What Love Can Do
Love can make you hypothetically track down an album when it leaks online. It can make you listen four times through in the first days and hope for improvement each time. Even if you didn't like the singles or care for the cover art, love can make you remember how you're an album person, where the body can save moments gone wrong.
Love can make you an enabler. It can make you quiet when a friend isn't doing his best work. Even if you're bored as a session player and out of your role as a recognizable band member of identity and tone, love can make you laugh at the jokes, have a few beers, play what's required of you, and catch a flight out of town in the next day or two.
Love can make you mistake your first thoughts for your last and writing for rewriting. It can make you rush to publish in a way you never have, accepting overblown and indistinctive production from an overwhelmed subordinate who wouldn't know truth shot through if he were holding the gun. Even if you can feel the weakness, love can make you ignore.
Love can make you write these songs. A pale imitation of the Western fantasias you once sued to stop from being your first record. A rocker where the listener can skip from moment to moment in the song and hear the same sound. A song with a whistling chorus and almost no lyrics, which by default is catchy enough to be the album's third best song. An ode to Odonna Matthews, a valiant attempt to win a bet, an inspired use of a checkout scanner beep, or a debate where you fall these days between The Clash and the Waffle House Music Machine. A song to show you still have it — or maybe just a song that fits me now. A Beckett play where Brian Wilson meets Brendan O'Brien and meaning ever arrives. A taste of what kickass-ness the album could have been if you'd just invited everyone over to the barn. A casting of Jakob Dylan as James Bond. An absence of a producer-as-editor never felt more strongly but an opportunity still to find live-and-stripped redemption. A studio beauty that can't keep a real relationship. A contender as the best song ever written for animatronic bears. A fitting memoriam for a friend. A bonus track I'd like to hear over the credits and in church.
Love can make you dislike an album and go the obtuse way to say so. It can make you take one song, that one near the middle that fits you, and forgive the rest. The new album is true to its title, very much one's hazy memories of dreams. But waking up startled night after night has never felt so awful and alive and important by comparison. At least the waking's real, night after night. Even if the remedies you've taken are all in vain, the lyrics that fit go, let me show you what love can do.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:37 AM
Oh, Bruce…
May 19th, 2009 at 3:21 AM
[...] new album, The Wrestler was as expected the standout. Had been reading the setlists, didn't have my hopes up for What Love Can Do. Not on the album, a cover of Stephen Foster's Hard Times Come Again No More [...]
October 15th, 2009 at 8:53 AM
[...] WOAD mileage, like mine, may [...]