1999, The Year Power-Pop Broke (My Heart)

Okay, well, first of all, power-pop never broke, or broke my heart, so jot that down. I was just looking for a clever title. (And I was able to riff on a track from a power-pop debut album from nearly a decade later, too.)

Three of my favorite albums at least adjacent in the genre came out that year. I was of varying familiarity with the bands involved. Wilco, of course, carried a great deal of personal significance to me even before 2001. I was largely familiar with the Flaming Lips through their inexplicable mainstream breakout with “She Don’t Use Jelly”– and indeed, didn’t get to this album for a couple of years after it came out, though by that point I was familiar with a couple more of their songs. I’d heard Fountains of Wayne’s debut album– pretty sure I picked it up on CD at some point– and certainly had heard “Radiation Vibe,” their first single, first track on their first album, and an outstanding summer jam track. (Though they might have topped themselves in that regard on Utopia Parkway.)

All three released albums in 1999 that in some way could be described as “power-pop,” though perhaps increasingly tenuously as this article goes on. (Hey, maybe they “broke” from power pop, which means this title makes sense!) Let’s start with the most straightforwardly power-pop album of the three.

Fountains of Wayne, Utopia Parkway

I’m always a little astounded when I remember I knew about something back when I had to be more resourceful to actually find it. In this case, I’d heard of Fountains of Wayne… somewhere. On the radio? In Rolling Stone? I’d heard “Radiation Vibe,” a great power-pop summer jam, and I’d eventually buy the first self-titled album, though I’m not sure I had done so yet or if I bought it concurrently with Utopia Parkway. In any case, I learned Utopia Parkway was out from hearing lead single “Denise” on some internet-streaming radio station from a bigger city, somewhere the culture was both less homogenous and less shitty. I did pick up both albums on CD; while they are both quite good, I think the second one is a little better.

If you know anything about Fountains of Wayne, and what a great songwriting duo Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood were (the late Schlesinger, in particular, has many more notable credits, such as “That Thing You Do!” and his role as songwriter and executive producer for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), then I really don’t need to sell you on the quality of this album. I can’t say I find the emotional depth in it I do in the latter two, although it was apparently conceived to be unified with a strong sense of location– appropriate to a band named after a highway-side lawn-ornament store in Wayne, New Jersey– but it is upbeat and a lot of fun, full of great power-pop songs. And location specificity aside, the stories largely speak to more universal experiences– whichever big-city parkway represents your dream, or whichever girl at Liberty Travel you crush on, or whichever tattoo you get or other dumb thing you do to impress her.

Speaking of those songs, the album has a pretty diverse stylistic lineup for a power-pop record, and the differences between the three show it well. I love the guitar tones on “Utopia Parkway,” and for contrast, there’s also the laser-gun sounds of “Red Dragon Tattoo” and the crunchy garage tone of “Denise.”

Even the more straightforward, less standout numbers are pretty pleasurable power-pop songs, like “Laser Show” and “Lost in Space.” “It Must Be Summer” might be an even better summer jam than “Radiation Vibe,” as the title suggests; I also mean specifically for summer. (It’s a great song, but don’t make me choose between the two.)

There isn’t a bad song on the album. “Hat and Feet” has the similar low-key energy to their debut’s “Sink to the Bottom.” “A Fine Day for a Parade” is a nice touch of melancholy narrative, expanding the kind of themes and tone the band would use. That slight expansion without changing what made the first album great sort of makes this their Radio City to Fountains of Wayne‘s #1 Record. “Sort of,” because nothing can touch those two albums; they’re the blueprint for power-pop. But they’re great albums in their own right.

I have a faint memory of some critic calling “Prom Theme” ironic, and I don’t get that at all; it works perfectly as the real thing. (It is possible I am confusing this with a comment on “Please Don’t Rock Me Tonight” from their first album.) And “The Senator’s Daughter” is a gorgeous ballad to close to the album, one of my favorite tracks on the record.

1999 was also the year of American Pie, and Fountains of Wayne would take advantage of the MILF Appreciation Era kicked off by that movie with a track on their next album. I’ve never much cared for “Stacy’s Mom,” as it always felt like a gimmick to me, a band I already liked and thought deserved success doing something nakedly commercial. On the other hand, I hope it got them paid, because they deserved to get that bag.

