we hung a right and spent the next week on I-40. We got $10 a day per diem, so cigarettes were rationed, and meals were selected from the value menus of fast food chains. In the crushing heat of Needles, we smoked cigarettes and ate cheap mystery meat out of crunchy shells, huddled in the shade of a Taco Bell sign. After Needles we crossed London Bridge and ascended into Arizona. I’d never been to Arizona before. I snapped a picture of a large billboard with a blazing sun and 60s-style advert font welcoming us to the Grand Canyon State.
Once in Arizona, the mountains reddenned to the color of baked clay. As the elevation rose, the yuccas were replaced by pines and the freeway’s east and west veins separated, isolating us from the sun-chasing traffic headed west. We passed through Flagstaff at sunset and drove on until past dark. When we hit New Mexico, its cloaked black sky was dusted with stars.
Our destination was Albuquerque where we’d crash for a few hours before driving all the following day to Tulsa where, in a Marriott next to a Cracker Barrell, we’d catch a few hours’ sleep after a marathon video game session, multiple refill trips to the ice machine to keep our gin and sprites frosty, and visits to Heather’s confessional-style documentary filming taking place at the end of the orange-carpeted hallway. Every room was a smoking room. We’d fill the sink with ice to chill the beers, using empties as ash trays.
The first show of the tour was in Springfield, Missouri. Heather, Loop and I were pretty excited; we were opening for Starflyer 59 for the next two weeks. And for the next two weeks, after every soundcheck, no matter if we were playing in a church basement or a rock club, Johnny Cash played from the PA. In honor of the fallen hero of outlaw country, we dubbed the tour “the ghost of Johnny Cash tour.”
Before his death, Cash’s most recent album had been the latest installment of his Rick Rubin-produced, late-career renaissance, The Man Comes Around. While Cash is considered a national treasure today – his songs grace soundtracks and pharmaceutical commercials the world over – the Man in Black had been profoundly uncool in the 80s and early 90s, a has-been from an era of country that prized glitz over gunslingers. That all changed with Cash, his first album with Rick Rubin. The back-to-basics approach is stale now, but then Rubin’s work with Cash felt revelatory.
The first song on Cash is “Delia’s Gone,” a bone-chilling, heart-breaking murder ballad that is perhaps the best tune Cash ever wrote. Hearing the old man’s shale-shattered voice and his gnarled fingers reckoning with the steel of his guitar transformed Cash from gospel flunky to untouchable legend. The second and third installments of Cash’s American Recordings series featured a dream-list of collaborators, from Tom Petty to Bonny “Prince” Billy. Each collection leaned heavily on Cash’s reinvention of other’s songs. He would sit and listen to cassettes filled with potential covers that Rubin would send him. Once he chose a song, he’d listen to it over and over, sometimes for days, before ever starting to learn it. Cash was a possessor, inhabiting the tune. When he sang your song, it no longer belonged to you. It was Johnny Cash’s now.
Cash’s method of learning another writer’s song reminds me of a character from a collection of stories I was reading on the tour, Pierre Menard. Menard attempts to write the Don Quixote word for word, not by copying it; rather by recreating the life and experiences of the novel’s original writer, Cervantes. The idea is, if Menard recreates the exact conditions that inspired Cervantes to write the Don Quixote, Menard should then also be able to write it.
While the author Borgés seems to be lampooning postmodernism’s death of the author, it’s relevant to note the connection to Cash’s use of covers specifically, and all cover songs in general. When we listen to a cover song, we interpret the words and inflections of the tune differently than we do the original. In the same way reading identical lines of prose written in two entirely different contexts alters their interpretive meaning, so too does an artist’s performance of another artist’s tune.
This often puts a rapier through the merit of a cover song. For example, Dynamite Hack’s regrettable cover of “Boyz N the Hood” is impossible to take seriously because it’s a bunch of suburban white kids singing lyrics written by Eazy-E. Conversely, consider Megan Thee Stallions re-imaging of “Boyz N the Hood,” “Girls N the Hood.” This is an example of an artist reterritorializing another artist’s song in a way that empowers the new artist, thereby transcending the original.
