NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out Nov. 1

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

NPR Music's Ann Powers and Daoud Tyler-Ameen are your guides to the most compelling new releases of the week, including the first album in 16 years by The Cure and a surprise release by Tyler, the Creator.Featured albums:• The Cure, 'Songs of a Lost World'• Tyler, the Creator, 'Chromokopia'• Willie Nelson, 'Last Leaf on the Tree'• Haley Heynderickx, 'Seed of a Seed'Check out the longer list of albums out November 1 and stream our New Music Friday playlist at https://npr.org/music.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Just a quick heads up, this podcast contains explicit language. So I doubt you're in the office today, right? And I hear something happen. TV on the radio was in the damn office. Unbelievable. What a terrible burden for you to have to watch a tiny desk being filmed with TV on the radio. Perhaps the greatest live band in rock anyway of the 21st century, at least in my opinion. Sucks to be made.

It was a highlight. Just give us a highlight. He did stop partway through and just look around. and say after a couple of minutes, is anyone hot? I'm so hot. They're just frantically looking around for something to wipe his face down. Oh my gosh. Like, uh, I missed you guys. I'm very happy they're back and it's quite a week for comebacks. My goodness. My goodness.

Hey, everybody. It's New Music Friday from NPR Music. Here to talk about the best and most discussion-worthy music coming out today, November 1st, with one notable exception. Coming up on today's show, new music from Tyler the Creator, Haley Hendricks, Willie Nelson, and some thoughts on one of the godfathers of modern power pop and the sun-soaked image of rock songwriting

that his work brought into focus for a generation to come. But first, I can't believe I'm wasting time talking about anything but this. Holy hell, and there's a new cure album. Robert Smith has come out of his Victorian Garrett. He's emerged. Not only have he and his band Macy merged, but this is a freaking great record. It's great.

It's great. I really had like a Is This Real Life moment. Well, you know, David, even though they've been around since the early 80s, they are still one of the most vital bands out there when they choose to be out there. And fans have been anticipating the release of this album for a very long time. So befitting that long absence, what is the name of this record? It is called Songs of a Lost World. That's a typically, you know, Black is the Night kind of title, right? Joining other classic titles like pornography and disintegration.

This is definitely an album about loneliness, despair, confrontations with death. But unlike the music, that Robert Smith and his cohort made like that back in the beginning of their career, and also at the peak middle of their career with the great 1989 album disintegration. Unlike on those albums, now Robert Smith is 65 years old. He made this album in the wake of the deaths of many family members, his parents, and very significantly his older brother, who actually introduced him to punk or post-refer. punk music and it deals with these very heavy, heavy losses. And doubt it really, for me,

it really rings different, you know. This is a guy who was complaining that he was too old when he was like 25 years old. But now he's truly staring down. You know, he's staring down mortality. And I think these songs, these epic operatic songs just capture that mood, you know, that confrontation. His voice sounds incredible. Unbelievable. I wonder if his voice just sounds like that coming out of his head. Did he sing like that in choir as a kid?

Or did he find it somewhere along the way? He's always been one of the great rock vocalists. It's all about embracing your imperfections. This is what Rock and Ball learned. I mean, not so much from Elvis and the first generation rockers or Little Richard or whatever who are all great singers. but from Dylan, for example. Think of Neil Young.

You know, I mean, you speak of the yelps and the hiccups and the kind of, I don't know, the like strangulation effect that Robert Smith can get in his voice. And we hear that on these tracks. I mean, when you listen to his voice on a song like a fragile thing, and also the melody itself, it conjures old classic cure. Every one of these songs isn't truly an epic. These are songs that take their time getting where they need to go.

That song alone is, it is this epic orchestral rock song almost entirely without symbols. I know. I know. There might be a few here and there for emphasis, but the places that you expect in a rock song to hear like a high hat keeping an eight count and, you know, crash symbols or a ride symbol going through the chorus, Maybe there's a rhythm guitar doing that job, but otherwise you just get these massive kick and snare wallups. Every snare hit sounds like it's being played with two hands.

The rhythm section on this, that's Jason Cooper on the drums and original cure member Simon Gallup on the bass. They really are, I wouldn't say they're running the show. I mean, Robert Smith wrote all these songs himself. He created the arrangements. But that rhythm section, it is what makes the difference between this being kind of like a wan imitation. of what a great band did back in the day and fully an album that stands with their greatest release season.