Wilco, Summerteeth

Wilco started moving away from alt-country as soon as Being There, but Summerteeth represented a total break from alt-country, and more fully incorporating power-pop and baroque pop into their rock. I touched on this, of course, when writing about Wilco’s magnum opus; Pet Sounds might have been a little optimistic on my part as a comparison point (especially since, well, the next album drew its own comparisons in that regard), but similarly to what that record told us about the Beach Boys, it reflects a maturity in the band and an expansion of their sound, without losing their gifts for hooks and melodies.

The more upbeat, poppy, and straightforward (as straightforward at Wilco gets, anyway) tracks are best represented by opener “Can’t Stand It,” and the back-to-back “I’m Always in Love” and “Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (again).” (“ELT” is another great example, although I still suspect Tweedy lifted the intro from Elvis Costello’s “I Can’t Stand up for Falling Down.”)

Hidden track “Candyfloss” might be the most overtly power-pop track on the album, with a title that describes its buoyant, airy sweetness, which makes it one of my favorites, naturally. Befitting some of the darker lyrical turns of the album, it could be about a boy smitten with a girl, or it could be about Tweedy’s relationship with heroin and painkillers, as he was still struggling with addiction then. (“A Shot in the Arm” is about as literal as can be on the subject without being fully explicit.)

There’s certainly a darkness to this album that’s reflective of Tweedy’s personal demons at the time. “She’s a Jar” doesn’t describe Tweedy’s actual marriage, with its tale of financial struggles and domestic violence (and what a gut punch that last line is), but it reflects the darkness in him he was struggling with at the time. “How to Fight Loneliness” is not subtle; certainly, as ever, Tweedy’s gift for metaphor, symbolism, and other literary devices shows there, but it certainly is direct about the titular loneliness and the emptiness (but not cleanliness or godliness, fuck off) it brings– and that any performances of happiness on his part are a lie.

“Summerteeth” is surprisingly cheery-sounding for a song with the line “One summer, a suicide,” but it is in fact about an author, at his typewriter writing stories and paying jobs (“Another autumn, a traveler’s guide”), but again, the writer is very lonely; if eating his supper alone every night didn’t tell you that, the personification and metonymy and/or synecdoche of “His black shirt cries while his shoes get cold” will. And I’m as always a sucker for a good key shift, although the lyrics in this one suggests his loneliness might be self-inflicted due to his inattention.

The more epic, orchestral-sounding songs are really killer, too. “Pieholden Suite” is one of the most beautiful songs about a failing relationship thanks to that melody and the way the third verse ramps up. Tweedy’s unfaithfulness and the lack of intimacy in the first two verses give way to a reminiscence of the initial feeling of falling in love, and the beauty of the extended outro makes you believe they could really find that feeling again.

“Via Chicago” is the longest track on the album, and opens with another exploration of Tweedy’s darker thoughts and feelings: “I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt all right to me.” As the song goes on, though, it becomes more clear that it’s about Tweedy’s struggles to get clean and start fresh (if you think of the “name on the back of a leaf” as the part of himself he’s trying to leave behind and the “notebook full of white, dry pages” as the new beginning), and that he’s searching for something that, in my experience, feels true to a reason why people fall into addiction: searching for somewhere, or something, that feels like home. Notably, at this point, home is via Chicago and not in Chicago; Tweedy relocated there from St. Louis after Uncle Tupelo’s breakup, and Wilco remains rooted there today, but at the time, considering Tweedy’s struggles with addiction, it seemed very possible that he’d have to go somewhere else to get clean and stay clean, and that in the end, Chicago would merely be a point on the journey home.

Ultimately, Tweedy stayed, and he got clean in 2004. Perhaps notably, this is also when Wilco’s lineup finally stabilized. I suppose in the end, he did search for a home via Chicago, and he found it there.

It would not enter the annals of legend like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot did, but Summerteeth is still on balance my second-favorite Wilco album and not terribly far behind my first. I still rate it as a modern classic, even if it doesn’t come with an epic myth or rewrite what we thought music was capable of or launch them into the mainstream consciousness. (Where they now reside as a massive touring act and the tautological “dad-rock” band, a term I still take umbrage with.) If we could get The White Stripes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, why haven’t we gotten Wilco in yet?

The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin

In 1999, I was the least overall familiar with the Flaming Lips of the three acts on this list. Indeed, this is the last of the third albums I discovered, only coming to it a little later in time, closer to the release of Yoshimi and the Pink Robots.

I’d heard of the Lips before, of course. Who hadn’t heard “She Don’t Use Jelly” when it got its inexplicable moment in the sun (even though I didn’t watch Beverly Hills, 90210)? I even heard a bit of Clouds Taste Metallic from a friend. But the weirdness of mid-90s Lips didn’t really prepare me for the gorgeous The Soft Bulletin.