Cash was an absolute master at this. His covers on The Man Comes Around are so deeply incorporated into his own mystique, and so passionately performed, it seems heretical to prefer the original. Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” sounds infinitely more powerful coming from Cash, a man alone at the end of his life, than it did from a pity-me drunk in his 20s. Or consider “Personal Jesus.” From Cash’s perspective as a devout believer it’s entirely changed from Martine Gore’s quasi-blasphemous 80s hit. This is the magic of Cash—he may have been a bit of a has-been, but beneath the glamour and squalor of failed TV shows and Vegas blow binges, a magnetic performer still existed.
The commanding presence of his voice is immediate and undeniable. On album opener “The Man Comes Around,” Cash channels the bombastic timbre of the God of Revelation. The narrative yarn Cash unravels in “I Hung My Head” is devastating in its depiction of an accidental killer’s shame. It’s a traditional murder ballad reworked by a man recontextualizing his own regrets at the end of his life. Cash’s version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is about the saddest song I’ve ever heard. While it’s a love song originally written by a British folk singer to his mistress, when you hear Cash sing it, it’s like a chronicling of his 35-year marriage to June Carter Cash in four minutes. After she died in May of 2003, just months before Cash would follow, Cash is quoted as saying all he wanted to do was record as much music as possible.
If I’m lucky enough to have 35 years with Heather, I can’t imagine what it’ll feel like if she dies before me. In my darkest four AM anxiety bouts, I wonder if she and I are in a cold war of seeing who can kill themselves slowly enough for the other not to notice, to die first in order to not have to do this life alone. Unlike Heather and I, Cash had a certainty he’d see June again, captured sweetly on “We’ll Meet Again.” It’s another stellar example of Cash’s titanic gravity overtaking a song’s original intention and bending it into his orbit.
On the Ghost of Cash Tour, I remember setting up my drumset at Emo’s in Austin. Cash’s voice echoed in the empty room. Usually, there’s a rhythm one acquires a couple weeks into a tour, causing many shows blur into one amorphous memory. But on this tour, Cash’s voice differentiated one venue from the next. At Emo’s it was the pipe organ and Cash’s alone-in-an-auditorium voice singing “Danny Boy.” At The End in Nashville, it was “Personal Jesus,” reflecting off walls tagged with the names of punk legends past. At the church in Kansas City it was Cash’s stirring duet with Fiona Apple, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
And each time as I put together my ragged drum set, I’d watch Heather and notice how beautiful she looked setting up her pedals, tuning her guitar, testing the volume of the amp, totally unconscious I was observing her. I knew then we would marry and I knew I wanted our first dance to be to Johnny Cash. Of course, that’s not what happened. But that’s a story for another album.
SIXTY-ONE musical doppelgangers
Pedro the Lion Control, April 16th, 2002
A waiter in Zurich awakes. His anticonvulsant medication lies untaken by a glass of water sweating lightly in the Swiss summer, as it has for days. He doesn’t want to go to work, so instead he stays in bed and gets drunk.
In a 2015 BBC article on the phenomenon of doppelgangers, Anil Ananthaswamy describes what happened next. Feeling dizzy, the drunk man gets out of bed, only to see himself still lying there. A panic sets in as he realizes he has to get to work. He shakes his other body, still prostrate on the mattress, imploring his self to get up. While doing so, he noticed his perspective would intermittently skip from one body to the other: in one moment he’d see himself above him, shaking furiously, in the other he’d watch his motionless body recoil from his assault.
The cognitive dissonance of experiencing his doppelganger began to produce an existential fear, an anxiety a priori in us all: Who am I? When the sensation became unbearable, the waiter leapt from his 4th story window, landing in a giant sage bush. When asked later why he tried to commit suicide, the waiter responded simply: he jumped to try to align his mind and body. The waiter would later have a large tumor removed from his brain. After the surgery, his doppelganger experiences ceased.
Sometimes referred to as a twin stranger, a doppelganger is typically identified by physical appearance. The avant-garde thriller Enemy, directed by Denis Villeneuva and based on Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s 2002 novel The Double (or, in its native Portuguese, The Duplicated Man), is a chilling exploration of two men who appear exactly the same and the consequences of their lives intertwining by chance.
After a recent conversation with a musician friend, who remarked that a certain artist wrote tunes that felt written so specifically for them that they could have been by them, I got to thinking about musical doppelgangers. I didn’t take long for me to identify mine. I have a musical doppelganger and it’s Dave Bazan of Pedro the Lion. Bazan is not my twin stranger in a physical sense. Rather, our similarities in upbringing and songwriting have produced two diverging, yet still parallel trajectories.
