I did it: I finally listened to the new Shellac record, over two months late.
I can explain...
This one’s gonna wander. Come along with me. We’ll get there eventually.
You absolutely knew at least a couple of those people who couldn’t finish the final Harry Potter book because then it would be over. J.K. Rowling be damned: I’m talking over ten years ago here.
When Steve Albini passed away on May 7th, Touch and Go Records made the (appropriate) move to release preorders of To All Trains, the new and now final Shellac record, early. It was originally to be released on the 17th and I think my vinyl copy rolled in on the 10th or something. And as I do with so many exciting things that I preorder months in advance, I immediately put it on the shelf.
Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I put it on our large glass coffee table first where it spent a few weeks staring me right in the face. Then as summer began to roll in and I saw the midday sun hitting that corner of the table head on, I moved it onto the top of the turntable lid. As my partner Jon and I played different records here and there and needed to lift the lid, it got moved around. Finally it moved into the wooden magazine holder that stores all our “current rotation” vinyl.
I don’t buy a lot of vinyl records. They’re heavy and expensive and they almost never come with download codes anymore unless purchased via Bandcamp, which means I have to drop an additional $10 if I also want to burn a disc for the car or my shitty Goodwill boombox. My vinyl picks at this point are limited to very special albums, often preorders from favorite bands, that I know I want to listen to BIG. If it’s something Jon wants too, the likelihood that we’ll get it on vinyl increases considerably because he’s not very interested in CDs. Our collections haven’t quite merged... It’s generally very clear whose are whose, except that we can only tell our copies of Shellac’s At Action Park apart from the plastic outer sleeves. His has an IN YOUR EAR price tag still on it. Actually, does mine have the plastic sleeve…? Well whatever the case. Most of the rap records are his, as are nearly all of the metal ones. Post-punk and math rock could go either way. I think all of the Mission of Burma is mine, not that it matters much at this point.
Back to my story. I wasn’t ready to listen to To All Trains when I received it. I’d only have one chance to hear it for the first time and that fact was weighing on me. If I’d spun it as soon as it came, I’d definitely have cried through side A at least. That would have been a cathartic experience in its own right but not the one I wanted. So I waited.
The last time I blew a first vinyl listen— and I may never be able to revisit this one with a clear state of mind now because of it— was Foo Fighters’ 2023 release But Here We Are. Anyone who knows me relatively well may be surprised to learn that I own this record at all. While Foo Fighters were an absolute bedrock of a band for me; a band that propelled me into wanting to be a musician and one that will forever hold a place in my heart and a tattoo on my leg; I have been very vocal about the fact that I don’t think they’ve put out a good album since 2011’s Wasting Light. Dave Grohl is one of my favorite human beings ever and I will never not feel comforted by his voice, but the Foos have passed the threshold of my interest and I find most of their newer music extremely predictable and/or uninteresting at this point. There are a few hits for me here and there still, but I couldn’t even get all the way through Concrete and Gold. By the third or fourth song whose melody and progression I was predicting by the second verse, I was just straight up annoyed.
UGH. I came here to talk about Shellac and not spill all my Foo Fighters drama but bear with me. My last blog post took me forever to edit and this one here is just going to be a damn journal entry. I think I need it this week.
My best friend Laura and I were obsessed with Foo Fighters— like, obsessed— in middle school and much of high school. We first saw them at The Wallace Civic Center in Fitchburg, Massachusetts on October 9th, 1997 (I recently met someone who was born at about 9 PM on this exact date and I’m still a little fucked up about it honestly) which remains one of the most exciting shows of my life. At 39 now I still hold on to the bragging rights of having seen them in such a small venue, as well as at a Newbury Comics (North Attleboro, Massachusetts) a few years later, even though I’m salty about having been just slightly too young to have seen Nirvana in the same fucking room. Over time, Laura’s and my feelings on the Foo Fighters diverged. I was annoyed as soon as they started to really blow up. It wasn’t the proverbial feeling of a band “selling out” at all: they were already a mainstream band. But I just didn’t want to see them in a huge room surrounded by thousands of people. The moments of palpable intimacy with that band had passed.
Laura and I both dropped off the Foo wagon to some extent in the years following high school but in different ways. I think I was resentful even though I was still very occupied with bands and shows, and she was just more occupied with other things but maybe not quite as resentful. We did see them live in on my birthday (February 18th) in 2008 when they came to the DCU Center in Worcester. My dad had always happily brought me/us to their shows when I was younger, so now that I was in my early 20s, it was an opportunity to buy him a ticket and bring him along with us. Of course we lost him as he immediately left the balcony where our seats were and wandered down to the front. By the end of the night he had a drumstick, a sweatband, and a guitar pick... He always manages to pull this shit. We found him outside the venue, standing in the snow, waiting for us patiently as he didn’t have a cellphone. I asked him how the hell he had managed his old memorabilia tricks at a venue this size and he said, “Well, when I got down front, a big security guy yelled at me to sit down. So I did!”
