Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

You may not have noticed, but the sun was shining this morning. It was warm. A sweet breeze was blowing. It was as if the spirit of life were refilling the empty, fragile vessels of our souls. That’s right. After a long hiatus, Gossip Girl is back. I’m just praying that my tears of joy don’t fall on my keyboard and cause computer problems.

Also, I watched this off the DVR, so the time stamps are pretty useless. The whole blog is pretty useless, actually.

10:25 Zomg! GG is back!

Isn’t B obligated to inform her best friend that Nate is, in fact, a lamewad?

So Damien is from the same boarding school that S went to because she was a giant whore. Is this the uh, School for Scoundrels or something?

10:29 Hi Damien. Got any drugs you need to be delivered?

10:30 I probably should have looked over my last recap so I can remember why Rufus is pissed at Lily. This has been a long hiatus!

Since when are jewelers like lawyers and priests? Client confidentiality? What the hell is that?

10:31 “My grandfather got sick of watching me text you” = “My grandfather got sick of me.” Also, Serena wants to take things slow with Nate. I feel like anything would be slower than like, doing it on the bar. So carry on.

10:33 Remember when Dan was desperately in love with Serena? And now he’s casually giving Nate advice about her. Good turnaround, Dan. What a disappointment you are.

10:35 This is absurd! Jenny is making drug jackets! What a rotten human!

Anna Karenina roleplaying. Even as an English major, I don’t really appreciate that one.

10:38 Oh, that’s right. Rufus is going to shack up with the woman from the co-op. There’s that little subplot. How could I have forgotten!

10:40 But Serena, you’re right. The last thing you want to do IS rush into something! Why do I know your life better than you?

10:41 “I thought you lived on the Upper East side with your wife.” Just when I think Dan is a useless drip, he goes and redeems himself with a killer line.

“This wasn’t a Parent Trap situation that you and jenny could swoop in on.” Rufus with the burn! Did they get like, the good writers to take on this scene?

10:44 I’d like to see Jenny try to outsmart the international drug dealer.

10:45 Is that the first time someone has mentioned that Blair’s social-climbing agenda isn’t the most important thing in the world? Seems like it.

1047 Do you think the outfit that jenny would have worn with the sweet tart jacket would have displayed her cleavage as amply as serena’s? probably not, right?

10:51 You’ve changed, Serena? So why are you wearing a jacket made of drugs? Eh?

10:52 “That whore may be my mother.” I keep forgetting that it was painfully apparent to all of us that Chuck’s mom was at Bart’s grave, but that the folks in the show would never assume that in a million years. Woops.

Whoa, the masquerade ball was two years ago? The sands of time are slipping through my fingers like so many . . . grains of sand.

10:55 I really liked Serena’s shoes.

Hey, good idea Rufus, talking to your wife about your problems.

10:59 So . . . is this woman lying? Is it bad that I can’t tell? She’s got to be lying, right?

Also, is there any reason why we should believe that Blair’s super powers of persuasion work on grownups?

11:03 Come ON, rufus. You’re acting like your kid!

11:06 that newborn in the locket looked JUST LIKE CHUCK!

As always, I’m writing about the Oscars because I like movies and I watch them from time to time, and I’m always trying to position Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun within the zeitgeist. I only saw a few of the nominated films, namely Inglorious Basterds and a bootleg copy of Avatar, so as usual, all opinions should be taken with the requisite grains of sodium chloride. And for previous Oscar commentary, go here!

8:32 How about a Harold and Kumar reference in the opening musical number? Fun!

8:33 Also, remember like, ten years ago when Neil Patrick Harris was nobody? Does anyone even refer to him just “the guy that was Doogie Howser” anymore?

8:37 I usually don’t like saying these things, at the risk of sounding like I’m the kind of guy that thinks women are objects, but Helen Mirren = hot. Yeah, I said it.

8:39 In our first movie, we were both born a poor black child. That was kinda funny.

8:43 This George Clooney scowling thing in the opening monologue is supposed to be a gag, right? Am I just not in touch enough to get it? Because I’m pulling my collar like crazy over here! Also, I didn’t see his movie, but I think Jeff Bridges is owed an Oscar after being snubbed for his betrayal as Dude Lebowski.

8:47 Ah ha! An actor nominated from a movie I actually saw! Christoph Waltz for best supporting actor!

8:48 Ding ding ding.