By the time Control was released in 2002, I had been following Pedro the Lion since the release of the Whole EP a few years earlier. For disillusioned Christians like myself, Bazan’s Doubting-Thomas examination of religion, love, politics, and sex through a parabolic lens was revelatory. As I started to write songs, I found myself writing from a similar perspective, as if I were unwittingly following Bazan on an unmarked trail of shared consciousness just a few steps behind.
I get it. This sounds super fan boy. But stay with me.
Based on interviews I’ve ingested over the years, as well as a close-reading of his lyrics, Bazan and I appear to have had concurrent moments of personal apocalypse. Like me, he grew up as a pastor’s kid playing worship music in a Christian church. (In a bizarre small-world twist, Bazan’s grandfather and my uncle played music together at their Assembly of God church.) Bazan’s early albums tightrope the border between a skeptical Christian sentimentality and the sinking suspicion something else is going on behind the scenes. By the release of Pedro’s second album, Winners Never Quit, I got the sense the legalistic dogma of Christianity was beginning to deteriorate in his mind, the same way it had done for me.
On Control, Pedro the Lion’s third album, Bazan was not yet the nihilist of Fewer Moving Parts nor the misty-eyed atheist of later solo works, but something had goosed his world view towards something darker. The sonic landscape of Control is sludgy, a musical monochrome akin to what you’d imagine Cold War Ukraine to sound like. This wasn’t unusual for Pedro; the early albums adhere to a minimalist sonic palette. But these songs are heavier than anything Bazan released before, both musically, and lyrically, where a relentlessly dour narrative unfolds.
The deceptive simplicity of the music and frankness of the lyriccs are what made me fall in love with Pedro albums in the first place, but it’s also what’s made it difficult to listen to as I’ve grown older. Songs like “Penetration” and “Magazine” shudder in a thick distortion, propelled by the narrators’ disillusionment with institutions, whether it be marriage or the corporate cubicle culture of the late 90s early aughts. I definitely still relate, but christ, I’m not usually in the mood to want to. But listening in 2002, as I was finishing up my university years, I was convinced of Bazan’s assessment of the world, like he was putting a name to a concept already in my mind.
While tearing down institutions has been the main objective of the anti-democratic right in recent years, this distrust has been historically couched in leftist politics. Bazan credits the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle as the moment he realized there was something “left of Bill Clinton,” a friend having given him Noam Chomsky.
Around the same time, I began taking leftist socio-critical classes at UCI and subsequently registered in the communist party. When I heard Control a couple years later, I was astounded by how much the viewpoint of the album appeared to mirror my own. The big difference: I wasn’t then the songwriter that Bazan was, and still is. For better or worse, Bazan’s writing is sincere in a way mine never was until much later in my life. There’s a sense when you listen to Pedro tunes or hear Bazan speak at a show that you’re getting the unfiltered human behind the art. With me, you’re usually getting a small piece of me obscured by metaphor and guitar feedback. It’s a credit to Bazan that he’s been so generous with his self; I think it’s a big reason why he’s seen some small modicum of success.
This idea of divergent doppelgangers is explored by Bazan himself in the album’s standout track “Options.” The tune’s narrative follows what at first appears to be an idyllic stroll along the beach shared by the tune’s protagonist and their lover. At the perfect moment, beneath a parabola of seagulls and ocean mist, the protagonist tells his lover:
"I could never divorce you
Without a good reason
And though I may never have to
It's good to have options"
But for now, I need you
The I-can’t-believe-he-just-said-that reaction only lasts a second before Bazan reveals the words only occurred in the narrator’s head. It’s an effective misdirection and an insight into a rare cynicism towards relational honesty. The narrator concludes:
So I told her I loved her
And she told me she loved me
And I mostly believed her
And she mostly believed me
— thus birthing the narrator’s doppelganger for the rest of the album, someone who sees the awful shittiness of existence but perseveres while the twin stranger devolves into a haze of cum-soaked hotel trysts, alcoholic binges, economic failure, and is ultimately murdered by the jilted wife. The twin left alive concludes the album, saying on “Rejoice”
Wouldn't it be so wonderful if everything were meaningless
But everything is so meaningful
And most everything turns to shit
Rejoice
It’s a bleak conclusion to a bleak album, one that tackles climate change, infidelity and the sleazy hand-holding between late stage American capitalism and the US political establishment. Its unclear how prescient the specifics of Bazan’s dystopia in Control remains today, but the undercurrent of anxiety inherent to growing older and realizing that, so often, shit just doesn’t work out – that’s it, that was your shot – this anxiety feels especially relevant now.
