DrFaustus's Full Review: State Songs by John Linnell
Concept Album.
It's a phrase that can strike fear and trepidation into the hearts of even the most seasoned record buyer. For every Ziggy Stardust or The Wall that manages to find success through a unifying concept, there are dozens of Metal Machine Music or Kilroy Was Here type albums, where the pretension and self-indulgence render the album less pleasant to the ears than sitting next to Fran Drescher at the Aspen Comedy Festival.
While history has shown it is possible in rare instances to create an artsy, high concept album that listeners can actually enjoy, it seems these days that it's much easier to craft a worthwhile concept album if the artist refuses to take things too seriously.
Enter John Linnell, half of the world-class geek rock duo They Might Be Giants. Linnell is a man with a vision, and that vision is to record an entire series of songs inspired by each of the fifty United States. His 1999 State Songs album compiles fifteen such songs, but you won't find anything like On, Wisconsin, My Old Kentucky Home, or Utah, We Love Thee here. Rather Linnell has assembled his own original compositions inspired by the spirit and character of these states. "Inspired," in this case, is a very loose term. Basically, these songs are all the kind of esoteric goof pop that They Might Be Giants are known for, only with the name of a particular state worked into the lyrics. The results aren't always the most flattering depictions of the states at hand, but they all come across as fun and entertaining.
Take Michigan as an example. The fact that the song starts out as a punk-tempo polka full of clarinet and accordion riffs is enough to raise a few eyebrows as listeners try to figure out this song has to do with the Great Lake State. By the time we get to the lyrics, the search for meaning and significance becomes futile as we hear:
don't hold us back, don't hold us back
we must eat Michigan's brain,
now grow back Michican, we miss you again.
By that point, anyone left looking for meaning is just tilting at windmills.
Several other states serenaded here come off in a fairly negative light. Oregon is portrayed as some sort of unstoppable B-movie mutant monster, and New Hampshire is the creepy, twitchy guy standing outside the window at a party. As Linnell describes it, Iowa is a witch, complete with "conical hat, matching black dress, and a cat," but at least he has the heart to make sure that Iowa is hip, modern-day witch who flies around on a dustbuster rather than the decidedly low-tech broom of tradition.
The lyrical descriptions of other states aren't so much creepy and unflattering as they are, well, just plain weird. Montana is little more than the fever dream of a patient lying in a hospital bed. The song Arkansas, on the other hand, is a somber, tragic ballad telling the tale of the navy's attempt to built a boat the shape of Arkansas at a 1:1 scale. When in comes down to it, only South Carolina and West Virginia are lyrically sane enough to pass themselves off as even remotely traditional pop songs.
Anyone familiar with the music of They Might Be Giants knows that the musical range knows no bounds, and Linnell brings the same variety to his solo work here. Besides the punk-polka of Michigan, there's the circus-style Wurlitzer organ romp of Illinois, the 1960's mod-pop of West Virginia, the low-key bossa nova of Idaho (which, oddly enough, incorporates a car alarm into its musical mix), the Sousa march of Nevada, and the exquisite power-pop balladry of Montana. Apart from the very loose connection to various states, there's hardly any unifying thread for the album (unless you count the fact that these are all undeniably weird songs).
State Songs isn't without it's disappointments. Three of the songs, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi are instrumentals, which I normally wouldn't complain about, but all of the other states have such bizarrely creative stories, that I would have preferred to hear what inspired madness Linnell could have dreamed up for these states. There are also a few questionable choices on the album that may raise a few eyebrows. In Nevada for example, Linnell simply hangs his microphone out the window of the studio once the lyrics are over to capture the sounds of a nearby practicing marching band and passing traffic. It might have been a forgivable choice, but the ambient recording goes on for more than six excruciating minutes. Still, as this is the last track on the album, it doesn't really disrupt anything. Linnell himself acknowledges the ambivalent presence of flaws on his album during The Songs of the Fifty States, the only track not dedicated to a specific state, when he sings "I'm not gonna say they're great, I ain't gonna say they ain't," but his lyrical humility is tempered by an equal lyrical insanity later in the song, when he announces that he'll be singing "about a certain place, where everything is in the control, of men who are controlling my mind."
State Songs works because of, not despite, Linnell's refusal to take his artistic concept at a very serious level. It's clear that his attempt to present eccentrically personified character sketches for these different states is all about fun (albeit goofy, weird fun that may not appeal to people who like their music more straightforward). Fun in music is all too lacking these days, and it's enough to make Sate Songs well worth a listen. Now all we have to do is cross our fingers that we'll get a second volume of these bizarre-world state anthems from Linnelll sometime in the foreseeable future.
(On an interesting side note, any fans of They Might Be Giants who listen to State Songs will notice right away that these songs sound unmistakably like the songs Linnell has made with TMBG. The same can be said of the music that Linnell's bandmate John Flansburgh has recorded with his own side project, Mono Puff. Oddly enough, the music of State Songs sounds nothing like the music of Mono Puff. Such an apparent dichotomy just goes to show that They Might Be Giants truly is thorough amalgam of two very strong, very distinctive songwriters who complement one another superbly.)
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