8:50 I don’t like Ryan Reynolds being all solemn and serious, introducing The Blind Side. This is Van Wilder, dammit! Chris Brander! Is this some sort of preparation for us to take him seriously as Hal Jordan?

8:52 Does everyone else have a The Bounty Hunter commercial on right now? And are you all weirded out that King Leonidas is now the go-to guy for soulless, forgettable action flicks and cookie cutter romantic comedies?

8:56 Does this Steve Carrel thing mean that Jude Law won’t be appearing on this broadcast? I’m a huge Jude Law guy : (

8:57 I like what they do with the cartoons. That is all. I gotta go for Coraline here, because it was written by a guy that writes comic books. Like, really writes comic books.

8:58 College Humor says what needs to be said about Pixar.

9:00 Is Miley Cyrus on stilts? Look at how tall she is!

9:02 Reinhart Wagner, nominated for best original song. Is he German?

9:04 Neither of these guys who won look like a “T-Bone Burnett.” I think the guy that said “I love you more than rainbows, baby” should be named T-Bone.

9:06 Why didn’t they make the previews for District 9 as good as that little montage? I probably would have seen it!

9:10 David Carr signed with the 49ers? Who’s our backup now? Sorry, this has nothing to do with the Oscar broadcast. It’s just a reason for concern.

9:13 I, for one, am thrilled with how Robert Downey’s career has panned out.

9:17 Molly Ringwold? Where’d she come from? I haven’t seen her since that episode of Family Guy.

9:17.5 Of course it’s a John Hughes memorial, so now I feel like a big jerk.

9:19 Breakfast Club, Shmreakfast Club, when was anyone gonna tell me that John Hughes wrote Home effing Alone? And Christmas Vacation!

9:25 Margaret Monroe of Washington, DC, has never seen Christmas Vacation. I thought the world should know.

9:34 Yup. Short films.

9:45 Wait a sec, 72 percent of America preferred their toilet paper over the roll? How is that even possible!

9:48 Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire was based on a book? How about that.

9:53 They honored Roger Corman? That’s actually kinda awesome. I know a guy that works for him nowadays.

10:00 This is a make-up Oscar for Mo’nique, after she was snubbed for her portrayal of Cherry in Beerfest.

10:20 Bride of Frankenstein was a pretty good flick. Thoughts?

10:24 I feel like it would be much cooler if they actually like, recorded an actual RPG blowing up an actual cop car in that scene from The Dark Knight.

10:26 Now, does every member of the Academy get an equal vote for every category? What the hell does some writer know about sound mixing?

10:32 I’m glad we don’t have to see those Yaz commercials that are solely about how Yaz is actually deadly poison. Girls falling into bathtubs with their clothes on is much more whimsical than “Our last ad lied to you about how harmful our product is.”

10:35 Is this a glitch? I feel like the cinematography category should have some like, examples of good cinematography. Right?

10:39 I like James Taylor, but they couldn’t get Sir Paul to sing the song he co-wrote?

10:45 Remember when J-Lo used to put out records? “I’m Real” with Ja-Rule is still an awesome song!

10:51 Those guys were spinning on their heads for like, 30 seconds! That was a crazy. Maybe this is a legion of extraordinary dangers. Also, thank you, Alan Moore, for giving us the “Group Noun of Extraordinary Plural Nouns” construction.

11:01 I’m a huge Matt Damon guy. I don’t care who knows it, either. Also, this Burma movie looks wicked heavy. Yikes!

11:02 And then a movie about slaughtering dolphins? WTF?

1103 Seriously, Hollywood. Can we get a documentary with some whimsy? I’m about to cry.

11:05 Awesome awesome awesome. The producer of the winning documentary, The Cove, is the same guy that played Lyle Corman, the critic from the Philadelphia Inquirer who gave Paddy’s Pub a scathing review on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. H/t to my roommate for figuring that one out.

11:10 I’m kinda rooting for Jeremy Renner. Not because I saw The Hurt Locker. But because I saw 28 Weeks Later, and I kinda liked it!

11:12 People might treat this like a joke, but good for the pride of New Jersey, Buzz Aldrin, for appearing on Dancing with the Stars. I’m rooting for him full-throatedly.