In a way, returning to everyday life after the global pandemic has felt like we’ve all been torn in two, like we’ve all been given a twin stranger. Standing behind the bar, watching the predictable behavior of predictable drunks, there’s the me who accepts this as normal. But then there’s the twin stranger, who’s shaking bartender Benji, yelling at him to wake up. Did you not just go through a disruption of your life of gargantuan proportion? Did the experience not inform you as to what actually matters? How can you just go back to your before-life when everything has changed?
Reconciliation of doppelgangers never ends well in stories. And it certainly didn’t end well for the protagonists of Control. But I hope Bazan can escape his pandemic doppelganger without too much suffering. And despite my rational expectation, I hope I can, too.
SIXTY-TWO loving me ain’t easy
Rilo Kiley The Execution of All Things, October 1, 2002
So, I’m working at this hippie coffee joint in downtown Santa Ana, in a part of the city desperately trying to identify as “artsy.” I looked the part, I guess. I had the shaggy blonde hair held off my forehead with pink berets, nails painted, ear lobes stretched. I was a bit of a poser, as I wasn’t a hippie. I’ve never felt like I fit into any specific fashion trend, but I was always conscious of wanting to look a little bit different, or at least, slightly odd. However pretentious this is, I think the function of public art is to startle people out of their fog of routine. I thought, if I look weird, then perhaps it will make a person think about the environment around them, if only for a second.
The coffee shop wasn’t a hard job. Mostly we just drank Sierra Nevada in to-go cups from the tap and traded cig breaks on the patio. Rarely was there a need for more than one person to be working at any given time. The dining room was spread out and furnished like a Moroccan vintage store; if you wanted, you could enjoy your latte and alfalfa sprout sandwich on a low-slung mustard couch with oversized purple pillows, or at a wide wooden dinner table, or on the little stage next to an upright piano.
One afternoon I was playing Pedro the Lion—it’s summer 2001, so I’m guessing it would be Winners Never Quit—and waiting on the two or three tables leftover from the lunch rush. On the stage there was a couple. They were a bit older than me and definitely “cooler.” Their haircuts were nicer and their clothes were obviously bought to fit them, unlike me, who’d been dressing in thrift store clothes since I moved out of my parent’s place. They were worldly, and attractive, with a tacit understanding of how things are. They had the from-a-big-city vibe. It’s not like they were stuck-up. Their experiences had leant them an air of aloofness that me as a suburban kid never acquired.[1]
When I went to give them the check, the dude said, “Hey, you like Pedro the Lion? I think you’d like my band.” He asked me if I’d listen to his CD and I said sure. I listened to anything anyone would give me; you just never know when you’re going to hear your next favorite album. The guy ran out to his car and came back with a CD. The cover was tan with a pale blue stripe and a diagram of airplane seats. The words read: “Rilo Kiley Take Offs and Landings.”
This experience taught me an extremely valuable lesson, one I’ve emulated with every band I’ve ever been in: if you love something, give it away. Instead of trying to sell me on his band’s music, dude just gave it to me. And while I didn’t love the album as a whole, I really liked three or four tunes on it, which were enough to get me to buy Rilo Kiley’s next record when it came out in 2002, the fantastic indie-pop album The Execution of All Things.
Execution is my favorite example of artists trying to make a classic album and not quite hitting the mark. The everything-but-the-kitchen sink production style is endearing, evident in album opener “The Good That Won’t Come Out” and late album jimjam “My Slumbering Heart.” Producer Mike Mogis of Saddle Creek fame deserves a ton of credit for why Execution sounds light years ahead of its predecessor. Landings sounded like a band who knew they wanted to sound better but didn’t know how to make it happen. On Execution, Mogis expanded the band’s sonic boundaries to include a plethora of auxiliary sounds.
