Song Of The Week - June 18

Along with Food Will Win The War, the moniker of singer-songwriter Eric Elbogen—formerly Say Hi To Your Mom, now simply Say Hi—is one of the worst band names in the business. Ever-trusty Wikipedia credits the name change to a shift in ‘aesthetics,’ but the cited website—Say Hi’s FAQ page—not longer mentions ‘aesthetics’ or any reason at all. Instead, Elbogen offers up the concise, somewhat bitter, response: “Please don’t ask about the name change, [sic] it’s been more than four years.” He’s so sick of the question that the response appears twice on the page.

Complaints with the silly name aside, Elbogen crafts some cannily simple and affecting pop songs, among which is “Dots On Maps,” off Say Hi’s 2011 album Um, Uh Oh. Part of the charm is the lo-fi production values, which are basic and uncluttered, thankfully allowing the music to breath. Like The Wooden Birds, another indie act with a similar taste for melancholic pop, Say Hi populates songs with rhythmic and lightly catchy guitar patterns that draw the listener into the song without drowning out the lyrics. After pontificating last week on Fiona Apple and the sometimes (in)significance of lyrics, I could not help but relapse to a song whose lyrics I felt were peculiarly powerful in the mere sense of meaning—not sound and rhythm as with Apple.

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I’ve already noted that Elbogen practices a particular form of ‘melancholic pop.’ You could probably add Jeff Tweedy, Adam Duritz, and Ben Gibbard to that cast of characters. Their music, if often warm and melodic, is shadowed by lyrics whose various characters and narrators aren’t exactly ever happy. The narrator of Elbogen’s unsunny road trip tune contends not only with his own troublesome thoughts, but with the impatient commentary of his unnamed road companion. The sense of frustration begins in the first verse, pouring out in the underwhelming sense of not being able to make any progress:

Remarkable as it seems

turns out the night was much shorter

than you wanted to believe.

But we’re only in Dakota, dots on maps,

en route to bigger cities.

Elbogen sagely picks “Dakota” as the setting for the song—a kind of Everyman’s nowhere. He doesn’t bother specifying “North” or “South” because (well…probably because that wouldn’t fit into the line of the song) it doesn’t matter which one they’re in. Either state is a kind of ‘undesirable;’ it’s the sort of place that you would only ever pass through on your way to somewhere else. It’s a transitory place; the narrator and his companion (I assume a male narrator because of Elbogen) are “en route to bigger cities.” Additionally, it’s telling that no destination is specified; they are traveling simply to “bigger cities.” Elbogen communicates the sense that any city would be fine, so long as they can escape the doldrums of the prairie.

The second verse elaborates on the traveling situation; it moves the physical setting away from a geographical or conceptual plane—that of the two people “en route” in a car on a map—and into closer proximity with the interior of the car and the relationship between the two people. At first, the narrator focuses on the reality of the road—the “ebbs of traffic patterns reced[ing]” and playing the “only record front to back—infinity”—but he narrows in on an acutely personal thought at the end of the verse:

When it’s dark like this,

all that I can see is the whites

of her green eyes.

Not only is it an image that grabs the listener, it also provides the first concrete detail regarding the relationship between the narrator and his companion. The fact that he’s noticed this small detail implies a particular sympathy and even concern for this companion.

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What is not immediate, however, is the pronouns that Elbogen plays around with. It’s a small detail, but one worth noting. Although it’s easy to assume that the second person of the first verse—“you wanted me to believe”—is somehow the same as the woman of the third verse—“her green eyes”—there is clearly a disjunction. An explanation that might solve that conundrum is a grammatical one. Something that Elbogen is aware of, I suspect, is the non-textual reality of lyrics; they live in a world without punctuation, which allows songs a level of complexity not attained by other texts. (Poetry, of course, often sacrifices punctuation, but not so naturally as lyrics.) Perhaps the second verse ought to be transcribed as follows:

And the ebbs of traffic patterns recede

And we played our only record front to back—infinity.

(When it's dark like this

all that I can see is the whites

of her green eyes.)

The verse settles once some punctuation is introduced, once that last sentence is received as interior monologue of the narrator rather than a more general kind of narration. But that doesn’t quite square with the final pair of verses, which includes the second person thought: “But now you’re about as turned on / as a bottom feeder likes the sun”—not exactly the sentiment to be voiced out loud.

Another approach is, still viewing these instances second- and third-person as recording the same character, to view them as distinct lenses of the same person. In that sense, the second-person represents all that is uncomfortable about this relationship: the longness of this drive, the awkwardness of having grown up together, the lack of sexual chemistry in their relationship, the spirit of competition (“you suppose that ever reigning champ / eventually meets his better”). The third-person breaks through in the honest moments; when neither of them are overthinking this relationship and the commitment that they’ve made. The chorus, of course, represents the high point of honesty in the song; it presents a visceral acknowledgment of their difficult relationship, which is stuck in a stasis—in Dakota:

And she says, “Oh, tell me, this is all it’s gonna be?”

And I say, “Oh, I don't know just how it's gonna be.”

And she says, “Oh, tell me, is this all it’s gonna be?”

There’s a trigger somewhere, let's pull it.

There’s a trigger somewhere, let's pull it.

Ultimately, as we all sort of suspected, the song’s not really about a road trip across the Dakotas. It’s about, cliché though it sounds, the rocky road of life. There are Dakota stretches in life and in relationships, when people seem to fracture into different personalities. There are flashes of the person the narrator was first interested in, but more often, it’s this lingering second-person character, whom he knows perhaps better than he would like.

Ever the clever songwriter, Elbogen denies us the knowledge of which person is speaking that final, decisive line: it could be either the narrator or the woman. We can’t even be sure that that the “trigger” is a positive or negative presence; as far as the song is concerned, it simply represents a change.