A song like war song, which you clocked as a political song, I didn't even hear it the first time, but I think it's because I was focusing on the musicianship. There is, I mean, this has in common with like doom and sludge and, you know, metal music's of that persuasion

that... Yes. It must take so much focus and precision to be able to play that slowly and stay in time, right? I know. Play that slowly, but also create this intensity. To me, it's like the sound of war. And the song that we played at the top of the show, which is called Dron, No Dron, which apparently is actually was inspired by a drone flying into Robert's,

My God. I don't know. Which he didn't, he didn't enjoy that. But, you know, that song too, it's like the layers, the incredible layers of sound that they get, it's so dense and intense. Yeah. What a gift to get this after 16 years, and I wouldn't blame them if, you know, they, if, I guess, if this was it for them. Right.

I know, but the amazing thing is that Smith is said that they have written dozens of songs and planned three albums. So this could be a late breaking kuroscience. It could be, we could be in the middle of it right now. Oh man, that's so exciting. That is Songs of a Lost World by the Kier. The first album in a decade and a half by the band, not the last from The Sound of Things. It's just such a coup for for the indoor kids. Next, on New Music Friday, an album that is actually already four days old, but we couldn't let it go unacknowledged, and boy, is there a lot here to acknowledge, it is the seventh album by Tyler the creator, Chromacopia.

And there is a bombshell moment in the middle of this record, but I kind of want to start slow. So why don't we jump in with Darling Eye? So a couple of telling lines here. I'm at the altar, but I'm still searching. When that gray hair finally come, at least I felt something if I ain't found the one. I am reminded of the place that Kanye was in in the late 2000s with 808s and Heartbreak and my beautiful dark twisted fantasy, where he was sort of examining what his wealth and fame

and, you know, prolificacy and focus on his art had gotten him materially and what it had perhaps bereaved him of emotionally. And it's one of a couple of emotional axes at the heart of this record is Tyler, you know, in his 30s now, we all met him as this, you know, brady teenager, you know, sort of like proto-edged lord. Yeah, total edge lord. And then he, you know, I mean, that could have been like a one or two season story. And he kind of surprised us all and became like one of our busier and more adventurous pop autores, you know, stole the number one slot from DJ Khalid at one time. I know, so crazy. And also became a notable designer.

Yeah. Entrepreneur. And kind of the potter familiarist. of that whole odd future crew that was the crew came out of who also include, you know, one of the greatest rappers of our time, Earl sweatshirt, one of the most beloved R&B performers in Sid, and then, of course, the legend Frank Ocean. So, yeah, Tyler's a patriarch man, except I guess he's not a patriarch. Oh, did I set that up or what? No, well, let's get into it. So the centerpiece of this,

record, I would argue, is a song called Hey Jane. A phrase that I did not realize until you told me a moment before we started recording has a little bit more significance than I realized. And you know, Hey Jane is the name of a sexual telehealth clinic and an online abortion pill store. And it's also the name of the fifth song on this record. Well, so it begins with a voice. Always, always, always, always. We're a condom. One that. is woven through the entire record that I believe belongs to Benita Smith, Tyler's actual mother. She is sort of there kind of in the tradition of like you know the like Midnight Marauders tour guide and sort of you know giving context and

commentary on the proceedings but in this really personal way that sort of reveals a lot of details of you know sort of their relationship you know things behind the scenes that have been hinted at Over time, I mean, he's wrapped a lot about, you know, his own absentee father and, you know, the impressions that that's left on him. And now we get this song, Hey Jane, that begins with his mother telling him always wear a condom and then delves into this conversation about an unplanned pregnancy. Right, right. Listen to your mother. Yeah. Listen to your mom.

I mean, among the things that are really kind of bone shaking about this, one is that he, he, immediately gets into some of the guilt and unfairness that he feels just about like the the the gendered you know tilt um that these conversations often take he talks about you know what it is for a woman to go through the the physical pain and inconvenience and stigma of pregnancy and childbirth only for the child to get the man's name a lot of the time um uh he talks about um basically mourning skipped chapters in an ostensible love story. He said it's, the line that really killed me was we took a shortcut to forever. It's rough.