It almost works, but at times, the use of the choirs, the glockenspiels, the saxophones, the woodwinds, the banjo, even a fucking saw — it’s distracting from what makes Rilo Kiley special: Jenny Lewis, the band’s primary singer and songwriter.[2] Lewis is an incisive and perceptive songwriter, whose three-album peak includes Execution, More Adventurous (Rilo Kiley’s third album), and her first solo album, Rabbit Fur Coat. Any one of these three albums could have found a place in this book, but as so often is the case, the first time gets outsized importance placed on it. Execution is the first time I fell in love with Lewis.
I should clarify. I wasn’t in love with Jenny Lewis the person. I didn’t know her then, I’ve never met her since, and I have no desire to in the future. I was in love with the “I” of her songs, which is very different than the IRL person. The “I” in many of Summer Darling songs is not Ben.[3] The “I” is a cryptogram used in songwriting to convey some version of truth. Sure, there’s true bits of me in there, but only bits.
What drew me to Lewis’ songwriting was her ability to put into words feelings I’d felt before but was unable to express. For example, I definitely experienced the emotion of schadenfreude before I learned what it was called but putting a word to it allowed me to express my feeling of schadenfreude to others. Listening to Lewis’ songs was like learning what a bunch of feelings I’d been having were called.
In an earlier issue, I used lyrics by Lewis to express what it feels like to be on tour. But Lewis also nailed what it’s like to be a 27-year-old musician still searching out success. It’s a sour-grape mix of wanting the best for yourself but suspecting that you don’t deserve it. Of wanting the best for your friends but worrying you’ll be envious of them if the best happens. In “The Good That Won’t Come Out” she sings
I think I'll go out and embarrass myself
By getting drunk and falling down in the street
You say I choose sadness
That it never once has chosen me
This line fucking got me.
In therapy, I’d been told that I’d chose to be the way I was and that if I made better choices, I wouldn’t be as depressed. Seemed simple. Problem was, making better choices didn’t work, because, for me, depression was never something I chose. When I was younger, I’d wake up depressed and go to bed depressed. There was no escape. It was only after I discovered a daily cycle of alcohol use that I found relief. I’d wake up hungover from drinking the night before and the depression wouldn’t hit until around 5pm. This gave me a few precious hours of serenity between the hangover and the black dog to get things done. It’s no surprise to me that I do all my creative work in the late morning and early afternoon. They’re usually the only hours in the day when I don’t feel depressed.
While I’ve found I can’t control the onset of the depression, what I can usually control is how much I dwell on it. It’s unclear whether that’s what Lewis is talking about when she sings
It's all of the good that won't come out of me
And how eventually, my mouth will just turn to dust
If I don't tell you quick
Standing here on this frozen lake
It’s probably not. But I related to it. For me, the good that won’t come out is my creative intentions, feeling grateful to be who I am and the ability to love that person. These attributes are prevented from manifesting in my daily life by the sadness, anxiety, and hopelessness of being fucking bummed all the time. The only way I’ve found to get the good out is by connecting with someone else. The darkest times in my life were the times I felt like no one understood what I was going through, that I was utterly alone. These were also the times in which I was the most self-centered. Perhaps there’s a correlation here.
I once told Heather I loved Jenny Lewis’ songwriting because I felt like she was a female version of me. Her cynicism, her depression, her sexuality all felt like me. But in reality I was projecting the parts of myself I had a hard time accepting onto the narrator of her songs in order to deal with them in a way I could handle. Lewis isn’t a female me. And the way we write songs is entirely different. So, who was I actually in love with?
Myself. But for whatever fucked-up reason, admitting that at 22 was not an option.
Execution reminds me that learning to love oneself is no easy task. Falling in love with someone else is often a lot easier. The same way alcohol papers over my depression, loving someone or something obfuscates the problems inside us. The star-crossed lovers of Lewis’s songs seem perpetually stuck in these destructive cycles. It’s probably why I keep falling in love with them.
[1] See, Santa Ana isn’t a real city. It’s why bands like Local Natives move to Silver Lake and start playing Spaceland. No one gives a shit about who the resident band at Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa is (trust me, I know). [2] Yes, there’s also Blake Sennett, but his tunes never really did it for me. Too Elliott Smith-y, which I realize, coming from me, is hypocritical. But hey, humans, man. We’re contradictory fucks sometimes. [3] Both Heather and I have been the victim of rumors of infidelity based on songs we’ve written. Heather had someone flat out tell her, “How can you write about cheating on Ben?” as if Heather were the vilest person in the world. I found it amusing.
That’s all for another round of OHA. Signing off from Panama City, Ef Elle A