Jesus Christ, Dad.
And how did we enjoy the show? Well... Despite years of distance and years of telling myself I was completely over this band, when the curtain flew open to reveal the band as they blasted into Monkey Wrench as an opening number… I lost my entire shit, jumping up and down, screaming and crying. What the fuck?
I’ve seen Foo Fighters live once more since then, on July 18th of 2015 at Fenway Park in Boston. I fucking hate Fenway Park. I was not going to go to this show until I found out that Mission of Burma had been added to the bill. So it was going to be Burma, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Foo Fighters. It was too weird. It made no sense. I couldn’t imagine seeing Burma play such a big, open stage with this lineup, so I bought tickets. It was weird, for sure. Fun but weird. I did get a bomb-ass Foo Fighters hoodie out of the deal, which I still have now and still occasionally wear. It’s got those little holes for your thumbs and even a grommet inside one of the pockets for the explicit purpose of slipping the end of your headphone cord through, INTO AN INNER iPOD POCKET. It’s brilliant. The bonus pocket is of course completely useless to me now because my phone is too damn big (even though I refuse to buy a phone without a 3.5mm headphone jack) but boy howdy that has been a solid hoodie.
It was nice out. Everything sounded pretty good. But I could feel it: the energy had shifted. This was too big. It was just too big for me. Foo Fighters played a very long and very bloated-feeling set. So much crowd work. So many iterations of HOW YOU ALL FEELING OUT THERE??? I mean, I get it. You become one of the biggest rock bands around and what are you supposed to do? You’re big so you just gotta be big I guess. It was cool that Dave had “the throne” on stage for this one since he’d recently broken his leg falling off the stage in Sweden. Yup, that tour.
But after that show, I felt like I could truly never go back. Things felt so complicated. What this band had been had meant so, so much to me and was such a part of who I was for so long. Seeing them now in an environment like this made me sad. I mean… it was complex, how I felt, for sure. I was excited in a way. I still sang along and knew a staggering amount of lyrics. I’m sure I had a tear or two in my eye at some point and it felt good to (of course) be there with Laura again. But it was such a save point. It was something I knew I could never get back from: this feeling of inevitable alienation.
In March of 2022, Taylor Hawkins died and I lost my mind for a bit. Wow Rainy, hypocrite much??? You didn’t go see them for years and now you’re upset about this??? Yeah, fuck off. You want to talk about finality: this was finality. This was not just a save point. This was bizarro Super Mario World with all the inverted colors and weird baddies after finally making it through the end of Star World. Oops, sorry. Spoiler alert. I won’t go into Taylor’s death here any further. If you want to read more about that, I wrote about it here. And then I wrote a song about it.
I feel low writing this, right now, still. I feel slightly sunken into my chair, dark blueish green. It’s how I felt when I texted Laura immediately after learning of Taylor’s death. I hated being the one to tell her but I knew it also had to be me. Long story short, we ended up reconnecting. Not that we’d had a “falling out” at all. We just drifted as time went on. She’s got kids. I’ve got… listen, I do stuff.
This tragedy ended up sending Laura not only back down the many rabbit holes that intense fandom digs, but some new ones as well. For her it was a catalyst to rediscover a world that had once been so comforting and familiar and to look at it with fresh eyes. For me, it was a door closing. Sure, I hadn’t wanted to see Foo Fighters live anymore in the venues they play nowadays, but it still crushed me to know that now I could never see the band as I knew it again. There was no possibility that they’d become washed up and simmer down to venues I was willing to patronize. No lounge act for me.
Over the next few months, Laura and I talked a lot and it became clear how disparate our points of view had become where the band was concerned. She was coping with [gestures broadly at everything] by diving fully into the lyrics and the lore of the band. I was coping with [lol same] by being avoidant. But for me, diving in wouldn’t be helpful. I did a lot of soul searching during this time period (yes, soul searching over a big bloated pop rock band fuck you) and I decided that my avoidance was the reasonable move for me. The memories were what brought me joy and comfort. The present tense felt like an overlay; a gossamer haze of inevitability that eclipsed the thing I had once loved.
When But Here We Are came out, Laura bought me a copy on cassette and dropped it off at my work, one of her kids in tow. It made me feel anxious because “I didn’t want to hear it” (I mean, see above) but I appreciated the gesture and what it said about our friendship. We were both at least able to laugh as I said, “You bitch. You bought me a tape so I can’t even skip songs.”
She knew what she was doing.
Somehow, a few weeks later (?), I ended up with a vinyl copy of the record in my house, also via Laura. And finally, for whatever reason, I chose the weekend my eight-year relationship was (rightfully, but jarringly) falling apart to listen to it.
This, dear reader, was an absolutely terrible idea.