And then, incredibly, we get a switch to the other party's perspective with Haiti. And now we're hearing her ambivalence about the whole situation, leaning towards keeping the kid and raising it alone. and this realization that in the end, like, no matter what happens, their friendship might be the unavoidable casualty of this whole situation. We got great skin, you're not dumb and your energy is a good mood, a little weird, but overall you's a good dude. How would you feel if we kept in a secret? It's a voice inside me begging to keep it.

I'm 35, and my ovaries might not reset. I don't want to live my whole life feeling regret, damn. A feeling you can never understand. You just hope to God I get my period. We got to talk about the production because the production is a lot. And it also, to me, it kind of counters the confessionalism in a way that I, my jury is still out. Like, I'm not convinced that the really super busy production and all the guests, stars and just the sound of this record, I'm not totally convinced that it's the. frame for these lyrics, but

Dowd, I think you might have an argument for it. I guess I'm used to the experience of listening to Tyler being a real 3D movie kind of experience, where he is leaning out of the speaker and getting right into your face. And this is different.

This thing is packed so dense that you are required as the listener to kind of lean forward and push the brush aside. At the very least, you need to lean in to try to catch all of the features, which at the time that we're speaking are uncredited. But man, the minute I heard Dochi, I was like, oh, wow.

I, what a swamp piss. Fly his bitch up in the room, I need a cock pig. I need some Peter Buttis Pussy. They want the cropped bread. I'm in there air these deal on niggas out the closet. I let it eat. I know you and I agree that Dochi made the mixtape of the year, and it's really fun to hear her.

On this track where she certainly matches not only Tyler, but like the production, her voice truly jumps out. That song is called Balloon. The part that she's rapping over is a little bit diffuse. It doesn't really have hard drum, so she's not getting to really like stunt on the beat in the way that we know that she can. But it's still impressive that she can do what she's doing here over such a spare beat. It's like her breath control is just insane. To me, Tyler's records are a little bit like West Anderson movies.

Okay, keep going. Walk with me here. Walk with me here. You know, I love a Wes Anderson movie. I love being immersed in this world. It is such a world and you are so vividly transported by those experiences. But see, I have a similar problem with him and with Tyler, which is that I walk away and spend a little time away and I don't remember it very well.

I feel like you've got to be in it. I feel like you have to be inside the listening experience to really appreciate what Tyler does, Just as you have to be watching a Wes Anderson movie, it's like I couldn't necessarily say, oh, this is my favorite scene from Moonrise Kingdom or whatever, you know? Damn, nigga, every time I look at you, I swear to God. Nika, you got that nigga feet. You got that nigga body.

You got that nigga long arms, fingers and shit, flat beat, big. I do think this record has, it has built in a couple of unforgettable moments. There is a song called Like Him that is Tyler staring down the sort of legacy of his father. Basically, the sins of the father return in a sort of more ambivalent shape where he's kind of accepting the undeniability of his birth parents' influence. That, you know, no matter how much you might mutually disown each other, like there's no getting around looking like your dad, And he has this line, Mama, I'm chasing a ghost, about the fear of sort of following in those footsteps and maybe not even knowing it.

And then there is this incredible moment of his mom coming in and saying, like, it's my fault, you don't know him. He's a good guy, which like, holy moly, that feels unexpected in a story like this. Not yours, not he is. You know? Not him, because he always wanted to be there. And I'm sorry, I was young. But he's always wanted to be a father to him. So I fucked up and I take ownership of that of my choices and decisions.

Always one of the most courageous artists in hip-hop, I think. Yeah, yeah. It is crazy to witness the evolution of his voice, not his artistic voice, although there's plenty to talk about, but I mean literally his voice. Because at the start of his career, it was so unmistakable, like enough so that, like, you could do like a comedy impression of Tyler the Creator and people would know who you were trying to be. Maybe unmistakable, not always in a good way. Right, yeah, exactly.

But now... Dude needs to hone his skills a little bit, you know. But he has, I mean, listening through this record that has so many features on it, like sometimes there were points where I wasn't sure if I was hearing him or somebody else. Maybe I should before I'm too old and washed up like this shit. Never bite tongue till it too sore.