11:19 Here’s the thing about Avatar. You’re a human, so when you’re not in your avatar, it’s sleeping. Presumably because you’re awake and doing human things. Don’t you also have to be awake while you’re in the pod and you’re controlling the avatar? Because if you’re actually the mind giving agency to this puppet, don’t you yourself have to be conscious? So when does the human sleep? Did this get established in the movie? And I’m not talking about established in a “we have one scene where Jake is tired in his video diary” way. I mean was this problem actually addressed and resolved in a grown-up way.

11:25 What happened to Michelle Pfeiffer? Is she not a big star any more?

11:26 I don’t know if I’m digging this “co-star yap yap yapping about the nominee” thing. These are Hollywood actors here. They don’t need to be praised any more than they’ve already been praised!

11:32 We all saw this Jeff Bridges win coming, right? The Dude abides, right?

11:34 Oh hey, Julianne Moore was just on stage. She played Maude Lebowski!

11:48 Did the Academy just not want to have to decide between Meryl Streep and the girl from Precious?

11:55 Is it cool or funny or something that the woman that directed Point Break just won best director?

11:58 I guess James Cameron will have to console himself with his millions and millions of dollars. I should probably also get The Hurt Locker on-demand? People seem to think it’s a good movie.

I wouldn’t really say that I’m tremendously versed in the world of art, especially contemporary art, but I know what I like, and I know what I don’t like. So for anyone who ever looked at, for instance, Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Panel and said “Oooooh…I get it…so, how about that local sports team,” I give you Sebastian Smee’s review of the Whitney Biennial from the Globe. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such utter pwnage in an art review. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such utter pwnage. The choice lines start in the second graf:

Unfortunately—and there’s no gentle way to put this—the show as a whole is a debacle. Not only is it incoherent, it is overburdened with art about art, sloppy gestures of pseudo-revolt, dreary and repetitive video art, and arcane conceptualism.

Then Smee goes after the curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari:

They are so mired in outdated academic discourse and aesthetic navel-gazing that they can no longer tell good from bad, engaging from alienating. Even when they do find good things, they fail to display them in lucid and sympathetic surroundings.

Oof. Then a series of dreadful installations that are

conceptually overloaded, politically limp, tedious, arcane—you name it.

The coda is a piece called Couch for a Long Time by Jessica Jackson Hutchins, which inspires this reaction:

You look at it, and search your memory for anything that has looked quite as arbitrary, as ugly, or as pointless.

Yikes. I won’t pontificate about contemporary movements in art, since it should be abundantly clear that I really don’t know shit. But it’s very refreshing to know that I’m not an idiot for looking at, for instance, Scott Short’s Untitled (White), and thinking “Huh?” Maybe it’s the artists who don’t know shit!

“I cannot self-terminate”? Is there some functional reason for the T-800 not to be able to destroy itself? What if the Terminator’s mission objective is best achieved by self-destructing? Or did we need an excuse to have a slow, heart-wrenching ending?

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know exactly what I’m talking about.

Why the hell does Glen Gulia think he can trust Robbie Hart enough to admit that he’s off chasing skirts behind Julia’s back? He doesn’t know Robbie!

Meeting the girl of my dreams? Landing that writing gig at the New Yorker? Closing out Game 7 of the World Series? Silly readers, none of those moments, were they to happen, would even come close to being in the same ballpark of being able to be even remotely compared to this:

Sonic 4? A side scroller? That picks up right after the action of Sonic and Knuckles? Yes, please!

You people might not understand how significant an event this is. I’ve been a Sega guy my whole life. I never owned a Nintendo, but I did own a Sega CD and a Dreamcast. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is, in this blogger’s myopic opinion, the single greatest achievement in the history of video games. I played that game until my thumbs were raw and bloody. The Sonic games of my late adolescence, early teens, late teens, early 20s, and mid 20s have been, to say the least, uninspiring. But this? This Sonic 4? This thing looks like it was handed down by God Herself. I’m beside myself with excitement.

Why didn’t they just spin the boot at the beginning of the chug, long before the threat of the vortex bubble was ever an issue?

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me

1) Brand New, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006)

After a month and a half of this endeavor, you might have come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of crap on this list. I love every album on the list dearly, but I’m self-aware enough to admit that I wouldn’t go to a wine and cheese party and try to wax philosophic about the subtler nuances of Taking Back Sunday.

