Cursive – The Ugly Organ (2014, Vinyl)

Art is Hard was the single off The Ulgy Organ that caught me. The whole album is self-discovery wrapped in a thin gauze. On Recluse, the other single from the album, the protagonist hopes to be “not that desperate” when thinking about staying in the bed of a one night stand because he’s worried he’ll never be able to get back in. A beat later, he realizes he is that desperate.

Art is Hard is a song about the nonsensical idea of the wounded artist. A songwriter telling himself or being told by an exec they need to “recreate your misery” to sell albums. It’s a fascinating song because the idea of failure as muse is two things – crazy and impossible to shake.

Reading Hemmingway or Joyce or Wilde or Chabon or Dickinson, you get the feeling that they’ve tapped into the horror of their own lives to make something beautiful. You couldn’t do that if you didn’t have horror to tap into, right?

Here’s the thing. I really like Spider-Man: Homecoming. I know Johnathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have some relevant background. Goldstein was raised in NYC and Daley was on Freaks and Geeks. So that stuff is important, sure. I don’t think, though, either was ever a teenage crimefighter coming to grips with the powers imbued in them by a radioactive spider.

The story is still compelling. The characters are believable. The thing holds together well despite these drawbacks.

You don’t have to be the people in the story or have lived a specific life to generate good work. The deification of sadness is bad news. The people who make art driven by depression don’t end up in good spots and they could make the art without the pain. Or they could make different art, that’s a thing too.

The Ugly Organ isn’t entirely about overcoming expectations of misery. A lot of it is about loss, regret and the weirdness of life. It’s the presentation of those things as reflective experiences that makes the album coherent and powerful.

Instead of telling a sad story, Kasher sings about what happens after the sad story. What the characters think about the events that have unfolded. Art is Hard isn’t about being told to be sad to make art, it’s about thinking about being sad and the burden that puts on a songwriter. 

In Sierra, probably my favorite song on the album, the character seems to be basically stalking his ex-lover and daughter. He sees her from afar and wonders about the life she’s now living, regretting his forced distance.

“I’ll never know
Know who you are
And I don’t deserve to”

He envisions her life and the father who now lives with her. He wonders about the things a person would just know if they hadn’t screwed something up so irreparably that they were walled off from that life. It’s not about the thing he screwed up, it’s about the way he now feels.

The reflection makes it that much more powerful. Regret is one of the things I’m most terrified of. I feel it all the time, but I can’t shake it’s impact on me. At the end of this post, you’ll find the poem BoJack’s father reads in the penultimate episode of BoJack Horseman. It does a great job of capturing the thing I’m terrified of.

Reflection is one of the parts of life I most enjoy. I mean, I’m writing a blog about pieces of plastic I bought. Maybe it’s assumed.

I didn’t end up listening to much Cursive outside of The Ugly Organ. Kasher has said the first three albums weren’t as personal. The band was trying to make the music they liked instead of their own music. 

(Cafe aside. If you’re on a conference call, you mimic being in a meeting. That means, if you’re learning something, you take notes, listen intently and maybe ask a question. If you’re leading the call, you make yourself interesting. A good meeting lead keeps the spotlight on themselves. As such, if you’re leading a meeting in a coffee shop, you’re inadvertently making yourself the center of attention for everyone else in the shop. Please, please don’t do that. Lady.)

People seem to love their stuff, with Happy Hollow being another standout. I should listen to that more/at all.

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‘The View From Halfway Down’

As written by Alison Tafel for BoJack Horseman
Nicked from Vulture’s oral history of the final episode

The weak breeze whispers nothing
The water screams sublime
His feet shift teeter-totter
Deep breath, stand back, it’s time

Toes untouch the overpass
Soon he’s water bound
Eyes locked shut but peek to see
The view from halfway down

A little wind, a summer sun
A river rich and regal
A flood of fond endorphins
Brings a calm that knows no equal

You’re flying now
You see things much more clear than from the ground
It’s all okay, it would be
Were you not now halfway down

Thrash to break from gravity
What now could slow the drop?
All I’d give for toes to touch
The safety back at top

But this is it, the deed is done
Silence drowns the sound
Before I leaped I should have seen
The view from halfway down

I really should have thought
About the view from halfway down
I wish I could have known
About the view from halfway down