If you was going to apologize, fuck you shoot for. When I pop out, they say, ooh Lord, no mecgala, but I'm married by the mood board. I did a whole collection, collection of them pairs. Those are just a few thoughts on Chromacopia, the new album from Tyler's The Creator. Our colleague Sheldon Pierce wrote about the album for his weekly column, so for much sharper insights than we can provide here, go find Sheldon's review at npr.org.

Coming up after the break, Willie Nelson does the flaming lips? Stick around. Welcome back to New Music Friday, and I have to say that I did not read the liner notes for this record before I listened to it, So I was taken totally by surprise when this happened. This is the album, Last Leaf on the Tree by Willie Nelson. And the choice to include, do you realize, a flaming lip song from 2002, made a whole lot more sense to me when I discovered that the album was produced in its entirety by the 91. by the 91-year-old Willie Nelson's 34-year-old son, Micah Nelson.

Micah performs as Particle Kid. He has a lot of musical goings-on of his own. He's been a touring guitarist in Crazy Horse. And this album of mostly, though not entirely covers, is sort of split between Willie's cohort and Micah's own millennial. favorites. Willie has these two sons, who both play music and Mike Nelson.

And this is like that moment in succession where, you know, the best session where, you know, the best boy, Kendall, is on the outs and here comes Roman. Here comes Roman. And Roman turns out to be a genius. Okay, I have to qualify that very, very quickly and say, these are good, nice, people, lovely. Lucas is amazing. I love you, Lucas. You're amazing in every way.

So they're not the horrible people that are on succession. But it is an interesting moment in the story of, Willie and his boys because Lucas, you know, in some ways, he's a great artist in his own right with his band, Lucas Nelson and the Real. Might have seen them in A Star is Born. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's fantastic, but he's a little more, you know, down the path of Willie. It makes, you know, it makes sense the Lucas Willie combination.

Whereas Micah's the Wild Card for the 76th album from this art. artist. Yes, I didn't, I said that and I was correct. 76th album for Willie Nelson. This is a departure and one that I love. I'm the last leaf on a tree. Why don't we rewind a little bit and go back to the beginning of this record? It's it is the namesake track Last Leaf, one of two Tom Waits songs. And it is, I mean, to put things in contrast with Robert Smith, like you can tell right away, this is an artist whose age and experience is very apparent in his voice. And the choice of repertoire here, I mean, every single song, every single line is underscored with layers of meaning connected to that age and that experience. So you've got Willie singing, the autumn took the rest, but it won't take me. And this

image of somebody being, you know, one of the very last of his generation. Everything here feels, I mean, it's very deliberate, it's very, you know, heavy-footed, something a little, you know, ghost. Something a little, you know, go and autumnal about the instrumentation. And that's one of the big touches that Micah Nelson added is that in addition to doing a lot of the instrumentation himself, he does a lot of what I guess you would call folly work with non-instruments, right?

Right. There's like leaves and logs and coins and just like, you know, anything you could think to strike a surface with that you couldn't find in a guitar center is haunting the margins of this thing. Oh, Mr. So, he was on. You know, when I saw the track listing for this record, I was simultaneously excited and also a bit worried because I thought,

okay, here we go. This is his American recordings. And he's made, he's made, you know, he's on, I mean, Willie Nelson's done everything. He's done a lot of covers and covered a lot of contemporary artists. And so that would have been the standard thing to do. But to me, it really is the arrangements. and the unexpected appearances of people like Sam Gendell,

who his saxophone really defines the recording of Micah's Particle Kid song, Wheels. I mean, Sam Gendell's a total weirdo. I love him. He's amazing. His spare playing on that song, it is very, it feels like a kind of crumbling, crumbling building or something. I love that. I just keep your love running

till the wheels come off. Can we talk about the Sunny War song? Oh, yes, I was so excited to see that. I'm such a huge Sunny War fan. So tell me about her, because this is an artist that I was not familiar with before I found her name in the liner notes.

She is one of my favorite young artists kind of bridging the gap, the non-existent gap, between like Americana and punk. She's a great guitarist and a really cool singer and songwriter. She used to live in LA. Now she lives in Nashville. But I think that's one of the tracks that Micah definitely brought in.