As I said in this week’s vital interpolation, and this should have come as a surprise to no one, taste in music is subjective. And so while I chafe slightly at the judgment of sundry music snobs looking down their nose at the music I like, it usually rolls of my back quickly when I realize that everyone likes crap in some form or other, including the snobs. I try to avoid proclaiming that the stuff I like is any better or worse than the stuff you like, because really, who are any of us to judge?

All of this is to say, were I to find myself at a wine and cheese party and someone broached the topic of the best albums of the Zeroes, I would probably wait around patiently, noshing on my smoked gouda-on-a-table-water-cracker before politely interjecting, “Yes, This Is It was a very good album, but did you listen to The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me?”

Devil and God puts me in mind of the great paradox that we all find ourselves in w/r/t our favorite bands. On the one hand, there’s a reason you love them, so you want to hear the same, consistent sound. Of course, the band that stays consistent opens itself to accusations of being a one-trick pony, a trite and hackneyed joke. On the other hand, we like our bands to grow and develop. But if a band strays too much from the winning formula, well, “howling fantods” isn’t a strong enough term to describe our reaction. (I can’t count how many different people listed “old Blink-182″ as a favorite band in their AIM profile after Enema of the State came out.) So, in review, we want our bands to keep the same sound that made us fall in love with them, but also to develop and advance musically. Got it?

I think this desire for our favorite bands to grow (if it’s not something I completely invented) is kind of like a security blanket. We get to cling to the bands of our youth, but it’s not pathetic, because look, they’re actually a better band than they were when I started listening to them. If our bands don’t grow with us, it’s like a betrayal. We’re forced to look into the eyes of our own mortality and admit that there are some things that have to be left in the toybox. Take it from me: I just spent a month littering the tubes with however many words about emo records from eight years ago.

When Devil and God came out at the end of 2006, Brand New fans were almost at the end of their ropes. It had been more than three years since the release of their sophomore effort, the excellent Deja Entendu. Which would be fine, were it not for the band’s notoriously reclusive nature. There were no dates, no news, no nothing until early 2006, when nine untitled demos recorded for the new album leaked onto the Internet. (Incidentally, shortly thereafter I found myself sitting at a bar in Providence, Rhode Island, after the first show Brand New had played in almost two years, with lead guitarist Vin Accardi. [This is like, the only name-dropping story I have, so please indulge me. And Linda, please corroborate this in comments.] He said that one of the tech guys in the studio had had those demos [which took on the moniker Fight Off Your Demons, after the band's new URL, and is a pretty damn good album in its own right] on an iPod, which he proceeded to accidentally leave in a pizza parlor, where it was somehow picked up by some enterprising fan who proceeded to put them on the Internet. It seemed like a far-fetched story, to say the least.)

Long story short, Brand New’s third album was much-anticipated, and I bought it the minute it came out. I can’t lie: I was underwhelmed! It was too dark. It was too much of a departure from the band’s emo roots. I took to heart criticisms like those leveled in Rolling Stone’s dismissal of the album: “But the selling—and sticking—point is still dark drama, with shadowy, shimmery textures, agonized choruses and frontman Jesse Lacey yowling away and dropping ponderous poetry like a guy with his heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf.” I had the reaction of a self-loathing pop punk fan: it was inconceivable that an emo band I liked could produce a serious piece of art.

I’ve been beating this quote into the ground, but it’s always been true: the songs you grow to like never stick at first. The more I listened, the more every track grew on me, to the point where I would just listen to the whole thing all the way through. That’s right: there’s no skippable song. Not only was the music masterful; that could have been expected, based on the leap Brand New made between Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Entendu. Not only were the words poetry; Jesse Lacey is a crafter of lyrical miracles. No one disputes this. I guess I just wasn’t prepared to encounter an actual thought-provoking album, where I would find myself thinking about the songs long after I stopped listening. Is it so bad for a songwriter to have his “heart on his sleeve and a couple of philosophy books on his shelf”? That’s a couple more philosophy books than most people have!

So, what happens when an emo band grows up? They find God, in a manner of speaking. (You couldn’t tell from the title of the album?) Yes, Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s favorite album of the decade is also the most existentially dreadful one on the list. It’s refreshing, in its way. I understand that not a lot of people are going to the Billboard charts for their theology, but on the other end, there’s not a whole lot of critical thought regarding religion going on in popular music these days. It’s like Kanye says: “They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus. / That means guns, sex, lies, video tapes, / But if I talk about God my record won’t get played.”

