What I Think it Might Feel Like to Be the Frontman Of Brand New, a Band I Finally Put Aside My Indie Rock-Pretensions For and Started Actively Engaging With About a Month Ago
So imagine you’re an Aspiring Artist type, specifically a writer, and you have just dedicated the last two years of your life to writing a novel. You have been told that thinking about reviews is bad, but you do it anyway, and your mental reviews are almost outlandishly positive. You know it sounds lame, but you really do want your novel to affect readers in the same way that novels you’ve loved (which, for the most part, are Canonized and/or Subculturally Approved) have affected you. And then finally, after drinking a celebratory Keystone Light (your favorite beer!!) you work up the courage to mail the thing to your editor, and then you get so excited and nervous that you end up drinking the entire case of Keystone and passing out and then wake up the next morning to your ringing phone. “Congradulations, Mr. Aspiring Artist,” your editor says. “We loved it!” You immediately grab a Keystone and are about to crack the lid when he says: “The publishers want 9-14 for the back, but I’m thinking this thing deserves to be read by the 8-15 y.o. demographic. Personally I think we can fight for this.” And suddenly it occurs to the A.A. that his editor thinks he wrote a preteen novel. The kind of novel that gets reviewed by Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly only; the kind of novel that fat, lazy 5th graders write book reports on with the help of their helicoptering parents; that special kind of book that absolutely nobody above the age of twelve reads.
And that is how the book is marketed. Eventually it becomes a huge Perks of Being a Wallflower-type success, but that does nothing to fill the Critically Acclaimed and Subculturally Approved hole the A.A. has in his now-grotesquely-rich heart. Crying fourteen-year-olds show up to his book signings, crudely designed fan sites dot his Google Alerts, but none of it fucking matters: he wouldn’t know who he was, if he wasn’t himself.
Okay so about Brand New.
They’ve covered Built to Spill live. They’ve publicly professed admiration for Archers of Loaf. Their debut album references both The Smiths and The Cure, albeit in too-clever and/or less-than-clever ways (“I’m sick of…the way you always criticize The Smiths and Morrisey” on “Mixtape”; an entire line cribbed from “Close to Me” on “Logan to Government Center”). And yet the audience for those bands and Brand New’s audience are entirely different, in that the former is comprised of Tastemaking Types and Pretentious College Kids, and the latter is comprised of screaming teenage girls and people whose taste in music you sneer at over your New Yorker.
Brand New and the bands they idolize express pretty similar emotions (yearning, self-hatred, How It Feels to Be Young and Maybe Smart), the only difference being that Brand New actually say what they’re feeling. That isn’t usually tolerated in indie rock, unless you’re Gareth Campesino!; you can make a sensitive, introspective song, but the lyrics better fucking be about spitting on strangers and choreographing animals in the sea if you wanna see that shit on Pitchfork.
And listen, I know it’s more about the art itself and if they’re happy with it then who cares (and also they are probably richer than fifteen Kurt Viles combined) but you have to imagine it’s hard, to be a grown-up artist making ostensibly grown-up music that is mostly just appreciated by your younger sister. (And keep in mind I’m only halfway through their discography, so maybe this is premature.)
