Why Do I Keep Listening to Shearwater’s Jet Plane and Oxbow? – A Conversation

Guest appearance by Rachel S. Anderson.

Rachel: Shearwater’s 2016 Jet Plane and Oxbow is one of my desert-island discs. Why?  I’m not particularly sure – I’m very much a “music listener” and not a “music critic”.  I’m sure that this sometimes frustrates my very much musician/music critic partner (who will chime in below) who must get tired of me saying “oh, I like that one!” and not being able to explain why I like it – in much the same way I don’t quite understand how he can’t tell the difference between multiple shades of green.  We’re all tuned into slightly different frequencies; aren’t we?

Which brings me back to Shearwater and Jet Plane.  I discovered this band late in their existence – about when their 2012 album Animal Joy came out.  By the time they released Jet Plane, I was enough of a fan that I travelled to go to multiple shows on the tour.  If you were to ask me then, and now, what it was that drew me to them – I’d have to say the lyrical complexity of their work.  I’ve got a PhD in English and have spent most of my life translating medieval poetry, so a band whose lyrics include the word “nacreous” just resonates with me.  But there’s more to it, of course.  So, what follows is a conversation of sorts between me and my musician partner, as he does his best to help me figure out why I like Jet Plane so much.

John: Well, when I started thinking about the record – and my first experience of Shearwater was seeing them live in 2012, where they outshone the headliner – I found it challenging to describe, at least as the lyrics and their delivery go. So, by necessity, I’d focus on the music.

Rachel: What musically informs Jet Plane?  I know that Shearwater put out their version of David Bowie’s Lodger (1979) right after Jet Plane – what’s the significance of this connection?

John: The connection, as was stated in the interview with front-person Jonathan Meiburg to promote Jet Plane, is that the record is influenced by Bowie’s Scary Monsters (1980) and Brian Eno’s Before and After Science (1977).

For Bowie, he’s throwing a lot at the wall, some of it taken from his past work, and not everything, this time, sticks. I think Bowie would be the first to say that maybe the most definite feeling that comes across is the “all time low” of “Ashes to Ashes.”

Eno’s record puts us into a sustained drift, where there’s not a whole lot to hang onto. I do like this record, though, because it asks some rather interesting questions, especially about what, if anything, is the most important part of traditional song structure/composition. In other words, what can you subtract to make a better song?

Broadly put, these musical influences help to explain why Jet Plane feels like it tends to ebb and flow, for the most part, rather than peak. And, come to think of it, that’s not a bad way of summing up the un-shitty moments of 2016.

Rachel:  When I was listening to this album in 2016/2017, I was doing so in the shadow of Trump’s first presidency and the lyric

I can’t help it
If all the world is ending
If all the life is gone
Still, you’re calling out this name:
Where are the Americans?  (“Quiet Americans”)

felt pretty on the nose.  It feels even more so now.  Is this a political album?  Is it looking back (Nixon, Reagan, George/W. Bush) and what is it asking us to understand about the US now, as we listen to it nine years on?

John: Yeah, it’s a political album, not the least in its rather pessimistic outlook. On the one hand, you get why Jet Plane would reference Scary Monsters, as Bowie’s album reflects anxieties about the counter-revolutionary Reagan/Thatcher years. Yet what makes Jet Plane a forceful political statement is that it looks at Trump as the end of this political era (error). In 2025, this statement remains relevant; it’s just that sometimes it takes longer for an era to end than we’d like.

That said, we still must live through these times. And I think that’s where many of the reflective lyrics of Jet Plane are focused. Of course, there’s no easy way through;  the record, when it’s being cruel to be kind, goes after the bullshit excuse of “just asking questions.”

Looking at the song titles, what you’d guess would be the explicitly political ones are “Quiet Americans,” the 2^nd song, and “Wildlife in America,” the 9^th song. If the question then is, “Where are the Americans?”, the answer is what you might not expect—or even like.

“Wildlife in America,” the “answer” song, is one of the harder to fully parse. If you look at the track listing on Scary Monsters, you’ll see, title wise, that “Wildlife in America” resembles Bowie’s “Teenage Wildlife.” Now if you’ve heard this Bowie song, you’ll know that it quotes from “Heroes,” his big, classic-rock anthem.

That “Wildlife in America” quotes from “Teenage Wildlife,” and thus also from “Heroes,” should give you pause. I mean, as a political song, it feels anything but direct. While you keep expecting “Wildlife in America” to depart from that “Heroes” chord progression, it never quite does. But its lyrical perspective has crucial shifts, especially towards the end:

Billy’s in position
He’s rolling into town
Kicking in the door
That fucker’s never coming down

Whatever meaning you get, it doesn’t feel very heroic.

Rachel:  So, why do you think I like this album?  Or maybe more generally – why do you think an overeducated college professor finds such solace in this work? 

John: I think it’s because the album looks out into a multi-faceted cultural world, where it finds resonances with art that goes well beyond rock music. Literature, in particular, has long warned us about inventing simplistic myths to explain history. In 1975, John Ashbery’s poem, “The One Thing That Can Save America,” deconstructed political sloganeering. I think the poem’s opening question, “Is anything central?”, is echoed, in an uncanny way, by Jet Plane.