And thank you, Willie Nelson, for recording a song by a young black musician who's changing the game. I mean, that says so much about who Willie is. Like, Willie is an amazing mentor. He is truly a champion of young artists. So you lost your baby. So you lost your job. And you lost all faith in the one that you call God.

So that song is called If It Wasn't Broken. The words go, you may be empty. So is the drum that brings me rhythm. You're forced to reckon with the idea that, Like, yeah, it's empty space that allows an instrument to resonate. It's chasms and cavities that create places for air to vibrate all at once. So don't worry so much if you detect one of those empty spaces within yourself, because that's where music comes from.

Thank you, Willie. That is Last Leaf on the Tree by Willie Nelson. We got one more before the lightning round, Ann, hit me. Well, this is another wonderful young musician working in the space. where folk meets, I guess, more contemporary musical styles. This is Seed of a Seed by the Portland, Oregon-based artist Haley Hendrix. And let's just listen to this lovely little song about a hummingbird. It's called Mouth of a Flower.

Don't you feel like you want to be out in your garden right now, Doug? Get out of that stuffy recording studio you're in and go out and start. smell the roses, as it were. There's this little staccato string part that mirrors the way that she says the word take. You get take, take, take, and this, you know, like really, like short, sharp bowing on the strings. And it's just like, yeah, it feels like a kind of natural, you know, resonant frequency being reached. There are several songs on this record that are clearly connected to her time outside. There's a great one called Redwood, Anxious God, that is sort of about wanting to be able to communicate with trees, be a tree.

It is basically the overstory, Richard Powers' great award-winning novel, condensed into a short little song. She doesn't just give us like a pastoral fantasy. She is using these metaphors and these narratives to talk. about her own, you know, struggles to figure out her place in the contemporary world. We know that humans are messing very seriously with the planet. Each of us knows we need to spend time communing with nature and reminding ourselves that we are part of many ecosystems. But our egos get in the way, our desire to consume gets in the way, our need to move gets

in the way. That's a lot what this record, I think, is about. I've been making my way through Naomi Klein's doppelganger slowly, and I was both delighted and horrified that this album kind of starts with a doppelganger story. It's true, Gemini, and in that one too, she's out sniffing the clover. She stops along the highway and tries to remind herself how important it is to get out of her head and connect. And I can lack communication.

I can lack coordination inside my awkward occupations like a for a truth. It was 2018 when she released her debut album, I Need to Start a Garden, and gained a lot of attention. Great reviews for that album. Yeah. But that's quite a while ago now. And since then, she's really put together this amazing band. She calls them her cool jazz boy band, although I don't think they're all boys.

She's a really distinctive guitar player on her own. Yes. And often in the moments where the guitar is more exposed, she's sort of doing the job that the absent percussion would be doing. There's a lot of, you know, pick noise. The stuff that you usually try to EQ out of a mix gets emphasized in order to give you a little bit of that top end and she'll hit certain beats harder.

The feeling that I get all throughout it is this idea that sort of who you are, like to yourself, to your friends, to your loved ones, to your employers, like whoever it is, like, it is so dependent on context. It has very little to do with some sort of, you know, divinely, you know, determined identity. Julie Hendricks has this classic folk voice. It's not the kind of voice you hear that often in 24. It's really resonant to me looking back at artists like the great Shirley Collins or Bonnie Dobbson who actually wrote the song that the Grateful Dead made famous Morning Dew, R.A.P. Phil Lish, which I think could have been a Haley Hendricks song, honestly. But it's this beautiful,

little, lilton, rich, elastic voice that the only contemporary that I can really think of that is on this level is Laura Marling. I think they have a lot in common. Well, that is Seed of a Seed by Haley Hendrix. Of course, there is so much music out this week that we can't cover in depth. So let us quickly speed through our lightning round. So first off, a couple of records that dropped a line. little bit early, just like Tyler, released on Tuesday, October 29th, Earth Gang, with Perfect Fantasy, and an EP from Flying Lotus called Spirit Box. Some records out today,

new ones by Warren Hayes, MXM Toon, IDK, and Lil Uzi Vert with a sequel to Eternal It Take, his album from 2020. Anne, what do you got? Well, the Canadian folk rocker, Jennifer Castle, has a lovely new album out called Camelot. And this band from Brattleboro, Vermont, called Thus Love, that I'm really excited about. They're like a queer post-punk band, they're sort of this sleazy, sublime group. I love their sound. They have a new record called All Pleasure. And then I have to express my excitement that low-cut Connie, the best live rock band in America,