The Lips’ masterpiece album has the upbeat hooks and harmonies of power-pop, but the actual production and instrumentation goes much further than the usual description– psychedelic pop, orchestral pop, chamber pop, and of course the Lips’ usual flavor of outer-space weirdness. (Really, even the openers, “Race for the Prize” and “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton,” lyrically display some of the sci-fi leanings that followup Yoshimi and the Pink Robots would further explore.)

But while the Lips’ weirdness still remains, this album is really gorgeous in a way they hadn’t been up until this point. Some of that is due to Dave Fridmann’s production, although Peter Mokran’s remix of “Race for the Prize” that kicks off the album really blows out the drums and gives it this kind of 60s-garage-psychedelia sheen. The album as a whole is a lot more sweeping and epic sound than we might have typically associated with the Lips. (It did come on the heels of Zaireeka, which could probably fairly be called epic in its own right, although that kind of project isn’t something we could typically associate with anybody.)

It’s tough to find new or interesting things to say about such a highly-regarded album, but damn, it really is beautiful. “Buggin'” is one of the prettiest songs about being in love ever written (again, the US CD release features Mokran’s remix, this time as the only version). The stranger songs are rooted in truth: “The Spiderbite Song” is about the actual series of disasters that befell the Lips– Michael Ivins’ car accident (that really “did seem too bizarre” – a tire flew off another car and into Ivins’ windshield), and Steven Drozd’s infected, abscessed “spider bite” (really from his heroin use)– that could’ve broken up the band if they became more serious.

Coyne’s own personal tragedy didn’t make it into this song; he saved it for “Waitin’ For a Superman.” Coyne’s father died of cancer around the time of the album, and the song is about his process of dealing with him dying and talking to his brother about it– according to Coyne, the refrain comes directly from conversations the two had as their father was dying: “Is it getting heavy?” “Well, I thought it was already.”

While still a pretty song, it’s certainly tinged with sadness, and it’s sincere in a way you might not assume the band was capable of being. Sometimes grief is just too heavy for Superman to lift.

The second half of the album, generally, has more contemplative songs than the upbeat and/or adventurous ones of the first half. “Superman” is followed by “Suddenly Everything Has Changed,” “The Gash,” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” Coyne’s reflections on getting older and the process of dying– of course, again, informed by his father’s own– are all over these songs. Coyne was already 38 when the album was released; and while I wouldn’t call it a midlife crisis on his part, “It goes fast, you think of the past / Suddenly everything has changed” is certainly a feeling I can relate to; long periods of time seeming so short in hindsight. “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” is literally about aging as long slow death– “to realize something is ending within us.” But it’s also about love, the only thing that matters: “it’s just too valuable to feel for even a second without it.” (No surprise to me that the death of a beloved parent can have you thinking about your own mortality and the importance of love.)

And “The Gash” is about how, despite all that, we just have to keep going. We take the blows, we suffer and struggle, and through the pain and the injuries and all, we keep on pressing; we don’t quit, we don’t lose the will to battle on. The battle never stops, whether it’s the fight for our sanity or the fight for our lives (or both).

The Soft Bulletin has stood the test of time for me not just because it’s a beautiful sounding record, but also a deeply sincere one. It’s still strange and off-kilter enough to be undeniably the work of the Flaming Lips, but it’s also about Coyne and the band dealing with their personal tragedies, processing their feelings, and resolving, no matter the dangers or the hardships or the tough times, to press on. And though they were sad, they rescued everyone.

Fountains of Wayne were at home in New Jersey and searching for love in a very young-man way. Wilco was searching for a home and for the love that would pull them out of the darkness. The Flaming Lips were counting on love to provide them a home through the struggles and get them through the hard times. Perhaps that’s what gives them their roots in power-pop: the silly little love songs turned into something greater, more specific, more mature. Maybe I’m just fishing– love and life and home and death are pretty well-traveled and universal subjects (and thus well-traveled for a reason). Maybe it’s just that, whether in Fountains of Wayne’s more straightforward vision or Wilco’s forays into orchestral pop-rock or the Flaming Lips mixing interstellar psychedelia with symphonic rock, they all still come back to structure, melody, hooks, and harmonies– the essence of power-pop.

Whatever it is, they’re all great albums, and great pick-me-up listens that always put me in a good mood; whatever you’re feeling, there’s a song on one of these three that will speak to it.