But Here We Are is a record about loss and resilience. Which of these sentiments punches you in the gut is dependent on your state of mind going in, I think. One side makes you taller… ANYWAY! I was in a loss mindset. This was the end of a long relationship that had been serving absolutely no one for quite some time, and I have since logged it firmly in the “for the best” column. But man, it was a lot. Long story slightly less long, I bawled my eyes out for the whole fucking record. You could argue that the catharsis was what I needed, because I don’t cry much, but any time I’ve considered putting the record on again since then… I have not. Hello avoidance, my old friend.
Following this… or around the same time… my memory sucks, Laura asked me if I’d want to go see Foo Fighters with her at Fenway when they came back around with a new drummer, as tickets were going on sale soon. I said no. Then she bought me a ticket just in case and we got in an argument about it.
OKAY! Okay. We didn’t “get in an argument.” I got really mad and was a little mean about it and she was, as always, understanding and gracious about the whole thing god damn it. She understood that I felt not-listened-to. She understood my nostalgia-based avoidance of this new paradigm and my hatred of Fenway Park. She understood that I wanted the last time I saw Foo Fighters to be with Taylor. I was able to hear that she was used to people saying no to something fun and then changing their mind later. She wanted to make sure I didn’t regret it, but no problem: she had plenty of family members who would be happy to go to the show. And they did! The show was two nights ago, on Sunday.
How did we get here… Shellac. Oh my god. Are you still reading? Alright. This blog post is not going to win me any awards. It’s fine. So… I finally listened to the new Shellac record. I had waited because then it would be over. I had waited because I knew it would sting. I had waited because there are so few things to look forward to sometimes that I always tend to set the best things aside. I always do this with new guitar pedals and people think I’m insane. I won’t open the little box for two damn weeks sometimes until I need the fix. A few months for a record though… that was a record. (Get it? Like, it’s a record and… okay.)
Yesterday would have been Steve’s 62nd birthday— #ThankYouSteveAlbini— and I felt like the time was finally right.
So what did I think?
I mean, not shockingly, it’s a fucking masterpiece. Wow here’s my surprised face. Everyone is so surprised. Jon and I sat down together and listened to side A without saying a word until near the end when he commented that he wanted to figure out Bob Weston’s bass tone. I said that I figured the aluminum neck probably had a lot to do with it. I flipped the record and closed my eyes again. Periodically I would open them to make a note. Here are my notes.
SIDE A
W500: A Very Shellac longform intro to this song. Their instrumental riffs always say so many things. My ex (the one I Foo Fighters cried about) said they could never really connect with instrumental parts much, or that they weren’t “about” anything. I wholeheartedly disagreed. The instrumental chunks always say something to me.
The bass on this record sounds just slightly more… something. More something. It’s more BLAM. I don’t know what word I want. I’d still be able to tell it’s Bob Weston from 500 yards away underwater.
Girl From Outside: Ohhhhh. Double tracked vocals in more-or-less unison? They don’t really do that. Shit, not sure if it was two Steves or Steve and Bob. I gotta listen back later. I BET it was Steve and Bob. Excuse to listen again soon.
Chick New Wave: [I didn’t write anything down here. I was groovin’.]
Tattoos: Oh I think this one is my favorite song on the record. “Urgent need to mingle.” I like the lyrics on this one. Did Todd get another rack tom??? Hmmm. 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5.
Wednesday: “This song sounds like Halloween.” I wish aluminum necks weren’t so [physically] heavy.
SIDE B
Scrappers: Pulsing. “We’ll be pirates.” This song makes me think of Primus and Barkmarket and I’m not mad.
Days Are Dogs: Cowbell??? Oh, it’s gone. “Crush the life out of your chest.” Uggggghhhh.
How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man (Cock & Bull): This is “The Bob Song.” There’s always one full Bob vocal song even though he’ll sing on other tracks as well. The Bob songs are always very hypnotic and undulating to me, still angular but with this sort of circular sensibility. Song Against Itself. Compliant. I wrote that “the bridge (bridge?) has what feel like unexpected chords for Shellac…” they have this very major… maybe? I dunno. They made me feel a certain way. “This is the trainiest song on the record.”
Scabby The Rat: Oh shit, disco beat. Is this Shellac’s Got The Life? I just bought a RAT pedal from my friend George an hour before listening to this. Scabby the rat should be friends with Long-Legged Larry and the Big Lizard In My Backyard. Jon is on his phone… why! Oh, he’s looking up preamp circuit clones for Bob’s bass sound. Fine. Sustained.
I Don’t Fear Hell: This one was rough but cathartic given the circumstances. “If there’s a heaven, I hope they’re having fun. Cuz if there is a hell I’m gonna know everyone.” Potent final track. Christ.
In the end, I didn’t cry. I don’t feel great, but I feel right.
Oh, and the Foo Fighters record? From the shards and swells I can remember, it was actually pretty fucking good. I won’t be able to prove it for a while.
~RMSC