has a live album out finally. It's called Connie Live. Couple of reissues out today as well. There is a 30th anniversary edition of Weezer's Blue album, as well as a remastered edition of Elliot Smith's posthumous release from a basement on the hill. And finally, this is a big one, so I'm going to take an extra minute with it. The new album from Mount Erie, a pretty spectacular recording that we were very close to covering as a main pick, and what held us back is that it is so, so hard to reduce.

It is long and thorny. it will turn on a dime from traditional instrumentation to these really abrasive sound experiments and back again. Phil Elverham, the songwriter at the center of Mount Erie, has been in this fraught emotional place since the mid-2010s. That was when his partner, the artist Genevieve Castray, died at just 35, left him suddenly as a single father. And every piece of music he's made since then

has in some way been kind of processing that loss. This new album is his first in nearly a decade that feels like something else. If anything, it's a little bit of a return to the feel of his earliest work making music as the microphones for K Records. The hard album to talk about, but in some ways an easy one to listen to you

if you just submit to it. I recommend lying on the floor and playing it as loud as you can. The new album from Mount Erie is called Night Palace. I have a challenge for our devoted listeners out there. I dare you to stack the cure. Tyler and the Mount Erie record, all in sequence on your playlist,

and just experience them all at once. See what happens. It would be like the acid trip you've never taken before. Maybe it's more like ayahuasca, I don't know. I think the Apple Health app might pop up with a notification. Did you mean to do this? Just making sure love your ears. Challenge your ears.

Yeah. All right, after the break, the 1991 album that changed everything. No, not never mind. And what songwriters have been learning from it ever since. That's in a minute. Welcome back to New Music Friday. For the end of the show, indulge us, if you will, some old music Friday because, Anne, there's a guy who's been on our minds lately and an album of his in particular. On October 12th, the power pop hero Matthew Sweet suffered a serious stroke when he was preparing to open a few dates for his friends in Hansen, he was up in Canada, had to be airlifted back to the States. He doesn't have insurance. So like so many musicians now,

he and his team had to put a plea out on GoFundMe. And this is not an unusual story, sadly, tragically, in case you don't know him. He was something of a cult artist, I guess, back in the 90s. He was a modern rock star, but he wasn't like, at the level of Nirvana, certainly. You know, he wasn't, he wasn't at the level of Weezer, let's just say that. He's one of those musicians, musicians. But what really caught my eye about this was that his GoFundMe raised $300,000 in just a few days, which is extraordinary and says a lot about the influence of Matthew Sweet on popular music

and particularly about the enduring importance of this one record he made in 1991. It was his third album. It was called Girlfriend, and basically it kind of defined melodic rock in the early 90s. I'm curious to hear how you first encountered this record, because for me it was a little bit circuitous. I missed the boat on Girlfriend because, I was seven years old. But a couple, go ahead.

But a couple of years later, when I had begun to be a little bit more of an active, you know, participant in the music economy and was going to, you know, like, Tower Records with birthday money, an early pick of mine, a record that I wore out was the Can't Hardly Wait soundtrack. You know, had some familiar things, you know, to me at the time. You had your third eye blind, your blink 182, and what have you.

And then out of nowhere, in the back half of that record is a song called Farther Down by Matthew Sweet, which makes prominent use of a delay pedal. But the thing that really struck me was his voice because it has this incredible purity to it. It's just clear as a bell. And it really, it's extraordinary at blending with itself. And it was years after that when I'd started my job at NPR Music, I sat next to Robin Hilton at the time, and he had girlfriend on his desk. And he was like, do you know this record? Do you like it? And I was like, oh, I've heard that name.

And he was just like, take this home. Give it a listen because I think you'd enjoy it. So that was me. Take this home, little grasshopper, and learn. But tell me about you. Do you remember your first exposure? In 1991, it was a big year. year for rock.