I won’t dissect entire album’s various religious messages, just what I think is the main one: redemption, and its possibility or lack thereof. In the second track, “Millstone” (that’s an allusion to Mark 9:42, for those scoring at home: “And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck”), we get the first seed of doubt: “I used to pray like God was listening,” Lacey laments, before a uh, fine point is put on things in “Jesus.” The song is one side of a conversation between our protagonist and Our Lord and Savior himself, asking all the usual questions: “Well Jesus Christ I’m alone again. / So what did you do those three days you were dead? / ‘Cause this problem’s gonna last more than the weekend. / Well Jesus Christ I’m not scared to die. / I’m a little bit scared of what comes after: / Do I get the gold chariot? / Do I float through the ceiling? / Do I divide and pull apart?”

At the end, we get to Lacey’s view of the relationship between Christ and ourselves: “And I know you think that I’m someone you can trust, / But I’m scared I’ll get scared / And I swear I’ll try to nail you back up . . . / But we’ve all got wood and nails. / We don’t turn out hate in factories.” Say what you will about how crummy Christianity has been and continues to be, but I think we can all agree that Jesus was a pretty righteous dude. To imply that after 2,000 odd years, we would still be compelled to fear and punish that kind of goodness, and further, that the spark of hatred and violence doesn’t come from the outside, but rather burns in every man’s heart, says a lot about Jesse Lacey’s low opinion of humanity in general. Is he right? Do each of us have wood and nails?

Clearly, mankind is still in need of redemption, but you won’t find a ton of it in The Devil and God. (To wit, in “You Won’t Know,” for instance, we learn that “They say in Heaven there’s no husbands and wives. / On the day that I show up they’ll be completely out of their forgiveness supplies.” Oh well, right?) Fortunately, we hear from JC himself later on in the album, which leads me to my

Signature track: Limousine

“Limousine” is a song about a young girl named Katie Flynn who was killed in a drunk driving accident on Long Island in 2005. It’s a terrible enough story, some of the details of which are recounted here, to inspire a complete stranger to write a haunting, powerful song about it. There’s an interpretation of “Limousine,” which I’ll run with here, that says the song features the voices of the three principles in Katie’s story. The first long, chant-like portion of the song is supposed to be her mother. The second, a prayer from her killer. And finally, Katie speaks in the muted portion behind the frenetic climax of “Limousine,” reflecting on the life she’ll never get to actually live: “I’ll never have to buy adjacent plots of earth. / We’ll never have to rot together underneath the earth. / I’ll never have to lose my baby in the crowd. / I should be laughing right now.”

(I encourage you to watch the band play this song live. That link is from a show I actually went to a few months ago. It’s eerie and moving stuff, and probably the closest thing I’ve seen to a collective spiritual experience at a rock show.)

I’m most concerned with that middle part, though: “Dear Beauty Supreme, / Yeah you were right about me. / But can I get myself back from underneath this guilt that will crush me? / And in the choir I saw our sad messiah. / He was bored and tired of my laments. / Said, ‘I’d die for you one time but never again.’” Never again. Ouch. A lot of us consider God or Jesus or whoever as an all-forgiving, all-redeeming presence, and there are certainly arguments for that way of thinking. Taken rationally, though (and I know that’s a lot to ask of religion [I don't mean that as a dig!]), the question Lacey is asking here is, what more can we ask of Christ? If dying for us isn’t enough to get humanity on the right track, what else is there that a savior can do? Of course, it’s catechismical common sense that the whole redemption thing is a two-way street: God will take care of you if you do your part. Lacey takes a bit of a more pessimistic position: if you were hoping for a higher power to look out for you, you might be out of luck.

At first blush, this is a tremendous downer. And I’ll offer my amateur, theological know-nothing interpretation of Jesse Lacey’s lyrics, but I won’t speak for whatever kind of faith the man has in his heart. He may very well believe that there’s no hope for us at all, and considering that the types of tragedies that took the life of Katie Flynn are happening every day all over the world, it’s understandable that he would think that’s the case. I take a more affirmative message from “Limousine,” and from the whole album in general. I sort of kind of addressed this issue back in the day on this blog’s earlier iteration, w/r/t Barack Obama’s election, and the perfectibility of our union, but there’s a message there that applies to the conduct of our lives in general: “Thou mayest rule over sin.” Or thou mayest not. It’s up to you. If God isn’t listening, and if Christ died for us one time but never again, then that means that if we’re to be redeemed, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Making ourselves, and our world, better is our own responsibility, and no one else’s. And if it turns out that God is there, we’ll have done right by him. Feather on.