Yeah. Seattle was exploding. Grunge was making its way toward the mainstream. But yeah, here was this record that just from the first notes on Divine Intervention, I was just swept up in this narrative and swept up in the sound of it. And as you said, in the sound of Matthew Sweet's voice, let's just listen to a little bit of the beginning of that song, Divine Intervention. Here's an interesting thing about girlfriend.

there is a strong spine to this book. You know, there is a really definitive, it's a definitive work. And I think that's one of the reasons why girlfriend had so much impact, is that you want to sit and listen to every single song on this and think about how the songs relate to each other. Maybe not a concept album in conception, but perhaps a concept album in application. I can imagine it being the kind of thing that people sort of use as a bookend

and a reference point for a period of their life for a particular relationship. Yeah, that's well said. And, I mean, in fact, there was a very formative incident in Matthew Sweet's life that informed these songs, which was that he had gone through a divorce. And so really the story behind this is that kind of arc of love, desire, love, heartbreak, despair.

Some of the songs definitely have, like, lyrics that, I don't know, you might question today. like this is not necessarily reliable narrator on these songs and he's not always like his the views expressed about the woman uh he desires you know there's some lines you're like in i'm waiting for example when he sings i am waiting and i want to have you you know it's like i want to have you what does that mean i want to have you but you know what that imperfection that even like like the slight creepiness sometimes, that makes it all the better to me. Because this is something I have to say, like I miss sometimes in music now. I want that, I want that like huge swing of emotion that we get

on this record. A couple of years ago, I spoke with Rustin Kelly about the song Teenage Dirt Bag. Oh, yes. Which is also one of my favorite, my favorite unreliable narrator type song. Yeah, so, I mean, a song he didn't write, but he had covered it recently, and it was part of a series that NPR Music was doing about music from 2000. And we sort of had this interesting back and forth about, like, you know, the arc of that song feeling very cinematic, but, you know, cinematic in the sense of the kinds of, you know, teen movies and teen stories that were marketed to young people at the time and seemed to always focus on, you know, a young man who spends too much time inside of his head and just has this very sort of, you know, bitter, like, why doesn't she like me thing animating him? And, you know, sometimes when you go back to stories like that, they can feel a little cringy or creepy, but the ones that survive, I think, are the ones that are just very honest about what it is like to be young and awkward and messy and feeling your feelings at the loudest possible volume. And that's the thing that I think survives here. Totally. I mean, Matthew Sweet also has been public about his struggles with bipolar disorder.

and the emotional swings on this record are so intense. I mean, you have beautiful songs about desire, songs about love, songs about, you know, getting with a girl, like my favorite Evangeline,

which also is a great kind of complicated love song about really being a young woman who is religious and just has the greatest line, you know, What is it? Too bad? The only man she trusts is God above. And then there are just very dark songs, like the song Don't Go, which is just super heavy, painful song about losing someone. A couple tracks before that you have, You Don't Love Me, which is such a beautiful, compassionate song about divorce. Where in the end, he's like, you know what, it's okay. It's okay that you're leaving me. So I think one of the most enduring. during things about this record is its emotional honesty and how it captures this experience of falling in and out of love.

But aside from the lyrics, there's some slight of hand going on with the music. I'm thinking of a song like I Wanted to Tell You, where I noticed there is all this fun, flashy guitar noodling happening, but it's kind of happening in the margins. It's sort of between lines, it's tucked in one headphone, it's not, you know, standing at the head of the parade. It's always sort of subservient to rhythm and the form of the song. And it's not the first thing that you think of when you're thinking about Power Pop. You think about things being a little bit less riff-oriented and a little bit more sort of painting in primary colors. But it doesn't mean that there isn't musicianship here.

Oh my God, real musicianship? Are you kidding? This is like the guitar album of all time. Can I just list the guitar players who are on this record? I mean, beyond Matthew Sweet himself. We have Robert Quine, who was in Richard held the Voidoids and also played with Lou Reed for a long time. We have Richard Lloyd, the guitar architect along with Tom Verlaine,

of the band Television. Lloyd Cole is on this record playing rhythm guitar. Matthew was in Lloyd Cole's band for a little while before he made this record. And Greg Lease, the great pedal steel player, is on this record. It is a rich pageant of guitar. And the producer of this record, Fred Marr also, you know, who had worked with people like Lou Reed, I think he and Matthew together kind of designed this sound that does exactly what you're saying. And in a way, it updates

power pop by taking it apart a little bit. You know, often when I think of power pop, I think of one of two things. I think of either a band like the shoes and these really lush harmonies and, you know, that beach boys, the sound that comes from the beach boys. Or I do think of a little compressed. I think a lot of this music I imagine coming through a transistor radio even if it's not. Right, right, right. Or I think about like the romantics or the neck or it's about these really short, sharp riffs, right? Yeah. But what's cool about girlfriend is that it has all the energy and the the melodicism and the power of power pop. But then it also has the expansiveness and the kind of like just the super fuzz, big muff

of what was going on in Seattle at the time too. And I think that's why this record is so epicult. I mean, it comes out of a tradition that includes, of course, bands like Big Star, the absolute definitive Power Pop band of all time, or Marshall Crenshaw or the DBEs. So it comes out of that tradition, but then it sets the stage for who came later. Amy Rigby, for example, or of course, Fountains of Wayne. I mean, I guess we should talk about Fountains a little bit.

I guess so. I mean, you listen to a song like Utopia Parkway and you can just connect the dots immediately. Or, I mean, the place where I clicked in with Fountains of Wayne was their album Welcome Interstate Managers, which starts with a song called Mexican Wine. Yes. That's talk about how influence works. You've got all of the Matthew Sweet toolkit there in the instrumentation and in the singing style and in the arrangement. But there's also this weird kind of, you know, goofball humor that's sliding in that wasn't really typical of him. So you can see how these things sort of ripple out over time and people make their own modifications to it. I should have also mentioned the bangles and the go-goes because I think Matthew lives in that space too.

And of course he went on to make a couple of records with Susanna Hoffs, actually, from the Bengals. So again, that reverence for the past for the Beatles, for Dylan, you know, like Electric Dylan for the Beach Boys, but then you're asserting your own strong personality. That's what I think this record does so well. Another band we should mention that really came right out of Matthew Sweet. And right out of this record, I think, in a lot of ways, is Death Cab for Cutie. And I have to note that Ben Gibbard actually posted something after Matthew suffered from his stroke. And he said, Matthew Sweet has been one of my favorite songwriter since I first heard his album,

Girlfriend when I was 14 years old. I cannot stress enough how important and inspiring his work has been for me in the years since. And Death Cab even covered a Matthew Sweet song that came from a later record, 100% fun called Sick of Myself. They did this beautiful, it was kind of a hit for me. Matthew actually. They did this beautiful acoustic version of that where you can see that connection so perfectly. Power Pop has really infiltrated the people who are sort of holding up the banner for emo and pop

punk lately. Yes. We talked earlier this year on the show about a record by Oso Oso. I definitely put them in that conversation. There's a kid in Chicago named Snow Ellet that's been doing pretty incredible little mini albums and EPs and stuff that feel very indebted to this sound. And I think the thing that tips me off a lot of the time is there is a certain kind of guitar tone that just sort of exudes sparkle.

I wish I knew more technically about how guitar tones are actually dialed in, but it's a kind of thing that just comes screaming out of car stereo speakers. It'll just cut through anything. Yeah, and that's, I was definitely rocking on the guitars when I was revisiting girlfriend. but I think we should wish Matthew well and say goodbye for now to Girlfriend. Although I hope everyone listening spend some time with the album. I think we should do it on a tender note by talking about the most beautiful ballad on this record. It's called Winona. Guess who it's about?

In many ways, Girlfriend is the reality bites of albums. Matthew Sweet on this record is kind of like the Ethan Hawk of Power Pop musicians And fittingly, before that movie was actually made The movie Reality Bites in which Winona writer stars with Ethan Hawk And Ben Stiller, if you don't know it Matthew wrote this gorgeous little song Called Winona

Were you talking to a friend I tried again much later I love you, Matthew, get better. Folks, that is it for this week's new music Friday. Send your feedback on today's episode to all songs at npr.org. Leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash music newsletter.

And remember, you can get this show sponsor free and support our work by joining NPR Music. Go to plus.npr.org slash NPR Music or search for NPR Music and Apple Podcast to sign up. Today's episode was produced by Simon Rentner. Our editor is Jacob Gans. I'm Daewud Tyler Amin. And I'm Ann Powers. Happy listening, everyone.