Stay What You Are

2) Saves the Day, Stay What You Are (2001)

When I was in grammar school and high school, I was obviously into listening to music, but not really in a way beyond listening to what was on the radio. (For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s younger readers, a radio was an electronic box that received signals through the air and transformed them into music. [For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun's older and well, my-aged readers, did anyone else always have a blank tape in the stereo, and go home immediately after school and listen to the radio until dinnertime, and record all the songs you liked {except you'd always have to time it so you didn't include the insipid DJ chatter at the start, so even though you had eight tapes and they all had Blink 182's "Dammit" on it, none of them had the guitar riff in the intro. Does} anyone remember] that?)

Long story short, I listened to plenty of music, but none of it was stuff that wasn’t at or near the top of the alternative rock charts, so I never had the type of punk-rock, emo outcast, let’s-go-to-a-local-band’s-concert-at-the-American-Legion-hall musical youth that a lot of people I know had. Which is a shame, because I would have loved to have checked out a Saves the Day show in some dingy parish center in Bloomfield, plugged in, playing tunes from Can’t Slow Down, maybe dancing next to some skinny Northern Jersey emo chick with dark eyeliner and some metal in her face. Who knows how things would have turned out!

Stay What You Are is a bit of a departure from Saves the Day’s first two punkier albums. The lyrics and melodies are a little more subdued. (I say this, but then you listen to a song like “As Your Ghost Takes Flight,” with such lyrics as “The last time that I saw you, August of ‘99, / I should’ve had my hammer and a few rusty spikes / To nail you on a wall and use bottles to catch your blood / And display you for the neighbors so they know your time had come.” So, you know, take my judgment with a grain of salt.) The first track, “At Your Funeral” (which includes my favorite bassline in all of rock music), sets the tone for the upbeat nature of the album. I say “upbeat” in a strictly musical sense, as the lyrical content sways from angry (the aforementioned “As Your Ghost Takes Flight”) to depressed (”See You”: And I’ll wear glass shoes and plastic wrap. / No, I’ll just wear my insides. / You want to know who I really am? / Yeah so do I) to ecstatic (”Firefly”: We’re up and we’re out and we’re yelling through the streets / and I’m out of my fucking mind) to despondent (”All I’m Losing Is Me”: The moon hangs like the blade of an axe tonight, / And it’s poised to drop sometime soon enough / On this dump truck where I lie mixed up with the morning’s trash) to whistful (”Nightingale”: I’ll have to walk a thousand miles just to find the ground deserving of your feet). It’s all couched in (relatively) peppy melodies, the value of which can’t be overstated: no matter what mood you’re in, there’s a song on this album that’ll make you feel better, or at least validated. (And if you’re just in the mood for some good tunes, then you’re in luck.)

Signature track: “This Is Not An Exit”

One time, I asked my ex-girlfriend what her favorite color was. (I don’t mean to keep bringing her up on this blog, because Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun is most certainly NOT that kind of blog. It just so happens that this particular anecdote that includes her as a foil is the best way for me to introduce a point I’d like to make about Saves the Day.) Anyway, she looked at me like I had 10 heads. “What do you mean, favorite color,” she asked. “I like a lot of colors.” My favorite color is green. I figured everyone had a favorite color. Everyone had favorite colors when were kids, right? It’s how you knew what ball to pick when you played mini golf, or which kinds of M&Ms to save for last when you had a whole handful. I was left feeling like I had missed the boat on opening my heart to new colors.

And then I wondered if people feel the same way about songs. They have to, right? If a person can’t commit to a color (and I’m limiting “color” here to like, the rainbow and its reasonable offshoots. I don’t want to hear any “I like #F600FF” nonsense in the comments), how could they possibly commit to a song? I don’t know how it works. But I do know that “This Is Not An Exit” is my favorite song.

Not my favorite rock tune. Not my favorite song of the decade. My favorite song. It’s not that other songs aren’t good. It’s just that I like this one the most. That’s why you’re reading about this album, plain and simple. All of its songs are very very good, and one of them is my favorite. And, at the end of the day, if the hook sets in the bottom of our lungs, we’ll rip it out and lick the blood off with our tongues.